The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook
THE night before last week’s Senate hearings on our “progress” in Iraq, a goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment assembled in the vast lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. There were cocktails; there were waiters wielding platters of hors d’oeuvres; there was a light sprinkling of paparazzi. Then there was a screening. We trooped like schoolchildren to the auditorium to watch a grueling movie about the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Not just any movie, but “Standard Operating Procedure,” the new investigatory documentary by Errol Morris, one of our most original filmmakers. It asks the audience not just to revisit the crimes in graphic detail but to confront in tight close-up those who both perpetrated and photographed them. Because Mr. Morris has a complex view of human nature, he arouses a certain sympathy for his subjects, much as he did at times for Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, in his Vietnam film, “Fog of War.”
More sympathy, actually. Only a few bad apples at the bottom of the chain of command took the fall for Abu Ghraib. No one above the level of staff sergeant went to jail, and no one remotely in proximity to a secretary of defense has been held officially accountable. John Yoo, the author of the notorious 2003 Justice Department memo rationalizing torture, has happily returned to his tenured position as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So when Mr. Morris brings you face to face with Lynndie England - now a worn, dead-eyed semblance of the exuberant, almost pixie-ish miscreant in the Abu Ghraib snapshots - you’re torn.
Ms. England, who is now on parole, concedes that what she and her cohort did was “unusual and weird and wrong,” but adds that “when we first got there, the example was already set.” That reflection doesn’t absolve her of moral responsibility, but, like much in this film, it forces you to look beyond the fixed images of one of the most documented horror stories of our time.
Yet I must confess that, sitting in MoMA, I kept looking beyond the frame of Mr. Morris’s movie as well. While there’s really no right place to watch “Standard Operating Procedure,” the jarring contrast between the film’s subject and the screening’s grandiosity was a particularly glaring illustration of the huge distance that separates most Americans, and not just Manhattan elites, from the battle lines of our country’s five-year war. If Tom Wolfe was not in the audience to chronicle this cognitive dissonance, he should have been.
Mr. Morris’s movie starts fanning out to theaters on April 25. We don’t have to wait until then to know its fate. Sympathetic critics will tell us it’s our civic duty to see it. The usual suspects will try to besmirch Mr. Morris’s patriotism. But none of that will much matter. “Standard Operating Procedure” will reach the director’s avid core audience, but it is likely to be avoided by most everyone else no matter what praise or controversy it whips up.
It would take another column to list all the movies and TV shows about Iraq that have gone belly up at the box office or in Nielsen ratings in the nearly four years since the war’s only breakout commercial success, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” They die regardless of their quality or stand on the war, whether they star Tommy Lee Jones (”In the Valley of Elah”) or Meryl Streep (”Lions for Lambs”) or are produced by Steven Bochco (the FX series “Over There”) or are marketed like Abercrombie & Fitch apparel to the MTV young (”Stop-Loss”).
As The New York Times recently reported, box-office dread has driven one Hollywood distributor to repeatedly postpone the release of “The Lucky Ones,” a highly regarded and sympathetic feature about the war’s veterans, the first made with full Army assistance, even though the word Iraq is never spoken and the sole battle sequence runs 40 seconds. If Iraq had been mentioned in “Knocked Up” or “Superbad,” Judd Apatow’s hilarious hit comedies about young American guys who (like most of their peers) never consider the volunteer Army as an option, they might have flopped too. Iraq is to moviegoers what garlic is to vampires.
This is not merely a showbiz phenomenon but a leading indicator of where our entire culture is right now. It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it. They want to look away, period, and have been doing so for some time.
That’s why last week’s testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker was a nonevent beyond Washington. The cable networks duly presented the first day of hearings, but only, it seemed, because the show could be hyped as an “American Idol”-like competition in foreign-policy one-upmanship for the three remaining presidential candidates, all senators. When the hearings migrated to the House the next day, they vanished into the same black media hole where nearly all Iraq news now goes. If the Olympic torch hadn’t provided an excuse to cut away, no doubt any handy weather disturbance would have served instead.
The simple explanation for why we shun the war is that it has gone so badly. But another answer was provided in the hearings by Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, one of the growing number of Republican lawmakers who no longer bothers to hide his exasperation. He put his finger on the collective sense of shame (not to be confused with collective guilt) that has attended America’s Iraq project. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Voinovich said, is that “we haven’t sacrificed one darn bit in this war, not one. Never been asked to pay for a dime, except for the people that we lost.”
