An Audible Silence | 1, 2, 3, 4

HE ABSENCE OF INSTITUTIONAL OPPOSITION to the American war policy eventually provoked dissenting street protests not only in the United States but also among large numbers of people elsewhere in the world, with massive public demonstrations on February 15 taking place in more than six hundred cities across all twenty-four time zones and drawing crowds of 250,000 people in New York, 750,000 in London, 1.3 million in Barcelona. The major media dismissed the uproar as one of little worth and no consequence -- the work of aging flower children and B-list Hollywood celebrities; President Bush likened it to the assembling of an ad agency's hired focus group, an expression of nonserious and uninformed opinion not apt to affect his judgment, alter his course of action, or trespass in the temple of his unilateral enlightenment. Three weeks later, when he appeared in the White House on the evening of March 6 to announce the imminent scourging of Iraq, it was a wonder that he didn't speak in tongues. His topic was secular but his message was sacred, the blank expression engraved on his face disquietingly similar to the thousand-yard stare of the true believer gazing into the mirror of eternity. Answering questions for the better part of an hour from the assembled scribes and Pharisees, the president bore witness to a revelation mounted on four pillars of holy wrath:

1. America allies itself with Christ and goes to war to rid the world of evil.
   
2. Iraq is Sodom, or possibly Gomorrah.
   
3. Saddam is the Devil's spawn.
   
4. Any nation refusing to join the "coalition of the willing" deserves to perish in the deserts of disbelief.
   

If during the months prior to the bombing of Baghdad on March 19, every government spokesperson in Washington had attributed to Saddam Hussein the supernatural powers of the Antichrist, the first week of the invasion proved every assertion false. In place of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin (a villain "stifling the world," presenting an immediate and terrible danger not only to the peoples of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Kuwait but also to every man, woman, and child in the United States, certain to oppose any attempts of punishment with vengeful clouds of poison gas), the American armies found remnants of a dictator more accurately compared to a psychopathic prison warden, a brutal but almost comic figure, so enslaved by the dream of his omnipotence that he apparently had entrusted the defense of his kingdom to histrionic press releases and gigantic portraits of himself armed with a shotgun and a porkpie hat. No Iraqi shock troops appeared in the field to oppose the Third Infantry Division's advance into the valley of the Euphrates; no Iraqi aircraft presumed to leave the ground; no allied combat unit met with, much less knew where to find, the fabled weapons of mass destruction. The desultory shows of resistance at the river crossings constituted ragged skirmish lines of young men for the most part poorly armed, so many of them out of uniform that it wasn't worth the trouble to distinguish between the military and the civilian dead.

The weakness of the Iraqi target made ridiculous Washington's propaganda posters. Here was the American army in the sinister landscape of Iraq, equipped to fight the Battle of Normandy or El Alamein but conducting a police action in the manner of the Israeli assassination teams hunting down Palestinian terrorists in the rubble of the Gaza Strip. How then would it be possible to hide in plain sight the false pretext of Operation Iraqi Freedom? The Bush administration answered the question by simply changing the mission statement. The American army had not come to Iraq to remove the totalitarian menace threatening all of Western civilization -- absolutely not; the American army had come briefly eastward into Eden to "liberate" the long-suffering Iraqi people from the misery inflicted upon them by an evildoer with the bad habit of cutting out their tongues. One excuse for war was as good as any other.

Although by Easter Sunday the purification of Iraq was still a work in progress -- Saddam Hussein nowhere to be found, sporadic gunfire lingering in the streets of Baghdad and Mosul, a new government not yet seated on its prayer rugs -- in Washington the flags were blooming on the bandstands, and the heralds of American empire were crying up the news of great and glorious victory. The legions under the command of General Tommy Franks had destroyed the semblance of an Iraqi army, rescued the oil fields of Kirkuk, chased an evil tyrant from his throne, cleansed the cradle of civilization of an unsanitary regime. Priced at the cost of $60 billion and 129 American lives (45 of them lost in accidents), the month's work lifted President George W. Bush to a 70 percent approval rating in the opinion polls, the friends and officers of his administration everywhere attended by congratulatory nods and gifts of loyal applause. Important newspaper columnists pointed proudly to the "high-water mark" of America's "resurgent power"; elevated sources at the White House declared themselves well pleased with "the demonstration effect" of a military maneuver that "opens all sorts of new opportunities for us."

