| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
06 Jun 2006 01:18:26 PM |
| Object: |
The fantasy, so beloved by Americans, of a clean, surgical, decent war. |
From The Washington Post, 6/6/6:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/05/AR2006060501437.html
Unblinking Observer
Photographs Show a War Beyond Investigations
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 6, 2006; Page C01
The Iraq war is the first major conflict fought in what might be
called the age of the new Panopticon.
The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham coined the term in the late
18th century to describe a prison in which the guard tower was in the
center of concentric rings of cells, allowing authorities to exercise
an "invisible omniscience."
Although the word emerged in the context of prison reform, it has
become more suggestive over the years, capturing something essential
about power and authority, from Big Brother's pervasive surveillance
to the more benign notion that government is always "looking into"
things.
But the new Panopticon is a digital phenomenon, a world of instant
cameras, cellphone snapshots, e-mailed photographs, a world that
produces a nonstop, immediate and ubiquitous visual record of itself
-- and it is breaking the government's monopoly on omniscience.
Again and again throughout this war, amateur photographs have exposed
the flaws of the military's carefully constructed image of discipline.
Photographs made Abu Ghraib a symbol of shame throughout the world.
And photographs and video images are again undermining the military's
cherished reputation for calm under fire and heroic self-restraint.
The most horrifying images are not published or shown on TV, though
they're easy to find on the Web.
But the ones we are confronted with are bad enough:
A small child, a victim of a devastating and controversial U.S.
airstrike in Ishaqi, is dressed in baby-blue, his eyes are closed, and
his tiny, gently clenched hand rests by his side.
He might be asleep, except that the photograph, which ran in Newsweek,
shows a mangled, bloody arm next to him.
The unidentified, shredded limb (does it belong to yet another child?)
reaching into the center of the image might well stand for all the
rest of these photographs that ***** the conscience:
They seem to come from the margins of our attention, they reach in and
put their bloody imprint on a war that we wish had more innocence and
calm to it.
The military has concluded that there was no U.S. wrongdoing in the
March 15 Ishaqi attack that left the child dead.
They are not so certain about two other incidents, the killing of a
disabled Iraqi man in Hamdaniyah on April 26 and the deaths of 24
Iraqis in Haditha on Nov. 19.
Both are under investigation, and photographs and video from both have
begun to circulate.
In the Hamdaniyah case, we know there are graphic images of a man
wrapped in plastic sheeting -- a see-through shroud that has become a
grisly visual marker of the ongoing conflict.
Neighbors and family say the man, who has four bullet holes in his
face, was dragged from his house and shot by U.S. soldiers.
Eight American servicemen are under investigation.
In Haditha, the range of images is wider: bodies wrapped in rugs;
bodies bundled in white cloth and tied into neat, ghostly packages;
and bloody, bloated faces emerging from stiff folds of transparent
plastic, rather like Rodin's deathly Balzac looks out from his small
cave of draping metal.
Hands and feet of the living -- bystanders, onlookers, witnesses to
the silence of the dead -- often frame the images.
These strange, anonymous additions to the picture -- disembodied
appendages -- suggest humanity at a standstill.
They suggest an impotence among Iraqi civilians that is heartbreaking.
The U.S. military is still looking into the Haditha killings.
It's also looking into the possibility of a military coverup, which
kept the killings under wraps for half a year.
Photographs are immediate. Investigations are by necessity methodical
and often slow.
These two different senses of time -- the immediate and the methodical
-- are now in troubling conflict.
A dead child cries out for immediate response; the military
investigates.
We see photographs of men doubled over with grief, tear-stained faces,
mouths contorted in pain, and the pang is instant; the military
investigates.
A boy standing next to the bodies of his family or friends looks up at
his elders with a blank stare on his face, an image that puts death
and childhood in excruciating proximity; the military investigates.
Photographs may play an important role in some of these
investigations.
But it is the degree to which the photographs exist in a world of
their own, apart from the military's cautiously worded statements,
that is increasingly perplexing.
Throughout the war, the notion of two realities has dogged the
warmakers.
Is the president living in a world of good news and progress and
missions accomplished, while our soldiers and the Iraqi population
live in a world of chaos and death and uncertainty?
Are the media presenting a world of antiseptic images, bloodless and
vague, mere suggestions of a carnage they know all too well but dare
not make explicit to the public?
Investigations are meant to create closure.
But photographs, which can circulate forever, keep death and
destruction open.
Investigations are also meant to assure us that the war waged in our
name is being fought with some measure of precision and dignity, but
as photographs (and incidents) accumulate, and as investigations
linger and overlap one another, they begin to lose their moral force.
Investigation, a word meant to reassure us that the government is
always "looking into" itself, is itself now subject to the blur that
makes the nightly news coverage of Iraq seem like a tape loop.
And the only image that fades, as the war grinds on, is the one with
which we prepared for battle:
the fantasy, so beloved of Americans, of a clean, surgical, decent
war.
________________________________________________________
Harry
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