Sorglose Nacht

Clearly in the throes of what has been called by some “the El Salvador option”, the American-trained Iraqi counter-insurgency has developed its second front in an dishearteningly unsurprising place: television. Unsurprising, that is, if we accept the notion of an El Salvador style drama currently playing out in Iraq, from whence by definition the so-called counter-insurgency is little more than an American-funded and trained death squad. Death by television: it’s in the American modern war manifesto.

Incidentally, the propaganda piece/reality show “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” is apparently quite popular in Iraq, though this is at best hearsay coming from me. TGJ is aired on the state-run Al Iraqiya network, akin to public television in the US. It is apparently the only source of televised news in Iraq that does not require a satellite dish. Now, Al Iraqiya is part of a media conglomeration called The Iraqi Media Network, created by the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, which later became the Coalition Provisional Authority, after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. However, the IMN, apparently now in the hands of the Iraqi government (see the editor’s note in this Christian Science Monitor article) has since its inception “faced credibility issues and was too closely associated with the CPA…As early as June 2003, the CPA was engaging in censoring Iraqi media, issuing ‘guidelines’ for all media outlets in Iraq, forbidding them from inciting violence or opposition to the occupation authority…Several seasoned journalists were reported to have quit the IMN out of frustration with CPA oversight. ‘Critics say the network’s mission is weakened by its contradictory goals. So far IMN is touted as both the voice of an occupying military force and an inspiration for Iraqis to produce fair and balanced news coverage. But many Iraqis have already dubbed the network a propaganda organ.’” (@sourcewatch)

The show itself consists of detainees confessing to various crimes; not only to terrorism-specific style crimes such as murder, but also to being homosexuals or paedophiles [source], sometimes showing obvious signs of having been recently beaten, and almost always before being taken to trial.

An extremely interesting account of this show-device comes from Peter Maass, who was in the room with General Adnan Thabit, the leader of Iraq’s most fearsome counterinsurgency force, the Special Police Commandos, and creator of TGJ:

Those being interrogated on the program do not look fearsome; these are not the faces to be found in the propaganda videos that turn up on Web sites or on Al Jazeera. The insurgents, or suspected insurgents, on ”Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” come off as cowardly lowlifes who kill for money rather than patriotism or Allah. They tremble on camera, stumble over their words and look at the ground as they confess to everything from contract murders to sodomy. The program’s clear message is that there is now a force more powerful than the insurgency: the Iraqi government, and in particular the commandos, whose regimental flag, which shows a lion’s head on a camouflage background, is frequently displayed on a banner behind the captives.

Before the show began that evening, Adnan’s office was a hive of conversation, phone calls and tea-drinking. Along with a dozen commandos, there were several American advisers in the room, including James Steele, one of the United States military’s top experts on counterinsurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country’s brutal civil war in the 1980’s. Steele’s presence was a sign not only of the commandos’ crucial role in the American counterinsurgency strategy but also of his close relationship with Adnan. Steele admired the general. ”He’s obviously a natural type of commander,” Steele told me. ”He commands respect.”

Things quieted in the office once the episode of ”Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” began. First, a detainee admitted to having homosexual relations in a mosque. Then several other suspected insurgents made their confessions; two of them had been captured by Adnan’s commandos in Samarra, and their confessions were taped, just hours before, in this very office. Adnan sat smoking Royals and watching the show like a proud producer.

”It has a good effect on civilians,” he had told me, through an interpreter. ”Most civilians don’t know who conducts the terrorist activities. Now they can see the quality of the insurgents.” Earlier he said: ”Civilians must know that these people who call themselves resisters are thieves and looters. They are dirty. In every person there is good and bad, but in these people there is only bad.”

Last year, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI wrote this document to commemorate the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Allied forces landing in Normandy in 1944. It is, as one might expect, an almost stoically well-written text. Toward the front:

They [the first-generation post-war politicians] did not want to found a state upon religious faith, but rather a state informed by moral reason, yet it was their faith that helped them to raise up again a reason once distorted by, and held in thrall to ideological tyranny.

