The Garland Of The War In Iraq
By Mustapha Marrouchi
25 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again,
and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin–I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.Walt Whitman, Reconciliation, 34.
The Anglo-American attack on Iraq in 2003 was one of the worst-reported conflicts in history. A system of media management has kept the violent deaths of some 650,000 innocent people out of the public view. If you are a decent human being, war is going to offend you because it has no purpose other than to satisfy someone’s desire for power, greed, and profit. Guilt can be just as disabling as arrogance, however, in that it is the little people who suffer the most. At the first whiff of trouble, the rich and the informed get into their Mercedes-Benzes and off-road vehicles and leave. The poor people, the very last of the dregs of society, cannot escape. They get the bill.At one moment in Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Theater, II a character stares out of a window and remarks: “And to think all that is nuclear combustion! All that faerie!” Anybody with a sense of decency would be against this claim, as he or she would be against the many commentators who chanced to say that Baghdad looked on the first night it was bombed like a fireworks display on the 4th of July–a wicked remark to make while women, children, and the elderly were dying in droves, and typified the Anglo-American callousness. The example from Beckett suggests something further lopsided in the coverage of the war: Baghdad did look like that, just as nuclear combustion produces skies at once ravaged and ravishing. It might be a better world if moral or political wrongs were made visible at once by ugliness (as if in a spy-film Michael Caine crossed into East Berlin and moved from technicolor to black-and-white) but such an improved world is merely a fantasy, whereas Beckett’s character and his response to “faerie” are true to this world and to what its inhabitants are like. Media-persons like to worry that it is their coverage which has aestheticised war: they look guilty and mutter “video game.” They need not worry. After all, the global television audience was awed by Tomahawk cruise missiles roaring from the decks of US Navy warships at sea. Their target was Baghdad with its women shrouded in veils like black bees at a honeycomb hurling themselves at the survivors, pulling at the bloodied wounded men in search of their sons, their fathers, their lovers. “Have you seen him?” “Where is he?” “Is he not with you?” are questions that will go unanswered for many years to come.
The argument about killing innocent people because you happen to think of the world as an arena for showing off your bravado and deadly weaponry is even more complex and subtle than the one I have been making. It accounts, for example, for the sharp differences in warfare in the world today. Consider Tolstoy describing the scene of the Battle of Borodino:
Over Borodino, a mist has spread, melting, parting, shimmering with light in the brilliant sunshine, magically coloring and outlining everything. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist, and over the whole landscape sparkled the morning sun, gleaming on the water, on the dew, on the bayonets of the infantry. . . . These puffs of smoke and the reports that accompanied them were, strange to say, what gave the chief beauty to the spectacle.
Tolstoy does not just nonchalantly mention the sun’s equanimity, touching alike bayonets and dew, but conceives it with a feeling of relief, a relief that combatants might also feel when they see how, for a while, the light washes clean what their struggles had smirched; this is perhaps why he emphasizes that the puffs of smoke “gave the chief beauty” to the scene–even these signals of dire intent can be drawn up in lines of something other than belligerence.
The fact of the matter is that these transformations are a reality of postmodern-day warfare, and need to be remembered so that we do not give in to the sentimentalism of thinking that the only adjective which can properly qualify “reality” is “harsh.” Such things as Tolstoy describes happen outside novels too. Wittgenstein wrote notes on aesthetics at the Hungarian Front in 1917; Wilfred Owen was reminded of a pet canary by the bullets whistling past him in his trench. All this leads me to conclude that even the most well-intentioned amongst us can lack in imagination when it comes to dealing with his or her fellow men and women. Perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre was right when he wrote: “Hell is other people.” Otherwise, how can we explain the invasion of Iraq if it was not for a corrupted imagination that delights in power and in strong excitement, the effects of which are tragic for those who are not able to fly away before the bombs and laser-guided missiles start falling from the sky. Perhaps something like Keats’s reach of imagination toward minds different from his own would better serve the purpose and the cross-purposes, of decency: “Though a quarrel in the street is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel. . . .” Can the same be said of a quarrel in the sands, or in the skies over Baghdad, especially when the quarrel involves a giant and a dwarf? The answer to the question raised here may be found in the sheer destruction of that pitiful country, a country where body parts of men are being shoveled into the mouths of the bulldozers, men whose choice is to die defending their country no matter what the price is.
These “energies,” the “fireworks,” and the “faerie,” seem to have their appeal. Bloodthirsty Anglo-American imperialists, vengeful Iraqis, and television-spectators zonk out on a Crisis Specials are not alone in feeling it. Poets like Tennyson with his “blood-red blossom of war” are as susceptible to its pull as politicians like post-war debauched Churchill who invented the phrase “theater of war.” We, human beings, it seems, un-realize the world around ourselves very readily and, looking at what we have made of that world, it is hard to blame ourselves for doing so. Otherwise, how can we begin to explain the genetic predicates of human behavior, and particularly those of human aggression, which were formed in the 99 per cent of human history spent as hunter-gatherers. Perhaps we are no better than those species of warrior ants, who in engaging in warfare, do so entirely by genetic programming. This is rather cold cheer in a world increasingly dominated by low level-civil wars, nationalism, violence and counter-violence. Vastly more pessimistic in its implications, is the spread of full-scale, apocalyptic nuclear war. But war is a creature of the human imagination, is it not?
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