Tag Archives: Iraq War

The Iraq War as Blogging Psychodrama

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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I Was Wrong: A Real Time Chronicle of the Iraq War, 2001-2008, Andrew Sullivan’s recently released ebook, is a compilation of his blogging on the Iraq war. As such, it begins with a post on September 11, 2001, a few hours after the attack on the World Trade Center. “When our shock recedes,” he writes in that first entry,

“our rage must be steady and resolute and unforgiving. The response must be disproportionate to the crime and must hold those states and governments that have tolerated this evil accountable. This is the single most devastating act of war since Nagasaki. It is the first time that an enemy force has invaded the precincts of the American capital since the early nineteenth century. It is more dangerous than Pearl Harbor. And it is a reminder that the forces of resentment and evil can no longer be appeased. They must be destroyed – systematically, durably, irrevocably. Perhaps now we will summon the will to do it. “

Sullivan’s initial reaction, is, then, a narrative — and a familiar one. It is a story of evil revenged, good triumphant, and violence unleashed. World War II is summoned up, through references to Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and appeasement. The accuracy of these past allusions (Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds in 1988 caused more deaths than September 11, to name just one post-Nagasaki example) is less important than the future they point to. That future is just war, and a new greatest generation, of which Sullivan (through that collective “we”) will be a part

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. I Was Wrong is the story of a story gone awry; it’s about how Sullivan thought he was in a book about good defeating evil, and instead discovers himself in a different tale altogether. The arc of that tale is traced clearly enough in the chapter subheads of the ebook: “Trauma”, “Doubt” and “Regret.” Shocked by 9/11, Sullivan hoped for, demanded, and was finally thrilled by the reality of war. As the Iraq quagmire deepened, and the extent of Bush’s “feckless” mendacity became clear, he began to re-examine his support. And finally, with the revelations of Abu Ghraib, he realized that the war should never have been waged, and that he had been complicit in an atrocity. “Those of us who supported this war cannot wash our hands of the blood of tens of thousands of innocents it has now claimed,” he wrote in October 2006. And he adds, in an epilogue, “Although my intentions were good, I feel ashamed of some of the sentences in this book.”

Sullivan’s recognition of his errors, and his willingness to admit them, are both extremely admirable. Yet, there are unsettling ways in which the story he thought he was telling in the beginning and the story he ends up telling fit together almost too well. In his second post on the day of 9/11, for example, Sullivan writes:

It feels – finally – as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 – 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away…. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society.

In this story of 9/11, the fall of the towers becomes an awakening; a traumatic shock that erases the past and leads to moral and spiritual renewal. Though the specifics are somewhat altered, isn’t that also the story of I Was Wrong, with its path from benightedness to revelation to knowledge, awakening, and renewal? Sullivan here, waxing lyrical about America and freedom and democracy, doesn’t sound so very different from Sullivan at the end of the book endorsing Obama and “a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.” We always seem to be regenerating in one way or another, always involved in a never-ending American apotheosis of purification and renewal.

This is, perhaps, just another way of saying that Andrew Sullivan is still Andrew Sullivan; he may have reversed his opinions, but he’s still the same excitable, starry-eyed blogger in 2008 that he was in 2001. From this perspective, the most important part of the title I Was Wrong is not the “Wrong”, but the “I”. In his afterword, Sullivan says that “a blogger writing daily…has nowhere to hide,” by which he means that he can conceal nothing. But it also seems to suggest that he, himself, conceals everything — that he’s so close to the camera that you can’t see past him. Thus, September 11 becomes his revenge fantasy. Thus, I Was Wrong turns the Iraq war and its aftermath into the confessional, spiritual journey of one, Andrew Sullivan.

Blogging as a form explains a good deal of this self-absorption. You read Andrew Sullivan for news to get not just Andrew Sullivan’s take, or opinion, about the news, as you might find in an op-ed. Rather, you read Sullivan’s blog, or Sullivan’s book, to get Andrew Sullivan’s story of the news — an ongoing narrative about the world, filtered through his particular perspective. The fact that the Iraq War ends up being about Andrew Sullivan isn’t because Andrew Sullivan is a navel-gazing narcissist; it’s simply a genre default. In superhero comics, the superhero wins; in romance novels, the girl gets the guy; in blogging, the blogger is front and center. If you don’t like the trope, you read something else.

