In my response to Bush’s UN speech, I welcomed his desire to address the human rights violations occurring in Iraq, but did so knowing that he was only paying lip-service to those very real problems for rhetorical and political ends. This hypocrisy is the subject of Fred Hiatt’s wonderful op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post. After detailing the abuses in North Korea and Burma (neither of which is currently scheduled for an American induced “regime change”), Hiatt concludes:
“So it is naive to think that people will link “regime change” to “brutal repression” as a regular matter anytime soon. Yet to the thousands of North Koreans who even today are scraping bark off trees or boiling grasses in an effort to survive, who are chipping coal in labor camps, who are deprived of donated American food because they are deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime, the proposition of international responsibility might not seem so outlandish.”
One day before Tony Blair is scheduled to finally reveal the mysterious dossier that will apparently prove the existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the Prime Minister must first convince his own cabinet that war is necessary. His international development secretary, Clare Short, voiced serious reservations yesterday, and in the process made a statement the likes of which I have yet to hear from an American politician:
“We should be ready to impose the will of the UN on them if they don’t cooperate but not by hurting the people of Iraq. We can’t inflict pain and suffering on the people of Iraq, they are innocents. Each one of them is as precious as the 3,000 people who were in the twin towers.”
Here is a really interesting Hawk/Dove breakdown of Blaire’s cabinet, including links to further information about each member.
Want a preview of the upcoming war? Here is an overview of the Pentagon’s latest proposal, or, more precisely, the latest proposal shared with the press. This article feels like a sick PR piece to me, complete with the requisite double-speak from Rumsfeld. His intense bombing campaign will be an “attack on a government, not a country”; his target is the “dictatorial, repressive” Hussein: “The United States has not and never has had any problem or issue with the Iraqi people.”
When I read these articles about our precision attacks, our gung-ho bombing campaigns, I’m reminded of Michael Herr’s remembrances of his childhood, when he first saw photos of dead bodies in Life magazine:
“Even when the picture was sharp and clearly defined, something wasn’t clear at all, something repressed that monitored the images and withheld their essential information. It may have legitimized my fascination, letting me look for as long as I wanted; I didn’t have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at porn, all the porn in the world.” (Dispatches)
When he says “I remember now,” Herr is referring to his experience in Vietnam, where he saw first-hand the effects of America’s intense bombings. His porn analogy seems even more appropriate today, when technology allows us to watch a precision guided missile hitting its target from a first-person point of view. How disgusting to think that we are now made to identify not with human victims, but with the weapons that kill them. It’s Eisensteinian montage at its most perverse.