This is how the war planners wanted it, of course. No new taxes, no draft, no photos of coffins, no inconveniences that might compel voters to ask tough questions. This strategy would have worked if the war had been the promised cakewalk. But now it has backfired. A home front that has not been asked to invest directly in a war, that has subcontracted it to a relatively small group of volunteers, can hardly be expected to feel it has a stake in the outcome five stalemated years on.
The original stakes (saving the world from mushroom clouds and an alleged ally of Osama bin Laden) evaporated so far back they seem to belong to another war entirely. What are the stakes we are asked to believe in now? In the largely unwatched House hearings on Wednesday, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, tried to get at this by asking what some 4,000 “sons and daughters” of America had died for.
The best General Petraeus could muster was a bit of bloodless Beltway-speak - “national interests” - followed by another halfhearted attempt to overstate Iraq’s centrality to the war on Al Qaeda and a future war on Iran. He couldn’t even argue that we’re on a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people. That would require him to acknowledge that roughly five million of those people, 60 percent of them children, are now refugees receiving scant help from either our government or Nuri al-Maliki’s. That’s nearly a fifth of the Iraqi population - the equivalent of 60 million Americans - and another source of our shame.
The prevailing verdict on the Petraeus-Crocker show is that it accomplished little beyond certifying President Bush’s intention to kick the can to January 2009 so that the helicopters will vacate the Green Zone on the next president’s watch. That’s true, but by week’s end, I became more convinced than ever that in January we’ll have a new policy that includes serious withdrawals and serious conversations with Mr. Maliki’s pals in Iran, even if John McCain becomes president.
General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker define victory as “sustainable security” in Iraq. But both Colin Powell and Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said last week that current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan are unsustainable and are damaging America’s readiness to meet other security threats. And that’s not all that’s unsustainable. An ailing economy can’t keep floating the war’s $3-billion-a-week cost. A Republican president intent on staying the Bush course will find his vetoes unsustainable after the Democrats increase their majorities in Congress in November. No war can be fought indefinitely if the public has irrevocably turned against it.
Mr. McCain says Americans want “victory,” whatever that means today, and yes, they would if it could be won on the terms promised by Mr. Bush five years ago - fast, and with minimal sacrifice. It’s way too late to ask for years of stepped-up sacrifice now in the cause of a highly debatable definition of “national interests.”
This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.
Frank Rich is a regular New York Times columnist.
© 2008 The New York Times
“Iraq dismisses 1,300 soldiers, policemen for not fighting in Basra”
The Katzenjammer Kids will need to send yet another bunch of Iraqis to a ‘private’ training school and equip them all with borrowed money. Not even our great grand children can pay off this Bush Burden.
THE WAR ACCORDING2:
…CRONYPALOO$A
(In-just WAR / apologies to e.e.cummings)
…and the ba$e elite Family Fortune$-o’-War
multi-millionize and billionize our “value-added” “FEARS”
as the petered-principle GOPees
an off-shored golden $hower “home”
and the loophole-potted rainbow “appears”
bearing chicken-hawked-yellow In$ult-to-Injury
the heartland’s ruptured bridge
the mouldering sprawl of New Orleans
can you Feel it NOW?
…can you
…can you $ee it yet?
Public $ervus-gone-WILD
their whet dream–of ever-indeed More
at long last:
death- tax- —FREE!
and “so?” — on he goes:
with a touch and a stroke and a fondle and a rub
the red-handed, green-thumb$-up,
goat-footed NeoConstant Gardener of
…Hou$e Bushelzebub
tending to turd blossom, brushing hidden as the fig behind the leaf
the fingertip here, the whole palm there–
a $uddenly Tall $tranger for a salient brief momentality…!
returns to that faceless hunch like scales
glistering in unex”pected” sunlighthen
-doused~ . ~from complete view into waiting depths of shade…
there, See!! again—full-on!
in the Thorn Garden of the Root “of all Evil”…
Whistling @ his Work…”Far”… and “weeeee…”
–Artist General Masley
posted comment 9 @:
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3354/81/
If you are not willing to face the horrid, bloody, messy, AWFUL slaughter of war…
DON’T START ONE!!
If your leaders are not fully prepared to sacrifice IN PUBLIC their own children for war…
DON’T START ONE!!
