Right now, the suddenly fractious Bush administration is trapped inside Baghdad’s Green Zone with its fractious team of unpopular Iraqi politicians (referred to in our media as “Iraqi leaders”), who are the Iraqi face of America. There, in the isolated and embattled heart of the capital, a strange series of events, mirroring other half-seen events in Washington, is underway. A “transitional administration” has been set up to give the country a “new start” and, unsurprisingly, it’s dominated by familiar faces, many of the same people who were in the just “dissolved” Iraqi Governing Council. Plus ça change.
In a part of Baghdad which is essentially no longer in Iraq, the stock of certain “leaders” rises — Iyad Allawi, a “protégé” of the CIA and State Department as well as the new prime minister of the country — while that of others — Ahmed Chalabi, a “protégé” of the Pentagon neocons and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office — falls, reflecting similar struggles in Washington. Inside the Green Zone, America’s Iraq struggles on, engaged in the equivalent perhaps of a deadly bedroom drama, while just beyond the bounds of our heavily fortified version of Iraq a vast tragedy of policy and life continues to unravel.
The State Department and the CIA finally seem to be wresting control of major parts of Iraq policy and Iraqi reconstruction funds from the Pentagon — at least a year too late — but whoever may now be in control inside the Green Zone, events are not. Not even faintly. We’re talking here about putting the genie back in the bottle, the famed toothpaste back in the tube. What a strange moment. The Bush administration needs that toothpaste returned, however messily, to that tube for just a few months of relative calm, but it’s now a near impossible feat.
If Allawi and his colleagues are the Iraqi face of America, then, strangely enough, the President’s falling opinion polls, the layers of burgeoning inside-the-Beltway investigations and burgeoning cover-ups, the endless leaks, the administration infighting, the lack of “discipline” at the highest levels — these are the American face of Iraq in Washington. As could have been predicted long ago, the President and his administration, increasingly desperate, are being driven by a distant, ragtag insurgency toward potential disaster at the polls in November. The desperation is such that his advisors are praying the ongoing remembrances of “the Good War,” six decades past, might now somehow rescue the President from the bad one at hand. His speech at Arlington like the upcoming ceremonies at Normandy might, it is hoped by those close to him, “launch a turnaround in his battered public image.” Saving Private Bush?
The two pieces below — assessing the role of American women at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in our offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and assessing the state of the President’s mind amid the present turmoil — began as responses from two journalists I know to matters brought up in dispatches sent out from this site. Both soon became pieces in their right. Both address the strangeness of our moment quite directly and consider some of the questions that might be asked of it. Tom
Women and Abuse in Iraq
By Carolyn WakemanWomen obviously played an important role in the abuse inflicted on male detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. We’ve seen the shocking photographs of Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner and of Spc. Sabrina Harman with a broad grin and a thumbs-up sign standing behind a pyramid of naked, hooded males. We know that a third enlisted woman, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, has been charged with participating in acts of prisoner abuse.
Right now, the suddenly fractious Bush administration is trapped inside Baghdad’s Green Zone with its fractious team of unpopular Iraqi politicians (referred to in our media as “Iraqi leaders”), who are the Iraqi face of America. There, in the isolated and embattled heart of the capital, a strange series of events, mirroring other half-seen events in Washington, is underway. A “transitional administration” has been set up to give the country a “new start” and, unsurprisingly, it’s dominated by familiar faces, many of the same people who were in the just “dissolved” Iraqi Governing Council. Plus ça change.
In a part of Baghdad which is essentially no longer in Iraq, the stock of certain “leaders” rises — Iyad Allawi, a “protégé” of the CIA and State Department as well as the new prime minister of the country — while that of others — Ahmed Chalabi, a “protégé” of the Pentagon neocons and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office — falls, reflecting similar struggles in Washington. Inside the Green Zone, America’s Iraq struggles on, engaged in the equivalent perhaps of a deadly bedroom drama, while just beyond the bounds of our heavily fortified version of Iraq a vast tragedy of policy and life continues to unravel.
