Windows on the war: Images from the front lines show conflict's many facets
THE WASHINGTON POST
Sunday, March 30, 2003
So far Operation Iraqi Freedom hasn't produced many images of liberation. No collapse of the corrupt house of cards, no joyful crowds, no tossing flowers at the soldiers.
There have been a few happy images, a couple of young Iraqi men greeting American soldiers, some civilians watching tanks pass and making nonthreatening, supplicant gestures (for food, perhaps). But mostly the people of Iraq have looked a lot more like the hassled and humiliated residents of America's poorest neighborhoods.
These were not images of liberation, but detention: Men in bluejeans with their hands on their heads and men lying on the ground with U.S. troops poised over them, guns at the ready. And if they weren't in custody, they were either in pain (a wounded 9-year-old girl, now a motherless child), or exulting over whatever small victories (a downed helicopter) they can snatch from the teeth of the overwhelming force descending on their homeland.
The well-documented war covers all the messiness, the whole war, whether it is well fought or not. By necessity, it produces ambiguous photographs. Photographs that some will read as images of humiliation and capture, others will read as soldiers working efficiently and cautiously in a hostile environment.
Americans awoke this week to newspapers filled with crisp images of the ups and downs of war, and live television feeds of vehicles stalled in the orange blur of a sandstorm. Commentators have observed (and was there a measure of complaint in their voices?) that this war didn't begin the way they expected. If it doesn't end the way they expected, America's fundamental sense of its identity -- as protector and liberator of the oppressed -- will be further shaken, if not shattered.
A photograph by Eric Feferberg of Agence France-Presse showed a half-dozen American soldiers rushing to take positions after being attacked near Nasiriyah. Their guns point in three directions, suggesting not just surprise but an enemy on all sides. The palm trees behind them, however, send a more subtle and disturbing message. America has fought plenty of wars among the palm trees -- in Grenada, Panama, Kuwait -- but these palm trees, taken together with an enemy on all sides, suggest only one war. The war that no one wants to think about whenever the country goes back to war. The war that ended one presidency, the war that cast this nation as an oppressor, the war that continued because the people we were fighting to liberate just kept coming, with guns.
Two images are, so far, missing. To give this war some sense of moral purpose, we must see (and believe in) the clamor of happy people, and we want to see American troops standing warily over a cache of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The war, the president and his Cabinet have reminded us often, might take a long time. The generals are pursuing regime change, not searching for weapons of mass destruction. It's foolish, perhaps, to be impatient for the images that will vindicate the president and ease the American conscience. Soldiers fight; civilians wait; pundits fret; politicians advise taking the long view. (The visual icons: the tired and determined dogface, the resolute general, the lines in the president's face.)
If there was something discordant and troubling about many of the images that emerged, it was perhaps because they clash so sharply with our short-view logic for war. The short-view thinking was built upon a basic, simple, obvious premise. The regime was bad, the people oppressed. If that first premise was right, then many happy conclusions would necessarily follow. The regime would collapse. The people wouldn't resist. Let the cakewalk begin. (The visual icons: toppled statues, torn posters.)
The problem might not be the premise (the regime is bad, the people are oppressed), but some rather simplistic thinking about the psychology of people under repressive governments. Earlier this month at a Library of Congress round-table discussion, Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita, the Soviet premier) remembered the death of Stalin. The Soviet people, prisoners of his vast charnel house, mourned. Hysterically. If the people mourned when Stalin died, what, Khrushchev mused, might happen when Saddam Hussein (a student, we're told, of Stalin's power) goes to his reward?
The problem is that "oppressed people" is an abstraction, a simplification that doesn't take into account that people might live under bad governments yet still feel a patriotic determination to resist invasions. Or that as generations pass under autocratic rule, autocratic rule is taken for granted. Or that people might weigh in the balances the state motto of New Hampshire ("Live free or die") and decide there's another alternative.
For the first time since the long buildup to war began, we are seeing images that give a better sense of the people of Iraq than the abstraction ever allowed. Two men sit together, listening to Saddam on the television, their expressions suggesting only that they've done this often, that it's a familiar thread in the fabric of daily life. A family flees hostilities, their furniture and rugs and other household goods loaded on a trailer dragged by a tractor. A woman leaves the market, a handkerchief pressed to her face to keep out the choking smoke of fire in Baghdad.
These images -- of daily life and daily life interrupted -- might fade. Or they might be remembered dimly as the bitter medicine of a little regime change. But for the moment they recall a phrase from a master of abstractions who muddled the two most important categories of political thought, freedom and tyranny. Sometimes, Jean Jacques Rousseau said, people must be forced to be free.
Philip Kennicott |