If you are not prepared for the possibility you might lose a war…
DON’T START ONE!!
If you say you follow the ‘Prince of peace’…
DON’T START ONE!!
If you are not willing to look yourself in the mirror and ask ‘What the hell have we done or allowed to be done in our name?’ then you are just a sheep, waiting to be sheared and slaughtered.
Anyone ever see the cartoon ‘Fairly Oddparents’?
It has a character who is constantly on the lookout for fairys. His name is Crocker.
I’m not making this up.
His cry is a wigged out loony ‘FAIRY GOD PARENTS!’ as he goes through amazing contortions.
Perhaps Ambassador Crocker could be persuaded to do much the same thing…
I can hear it now….
“FAIRY AL-QUADA!!”
Galen: What might “Fairy Al-Quada!” refer to? Something new out there calling itself Al-Quada? If you meant al-Qaeda, or its alternative Brit spelling, al-Qaida, learn to spell it.
Meanwhile, Rich is right. Americans don’t care much one way or the other about Iraq, not only because they haven’t been made to sacrifice but because efforts to stop the “war” (it’s an invasion/occupation and systematic rip-off for oil companies, as well as long-term military basing operation for controlling the Middle East, but who has time to say all that when “war” masks reality just fine?) have proven entirely futile. Lacking any real democracy, it doesn’t matter what the people think about it (roughly 2/3 oppose it) or how much they despise Congress and the media for all their complicity. All that matters is who keeps the power, and it ain’t us nobodies. They myth of democracy is kept in fine fiddle, however, by brainwashing TV and commercial culture, and that too is all that matters. What doesn’t matter and has never mattered is what “the people” think of any of it.
I have taken myself to see every movie mentioned (including Taxi to the Dark Side) because I live in S.F. and they usually play for a week at one of the living-room sized theaters here. Every time I eat I think of Iraqis (ex-Catholic, guilt is my middle name) and I get that the horror is real, and I am complicit. But I am not silent. I call my reps on every issue, every vote, every outrage. Last night my dream was of composing a new letter to whom I did not know. I feel like shit. Sometimes the thought of Obama makes me feel better, but I am in full depression mode about Iraq. Acceptance seems a long (how many more murdered, tortured/raped, starved), way away.
“Americans want “victory,” whatever that means today, and yes, they would if it could be won on the terms promised by Mr. Bush five years ago - fast, and with minimal sacrifice.”
This is such a true statement. In his book “Partners in Command” author Mark Perry states that everyone realized these facts about war and democracy’s response to it:
NEVER start a war (pre-emptive)
Don’t fight a war UNILATERALLY
make It SHORT
to those great words ought to be added the Powell doctrine
the use of OVERWHELMING force
Voinovich is correct: the American people have no vested interest in this war. It’s being fought by our all volunteer army, thus the vast majorities of American families are insulated from any real responsibility. The chance of even knowing someone who has served in Iraq is quite distance.
” “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Voinovich said, is that “we haven’t sacrificed one darn bit in this war, not one. Never been asked to pay for a dime, except for the people that we lost.””
“It’s not just torture we want to avoid.”
Minor correction, Mr. Rich. It’s not just REAL torture “we” want to avoid.
The “Saw” torture-tainment series has already grossed over $400M domestically, and parts 5 and 6 are already in production.
That’s more cash than all the “Iraq War” movies ever made (not counting “Three Kings” from the first illegal Iraq War.)
No, “we” apparently have absolutely no problem with watching other humans being tortured - as long as they’re pretty and not in uniform.
More Americans would rather watch a sexually promiscuous pretty blonde get chainsawed in half in gory technicolor than sit beside her and enjoy the pleasure of her company.
More Americans are just fine with ’someone else’s’ child has his testicles treated to the joys of high voltage, as long as it’s not THEIR kid.
More Americans kneel in worship of the descendant of a BABYLONIAN war god before a device of crude and brutal execution every Sunday than in simple contemplation of the wonders of nature.
And they wonder why their culture is rapidly sliding into the abyss…
It seems to me that people figure there’s no point getting in a froth about Iraq since there’s nothing we can do to stop it. It’s a waste of time to fuss about it; it’s out of our hands. If it were a matter of a vote of the people (as in the 2006 Congressional election), the occupation would be drifting into the past by now. But of course that didn’t work. What further power do the people have to curtail it? What would it take? So to sit and watch another disturbing film is just masochistic. The politicos and the corporate overlords are making a killing, and that’s apparently all that matters.
