Myth on the Right

In his discussion of contemporary myths, Roland Barthes observed that the language of those in power is “rich, multiform, supple, with all the possible degrees of dignity at its disposal.” That is to say, those in power have the luxury of bending their language in several directions simultaneously, of playing with it, and, finally, of draining it of meaning, so that we are left facing the sheer fact of domination, sprinkled with the blank, ever-shifting confetti of argument. All those who have attempted to parse the multitude of conflicting, non-overlapping justifications for war forwarded by GW Bush and his supporters have come face to face with the luxury of the language of domination. The multitude of reasons flaunts the wealth of this language, a wealth that masks the simple fact that since what they say does not matter against the background of their power, they cannot lose the argument. How else can we interpret the perpetual process of political shadow-boxing? Those who worry about terrorism are told the war is necessary to protect them from terrorist attack. However, the logical fear that such an invasion would increase animosity toward the US and result in escalating reprisals is countered from a new direction: “Are you so selfish as to not want to liberate the suffering Iraqi people from a brutal dictator?” This charge is launched of course, by those who have long supported not just sanctions against Iraq, but their implementation in a way that increases misery in the population (withholding flour and materials needed to supply fresh water) in order to destabilize Hussein. As Joy Gordon notes, “Since August 1991 the United States has blocked most purchases of materials necessary for Iraq to generate electricity, as well as equipment for radio, telephone, and other communications. Often restrictions have hinged on the withholding of a single essential element, rendering many approved items useless. For example, Iraq was allowed to purchase a sewage-treatment plant but was blocked from buying the generator necessary to run it; this in a country that has been pouring 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers.” Are we being asked to believe that these policies were being carried out to benefit the Iraqi people in an excess of tough love? The goal was never just to get Iraq to disarm, but to ensure that the suffering of the populace was compounded so as to trigger a coup. The result, as has been widely reported, was increasing malnutrition and childhood disease that has been blamed for some half million deaths over the past decade.

The people who supported this deliberate use of sanctions as a tool for immiseration now want us to believe that their primary motivation is the well-being of the Iraqi people. Surely this is a good cause, but they have done little to justify the claim that it is theirs. Perhaps most fascinating of all is the recent claim by the Bush administration that invading Iraq is the first step toward solving the Middle East crisis – that it will help promote Israeli-Arab peace. In the region, of course, the idea of the US taking over one of the most resource-rich Arab nations is seen as worrisome encroachment – tantamount to colonization by the Israeli-American alliance. It is perceived as an escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict since the US is understood to be deeply in league with Israel – not just based on the military and economic support it provides, but because it has systematically overlooked UN security violations against Israel while going to war over those against Iraq.

Well then, if it’s not about lessening Arab-Israeli tensions it’s about democratization. This is an astounding claim given the pattern of US support for undemocratic, despotic regimes in the region and its active participation in overthrowing democratically elected leaders. Indeed, a plausible argument could be made that the reason we find ourselves facing down Hussein is in large part a result of our last attempt at regime change in the region: US support for the 1953 coup against Mossadeq by the Shah, whose brutal dictatorship triggered a fundamentalist revolution that drove the US into the diplomatic arms of none other than Saddam Hussein. The claim of democratization is further undermined by our apparent willingness to let the Turks have their way in the Kurdish region of Iraq not under Saddam’s control – a fledgling democracy that is seen as a threat to internal stability in Turkey because of the Kurdish population.

To recap, if the war against terrorism exacerbates terrorism, it’s a war for liberation. If we haven’t shown much interest in the liberation of the Iraqis it’s a war for Arab-Israeli peace. If it’s unlikely to alleviate Arab concerns about the US and Israel in the region, it’s a war for democratization. If the track record for US support of democratization is abysmal, it’s a war for…what? The endless sliding of the signifiers is maddening: we are told that the terror warning system is to protect us, and yet we can feel with a cold chill the possibility that it is to keep us afraid. We can imagine the very moment of relaxation following upon a drop in the alert status as a moment of vulnerability, our soft targets all of a sudden exposed. Even the admonition to be calm, to conduct ourselves “normally” becomes a warning reminder, exacerbating our fear: oh my God, they have to tell us to be normal -- what’s normal about that? Something has gone horribly wrong. Everything that comes out of the Department of Homeland Security, especially the rocklike calm of Tom Ridge, tells us to be afraid.

In this hothouse climate of fear, arguments for war seem to multiply in direct relation to their emptiness – to the lack of any belief on the part of the enunciators. Perhaps the extreme example was Colin Powell knowingly, deliberately going before the American people, expending all his credibility in an attempt to claim that bin Laden’s most recent tape – full of contempt for Hussein -- was a smoking gun. Powell had succumbed to myth: to the power that comes with the recognition that he could say anything – that it didn’t matter, because the words had become hollowed-out chips – means to an inevitable end. Surely he didn’t believe the words he was uttering – but perhaps he didn’t disbelieve them either. Belief was just no longer the issue.

The most disturbing aspect of myth is the way it steals speech, bends it to the ends of the mythmaker and leaves it, as Barthes suggests, “benumbed.” The hawks have piggy-backed on the words of real suffering – on the words of oppressed Iraqis, on those expatriates who have suffered the violence of Hussein’s regime. They have enlisted those words for their cause, but have simultaneously robbed them of their meaning insofar as they have come to serve as powerful, morally irrefutable instruments – but instruments nonetheless. Listen to the deep scorn for the third-world and disregard for human suffering on the part of a contributor to the National Review Online and pro-war hawk writing about another dictator, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whose coup was famously supported by the CIA: “Actually my impression of Pinochet's Chile is that it did rather well economically, & was no more politically repressive than the average S. American nation” (http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp).*

This is someone who wants us to believe that he supports war to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people? Despite loud protestations and dramatic posturing, torture seems to mean awfully little to him, as long as it is spread around evenly. If Iraq were to do well economically, and its people to live under conditions no more politically repressive than the “average” Arab nation, would he be satisfied? Perhaps all that needs to be done to achieve this goal is to lift the sanctions. The anguished and sincere cries of Iraqi suffering – of those who experienced torture and political imprisonment, who lost love ones – have been dislocated and disemboweled, offered up to the American people as the mythology of war: a moral clarion call that revels self-consciously in its lack of ambiguity. The numbness of this re-appropriated language is perhaps not least a function of the nagging doubt as to how these cries will be discarded once their meaning has served its purpose. And they can be discarded so easily precisely because they have been borrowed and emptied out. Will Derbyshire and his fellow war supporters reconcile themselves to tyranny and despotism, as in the case of Chile, if it is perpetrated by a new US ally and is “no worse” than what takes place elsewhere in the region?

*"According to figures given by the military regime and registered by the Vicaria de la Solidaridad, between 1973 and 1975 there were 42,486 political detentions. Also, according to the Vicaria, between 1976 to 1988, 12,134 people were individually arrested for political reasons and 26,431 collective arrests took place. Between 1977 to 1988 4,134 persons were threatened or harassed, 1,008 were victims of forced disappearance and 2,100 people died for political reasons."

- http://www.lakota.clara.net/derechos/victims.htm