Spectator Sport

It’s funny how certain memories survive the passage of time.  I’m not sure which night it was—March 19^th or 20^th—but I distinctly remember my eyes being riveted to the screen of one of the TVs in the student union watering hole.

I was a graduate student in the spring of 2003.  I enrolled a year and a half earlier after being released from the armed forces.  The 9/11 attacks occurred during the third week of my first semester and had cast a pall over my studies from then on.  The ensuing war in Afghanistan seemed remote, however, and I did not dwell much on the relatively small number of servicemembers serving there.

The preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002 filled me with renewed anxiety.  I knew people I served with would inevitably become mixed up in it.  The Bush administration’s absurd claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mistaken belief among many Americans at the time that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, made the impending conflict all the more worrisome.  The consensus among my fellow students and professors was that the war would end in disaster.

And so I found myself standing with a clutch of students watching the promised shock and awe unfold.  One of my professors, a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, stood with us slowly shaking his head before wandering off.  Those of us who stayed drowned the rest of the evening in pitchers of beer until we were chased out at closing time.

The war hung over the remaining year or so of my master’s program.  I led classroom discussions on the subject and was a panelist on a graduate student panel on its possible consequences the week President Bush declared the active phase of the war over whilst standing in front of the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner. 

Part of me wanted to believe that last part.  But my initial pessimism was rewarded as insurgency gripped Iraq.  I wrapped up the program upon completing my master’s thesis, a gloomy tome critiquing the flaws in neoconservative foreign policy preferences.  Seems quaint looking back.

I’ve commented on it elsewhere in this space, but I believe the public is too deferential to the military as an institution.  The path was set during the Reagan years and the media spectacle of the Gulf War confirmed it.  Thanks to our all-volunteer armed forces, war had become a spectator sport. The lopsided victory over Iraq, together with the high-profile media presence of uniformed leaders such as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf undoubtably contributed to the widespread support.  Several polls during the 1990s counted the military among the country's most trusted institutions.

The early mass protests notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little pushback against the intervention as it went awry over the ensuing years.  We can attribute some of this to the so-called rally effect and a reluctance to be seen as somehow disloyal.  It didn’t hurt that the relative success of the 2007 surge permitted a somewhat graceful exit later on. 

But the damage was done, even if it receives negligible attention.  Roughly 6,000 U.S. servicemembers died in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.  Their absence is surely felt by their loved ones.  Around half a million receive VA compensation for disabilities incurred in the two conflicts.

There is a tendency to just look at our own losses without accounting for the innocent bystanders.  The number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths were connected to the war varies by source but most put it well into six figures (not including casualties from the later Islamic State insurgency).  The toll the conflict took on Iraq’s infrastructure (outside the Kurdish northern region) may not be remedied for years, if ever.  Iraq ranks low on many human development indices.  (The United Nations Development Programme ranks the country slightly above the less developed countries of the Global South.)

The topic of the post-9/11 conflicts seldom arises among my students.  There are fewer veterans of these wars in my classes.  Most of the seats are filled with Gen Zers and younger Millennials who either hadn’t been born yet or have little or no memory of the time.  Most of the decisionmakers who cooked up (or at least went along with) these schemes are either dead (Powell, Rumsfeld) or are no longer in government service (Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al.).  Perhaps any lessons learned are beside the point for younger generations due to their removal from the present, opening the door for future misjudgments.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Indecent Interval

The U.S. has dispatched troops to Kabul to evacuate American personnel in anticipation of the Afghan capital’s imminent fall. 

So ends our two-decade intervention in Afghanistan.  Looking back, the present endgame was inevitable.  It was typical American hubris to believe the United States could bring order among an unconquerable people.  That assumption, of course, arose from America’s historical amnesia.  We never learn because we never remember.  

The misbegotten idea of American exceptionalism also played a part in bringing about this latest debacle.  The experience of the British and the Russians were irrelevant to the extent they were considered at all.  That we helped facilitate the latter’s defeat likely skewed perceptions of our chances of victory. 

