Smoking While
Iraq Burns
By Naomi Klein
26 November, 2004
The
Guardian
Iconic
images inspire love and hate, and so it is with the photograph of James
Blake Miller, the 20-year-old marine from Appalachia, who has been christened
"the face of Falluja" by pro-war pundits, and the "the
Marlboro man" by pretty much everyone else. Reprinted in more than
a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Times photograph shows Miller
"after more than 12 hours of nearly non-stop, deadly combat"
in Falluja, his face coated in war paint, a bloody scratch on his nose,
and a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips.
Gazing lovingly
at Miller, the CBS News anchor Dan Rather informed his viewers: "For
me, this one's personal. This is a warrior with his eyes on the far
horizon, scanning for danger. See it. Study it. Absorb it. Think about
it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And if your eyes don't dampen,
you're a better man or woman than I."
A few days later,
the LA Times declared that its photo had "moved into the realm
of the iconic". In truth, the image just feels iconic because it
is so laughably derivative: it's a straight-up rip-off of the most powerful
icon in American advertising (the Marlboro man), which in turn imitated
the brightest star ever created by Hollywood - John Wayne - who was
himself channelling America's most powerful founding myth, the cowboy
on the rugged frontier. It's like a song you feel you've heard a thousand
times before - because you have.
But never mind that.
For a country that just elected a wannabe Marlboro man as its president,
Miller is an icon and, as if to prove it, he has ignited his very own
controversy. "Lots of children, particularly boys, play army, and
like to imitate this young man. The clear message of the photo is that
the way to relax after a battle is with a cigarette," wrote Daniel
Maloney in a scolding letter to the Houston Chronicle. Linda Ortman
made the same point to the editors of the Dallas Morning News: "Are
there no photos of non-smoking soldiers?" A reader of the New York
Post helpfully suggested more politically correct propaganda imagery:
"Maybe showing a marine in a tank, helping another GI or drinking
water would have a more positive impact on your readers."
Yes, that's right:
letter writers from across the nation are united in their outrage -
not that the steely-eyed, smoking soldier makes mass killing look cool,
but that the laudable act of mass killing makes the grave crime of smoking
look cool. Better to protect impressionable youngsters by showing soldiers
taking a break from deadly combat by drinking water or, perhaps, since
there is a severe potable water shortage in Iraq, Coke. (It reminds
me of the joke about the Hassidic rabbi who says all sexual positions
are acceptable except for one: standing up "because that could
lead to dancing".)
On second thoughts,
perhaps Miller does deserve to be elevated to the status of icon - not
of the war in Iraq, but of the new era of supercharged American impunity.
Because outside US borders, it is, of course, a different marine who
has been awarded the prize as "the face of Falluja": the soldier
captured on tape executing a wounded, unarmed prisoner in a mosque.
Runners-up are a photograph of a two-year-old Fallujan in a hospital
bed with one of his tiny legs blown off; a dead child lying in the street,
clutching the headless body of an adult; and an emergency health clinic
blasted to rubble.
Inside the US, these
snapshots of a lawless occupation appeared only briefly, if they appeared
at all. Yet Miller's icon status has endured, kept alive with human
interest stories about fans sending cartons of Marlboros to Falluja,
interviews with the marine's proud mother, and earnest discussions about
whether smoking might reduce Miller's effectiveness as a fighting machine.
Impunity - the perception
of being outside the law - has long been the hallmark of the Bush regime.
What is alarming is that it appears to have deepened since the election,
ushering in what can only be described as an orgy of impunity. In Iraq,
US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal
attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors,
clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies. At home, impunity
has been made official policy with Bush's appointment of Alberto Gonzales
as attorney general, the man who personally advised the president in
his infamous "torture memo" that the Geneva conventions are
"obsolete".
This kind of defiance
cannot simply be explained by Bush's win. There has to be something
in how he won, in how the election was fought, that gave this administration
the distinct impression that it had been handed a get-out-of-the-Geneva-conventions
free card. That's because the administration was handed precisely such
a gift - by John Kerry.
In the name of electability,
the Kerry team gave Bush five months on the campaign trail without ever
facing serious questions about violations of international law. Fearing
that he would be seen as soft on terror and disloyal to US troops, Kerry
stayed scandalously silent about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
When it became painfully clear that fury would rain down on Falluja
as soon as the polls closed, Kerry never spoke out against the plan,
or against the other illegal bombings of civilian areas that took place
throughout the campaign. When the Lancet published its landmark study
estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as result of the invasion and
occupation, Kerry just repeated his outrageous (and frankly racist)
claim that Americans "are 90% of the casualties in Iraq".
There was a message
sent by all of this silence, and the message was that these deaths don't
count. By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable
of caring about anyone's lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and
its supporters became complicit in the dehumanisation of Iraqis, reinforcing
the idea that some lives are expendable, insufficiently important to
risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more
than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes
to continue unchecked.
The real-world result
of all the "strategic" thinking is the worst of both worlds:
it didn't get Kerry elected and it sent a clear message to the people
who were elected that they will pay no political price for committing
war crimes. And this is Kerry's true gift to Bush: not just the presidency,
but impunity. You can see it perhaps best of all in the Marlboro man
in Falluja, and the surreal debates that swirl around him. Genuine impunity
breeds a kind of delusional decadence, and this is its face: a nation
bickering about smoking while Iraq burns.
· A version
of this column was first published in The Nation
thenation.com