BAGnewsNotes

Russia Resurgent: One Side Of The Same Coin

I'm not making excuses for the Russians, but I am interested in double-standards.

The first cover is from this week's Economist.  The second is the March 3, 2003 TIME cover preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  The main distinction here is that the TIME cover, in spite of what Hans Blix had to say, completely overlooks any ramifications of a massive invasion and occupation of a sovereign Persian Gulf nation, the only tension in the illustration involving whether the man incarnated as Uncle Sam feels like doing it or not.

Latest Cover For Iraq's Core Meltdown

Remarkable, isn't it, how this cover -- illustrating Sunday's NYT Mag lead story on Iraq -- manages to reduce an otherwise complex multi-ethnic, multi-party train wreck into a simple one-liner?

What Michael Gordon's 8,000 word article does well is detail the U.S. Military's intense and largely successful effort to convert the Sunni insurgency into Awakening councils, and how these entities now hang in a tenuous state given the Shiite government's reluctance to legitimize or integrate them.  The article also describes the delicate circumstances between what it terms the ‘powers that be’ and the ‘powers that aren’t' within Shiite Iraq.  The article outlines power schisms between tribal and more urban/professional Shiites, and between more religious and secular Shiite factions.  In particular, it highlights the power struggle between Prime Minister Maliki's Dawa party, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Islamic Supreme Council party and the Sadrists.

Over and over, however, the article places all the chips for coherence, stability and political order on the provincial elections scheduled for this October.

Those are the same elections we learned Wednesday, however, that now aren't going to happen based on the failure of the Iraqi parliament to approve them prior to adjourning for the summer.

4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images

Why do I think this image from Thursday's NYT is so profound?

It's because the military has been so overwhelmingly effective in muting the war, and the war photographer, that -- practically without notice -- many of our best shooters have found themselves turning, in a disproportionate way, to the technique of irony.

For example, Cristoph Bangert has been masterful in articulating the surreal nature of a long incoherent strategy in an alien land.  And now, photographer Ashley Gilbertson -- whose work I've shown and discussed a number of times at BAGnewsNotes -- is back "in country," and again "firing wit-tipped darts" attempting to wake us up.

Of course, if we weren't so anesthetized, we might actually sit forward and wonder about the outlandish contrast in this photo, or more particularly, to consider what an all-too-stealth-like picture might have to do with still one more headline confirming the latest non-development concerning Iraq's Babel-ish, seemingly permanent stalemate-for-a-government.

The agrarian scene, confounding associations of Iraq as a mostly arid, desert-like place, uses the really hilarious device of cows grazing to mirror how we in the U.S. have become so thoroughly pacified (or, dare I saw, "cowed?") by the pictorial censorship and fundamental lack of context in the war reporting as to basically reduce the whole subject -- despite the shadowy war machine still silently screaming overhead -- to the significance of, well, grazing.

Lens On Gitmo

Why the 2003 interrogation tapes of Gitmo prisoner Omar Khadr look so bad:

1.  With the dingy surroundings, the view through the air-conditioning grate (which has the feel of a horizontal blind), and the black dots obscuring the heads of the supposed good guys, the "vocabulary" here bears a stronger resemblance to a surveillance tape capturing a crime going down -- which is exactly the point Khadr's lawyers are making, isn't it?

2. Since we've seen next-to-nothing but sterile shots inside Gitmo (1, 2), it's hard not to look at these pictures and think of Abu Ghraib, especially with the hat/mask, the orange jump suit, and the-then 16-year-old kid with his shirt pulled down.

Canadian teen's gitmo interrogation film released - includes school boy shot of Khadr and also graphic image when he was captured - Docudharma
The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr (Rolling Stone)
Blurry Peek at Questioning of a Guantánamo Inmate (NYT)

(screen grab: AFP)

Sleepwalking Out of Iraq

by Robert Hariman

There has been something strange about the recent coverage of the war in Iraq.

Privately I've been complaining that the war has all but disappeared from the papers, or that the photos are soft news shots, or that everything has becoming numbingly repetitive. There is some truth to all of that, but not enough. It finally hit me today after a friend suggested that I was giving up too easily. So I looked again and there it was: the US, across the board, is already disengaging and moving on, but as if in a dream, as if none of this is really happening.

To see what I mean, you might look at the photograph above.

Iraqi civilians are queued up for food and medical aid in Sadr City. We see, front to back, the civilians, an Iraqi soldier, and then an American soldier. The details tell a familiar story not without irony: As the Iraqi military steps up the US can drop back into a supporting role.  Although the US troops are occupying a school that had to be abandoned, the Iraqi soldier is masked because of sectarian violence, and kids are already armed, albeit with water pistols.