Not that any of this was in the forefront of the discourse surrounding the decision to intervene.  The 9/11 attacks were a fresh, raw wound in the fall of 2001, with the events of that day endlessly replayed and rehashed on the cable news networks.  A national adrenaline rush in anticipation of unknown horrors yet to come combined with a collective grief blocked rational discussion.  When the invasion began that November, it seemed victory was in sight despite the Bush administration’s warning that the War on Terror would take many years.  (This was about the only prediction they got right.)  

We are easily distracted, and issue saliency is perishable.  In this case, it was the lead up to the Iraq War and the grueling stalemate which ensued that shifted our attention from the Afghan War.  By 2009 matters had deteriorated to the point where the incoming Obama administration ordered a “surge” comparable to the one implemented in Iraq a couple of years earlier.  It was deemed successful, but was really a Band-Aid on a fatal wound. 

Now we are back to square one, with nothing to show for it.  The Taliban have taken Kandahar and Herat and it’s only a matter of time before they are in the capital.  I’m seeing visions of people lining up to board helicopters on the U.S. Embassy roof. 

Comparisons to the fall of Saigon are inevitable, though the North Vietnamese exercised a bit more decorum than the Taliban.  Hanoi observed a “decent interval” between the U.S. withdrawal and launching its campaign to take the South.   The Taliban began to aggressively sweep the country even before U.S. forces had fully withdrawn.  The execution of the withdrawal raises eyebrows, with troops abandoning bases shared with Afghan government forces in the dead of night.  I’m sure that did wonders for morale.  The Afghan National Army is collapsing just as surely as the ARVN did in 1975, but more rapidly. 

The return of the Taliban as Afghanistan’s masters does not bode well for human rights, particularly women’s rights and the rights of ethnic minorities.  There will undoubtedly be retribution against the Taliban’s enemies much as there was when they came to power the first time in 1996.  In any case Afghanistan will become even more unpleasant than it already is.

But as always, the American public is scarcely aware anything is happening outside its hermetic world.  It’s true that there are a lot of serious distractions at the moment, but even if things were “normal” it’s unlikely anyone would pay attention.  Our failure in Afghanistan is destined to be another foreign policy lesson unlearned.

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

The Good Fight

There are only a handful of surviving Second World War veterans.  This week’s D-Day commemorations here and abroad remind us, as with those of recent years, that their time with us is short.

Being the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, the spotlight shone especially bright.  President Trump stood alongside Queen Elizabeth at the celebration in Portsmouth, as actors read from the letters and diaries of those who served and jet fighters performed fly-bys in between rousing song and dance numbers.  Theresa May and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron each spoke, as did Trump himself.  The Queen gave the closing remarks, praising the resilience of the war generation.

Her Majesty is well aware of the thin strand the living vets represent, linking us in the present with the deeds of the past.  She is herself a Second World War veteran in a manner of speaking, having served in the British army at home during the war’s last year or two (though she returned to Buckingham Palace each evening).  This year’s commemoration will likely be the last to be celebrated on such a large scale.

Here in America, we subscribe to the same mythos surrounding that war.  It was a good fight, we were unquestionably the good guys, and the enemy, particularly the Germans, were evil.  It has been so even before the guns fell silent.  When I was a kid, the WW2 vets were fixtures in the community who shared their stories with elementary school classes and served as community and business leaders.

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, as the veterans began passing away in noticeable numbers, popular culture became particularly laudatory in its treatment of them.  Even as films and literature treated our other recent wars, particularly Vietnam, as morally ambiguous at best, the black and white view of the Second World War persisted.  Five decades after it ended, mythology became hagiography.  Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign was lauded by the talking heads as one last call to service even as they seemed to assume that Bill Clinton, derided by conservatives as a Vietnam draft dodger, would easily win a second term.  The ever-bombastic Tom Brokaw, who himself somehow missed out on his own generation’s war, dubbed those who lived through the war years as the Greatest Generation.