Whether you like them or don’t, though, tropes have meaning. In this case the narrative impulse to turn piles of dead bodies into a story by, and/or about, this one guy watching seems like it has more than a passing relationship to American policy. The invasion of Iraq, as Sullivan’s book painfully shows, was about a desire for revenge and for American renewal and goodness — it was about us, first and last, in other words, rather than about the WMDs that weren’t there, or about human rights which Abu Ghraib showed we didn’t much care about in the first place.   Sullivan can change the story about himself from revenge to regret, but he can’t stop making it about himself. One way or another, for us the meaning of Iraq is not Iraq, but us. The real moral error in I Was Wrong is not believing Bush or miscalculating the costs of war, but treating a country full of people as characters in one’s own psychodrama. That’s called imperialism. As this book shows, even for someone as honest and thoughtful as Andrew Sullivan, it’s a hard vice to break.
 

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Teaching the Invasion of Iraq 11 Years Out

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What people forget, of course, when they’re confronted with a graphic novel about four lions who look suspiciously like the characters in Disney’s The Lion King is that Pride of Baghdad is indeed based on a true story. It is a comic relatively free of humans, following four lions who escape from the Baghdad Zoo after the initial U.S. bombing campaign, tracing how they evolve in their understandings of freedom, place, and community. Their escape is a surprise (they are released when U.S. bombs blow apart their cages), but each lion reacts to this new-found freedom differently. Noor is delighted—she has been planning an escape for months—but worries that freedom that one doesn’t work for isn’t truly freedom. Safa, on the other hand, was a victim of gang-rape while she was still in the wild, and has no interest in returning to the chaos she perceives as reigning beyond the walls of the zoo. Zill, while he tells nostalgic stories about the sunrises in the wild, largely seems ambivalent about the prospect of freedom; he would like more control, but he also likes being fed regularly. Ali, the cub, is largely unaffected as well. What follows is how I approach explaining to students the relative use of Pride of Baghdad in understanding the variety of positions one may take in regards to the Iraq War.

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Zill and Noor both long to return to the freedom they had as cubs, although they approach this in different ways. While Zill indulges in nostalgia, he doesn’t seek freedom, and their liberation seems barely to affect his attitude. Noor, on the other hand, is actively attempting to craft an escape plan. However, once they are free, Noor shows herself to be capable as a huntress, but is psychologically ill-prepared for freedom. Safa, unlike the other two adult lions, appreciates the zoo for the safety and consistency it provides. After the escape, Safa adapts back to the unpredictability of the larger world swiftly, but she is physically no longer capable of being the huntress she once was.

Each lion approaches the question of freedom from a different angle. Noor, while still inside of the zoo, thinks primarily of the physical bars on the cages as limitations on her freedom. For her, liberty is freedom of movement. Safa, in contrast, does not see freedom in terms of the ability to make choices about where she is. Liberty for Safa is defined by safety from outside threat. She sees the cages as protection, and a regular feeding schedule as safety. 

For example, Safa could represent “staying at home” (i.e. staying out of foreign wars) as a preferable political stance. However, she could also represent the idea that safety can only occur with the sacrifice of certain liberties. Furthermore, she could represent a recognition of the negative potential for foreign intervention, but through her actions, she nonetheless intervenes for the good of her pride.

When I teach Pride of Baghdad, I first approach it considering who the lions represent.

It’s worth considering how they might connect to Iraqi civilians. America was the force that came into the country. Saddam was a brutal dictator. However, under his leadership, there was relative peace and stability for the vast majority of Iraqi civilians. They may or may not have liked living under his regime, but they were relatively safe from threat—unless, of course, you were unlucky enough to draw Saddam’s attention or to be a member of a religious sect or ethnic group he despised.

Consider the lion that Safa and Noor find in the palace. In this scene, we see the lion in his death throes, wasting away while chained within a palatial estate. We of course come to find out that the bear had been stealing his food, but the bear isn’t the only bad guy here. What was removed from that lion that was a part of him?

Teeth and claws—the vehicles of a sort of natural violence, evolved in order to survive, to fight and to eat prey. The chain isn’t the only thing holding him to the wall. The chain signifies something much more basic that has been stripped from him: the right to feed himself and to defend himself. His calls for his Master, the man who did this to him (presumably Saddam or one of his sons), gestures towards the extent to which a dictatorship may remove the most basic freedoms from its citizenry in the name of a particular version of safety.