Concerns about the possible squeamishness of the prime-time audience when exposed to scenes of horror proved to be unwarranted and overblown. On the first day of hostilities President Bush cautioned the country's senior news executives against publishing photographs of dead Iraqi civilians. As events moved forward and the home audience registered its approval of a new and improved form of reality TV, it was understood that foreign dead counted merely as unpaid extras briefly available to the producers of the nightly news to fuel the fireballs and stand around in front of the machine-gun bullets. By April 12 the American public had shown sufficient bravery in the face of a distant enemy that the New York Times didn't think it imprudent to publish a handsome color photograph of dead Iraqi children thrown like spoiled vegetables into a refrigerated truck.

But if the pictures didn't present a problem, one still had to be careful with the words. As a matter of well-known and long-established principle, imperialist powers shoot and kill only for the good of the people shot down, but the policy usually requires some sort of upbeat euphemism ("the training of backward peoples" in the art of "democratic self-government") with which to ease the minds of the women and children in the room. The producers of the March on Baghdad took the necessary precautions. The killing of Iraqis, both military and civilian, was softened to "attriting" or "degrading" resources; when it was noticed that in Arabic the word "fedayeen" means "those who sacrifice themselves for a cause," our official spokesmen substituted "terrorist death squads"; the looting of the Iraqi National Museum and the burning of the country's National Library were ascribed to the joys of "freedom." Nothing to do with our navy's cruise missiles, of course, and in no way the fault of our army units that had neglected to protect both buildings, and with them the twelve-thousand-year history of a civilization that prior to the arrival of General Franks had survived the conquests of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Genghis Khan. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scowled at the suggestion that somehow the destruction could have been prevented, possibly in the same way that American troops preserved the Oil Ministry. "Freedom's untidy," he said, "and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."

So are military empires free to seize "all sorts of new opportunities" opened to them by "demonstration effects" similar to the ones brought by an Athenian army to the island of Melos in the summer of 416 B.C. Having first butchered the Melian military commanders, the Athenians presented the citizens of the town with the choice of abandoning their loyalty to Sparta or accepting the sentence of death.

"As practical men," said the Athenian heralds, "you know and we know that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength, and the strong do what they can, and the weak submit."

The corporate managers of the Bush administration lack the concision of the Attic style, but they didn't find it hard to appreciate the ancient moral of the tale. The high-tech gladiatorial show in the Iraqi colosseum had served as a test market not only for the Pentagon's new and exciting inventory of weapons but also for the premise of American military empire -- established the necessary precedent, set the proper tone, opened the road to the grandeur that was Rome. Heartened by the message delivered to the voters in the next American presidential election as well as to America's enemies both east and west of Suez, various staff officers attached to the White House, its supporting neoconservative think tanks, and the Pentagon expressed varying degrees of satisfaction. Secretary of State Colin Powell threatened Syria, telling a press conference that Syria would have to change its ways, but, no, there was "no war plan right now." Vice President Dick Cheney admonished Germany and France, indicating that neither country could expect oil or construction contracts from a new jurisdiction in Iraq, saying that "perhaps time will help in terms of improving their outlook." Ken Adelman, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, hoped that the conquest of Baghdad "emboldens leaders to drastic, not measured, approaches"; Michael Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, placed the great victory in geopolitical perspective: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

Thus spake the Zarathustras of the Bush administration contemplating the ruin of what was once the World Trade Center. Let any nation anywhere on earth even begin to think of challenging the American supremacy (military, cultural, socioeconomic), and America reserves the right to strangle the impudence at birth -- to bomb the peasants or the palace, block the flows of oil or bank credit, change the linen in the information ministries and the hotels. The motion carried without undue objection on the part of the American public or the American news media. Told that the truth didn't matter, that motive was irrelevant, and that the Bush administration was free to do as it pleased, the heirs and assigns of what was once a democratic republic greeted the announcement with an audible and respectful silence.

Copyright © 2004 by Lewis H. Lapham