Page 4 of 4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Words in a time of
war By Mark Danner
principles of our age is that
scandals are doomed to be revealed - and to remain
stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished,
unfinished.
If this Age of Rhetoric has a
tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the frozen
scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and
revealed, in a never-ending torture familiar to
the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor half-eaten
liver. A full three years ago, the photographs
from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS (the
Columbia Broadcasting System)
on Sixty Minutes II and published by
Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far
back I wrote a book entitled Torture and
Truth, made up largely of Bush administration
documents that detailed the decision to use
"extreme interrogation techniques" or - in the
First President of Rhetoric's phrase - "an
alternative set of procedures" on prisoners in the
"war on terror".
He used this phrase last
September in a White House speech kicking off the
2006 mid-term election campaign, at a time when
accusing the Democrats of evidencing a continued
softness on terror - and a lamentable
unwillingness to show the needed harshness in
"interrogating terrorists" - seemed a winning
electoral strategy.
And indeed Democrats
seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not
to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of last
October, which arguably made many of these
"alternative sets of procedures" explicitly legal.
And Democrats did win both houses of Congress, a
victory perhaps owed in part to their refusal to
block Bush's interrogation law. Who can say? What
we can say is that if torture today remains a
"scandal", a "crisis", it is a crisis in that same
peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming
are crises: that is, they are all things we have
learned to live with.
Perhaps the
commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric
at the University of California at Berkeley is not
the worst of places to call for a halt to this
spinning merry-go-round. I know it will brand me
forever a member of the reality-based community if
I suggest that the one invaluable service the new
Democratic Congress can provide all Americans is a
clear accounting of how we came to find ourselves
in this present time of war: an authorized
version, as it were, which is, I know, the most
pathetically retrograde of ideas.
This
would require that people like Wolfowitz,
Rumsfeld, and many others be called before a
select, bipartisan committee of Congress to tell
us what, in their view, really happened. I squirm
with embarrassment putting forward such a
pathetically unsophisticated notion, but failing
at least the minimally authorized version that
Congress could provide, we will find ourselves
forever striving - by chasing down byways like the
revelation of the identity of Valerie Plame, or
the question of whether or not George Tenet
bolstered his "slam dunk" exclamation in the Oval
Office with an accompanying Michael Jordan-like
leap - to understand how precisely decisions were
made between September 11, 2001, and the invasion
of Iraq 18 months later.
Don't worry,
though, rhetoric graduates: such a proposal has
about it the dusty feel of past decades; it is as
"reality-based" as can be and we are unlikely to
see it in our time. What we are likely to see is
the ongoing collapse of our first Rhetoric-Major
President, who, with fewer than one American in
three now willing to say they approve of the job
he is doing, is seeing his power ebb by the day.
Tempting as it is, I will urge you not to draw too
many overarching conclusions from his fate. He has
had, after all, a very long run - and I say this
with the wonder that perhaps can only come from
having covered both the 2000 and 2004 election
campaigns, from Florida, and the Iraq war.
I last visited that war in December, when
Baghdad was cold and gray and I spent a good deal
of time drawing black Xs through the sources
listed in my address book, finding them, one after
another, either departed or dead. Baghdad seemed a
sad and empty place, with even its customary
traffic jams gone, and the periodic, resonating
explosions attracting barely glances from those
few Iraqis to be found on the streets.
How, in these "words in a time of war",
can I convey to you the reality of that place at
this time? Let me read to you a bit of an account
from a young Iraqi woman of how that war has
touched her and her family, drawn from a newsroom
blog. The words may be terrible and hard to bear,
but - for those of you who have made such a
determined effort to learn to read and understand
- this is the most reality I could find to tell
you. This is what lies behind the headlines and
the news reports and it is as it is.
We were asked to send the next of
kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on
Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be
handed over ...
So we went, his mom, his
other aunt and I ...
When we got there,
we were given his remains. And remains they
were. From the waist down was all they could
give us. We identified him by the cell phone in
his pants pocket. "If you want the rest, you
will just have to look for yourselves. We don't
know what he looks like."
... We were
led away, and before long a foul stench clogged
my nose and I retched. With no more warning we
came to a clearing that was probably an inside
garden at one time; all around it were patios
and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the
evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now
it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of
cattle, all around were human bodies. On this
side; complete bodies; on that side halves; and
everywhere body parts.
We were asked
what we were looking for; "upper half" replied
my companion, for I was rendered speechless.
"Over there." We looked for our boy's broken
body between tens of other boys' remains; with
our bare hands sifting them and turning them.
Millennia later we found him, took both parts
home, and began the mourning
ceremony.
The foregoing were words
from an Iraqi family, who find themselves as far
as they can possibly be from the idea that, when
they act, they create their own reality - that
they are, as "Bush's Brain" put it, "history's
actors". The voices you heard come from history's
objects and we must ponder who the subjects are,
who exactly is acting upon them.
The car
bomb that so changed their lives was not set by
Americans; indeed, young Americans even now are
dying to prevent such things. I have known a few
of these young Americans. Perhaps you have as
well, perhaps they are in the circles of your
family or of your friends. I remember one of them,
a young lieutenant, a beautiful young man with a
puffy, sleepy face, looking at me when I asked
whether or not he was scared when he went out on
patrol - this was October 2003, as the insurgency
was exploding. I remember him smiling a moment and
then saying with evident pity for a reporter's
lack of understanding. "This is war. We shoot,
they shoot. We shoot, they shoot. Some days they
shoot better than we do." He was patient in his
answer, smiling sleepily in his young beauty, and
I could tell he regarded me as from another world,
a man who could never understand the world in
which he lived. Three days after our interview, an
explosion near Fallujah killed him.
Contingency, accidents, the metaphysical
ironies that seem to stitch history together like
a lopsided quilt - all these have no place in the
imperial vision. A perception of one's self as
"history's actor" leaves no place for them. But
they exist and it is invariably others, closer to
the ground, who see them, know them, and suffer
their consequences.
You have chosen a path
that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that
you have studied and into the heart of those
consequences. Of all people you have chosen to
learn how to see the gaps and the loose stitches
and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this
Age of Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant
perfume of imperial dreams. You have made your
study in a propitious time, O graduates, and that
bold choice may well bring you pain, for you have
devoted yourselves to seeing what it is that
stands before you. If clear sight were not so
painful, many more would elect to have it. Today,
you do not conclude but begin: today you commence.
My blessings upon you, and my gratitude to you for
training yourself to see. Reality, it seems, has
caught up with you.
Mark Danner,
who has written about foreign affairs and politics
for two decades, is the author of The Secret
Way to War, Torture and Truth and The
Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is
professor of journalism at the University of
California at Berkeley and Henry R Luce professor
at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other
subjects appear regularly in the New York Review
of Books. His work is archived at
MarkDanner.com.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