Women obviously played an important role in the abuse inflicted on male detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. We’ve seen the shocking photographs of Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner and of Spc. Sabrina Harman with a broad grin and a thumbs-up sign standing behind a pyramid of naked, hooded males. We know that a third enlisted woman, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, has been charged with participating in acts of prisoner abuse.
We also know that women were prominent in the chain of command connected to the incidents of torture. According to Douglas Jehl and Kate Zerneke of the New York Times, Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, intelligence deputy to the commander of American forces in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and the top U.S. intelligence officer there, had responsibility for setting up the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib and for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, often ruling against the release of detainees. Capt. Carolyn Wood of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion led the unit in charge of interrogations at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan where at least two prisoners are known to have died in December 2002, evidently killed while under interrogation. She subsequently headed the Interrogation Coordination Element (ICE) at Abu Graib. At her second post she was allegedly “involved in intensive interrogations of detainees, condoned some of the activities and stressed that that was standard procedure.” And until relieved of her duties, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski commanded 16 military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, receiving, according to Jehl and Eric Schmitt of the Times, “broad direction from General Fast.”
How many other U.S. military women have played some part in this still unfolding drama of horrors we have yet to find out. For instance, we now know that teams of “interrogator experts” were dispatched by Guantanamo prison head Gen. Geoffrey Miller last fall and, write Jehl and Andrea Elliott of the Times, “played a major role in training American intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison.” Were these all-male teams or were female “experts” among them? Indeed, there is much we do not know about what happened and why.
In the search for explanations, both feminism and pornography quickly came in for a share of the blame. In the past, argued Naomi Wolf, author of the bestselling The Beauty Myth, in New York Magazine, feminist thinkers believed women incapable of sexual abuse, but at Abu Ghraib “some latently sadistic women did exactly what some latently sadistic men would do.” Wolf derided the idea of women as the gentler sex. “If anything, women may turn out to be more likely than men to follow guidance that encourages torture,” she stated, because of the acculturation that makes them “good at pleasing their bosses.” She also blamed the desensitizing effect of ubiquitous pornography, which “has blurred the line between. . . decent and indecent.”
Susan Sontag in an essay in the New York Times Magazine on the response to the Abu Ghraib images also wondered “how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet.” And Barbara Ehrenreich, defending feminist goals in the Los Angeles Times, reminded us that a uterus is not a replacement for a conscience.
Other contributing factors also leaped to mind. For instance, Wiley Hall of the Associated Press recently examined — Iraq aside — the escalating violence among American girls and noted that schools are reporting an increasing number of girls suspended or expelled for fighting. He quoted former Baltimore school Police Chief Jansen Robinson saying “We’re seeing girls doing things now that we used to put off on boys,” which Jansen calls “vicious, ‘I-want-to-hurt-you’ fighting [that is now] a nationwide phenomenon, and it’s catching us all off guard.”
Hall linked the upsurge in violence among school-age girls to the appearance of “movies and video games such as Tomb Raider in which women wreak violence with the gusto of male action heroes.” And he quoted Phil Leaf, director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins University, commenting on the “dearth of effective female role models [now that] mothers who used to be [in the home] are forced back into the job market or get rendered ineffective through abuse of drugs and alcohol.”
Perhaps it will turn out that the women prison guards, the women military intelligence supervisors, and the woman prison administrator involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib were abused themselves, or grew up in economically disadvantaged homes without effective adult women as role models. Perhaps they played video games like Tomb Raider, and watched pornographic films. Perhaps they wanted to assert their full equality with men through abusive behavior.
