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
[1] Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Jan.
11, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/01/11/more_murder_of_iranian_scientists_still_terrorism/singleton/
No comments:
Post a Comment