Meanwhile, our economy is in the tank, and I don’t know about you, but I and many others are on the verge of disaster. Would we be in this hole without this war?
Unlike most Americans, I look (like sansf), I get depressed, angry, frustrated, and I act - I write letters to the editor, and to my reps. I talk about the war with people I meet. I try to remind people that we’re at war, because it is so easy to forget that. What else can we do?
Five percent of Americans are ashamed.
Ninety-five percent of Americans are in various stages of denial, conscious or otherwise.
Amerikkkans have got their asses pulverized again, and deservedly so. Watching their morbid tenacity in the middle east is like witnessing a slo-mo sinking ship full of unrepentant degenerates. The longer they stubbornly stay the course, the greater the devastation to themselves, and the more that freedom can take root elsewhere in the world, where the Amerikkan thugocracy are ill-equipped to perpetrate the mayhem and mischief of their recent past.
Most Americans have long since decided that this war was a mistake and that we should come home ASAP.
Most Americans have also realized that their normal means of acting to change policy have failed with regard to this war.
By the latter point, I mean this. In a two-party monopoly system, the only action the voters can take to change policy is to toss out the party in power and put in the other party with a mandate to make changes. American voters did this in 2006. Under the normal ‘Standard Operating Proceedures’ for a two-party faux-democracy, the American voters have done what they can do.
The problem is the failure of the American political system. We now have a political system where the leaders of both parties laugh in the face of the 70% of the people who want this war ended. We face a presidential election where the candidates from both parties are saying that our troops will remain in Iraq through 2012. Since the Bush administration is already talking about cutting troops themselves, the difference between McCain continuing this policy and Obama’s vague talk is probably about 20,000 to 30,000 troops in Iraq…. and a lot of noise and rhetoric.
McCain will loudly shout that he’s staying the course and fighting for victory as he cuts the troops from the 140,000 now to about a 100,000 later. Obama will talk a lot about new course and change and diplomacy, while only reducing the troops to about 70,000 (to train the Iraqis, protect American interests, and the all-purpose ‘fight terrorists’).
Meanwhile, these same ‘Americans’ who get so criticized out here are fighting to survive in an economy where the good jobs are going overseas, where the dollar is falling and oil prices and inflation are rising, where people have to take more jobs and work harder just to make their ends meet. Just surviving in this world takes more and more work, and people have less and less time to do anything.
For all the people who are critical of ‘Americans’ in the silly comments above this, remember that 70% to 80% of them want this war to end as quickly as it possibly can end.
You expect the Republicans to represent Wall St and the Pentagon and to be warlike. But the Democrats are supposed to represent the rest of us. And when the rest of us unite in one voice to call to end this war, like we’ve been doing for the last 3 years, its the Democrats you expect to heed this call. What we are faced with today is the treachery and betrayal of the Democratic Party. They’ve switched sides. The Democrats are now funded by the same class as funds the Republicans, and they support the same policies. Just look at how hard the Democrats are working to keep this war going.
That’s what’s different now from before. In the two-party system, 70% of the American people are no longer represented. That’s why its time for a change. Not the phony faux-change of an Obama. But the real change of a new political movement that casts aside the Democrats and leads to a political party in this country that truly represents the 70% of the American people that the Democrats now give the finger.
namaste April 13th, 2008 12:57 pm
“Betrays US with a
__ C R O C K ER __ of __ b u $ h ! t”
This was also said at the hearing:
“The Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents and tribal leaders who have agreed to refrain from violence in return for arms, money and other concessions have by no means bought into the American vision for the future of Iraq. Their interests do not coincide with our own and we should not delude ourselves by pretending otherwise” - Dr. Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University professor and retired Army officer.
In addition to the U.S. and possibly some individuals within the Iraqi government trying to buy-off these groups, it’s important to keep in mind that almost 50% of the oil being produced in Iraq is being sold on the black-market with the majority of the funds going to support those same people whose visions for the future of Iraq don’t coincide with our own.
America is intoxicated with delusion!
Iraq is to moviegoers what garlic is to vampires. LOL. Too true.
Ephraim wrote, “They myth of democracy is kept in fine fiddle,…”
Ephraim also wrote, “If you meant al-Qaeda, or its alternative Brit spelling, al-Qaida, learn to spell it.”