It was at the movies and on cable TV where the mythologizing reached its apotheosis and shaped the narrative in the everyday discourse into the present day.  Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are of course the main culprits.  Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers were both technical tours de force and powerful storytelling.  The verisimilitude of the first film in capturing the horrors of combat is striking on first viewing and it still hits hard every time thereafter.  Nevertheless, both works and the volume of derivate films and TV shows following in their wake, engage in cheerleading for an American exceptionalism that we as a nation can’t seem to let go of.

The Second World War continues to resonate because so few of our conflicts have been so morally clear cut.  Only the Civil War, on the Union side at least, possesses the same clarity of purpose in the popular mind.  The others have been mainly exercises in imperialist expansion, large and small.  The Indian Wars aren’t discussed much anymore, even though the genocide of indigenous peoples made America as we know it possible.  Even less is said of our guerrilla war in the Philippines at the turn of the last century.  The Banana Wars involved the subjugation of Latin American states for the benefit of U.S. corporations.

Our military ventures after 1945 are no less problematic.  One could make a case in favor of our intervention in Korea, given the odiousness of the North Korean regime and the fact that Harry Truman shrewdly used the United Nations as a fig leaf for our unilateral butting-in.  By comparison, we sacrificed nearly 60,000 American lives in Vietnam—not to mention the lives of countless Vietnamese—over a pretext so slim that an exchange of diplomatic notes normally serves to settle such disputes as that which led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

After a brief funk in the late 1970s, we resumed flexing our muscles and making self-serving justifications for it.  The invasion of Grenada, the smallest country in the Western Hemisphere, was justified because the Cubans gave material support to a popular revolution.  The invasion of Panama wasn’t a violation of another country’s sovereignty, it was sort of a law enforcement action to catch a drug kingpin.  But the real turning point was just around the corner.

The 1991 Gulf War brought us into the present era of militarism.  A war fought to make the world safe for Exxon was packaged partly as a media event and partly as a case for ramped up interventionism cloaked as the liberation of oppressed peoples.  (Liberation of the oppressed—just like in the Second World War!)  We are now at the point where more than 70 countries host U.S. military bases.  The public has been culturally intimidated into supporting our ventures abroad, and attempts to debate the matter in the mainstream are a non-starter as a consequence.   

In a college history class, we were assigned to read Empire as a Way of Life by William Appleman Williams.  This was circa 1984, and revisionist historian Williams was somewhat passé even then and he is mostly forgotten today.  That’s too bad.  Empire as a Way of Life is a plainly worded account of America’s imperial adventures as the prominent, recurring theme in American history.  Williams made a moral argument for rejecting imperialism and embracing a renewed role for the United States as an ethical member of the family of nations.

Williams the man was a singular character.  A military brat, an Annapolis graduate, and a Second World War veteran, he left the Navy to pursue an academic career.  (The circumstances leading to this have been described variously as an early retirement for service-related injuries or for those inflicted upon him while participating in a civil rights march in the Deep South.)  By the 1960s, Williams was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in a history department featuring such luminaries as George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg.  Williams was a high-profile participant in the intellectual controversies of the era, opposing the Vietnam War while locking horns on occasion with the campus New Left.

Williams’ career stalled a bit the following decade as the discourse surrounding American history and foreign policy shifted and morphed and his work was nudged to the margins.  He migrated westward and concluded his career at Oregon State University.  Distrustful of large institutions, he continued to argue for a return to decentralized government which mirrored his critiques of U.S. foreign policy.  Williams retired in 1980 and died ten years later.

When the Iraq War was at its height, Williams’ writings enjoyed a minor renaissance thanks to academics like Andrew Bacevich but remain fairly obscure.  However, Williams’ ideas retain a certain authority applicable to our present predicament.  We must face the truth that few fights are truly good fights and address the questions of war and peace in language detached from nationalistic sentimentality.  When this discussion takes place at last, may the spirit of Dr. Williams moderate.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar 

Lessons Unlearned

John Walker Lindh is a free man, sort of.

