PlaNet www.pl.net
0800 752638
Planet Communications— delivering socially and environmentally conscious internet and media services since 1992.
PlaNet News & Views
|
|
|
Posted on 29-11-2004
Smoking While Iraq Burns
Its idolisation of 'the face of Falluja' shows how numb the US is to
everyone's pain but its own
by Naomi Klein, November 26, 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."
Advertiser links
Buy and Sell PlayStations on eBay.co.uk
You'll find thousands of new and used Play Station consoles...
ebay.co.uk
Great Deals on Consoles and Accessories
Consoles and accessories: find PlayStation at Kelkoo, the...
kelkoo.co.uk
Playstation Games at Index.co.uk
Thousands of toys for all ages all at high street prices -...
index.co.uk
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
|