Noor is immediately willing to hypothesize that this is indeed the end result of their captivity: the removal of the ability to live without the master. Safa, however, emphasizes the distinction between the compassion that the keepers showed and the brutality with which this animal was treated.

But how do we understand the bear’s interruption here? “Ungrateful whores,” he says. What is a whore? Why would this particular insult be used? The bear draws a relationship between this insult and the distinction between a prisoner and a pet. His name, “fajer,” is probably a corruption of “fajr,” which means “dawn,” but also has a related term that means “whore.” Why would the bear have been allowed to keep his teeth and claws when they were removed from the lion? Think in relation to expressions of capriciousness, the whim of the master as a guiding principle, rather than a stable set of laws by which one abides.

In relation to Pride of Baghdad, the value most clearly explicated is freedom, but what does freedom mean in the context of war?

On the other hand, the lions could represent American civilians’ debates in the lead-up to the war. It’s worth thinking about the pro- and anti-war camps in relation to Safa, Noor, and Zill. When is Safa violent? When she is convinced that her family is under threat. Safa is mostly concerned with maintaining her own safety, particularly because of her past. However, she doesn’t shy away from the prospect of protecting those who are weaker. Safa can be regarded as a stand-in for the American public—horrified and traumatized by 9/11, needing to reassert control over their own bodies and on the world stage.

That said, Noor, our revolutionary who wanted nothing more than freedom, finds that to a great extent, the boundaries of the zoo are not that dissimilar to the boundaries of life in the wasteland of a bombed city. No freedom exists without responsibility and without personal sacrifice of safety. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act and other legal frameworks were established to “protect” American citizens, but did nothing so much as create a transparent cage.

When is Zill violent? Consider the page in which he attacks the bear—distinction between a hunter and a fighter. Hunting, as “women’s work” within the pride, denotes a division of labor. Hunting isn’t perceived as violence, but rather as the procurement of food—a simple necessity. Fighting is violence, but it also springs out of necessity for Zill, in reference to defending the females from the bear.

Of course, when we’re considering the causes for violence, we have to consider how we justify violence within our own lives. What is a “justified use of force”?

In general, we think of violence as being justified when it serves to protect. Violence used in the service of protecting the self or another is seen almost universally as a moral exertion of force. This leads us into the question of what constitutes a “just war.” Just wars are based on a set of criteria that must be established to prompt particular action, including a cause celebré of the protection of the self (the nation) or the protection of a significantly weaker force. Just war may be employed only when other avenues have been exhausted. Of course, a part of what this means is the protection of the ideals and values by which we live, and the ideals and values we believe are basic human rights.

Fables are remembered because they filter into our consciousness and give us a series of rules to follow. However, Pride of Baghdad takes the structure of a fable and breaks down the possibility of a particular rule. The lions are killed at the end. This would seem to suggest that, given our sympathetic engagement with the lions throughout the text, that the invasion was wrong, and that we should feel angry at our government for invading. But precisely what do we encounter along the way to that final scene that complicates our understanding?

When the lions are freed from the zoo, is that not (aside from Safa), what they most desire? Who frees them from the zoo? American bombs. Bombs, for Vaughan and Henrichon, have at least as much power to liberate as they do to destroy. However, the final scene shows a fundamental misunderstanding by the troops of the lions. Zill is simply sitting there, watching the horizon with his family, until he is suddenly killed.

The pride’s reaction is very understandable. They turn in anger at the enemy who has suddenly shattered this moment of calm. In the scene following the lions’ deaths, what don’t we see? Faces.

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When you have an icon, the more abstracted it is from reality, the more opportunity you have to identify with it. The flag and the faceless soldiers both are icons through which we’re meant to identify—these are our troops, this is our war. When the soldier stutters that “It…it charged right at us, sir. I didn’t want to put ‘em down, but…” we may feel angry, or we may have a surge of sympathy for the young man suddenly thrust into the position of shooting these animals; we may feel his fear and confusion.

In regards to this, I also think of the lions. When we look at the lions, we see ourselves—they are mimicries of humanity —adjacent to us, but not precisely like us. They are like the Iraqi civilians, but so much closer to our experience through this metaphoric lens. While they have a different perception of the world based on their culture and their expectations about how the world works, they’re still excruciatingly present in their deaths, in a way that most casualties of war are not. When we look at a photograph of a crying mother or a dead man, we see them. But when we look through the prism of the fable, we see us. And in this reflection of ourselves, we see no easy answers as to right and wrong.