Smoking while Iraq burns
By Naomi Klein
Nov. 27 — 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 Fallujah”
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 Fallujah, 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 US 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.”
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 thought, 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
US impunity. Because outside US borders, it is, of course, a different
marine who has been awarded the prize as “the face of Fallujah:”
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 Fallujah, 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 Fallujah 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 percent
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 people in the US are incapable of caring about anyone’s
lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit
in the dehumanization 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 Fallujah, 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.
Source: Guardian (UK)
