February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Back in June 2001, I was lamenting to my journalist students at New York University how Time magazine had just let go a friend of mine who was a veteran reporter of the Afghan wars. But what was going on there (largely the result of U.S. intervention in the 1980s) was deemed to be of no interest anymore, Time magazine having decided to concentrate on greater coverage of entertainment stories.
After 9/11, I had assumed that it would no longer be so difficult to get people to sit up, turn off the sports channel or their favorite reality TV show, and pay attention to the real world. After all, foreign enemies had attacked us on our home soil for the first time in the nation’s history, killing thousands of our fellow citizens. So it was a singularly depressing experience on the day of the Madrid bombings to go to lunch at one of my favorite midtown bars and find absolutely no one talking about it and all the multi-screens covered with the usual soporific nonsense designed to distract anyone from thinking about anything more important than where the next slam dunk is coming from. Later that evening, meeting friends in a restaurant on 47th street, the mood was still the same — one of complete lack of interest in the fact that a major ally of the U.S had just been attacked with almost 200 people killed when bombs wrecked four commuter trains in one of the worst terrorist incidents in recent history.
I was glad, then, when many of the major news outlets, including the New York Times, decided to forgo the usual rules of good taste and publish the gruesome horrors of what happened in Fallujah on Wednesday, March 31. One always needs to know what one is up against, if only to prevent complacency. It so easy to begin believing in one’s own propaganda, especially if the war is 5,000 miles away and the citizens whose government is conducting it remain largely unaffected by its consequences. To see what may be the result of the publicity the killings are receiving it might be useful to make a few comparisons. It is a grim acknowledgement of the brutality of war that indeed there are comparisons to be made — but there are.
The first one is from Somalia, and the other from our own wee conflict in Northern Ireland.
Of course, all the pundits chose the Mogadishu incident just over 10 years ago for to draw parallels with the events in Fallujah. The sight of mobs dragging the corpse of a dead U.S. soldier through the dusty streets of that devastated capital to the howls and cheers of delighted Somalis is widely credited with having sickened Americans so much that President Clinton felt obliged to immediately begin a withdrawal of troops from the country. The government was so traumatized that when, seven months later, the Rwandan genocide began, the U.S., and its allies, stood by without lifting a finger while almost one million people — mostly Tutsis — were massacred over a period of a month. Overseas adventures — even when U.S. personnel were attacked, as with the USS Cole in October 2000 — were definitely off the agenda. It was a syndrome that persisted right up until 9/11. That supposedly changed everything, and Americans have since been prepared to risk their soldiers lives in far-flung conflicts as long as it can be shown that they will lead to a victory in the so-called “war against terrorism”.
The problem is, this willingness to take risks will last only as long as the war in Iraq seems to most Americans to be relevant to stopping terrorism. But if anything, it seems to have increased the number of terrorist attacks. The Madrid bombings are a direct result of the invasion of Iraq, as were the murderous attacks in Istanbul and Morocco earlier. That is, since April 2003 there has been a diffusion of terror rather than a containment of it. In that context, atrocities against U.S citizens could have a widespread and demoralizing effect.
The other comparison is with the incident in and around Casement Park, Andersonstown, in March 1988. Mourners at the funeral of an IRA man turned into an enraged mob that attacked two off-duty British corporals, dragging them from their car after it had blundered into the procession. They were stripped, beaten, thrown over a high wall for a further beating, bundled into a black taxi to be driven to a waste ground where they were pulled out, dumped on the ground stabbed and shot several times in the head and body by the IRA. As with Fallujah and Mogadishu, the graphic horrors of the violence were captured as it happened on television. Viewers could no longer avoid the reality of the long war in Northern Ireland. At least it was so assumed at the time. In fact, in the end, the outrage and horror produced no change in British government policy of any significance, nor was there an outcry from the British public for an end to the conflict and immediate withdrawal. Before long, Northern Ireland was being ignored again.
The deaths of corporals were not enough to transform the inertia of British policy toward Northern Ireland. There was no dynamic there on which to build. The government knew that withdrawal would be more costly than staying, whereas in Somalia the U.S. faced no such dilemma. The situation is, however, different in Iraq, where withdrawal would be seen as a significant defeat for the U.S.
The lesson for the U.S. is that a war against terror is different from the war being fought in Iraq, where we are engaged in an essentially guerrilla conflict, with insurgents who have widespread support and can count on the intense hatred of U.S. troops. Many view our troops as occupiers and when the people dance in the streets it is on the bodies of dead U.S. soldiers. That should sober up the conservative pundits who have for so long been predicting an easy victory in old Mesopotamia.