But before we rush to judgment, let’s at least remember that they were also selected and trained for a specific task in Iraq; that someone decided to place women in positions of responsibility in a Muslim country over predominantly male detainees; that someone instructed these military women in the tactical use of sexual humiliation to create favorable conditions for interrogation; that someone taught them about the cultural sensitivities they would deliberately violate; that someone advised them — at least tacitly — on the vital role the presence of women would play in the “softening-up” prelude to interrogation.
In It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It, Frank Rich in the Sunday Times cited Watergate felon turned celebrity preacher Chuck Colson’s claim that the prison guards had been corrupted by “a steady diet of MTV and pornography” to show how the Abu Ghraib abuse has been annexed as “another front in America’s election-year culture war.” Blaming porn or MTV or Howard Stern for the misbehavior of a “few bad apples,” Rich comments, lets everyone else in the chain of command off the hook.
Before we leap to attribute the abusive behavior of women at Abu Ghraib to the latent sadism of a few pornography-infused, hyper-violent guards, we need more information. We need to understand both the chain of command and the chain of responsibility — and just how these military women fit into the Pentagon’s plans for handling detainees.
Right now, the questions vastly outnumber the answers. Was this indeed a way for military women at different levels of the hierarchy to win approval from their male bosses, a way to prove their usefulness, a way to get ahead, a way to be one of the boys, a way to share in the wielding of power? Do women serve as prominently in U.S. military prison facilities and interrogation units elsewhere in what former Vice President Al Gore recently called an American gulag? Did women receive special training for their duties and at whose request? Did anyone in authority notice that the psychological humiliation and intimidation tactics implemented by women guards and interrogators evidently did not provide useful intelligence, and therefore consider changing the procedures?
As Newsweek‘s John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff note in their special report on The Roots of Torture, “ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them.” As Mark Danner comments in the New York Review of Books, the sexual humiliations, the threatened assaults, and the forced violations reported at different bases in Iraq “all seem to emerge from the same script.” Images of naked prisoners humiliated before grinning female guards actually portray “stress and duress” techniques officially approved at the highest levels of government, according to Newsweek.
“It was thought that some prisoners would do anything — including spying on their associates — to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends,” reported Seymour Hersh in his most recent article in the New Yorker. And we now know that a classified memorandum issued by General Sanchez on Oct. 12, 2003, outlined a new “interrogation and counter-resistance policy” that advocated “an interrogation approach designed to manipulate internees’ emotions and weaknesses.”
Hersh considers the source of such orders to be “the notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation [which] became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.” Those discussions were apparently based on a 1973 study of Arab culture and psychology by Raphael Patai, described by one of Hersh’s informants as “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” The claim that sex was a “prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world” served, according to Hersh’s informant, as the basis for discussions of Arab culture stressing two themes, “one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
So before we leap to too many conclusions, we need to know more about procedures, rationales, policies, and incentives for selecting and training women for deployment in our military police and military intelligence units in the Islamic world. Only then can we decide how much to blame feminism and pornography for the acts of sexual humiliation and torture committed in the U.S. military prison system in Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly elsewhere.
Carolyn Wakeman, associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, recently co-edited Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution and is co-author of To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman.
Copyright C2004 Carolyn Wakeman
His Reality and Ours
By Robert ManoffA recent Tomdispatch noted that Bush’s Army War College speech about Iraq seemed to have been “fedexed in from la-la land” in a “state of denial” and that for Bush — in the words of Slate‘s William Saletan — the “unpleasant facts” about Iraq “aren’t even facts, they’re illusions.” Indeed, Bush’s confusion on this point, says Saletan, is nothing less than psychopathology.
Would that it were so. Unfortunately for us, however, Bush is confused about reality not because he can’t discriminate fact from fiction but because he is bent on saving souls. At least that’s the way it looks to him. And he is not alone in this conviction. Erratic as it may appear to Slate, his behavior is not the product of individual delusion; it is the consequence of a vision shared with many millions of Americans. In this scheme of things, what appears to be confusion is actually a willed reordering of Being in the name of virtue itself.