You remember John Walker Lindh?  The so-called American Taliban.  The California native turned Islamic militant captured in Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11.  Yes, him.  He was let out of federal prison this week on supervised release 17 years into a 20-year sentence for numerous charges to which he pled guilty in 2002.

Like everyone else, I hadn’t thought of Lindh for a very long time.  Once he went to prison, the legal case against him was settled and so there was no reason for the media to pursue his story further.

John Walker Lindh’s moment in the spotlight was brief and confusing.  His name was initially reported to be simply “John Walker.”  We learned he was the son of Marin County navel-gazers whose religious seeking led him to fall into the rabbit hole of Islamic fundamentalism.  He had waged war on America, and a courageous CIA officer had lost his life as a consequence. 

Counternarratives fail to thrive in times of crisis.  There were fragments from which John Walker Lindh’s account could be elided.  There was the disturbing image of a naked Lindh blindfolded and duct-taped to a litter.  It was reported at the time that he had been held incommunicado aboard a U.S. Navy vessel for several weeks.  He was questioned by the FBI without benefit of counsel.  Little to none of that registered with the public at the time, however.

It did not register with me, either.  There is a whole new generation coming up who did not witness the September 11^th attacks.  For them, they will be as meaningful as Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination were for me as a child; important certainly, but events carrying no emotional freight.  But personally, the shock of that Tuesday morning reverberates almost two decades later.

The fall of 2001 was a surreal time.  There was the horror of large-scale terrorism visited upon us, live on TV.  The biggest news story over the summer had been the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy and the revelation of her affair with congressman Gary Condit, which somehow made our collective complacency even more astounding.   Weeks dragged on, the destruction of the Twin Towers replayed endlessly on cable news.

Then, in early October, I logged on to the internet (on a dial-up connection, naturally) and learned we had begun bombing Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan.  Finally!  Something was being done.   We’d get bin Laden and his murderous crew and our thirst for justice would be slaked at last.  Within weeks, NATO forces routed the Taliban.

As we would find to our chagrin, the Taliban would prove quite resilient.  But as November came to a close, just after we had solemnly observed the first Thanksgiving of the War on Terror, the Taliban’s resolve in the face of what we thought was certain defeat became very clear.

The Northern Alliance and U.S. special operations forces had secured the surrender of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan.  A number of prisoners were temporarily held in a fortress at Qala-i-Jangi, just outside Mazar-i-Sharif.  Seeking information on al-Qaeda activity, CIA officers Mike Spann and Dawson Tyson questioned a number of them.

One prisoner said there was an English-speaking man among them.  Facing certain questioning, Lindh was advised by his comrades to claim he was Irish rather than American.  When he was brought to Spann, however, it was readily clear Lindh was from the good ol’ U.S. of A.  News footage of the interrogation showed a visibly irate Spann haranguing his haggard and dazed prisoner.  At one point Tyson, seeking to further intimidate Lindh, turned to Spann and said they should just leave him to his fate, to rot in an Afghan prison.  Some time thereafter, Lindh was presumably returned to the prisoner population.

Later that night, a pre-planned uprising erupted at Qala-i-Jangi.  The prisoners overcame and expelled their Northern Alliance captors at the start of what would become a weeklong siege of the prison.  John Walker Lindh was among the prisoners, but his true role is open to question.  Lindh, understandably wanting to minimize his culpability, claimed he took refuge in a basement after being shot in the leg.  The U.S. government said he was an active participant. 

Lindh would have been in a world of hurt in any case once he fell into U.S. custody.  The mere fact he had joined the jihadists was damaging.  But there was an aggravating factor: Mike Spann had been killed in the early hours of the uprising, the first American to die in the War in Afghanistan. 

Mr. Spann was interred with honors at Arlington.  Mr. Lindh faced the consequences of Mr. Spann’s death, among other things.