But these are distractions from the real truth of the photograph. The American is already well in the background, behind a barrier, peering out as though from a door that he is about to close. He is looking on a scene of his own making, but one that now clearly is separate from where and who he is. The interaction is all on the other side of the barrier. Soon he will step back. After all, he is in the vanishing point of the picture.

Any one photograph can be but a fragment and not representative of a larger pattern. So let's look at two more.

The Case Of The Invisible American War Machine

(click smaller images for full size)

Last week, I thought there was something fishy about the photos from Amara, and now a new TIME article bears it out.

First, some background: In nearly every account of the push two weeks ago to clear out the Mahdi army from the southern city of Amara, the operation was described as an initiative of "Iraqi forces backed by US troops."  Yet, in combing through the newswire images of the Amara action, I found a striking absence of involvement on the part of the Yanks.

...With one exception -- involving the first photo above, as part of that standard portrait of the "captured enemy weapons haul."

The fact the remote presence of an American GI commands first notice in the Getty caption seems almost too telling to ignore.  It reads:

Your Turn: Keepers Of The Palace

Thanks for the kind words, and for filling up The BAG while I was off for a few days.  While I was taking a break from all things electronic, quite a few of you wrote me about the re-enlistment ceremony at Camp Victory in Baghdad. 

What struck me first was that this guy really must be on the way out to miss this kind of photo op. 

Second, the military must have been pretty desperate not just for the 5,500 years of additional commitment, but for the recruiting poster otherwise advertising the the scale of America's occupying force and the fact that the U.S. is the real keeper of the palace over there.

Bush’s War: Reading Behind the Images ( Richard Silverstein - Tikun Olam)

(image: Erik de Castro/Reuters. July 4, 2008. al-Faw palace, Camp Victory, Iraq.)

The Fix Is In

With the Iraqis working hard to resist a long-term U.S. occupation agreement, this week's Economist cover executes the latest version of "Mission Accomplished," reframing a potential American repudiation as the result of a country that -- through a new and profound capacity for self-healing -- might somehow not need our fixing anymore. 

Forget that splits among Shiite factions are so severe as to continue threatening civil war, or that the delicate counterbalance between traditional Sunni factions and the Sunni Awakening groups created by the Americans is wearing thin in the face of upcoming elections, or that the country continues to move farther into the Iranian sphere.

With a small generator (drawing power for how many hours a day?) and a bit of varnish (also, the preferred palliative of the Administration), the initiative of the tradesman is meant to signify that Iraq is well on the way to making its own music once again.  And then, I'm not sure how far The Economist meant to push the metaphor, but considering how America's "rescue" of Iraq mostly succeeded in setting off wide-scale looting, isn't it poetic that this craftsman is fashioning a lute?

The change in Iraq: Is it turning the corner? (Economist cover story)
Maliki raises possibility that Iraq might ask U.S. to leave (McClatchy)

(image: unattributed. The Economist. June 14, 2008)

Iraq Civil War #10 - Day 44

Like this image posted back on March 27th (two days after Maliki declared war on the al-Sadr and the Mahdi), what lends poignancy to a situation we have otherwise grown numb to are pictures that are this elemental.

In the latest evolution of the Shiite civil war, American forces -- with the support of troops from the U.S.-installed, pro-Iranian government  -- have so traumatized Sadr City that a mass exodus would surely take place (similar to the previous migration out of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities) if only the people, now trapped and starving, could get out.

This woman's hands gripping onto a truck while waiting for food supplies to be distributed not only powerfully reflect the circumstance in Sadr City, their expression and adornment offer an anguished and detailed personal portrait as well.

accompanying article: Aid Officials Urge Relief For Baghdad Slum (Reuters via NYT)
BNN Iraq Civil War thread
NYT Pictures of the Day, May 8 (nytimes.com)

(Photo: Petr David Josek/AP. May 2008. Sadr City. via nytimes.com)

Blowing Up The Surge

When it's all said and done (sometime within the next hundred years), the most redundant image of the Iraq occupation could well turn out to be the razed car carcass.  At this point, however, what could possibly distinguish one more crippled hulk from another?

In the former case (besides the fact it's an ambulance that took the hit), the method of infliction is worth noting.  The roof of the car is caved in because it was damaged from the air by one of three U.S. Hellfire missiles.  The specific view, however, is actually peripheral to the main target which Iraqis identify as a mosque and the American military described as a “criminal element command and control center.”

What everybody does agree on, however, is that the building next-door was a hospital, which made it that much more convenient to treat the twenty-eight people injured, including a group of kids who were collecting cans to salvage.