Iraq has become the other scene of American life, a kind of geopolitical limbo that exists beyond the horizon of intelligibility, at least for those Americans who manage to breach the cocoon of their everyday lives. Surfacing from our mediatized narcosis we gaze past the computer screen out the window onto the street and imagine what it would be like to see our neighbors screaming and bleeding on the pavement, to feel the buildings shake from heavy weapons fire. Later, as we go slack in the moment before sleep, we brush against the fantasy of the door snapped off its hinges and half a dozen bellowing, armed men crashing into the room kicking over the furniture. Or not. It’s tempting to succumb to the vague conviction that nobody knows what anybody else is thinking, that the apparent apathy and disconnectedness of acquaintances and passersby regarding the US occupation of Iraq and its larger imperial project of dominating the “dark corners of the world” (as one of El Busho’s speechwriters once phrased it) is endemic, generalized, the symptom of a cultural zombification which could only be interrupted by some cataclysmic event.
The kids who still watch television have a reservoir of selected and approved images, bytes and clips to draw from whenever Iraq enters the conversation. The dead boy’s mother jabbering incoherently; the American soldier– lean or beefy, tall or of middling height, padded with gear, gloved, booted, helmeted– virtually erased as a person by his equipment; the sprightly dignitary, girdled with kevlar, smiling, palpably thrilled to be in the midst of well-trained, purposive men and women whose destinies, directly or indirectly, he shapes.
Six years gone and the Iraq War image-system has expanded into a minor constellation: from the obscene abstractions of policy makers and pundits and technocrats concretized in ink– the print cacophony of position and rebuttal and counterposition and reiteration– to pixilated YouTube “videos” of resistance operations: the odd US soldier dropped by a sniper, another humvee buckling from an IED blast, a man in a keffiyeh firing an RPG. There is a surplus of such signs and messages, and they have become so ubiquitous they no longer encourage reflection but function as a somewhat interesting yet insubstantial scrim against which we live our lives.
Meanwhile the occupation and its strange inchoate politics, their mass mediation, proceeds according to a principle by which what is revealed remains hidden– airstrike, kidnapping closed-door meeting. New “actors” emerge: “militias” morph into “criminal gangs”; the Sunni-Shia narrative, which was always an intentionally and dangerously stupid oversimplification, fragments and coalesces. Nobody really knows what’s happening, possibly those who are in Iraq least of all.
And here, in the US, New Babylon, where we are permitted to see parts of the world in order to ensure we remain insulated from it, “the dogs,” as Auden observes, “go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