The charges against John Walker Lindh were sobering, ten counts altogether.  Most were paired conspiracy and commission counts (e.g., Conspiracy to supply services to the Taliban / Supplying services to the Taliban).  Lindh was unquestionably guilty of nearly all, and so he pled in federal court so as to avoid a harsher sentence.  A little more than year after his capture in Afghanistan, Lindh entered federal prison and faded from public memory.

It would be helpful if Lindh would be permitted to tell his story.  It’s doubtful we will hear it anytime soon.  The Justice Department says that the federal Son of Sam law precludes him from giving his side, at least for pay.  He might need it; from what the media have reported the restrictions on Lindh for the next three years would make it difficult to obtain paying work.  But there is one discrepancy between Lindh’s claims and one of the charges which has me puzzled.  Perhaps the most serious charge Lindh faced in 2002 was conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens.  Lindh, through his family, denies he ever wanted to fight or kill Americans.   

It’s possible Lindh was an innocent abroad.  In his search for Islamic community, he was led into the Taliban’s arms.  It is unlikely he or anyone else in the Taliban rank and file had any advance knowledge of 9/11 though he almost certainly had to have known of the Taliban’s links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.  But after the attacks, desertion or avoiding an armed confrontation with American forces became a dim prospect.

This begs the question why.  What would lead an American youth from an affluent background down such a path in the first place?  Regrettably, few of us are interested in knowing.  Empathy is not a virtue in our society.  Individuals who are square pegs get scant understanding from those who fit neatly into round holes.  

Then again, disaffection with the American way is nothing new.  During the Vietnam conflict, the New Left journal Ramparts once published a cover proclaiming, “Alienation is When Your Country is at War, and You Want the Other Side to Win.”  Our culture uncritically embraces American exceptionalism which in turn blinds us to the suffering our foreign policies bring to millions around the world.  For the small number of people at home who pay attention, however, such suffering affects them acutely.  An even smaller subset of them conclude that the only way to end the suffering is resistance.

Was John Walker Lindh one of these resisters?  Some of his statements seem to support this theory.  Is he still motivated by such sentiments?  Reports from prison, if true, would cast doubt on his reformation.  Lindh is said to sympathize with Islamic State.  He cannot obtain a passport or leave the country during his supervised release, though he acquired Irish citizenship through descent during his imprisonment and could settle in Ireland once the restrictions on him are lifted.  From there, his travels would be less visible to U.S. authorities and would arguably be even less so should he renounce his U.S. citizenship.

Then again, maybe Lindh’s idealism has waned sufficiently for him to retreat into obscurity.  Let’s hope that’s the case.  But until we address the conditions that produce young people like John Walker Lindh, we will see more of them.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

Breaking Points

We now have a name to go with the deed. 

After several days of withholding his identity, the Pentagon has announced that the alleged perpetrator of last week’s massacre in Afghanistan is a soldier named Robert Bales.  We’re told that Bales, an Army staff sergeant with eleven years’ service, left his base camp without authorization on the night of March 11^th, went into the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, Panjwai, Kandahar Province, and murdered sixteen civilians in their homes.  Another five were reported wounded in the attack.    

Most of the news accounts I’ve read and watched this week have been concerned with the attack’s potential consequences for U.S.-Afghan relations and future NATO operations in Afghanistan.  Never mind the human rights of the victims; already they have become abstractions in our foreign policy calculus.  To be sure there are diplomatic causes for concern not least of which was the surreptitious spiriting of Bales first to Kuwait, then to the United States.   The Panjwai massacre may very well be the breaking point in our relations with Afghanistan.  The Taliban have already broken off negotiations with the Karzai administration over the incident, further setting back prospects for peace and the Obama Administration’s objective of withdrawing U.S. combat forces by 2014.   