To understand how this can be, it’s useful to begin with Wesley Clark’s argument (in the current Washington Monthly) that the origins of the Bush Administration’s Iraq adventure can be traced to the Right’s misreading of the lesson taught by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The Right, he says, erroneously concluded that Reagan “won” the Cold War by means of military policies informed by “moral clarity” about the nature of Communist regimes. Clark argues that Bush & Co. are now applying this lesson to their “war on terrorism” in the mistaken belief that “moral clarity” will again yield up victory in this latest crusade.
Clark’s argument should serve to remind us that when it comes to “reality,” what has ontological primacy for Bush is not what we consider real (the facts on the ground in Iraq), but precisely this thing he and his cohort call “moral clarity.” As Bush put it at West Point a couple of years ago, “Moral clarity was essential to our victory in the Cold War…. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil…we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem.” In other words, for the Bush administration moral clarity makes it possible to see through appearances (those facts on the ground) to the Truth that underlies reality itself (Iraq as a battlefield in the Manichaean struggle between Us and Them).
It seems to me, however, that different members of the Bush administration understand “moral clarity” differently. Although it has been the largely Jewish band of insider neocons who have taken some heat recently, it is actually Bush’s own evangelical Christianity that has been responsible for the fact that “moral clarity,” which merely informed policy during the Reagan years has now, in the Evangelical hands of George W. Bush, become policy.
Most of the defense/foreign policy neocons around Bush, whatever their nominal religion, are rationalists: Indeed, their vision of a step-by-step transformation of the “Greater Middle East” through the exemplary democratization of Iraq illustrates what can happen when “reason” overwhelms common sense. (Let’s remember, too, that the original neocons were once Trotskyites, and that Leon Trotsky was the author of Their Morals and Ours, an attack on bourgeois morality for… lack of moral clarity.)
For rationalists like them, “moral clarity” is the product of disciplined, rational intellection, and we might say that for them it is associated with the mind as the seat of human reason. In this respect they differ from the President, the Texas evangelical Christian, for whom faith, not reason, is preeminent, and for whom, therefore, “moral clarity” is associated with the heart, the seat of the soul, the locus of the faith of the Born Again. (This is what made it possible for Bush, after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time, to report to the world in all seriousness that “I’ve looked into his heart and he’s a good man.”)
In trying to account for the apparent confusion about reality vis-à-vis Iraq, we come face-to-face with the consequences of Bush’s brand of evangelical Christianity: For this president, Born Again as he is, it is not “works” that matter (what the U.S. is making of the facts on the ground in Iraq), but “faith.” Reality for him is belief itself, not the fruits of that belief or the actions it counsels. His world may have the appearance to us of “la-la land,” but for our president it is the only land that matters.
This land is an internal landscape of conviction, not an exterior landscape shaped by activity and its consequences. For the believer (as well as for the recovering alcoholic, it’s important to note), the daily struggle to stay the course, keep the faith, exercise the will, and finally discipline a recalcitrant reality (one’s own body and embodied desires above all) is, first and foremost, the task of the faithful. “Reality” (those pesky facts on the ground), which is for us the ultimate test of propositions and actions, is for Bush the Kingdom of the Fallen whose very existence is proof of its ontological inferiority. Reality is not a touchstone; reality is a morally compromised domain which is to be transformed by will acting at the behest of faith.
It is for this reason that those who characterize Bush as “stubborn” in his adherence to failed policies miss the point. His persistence is that of Mel Gibson’s Christ on the Cross, the man of faith for whom earthly failure is a sign of transcendental success. While perhaps admirable in a prophet, for whom the Kingdom of God and not the Kingdom of Man is the Real, such faith could well prove cataclysmic when it rules the heart and head of a president.
Robert Manoff is director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at NYU, where he is also developing a Global Journalism curriculum. He has been managing editor of Harper’s and the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, among other editorial positions, and has published widely on the media, international security, and politics.
Copyright C2004 Robert Manoff