Ira Chernus PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER |
IS ANYONE RESPONSIBLE
FOR
Once again, a
mainstream journalist has missed the real story because he didn’t check out
Commondreams. This time it’s the New York Times’ top dog in
“Sassaman,” I
thought, as I read the article. “I’ve heard that name before.” Indeed, I wrote
about that name, on www.commondreams.org,
nearly two years ago. In December, 2003, I wrote: “The U.S. war against Iraq
has found its own Lewis Carroll, its true poet and genius of the absurd: Lt.
Colonel Nathan Sassaman.…The other day, he told a New York Times reporter:
‘With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I
think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.’"
That reporter
was Dexter Filkins. He’s been following Sassaman’s story for a long time. But when
he wrote it all out for the Times Magazine last week, he left out the amazing
Once a star
quarterback at
“The new
priority would be killing insurgents and punishing anyone who supported them,
even people who didn't,” Filkins writes. His unit began to beat prisoners, burn
down fields, and demolish houses. “When mothers put their children to bed at
night, they tell them, 'If you aren't a good boy, Colonel Sassaman is going to
come and get you."'
Why this harsh
new policy? Sassaman’s own explanation sounded crazy: “Fear and violence…can
convince these people that we are here to help them." So Filkins now omits
that quote, which he had once published, and makes it all sound very
reasonable: “His theory was that no progress would be possible without order
first and that ultimately, even if his men were hard on the locals, they would
come around.”
It all makes
sense, Filkins adds, if you assume that Arabs understand nothing but force. “Whoever
displays the most strength and authority is the one they are going to obey,” as
another officer told Filkins. This is probably the same officer he quoted in
his article about Sassaman two years ago. As I wrote back then, this officer
“explained clearly, if unwittingly, one good reason why it won’t work. After
explaining that ‘the Arab mind’ understands only force, he added: ‘force, pride
and saving face.’ Wounded pride can stir up a powerful resistance.” A
reasonable outrage at the injustice of occupation, I added, can stir up even
more resistance. And indeed it has.
One night
early in January, 2004, Sassaman’s hard-line theory of “order first” led some
of his men to throw two captive Iraqis into the
But Filkins’
current article lays no blame on Sassaman, nor on Bush administration decision-makers.
He portrays Sassaman as “a parable of the dark passage that lay ahead for the
Americans in
This highly
respected journalist never considers the idea that we shouldn’t have been there
in the first place. In his story, questions of moral choice are simply
irrelevant.
Nearly two
years ago, I saw it differently. “When the debacle comes in
It’s too bad
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all the other inside-the-beltway cowboys didn’t
read it two years ago.
Perhaps it
sounds self-righteous for me to say that, two years ago, I told you so. But we
need to remember that none of this was inevitable. As we approach the seemingly
inevitable 2000th
With the
failure of the U.S. war in Iraq becoming ever more clear, a new struggle is
beginning: the struggle over how we will remember this war, how we will tell
the story. Regardless of what mainstream media like the New York Times tell us,
we have to insist that it is no Greek tragedy. It’s a tale of individuals
making irrational, immoral decisions in pursuit of an irrational, immoral goal.
If we don’t learn that lesson -- if we call this war just a tragedy, or another
“aberration” like Vietnam, with no one really at fault -- we are bound to
repeat it.
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