But, back to Robert Bales.  News reports state that he had served three previous deployments, all of them in Iraq.  Assuming that the deployments were at least a year in length, Bales’ time in war zones nearly equals that of America’s involvement in the Second World War.  When you consider that the majority of our World War II service members never saw anything approaching that much time in combat, this fact takes on a certain significance.  Add to this the knowledge Bales had suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq and was diagnosed with PTSD, and he becomes an object example of the human toll of our post-9/11 wars.

None of this excuses his crimes.  But I can already see how this is going to play out in the arena of public opinion.  Our political and military leaders will do their best to minimize the incident as an aberration.  The mainstream media is already framing Bales’ acts as the tragic-but-inevitable consequence of a punishing operational tempo and inadequate military medical and mental health services.  There will inevitably be more than a few self-proclaimed “patriots” who will portray Bales as a wronged hero.  But I think the incident will quickly fade from our collective consciousness.  In the coming days and weeks, other news stories will claim our attention.  I doubt that the people of Afghanistan will forget quite as soon.    

We cannot simply write off the Panjwai killings as the deeds of a man pushed past his limits or as something out of character for us as a people.   Even though Bales’ acquaintances say he wasn’t prejudiced against Muslims, our culture reflected a strong anti-Muslim bias long before the September 11^th attacks.  When you consider our mindless propensity for conflating the words “Muslim” and “terrorist,” the spate of civilian murders by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few years was probably inevitable.  As it is, our faith in our national superiority causes us to take a dim view of other cultures.  When we are armed and among people we have been conditioned to hold in contempt, it takes little provocation to produce a tragedy.  

Considering the larger implications of Panjwai, it’s little use at this juncture to speak of our image in the Muslim world.  The United States, along with Britain and France, squandered its credibility there generations ago.  I suspect the most galling thing for people in the Middle East and in Central Asia is the glaring disconnect between Western democratic ideals and Western actions.  Americans like to claim they are bringing democracy to the oppressed.   Yes, Afghans were oppressed by the Taliban.  It’s true that the Taliban’s harboring of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda posed a threat both to the region and the rest of the world.  But a decade into our occupation of Afghanistan, can we really say its people are any better off?  Has anything fundamentally changed to make our conception of democracy a reality in Afghan society? Outside of Kabul, traditional ways continue as they have for centuries.  Pashtun culture is rooted in local custom and familial ties, rendering the kind of state-building pushed by the U.S. and its allies ineffective.  (The fate of the 1980s communist regime after the Soviet withdrawal is a grim example of what might befall Karzai’s after ISAF departs.)   Regardless of whether or not the Taliban ultimately return to power, there are timeless qualities in Afghan society which militate against exogenous change.  Perhaps it’s best that we finally learn the lesson the Afghans have been trying to teach the West since the “Great Game” of the nineteenth century and leave them at last to their own affairs.       

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Afghan Unrest

More than a decade into the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan, it seems we're still learning (or relearning) hard lessons.  This time it's the alleged burning of the Koran by troops at Bagram airbase, and the results have been tragic.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind...

A Few Thoughts on Triumphalism and the Other

Two news items in as many days have spurred uneasy thoughts concerning the war on terror and our views of the Muslim world.

The first was a video showing U.S. Marines allegedly abusing corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.   It’s reminiscent of any number of incidents over the last decade ranging from the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to the circus-like atmosphere of Saddam Hussein’s execution to the Koran desecrations at Guantanamo Bay.  The common element is an offhanded dehumanizing of the enemy, evinced in this case by a marine urinating on a body and walking away with a sardonic, “Have a nice day, buddy.”

The second was the car bomb murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist, the latest of several in recent years.  The assailant or assailants in this and the previous bombings are unknown.  However, it is not too far a leap to ascribe the deaths to the machinations of U.S., British, French, or Israeli intelligence, acting singularly or in concert.  I am not simply echoing Iranian accusations; I am identifying the states with the most to lose should Iran develop a nuclear weapon.  Certainly, the question of halting Iran’s nuclear development program by removing its scientists from the equation has been posed in the past, most notably by right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds in 2007.[1]  But I suspect that in the coming days the media emphasis will be less on the murdered scientist and more on the real and imagined perils of Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” as they are so often called. 