Perhaps, you, Ephraim, might like to look up the spelling of “fettle”, or better yet the use of the phrase, “fine fettle”, before you so harshly criticize another’s literary skills.
Literary skills?? Per chance are you gentlepersons the 86th cousin thrice removed in the lineage of cheney?????
Spelling a bit of a non-required element in regards to the topic.
Although I presume since you all are related to the cheney thing you all shall chime; SO?
Nelson - “What else can we do?” Aside from necessities (in which I include hand cream and haircuts), I have stopped buying stuff. Beyond that, I have no idea.
Our new system of unitary executive is a whopper. They got the courts, many lifetime appointments. But al la Pete Seeger, “you can’t kill all the unbelievers”, and you cannot kill decency. Many of us still know and practice and believe in that.
I was sure at the time that Katrina would bring GWB & CO. to its knees. When that did not happen I sent the money that I could, and I prepared an earthquake disaster plan with my dog. A year later she died (fast, fatal cancer). I still wake up in disbelief that there is no way to see her again. One in 3 or 4 Iraqis has lost a relative, everyone there knows death. I cannot imagine that much grief, and the ripple effect of it.
I’ll never forgive Feinstein for Mukasey, but the other day I saw her falter when she couldn’t get an answer from him on the Yoo memo footnote (no 4th amendment during domestic military ops). She gave us this guy; I saw a glimmer of her realization that she is fucked too. I love calling her office these days.
So I call, and write, and fax, and march, and vote, whether pointless or not. I work. And I come here, and go to tpm, and kos, and atrios, and I listen to Sam Seder, and of course Pete Seeger. And I walk my new dog, another old girl, who won’t let me stay in a fetal position. I would like to go to Iraq and lead the way out. Instead I go to the dog park. When I connect with someone along the way it is a pretty ok day.
Dick Cavett had a nice take on the Petraeus testimony. http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/memo-to-petraeus-crocker-more-laughs-please/?em&ex=1208232000&en=8d04295670e17536&ei=5087%0A
Petraeus was extremely inarticulate. To quote from the article:
“Uh, that is uh, a, uh, matter that we, er, um, uh are carefully, uh, considering.” (Not a parody, an actual Crocker sentence. And not even the worst.)
Of 202 comments, only #168 pointed out why: he was lying. It is difficult to earn an eagle sounding that unimpressive, let alone 4 stars.
WANT A MAN OF TRUE HONESTY AND TRUE INTEGRITY? VOTE NADER! VOTE RALPH NADER!
WHAT CAN WE DO TO REPRESENT “70%”OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE? REFUSE THE “COMFORT” OF LIES: VOTE FOR RALPH NADER!
“This war has lasted so long that Americans….. have had the time to pass through all five stages of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have gone only from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance.”
Frank Rich has done an exceptional job in this op-ed of capturing the mindset of those 70%-80% of Americans who once rooted for our side and idolized Little George like he was Churchill reincarnated back in the heady, statue-toppling early days of the US occupation of Iraq. Note carefully it is the “implosion” of this war (not the invasion decision itself) that Mr. Rich correctly identifies as the sort of horrendous event - comparable to death of a loved one or being diagnosed with a terminal ailment - that triggers the Kubler-Ross five-stages-of-grief analogy.
I’m much like sansf. Apparently unlike the great majority of consumers of American infotainment and culture “who don’t want to see, hear, or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it…..” personally I read and watch and follow the twists and turns of the ongoing occupation, the Middle East, endless US counterinsurgency tinkerings, GWOT, and the gradual decline of Empire Americana almost daily. I suspect many hard core, true believer “dead enders” who supported the war from the very beginning, and still do, are still not shutting down their sensory inputs either.
Still, I think Frank’s really on to something here in terms of how ending the war will play in the fall in the great mushy middle of the American political spectrum.
Those who grieve because it is a war gone bad (like Vietnam) can best be reached by walking them from bargaining through depression to acceptance. Forget all about those who are still stuck in denial, or who are angry and frantically looking for new scapegoats to attack. Absent an October surprise spiking the level of violence over there or domestic fears on the home front, a substantial majority of Americans are now prepared to swallow hard and turn the page.
Bill from Saginaw
The neocons don’t care about the box office….bigger profits in war.
The occupation will end when American soldiers resist and refuse to fight.
Thats how the Vietnam occupation ended, same with Iraq.
Support Iraq Veterans Against The War.