Words&Dirt

“When I was researching Ewen Cameron’s electroshock experiments in the 1950s, I came across an observation made by one of his colleagues, a psychiatrist named Fred Lowry.  ‘The Freudians had developed all these subtle methods of peeling the onion to get at the heart of the problem,’ he said.  ‘Cameron wanted to drill right through and to hell with the layers.  But, as we later discovered, the layers are all there is.’  Cameron thought he could blast away all his patients’ layers and start again; he dreamed of creating brand-new personalities.  But his patients weren’t reborn: they were confused, injured, broken.

Iraq’s shock therapists blasted away at the layers too, seeking that elusive blank slate on which to create their new model country.  They found only the piles of rubble that they themselves had created, and millions of psychologically and physically shattered people––shattered by Saddam, shattered by war, shattered by one another.  Bush’s in-house disaster capitalists didn’t wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up.  Rather than a tabula rasa, purified of history, they found ancient feuds, brought to the surface to merge with fresh vendettas from each new attack––on a mosque in Karbala, in Samarra, on a market, a ministry, a hospital.  Countries, like people, don’t reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

Which of course requires more blasting––upping the dosage, holding down the button longer, more pain, more bombs, more torture.  Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who had predicted that Iraqis would be easily marshaled from A to B, has since concluded that the real problem was that the U.S. was too soft.  ‘The humane way in which the coalition fought the war,’ he said, ‘actually has led to a situation where it is more difficult to get people to come together, not less.  In Germany and Japan [after the Second World War], the population was exhausted and deeply shocked by what had happened, but in Iraq it’s been the opposite.  A very rapid victory over enemy forces has meant we’ve not had the cowed population we had in Japan and Germany….The US is dealing with an Iraqi population that is un-shocked and un-awed.’  By January 2007, Bush and his advisers were still convinced that they could gain control of Iraq with one good ‘surge,’ one that wiped out Moqtada al-Sadr––’a cancer that undermines’ the Iraqi government.  The report on which the surge strategy was based aimed for ‘the successful clearing of central Baghdad’ and, when al-Sadr’s forces moved to Sadr City, to ‘clear that Shiite stronghold by force’ as well.

In the seventies, when the corporatist crusade began, it used tactics that courts ruled were overtly genocidal: the deliberate erasure of a segment of the population.  In Iraq, something even more monstrous happened––the erasure not of a segment of the population but of an entire country; Iraq is disappearing, disintegrating.  It began, as it often does, with the disappearance of women behind veils and doors, then the children disappeared from the schools––as of 2006, two-thirds of them stayed home.  Next came the professionals: doctors, professors, entrepreneurs, scientists, pharmacists, judges, lawyers.  An estimated three hundred Iraqi academics have been assassinated by death squads since the U.S. invasion, including several college deans; thousands more have fled.  Doctors have fared even worse: by February 2007, an estimated two thousand had been killed and twelve thousand had fled.  In November 2006, the UN High Commission for Refugees estimated that three thousand Iraqis were fleeing the country every day.  By April 2007, the organization reported that four million people had been forced to leave their homes––roughly one in seven Iraqis.  Only a few hundred of those refugees had been welcomed to the United States.

With Iraqi industry all but collapsed, one of the only local businesses booming is kidnapping.  Over just three and a half months in early 2006, nearly twenty thousand people were kidnapped in Iraq.  The only time the international media pays attention is when a Westerner is taken, but the vast majority of abductions are Iraqi professionals, grabbed as they travel to and from work.  Their families either come up with tens of thousands in U.S. dollars for the ransom money or identify the bodies at the morgue.  Torture has also emerged as a thriving industry.  Human rights groups have documented numerous cases of Iraqi police demanding thousands of dollars from the families of prisoners in exchange for a halt to torture.  It’s Iraq’s own domestic version of disaster capitalism.

This was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world.  The occupation had begun with cheerful talk of clean slates and fresh starts.  It didn’t take long, however, for the quest for cleanliness to slip into talk of ‘pulling Islamism up from the root’ in Sadr City or Najaf and removing ‘the cancer of radical Islam’ from Fallujah and Ramadi––what was not clean would be scrubbed out by force.

That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries.  The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated.  It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth––only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction.

The unanticipated violence that now engulfs Iraq is the creation of the lethally optimistic architects of the war––it was preordained in that original seemingly innocuous, even idealistic phrase: ‘a model for a new Middle East.’  The disintegration of Iraq has its roots in the ideology that demanded a tabula rasa on which to write its new story.  And when no such pristine tableau presented itself, the supporters of that ideology proceeded to blast again in the hope of reaching that promised land.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 471-4

“When it became time for the soil to be shoveled back into the hole, Juliette watched the crowd.  Two people dead from the up top in less than a week.  There had been two other deaths elsewhere in the silo, making it a very bad week.

Or good, depending on who you were.  She noticed childless couples biting vigorously into their fruit, their hands intertwined, silently doing the math.  Lotteries followed too closely after the deaths for Juliette’s tastes.  She always thought they should fall on the same dates in the year, just to look as though they were going to happen anyway, whether anyone died or not.

But then, the lowering of the body and the plucking of ripe fruit just above the graves was meant to hammer this home: the cycle of life is here; it is inescapable; it is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated.  One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life.  They make room for the next generation.  We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone.  All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.”

––Wool (Omnibus Edition), by Hugh Howey, loc. 2202-10