Across Europe ran a frontier, and not just across our continent, but dividing the entire world. A great part of Central Europe and Eastern Europe came under the domination of an ideology that subjected state to party, in the end, effacing the difference. Here, again, the result was the rule of lies.

He writes then that if post-war Europe experienced a period of relative peace, South-East Asia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and parts of the Europe on the eastern side of “the frontier” experienced nothing less than a sustained and bloody arc of armed conflict. He suggests that two (somewhat) new symptoms seemingly common among these disperate conflicts were:

1. The collapse of the “cohesiveness of law” - that is, the usurping of conscience-based order by “the cynicism of ideology”, which he corrleates at least in part with the interests of big business. The “good,” he suggests, “is shoved aside by the expedient, and might setup in the place of right.”
2. The phenomenon of terror, which, as he notes, “so often has its source in standing injustice, not addressed by effective measures.” The forces which have access to “right and law” of course must also have access to “carefully calibrated force,” to combat the phenomenon, but, he firmly intones, “is it important to vouchsafe forgiveness in advance, in order that the circle of violence may be broken.”

He continues, “In all these cases it is important that no one particular power act as the champion of justice. All too easily can interest interfere with action, and contaminate one’s view of what is just. Most urgent is a genuine jus genitum, free from hegemonic predominance and action which follows from it: only thus can it remain clear that what is at stake is the defense of collective law and right, and those also of them who stand, so to speak, on the other side.”

A secular viewpoint of enlightened reason, he says, is opposed to a fanatical fundamentalist religious viewpoint. There are pathologies of reason (say, Pol Pot) and of religion. Both pathologies “are life threatening for peace - indeed, in an age of global power structures, for humanity as a whole,” a formation that I think Derrida himself would have liked. In the following jarring short paragraph, he continues:

To a reason fallen ill, all recognition of definitively valid values, all that stands on the truth capacity of reason, appears finally as fundamentalism. All that remains is reason’s dissolution, its deconstruction, as, for example, Jacques Derrida has set it out for us. He has “deconstructed” hospitality, democracy, the state and finally, the concept of terrorism, only to stand in horror in the face of the events of September 11th. A form of reason that can acknowledge only itself and the empirical conscience paralyzes and dismembers itself.

The fact that he seems to accuse Derrida of relativism must be put aside. It is an old and long-standing tradition to imagine that Derrida or deconstruction in itself clearly indicates a sort of ethical relativism. Doubtless, there is more to be said, but not here. Back to the Cardinal’s ontology: “God himself is Logos,” he says, “the rational first cause of all reality, the creative reason out of which the world came to be, and which is reflected in the world. God is Logos - Meaning, Reason, Word, and so it is through the way of reason that man encounters God, through the espousal of a reason that is not blind to the moral dimension of Being.” This theology will be the condition of possibility absolute and sovereign reason and absolute justice, which is commented on shortly in the amazing formulation, “There is a justice love will not annul.”

Again, ontological arguments between the Pope and Derrida are unproductive, and at any rate I am unqualified to arbitrate them. But, is there a justice love will not annul? What a question. I really don’t know how to even begin to think it. But it is now being thought. I am intrigued.

Meanwhile, I think that short of what might be called their respective theologies, Benedict might find himself much closer to what might be called the ethical Derrida than he seems to think. This fact is littered through the above quotes. It is clear. From one small example:

I believe it is necessary, by way of a philosophical, historical analysis, to deconstruct the political theology of sovereignty…But at the same time you shouldn’t think that you must fight for the dissolution pure and simple of all sovereignty: that is neither realistic nor desirable. There are effects of sovereignty which in my view are still politically useful in the fight against certain forces or international concentrations of forces that sneer at sovereignty.

And finally,

My intent here is not anti-religious, it is not a matter of waging war on the religious messianisms properly speaking, that is to say Judaic, Christian, Islamic. But it is a matter of marking a place where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say by that waiting without waiting, without horizon for the event to come, the democracy to come with all its contradictions. And I believe we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (sovereignism, territorialised nation-state), without giving in to the Churches or to the religious powers, theologico-political or theocratic of all orders, whether they be the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they be, disguised, the theocracies of the West…