Media coverage reflects how our popular attitudes shape our approach to policy and vice versa.  Our perceptions of the non-Western world are inlaid with a deep vein of xenophobia, tinged with a profound ignorance of its complexity.  When most Americans probably can’t locate Afghanistan on a map or tell the difference between Iraq and Iran, Arabs and Persians, or Sunnis and Shiites, our ability to have an intelligent public debate is lost.  That our news is delivered to us in quick-cut edits and sound bites doesn’t help.         

Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, the Western cultural construct of Middle Easterners as “Other,” is useful here.  Western dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia was informed by an image of the region’s inhabitants as weak, childlike, and easily manipulated.  Resistance challenged these long-held assumptions, whether it was Arab opposition to Israel, the Iranian Revolution, the Afghan mujahedeen war against the Soviets, or the emergence of al-Qaeda, among numerous other events over the past sixty years.   And so what began as essentially anti-colonialist struggles for cultural and religious dignity have been consistently portrayed as threats to democracy and global security, which is to say that they are a threat to American supremacy.  Because even in 2012, led by an African-American president, it will not do to have people with dark complexions defy us. 

This has been a particular a sore spot for us since the Vietnam War.  Defeat at the hands of a postcolonial peasant army poked holes in our deeply ingrained belief that America would always prevail.  One result is that as a culture, we have taken a triumphalist attitude toward our country’s recent conflicts.  I first noticed this after the invasion of Grenada.  The following year, President Reagan was running for reelection.  The College Republicans on my campus commemorated the anniversary of the invasion as “National Liberation Day” with a well-attended rally on the quad…all in honor of the world’s most powerful military having defeated a handful of Cuban construction workers.  The occupation of Panama was greeted in a similar fashion.  The high tech media spectacle of the Persian Gulf War was a harbinger of things to come—the emergence of a pervasive belief that war is a push-button endeavor involving faceless adversaries. 

Our faith in automated warfare is a conceit that has only grown with time.  Witness the response to the targeted killing of al-Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last year: There was scant dialogue in the mass media over the morality of the act or whether al-Awlaki’s due process rights as a U.S. citizen were violated.  He was a problem that could be (and was) solved by anonymous individuals pushing buttons in a room hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

Another legacy of Gulf War I is that, simply put, war has become a spectator sport for Americans.  Consider the reaction to Osama bin Laden’s death.  Interspersed with the pronouncements of anchors and pundits was TV news footage that showed college students, few of whom could have had any clear memories of 9/11, whooping and hollering and dancing around bonfires as if after a football victory.  I half expected to see them holding up huge foam rubber fingers proclaiming, “We’re #1!”  While I won’t shed any tears for the late Mr. bin Laden, I question how we marked his demise.  There wasn’t any reflection on the conditions that gave rise to militant Islamism in the first place or the long-term implications of bin Laden’s death, if any, on the war on terror.  Rather, it was yet another paroxysm of the kind of un-self-conscious jubilation in which we indulge at times like these.

Which brings me back to where I started.  This week’s events reflect and reinforce our underlying attitude regarding our Middle Eastern policy: We will not brook opposition from our inferiors and their deaths are barely worthy of our notice.  Longstanding cultural portrayals of Muslims as alien and malevolent have served to dehumanize them in our eyes.  In such circumstances it’s easy for us to accept defiling the enemy’s dead, it’s easy to feel relief that maybe the Iranians won’t get the bomb as soon as we had feared, and it’s easy to ignore the violent loss of human life in both cases.  The feeling that we’re somehow safe, even if fleeting, is enough for most of us.  And a few days from now, something else will have our attention.  

   

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Jan. 11, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/01/11/more_murder_of_iranian_scientists_still_terrorism/singleton/