No soldier wants to be the last casualty in a war, but surely that designation pales in comparison to being the first fatal casualty in a combat mission that has already been declared “over.”  One week after “turning the page” on Operation Freedom, two unidentified U.S. soldiers were killed by Iraqi soldiers in a firefight inside an Iraqi Army base north of Baghdad. This would be the same Iraqi army that 50,000 U.S. military personnel were left behind (after the page was “turned”) to “advise and train.”  It would be comedic if it wasn’t so tragic, but even these theatrical characterizations fail to capture the sheer absurdity of the situation: soldiers fighting a war of foreign occupation/liberation that was initiated under false or grossly mistaken pretenses, and subsequently attacked and killed by the “security forces” they were assigned to help once the war was declared “over.”

The photograph above, which accompanied one of the early stories reporting on the incident, calls attention to the irrationality of the ordeal.  The soldiers here, of course, are alive, cast in silhouette against what is either a setting or a rising sun. The incongruity of featuring a photograph of two unidentifiable soldiers that live and breathe in a story about two unidentified fatalities marks the event being reported as somewhat farcical, almost as if to challenge the very possibility of representing soldiers dying in a war that has been declared over. But of course, all appearances and declarations aside, the war isn’t over, a point underscored by the ambiguous register of the blazing hot sun. It is important in this regard to notice that there is nothing in the photograph that clues us as to whether the sun is setting (on a day gone by) or rising (to a new day). The past and the future are utterly indistinguishable, each day apparently pretty much like the last with no discernable end in sight.  Indeed, the photograph could be a scene out of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Of course, the alternative to casting such a situation as utterly absurd is to try to make it fit within our ordinary conventions for representing war.  So it is that we find another news story on the incident accompanied by a very different photograph.

The photograph here is altogether familiar; an image, the likes of which we have seen hundreds of times in recent years in newspapers all across the nation—national, regional, and local alike.  It is an appropriately solemn and reverent honoring of one who sacrificed his life for the nation. The difficulty is that the soldier being memorialized in this photograph actually died and was interred in 2005. That the photograph anchors a story about a different event without so much as an explanation would seem to challenge the logic of journalistic representation.  But the bigger point is recognizing the effect of an image that is so generic, so transportable, that it can be substituted for any military casualty so as to locate the meaning of any particular death under the cultural logic of heroism and sacrifice without any consideration of the attending circumstances.  There is no reason to believe that the soldiers that have died since we “turned the page” on Operation Freedom were anything but brave and heroic representatives of the nation.  At the same time, substituting an image like this to represent their deaths rationalizes their sacrifice at the expense of calling attention to the madness of the circumstances that led to it.

Photo Credit: AG/MGB; Albans/News.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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New York Times columnist David Brooks cheerily announced yesterday that nation building works.  Specifically, that the $53 billion spent to reconstruct Iraq is going quite well, thank you.  Not surprisingly, Brooks led with economic indicators, quoting the IMF on the country’s progress since 2003.  (Gee, we might ask, what happened in 2003?)  He then added for good measure statistics on oil production, cell phone ownership, and the like.  To be fair, he did acknowledge that trash removal still leaves something to be desired.  Generally, however, it seems that what is good for business is good for Iraq, and that the past can safely be forgotten.

Out of sight, out of mind, unless you lost your son to the sectarian violence unleashed by the US occupation.  To be fair to the Times, they presented the other side eloquently with this front page photograph and an accompanying story on the painful search for those victims still lying in unmarked graves.  Other stories have chronicled how the reconstruction funds were squandered by mismanagement, corruption and waste, how the country’s civil infrastructure remains devastated, how the security and political arrangements remain tenuous at best, and how military insurgency is on the rise again.  Brooks, however, must not read the Times.  In his account, there is no memory that reconstruction was needed because the country had been wreaked by the US invasion and occupation (and before that, another war and a decade-long  blockade).  His most unconscionable oversight, however, is to deny the permanent human damage caused by the invasion.

Brooks allows that “the Iraqi mind has not caught up with the Iraqi opportunity” and then faults their lack of social trust.  Besides hitting a high mark for hypocritical condescension, this argument makes light of the human heart and its most intimate bonds.  (You’d think a conservative writer would care more about families and communities than market opportunities.)  Worse yet, perhaps, by wrapping oneself in the discourse of national development and aggregate economic data, one forecloses on an opportunity for human sympathy.  As Adam Smith knew, sympathy is crucial for extension of the self beyond egotism, naturalized greed, and unwitting immorality.  It is the stuff of human community.

And that is why we are fortunate to have this photograph from the cemetery in Najaf, Iraq.  Having finally located the grave site of her son who was abducted and murdered five years ago, Hassna Mirza grieves.  What else can she do?  She is plopped down on the ground like an old dog, disconsolate, body shrouded, legs and hands inert, mouth open in a long wail as if grief were running through her, as if grief and gravity were one.  Other graves, some marked and some unmarked, extend in all directions to the horizon, as if she now resided in a perpetual city of mourning.  The omnipresent sand has covered everything, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, as if blanketing identity and memory alike with the pale uniformity of inanimate oblivion.  All that remains, for the moment, is her pain, weighing her down but also bonding her to her beloved.

And tying her to us, if we are willing to admit to the deep, tragic, painful connections between her world and ours.  The invasion of Iraq has caused untold suffering in the both the US and Iraq, and no amount of economic development and nation building can undo that damage.   Nor is this a matter of finally making right.  If we can’t accept a common history of pain, we diminish ourselves.  Perhaps this is another case of why nation building has to start at home.

Photograph by Moises Saman/New York Times.  For an example of how public discourse can acknowledge two nations united by “shared suffering,” see the remarks by William Jefferson Clinton at the University of Hanoi, Vietnam, November 17, 2000 (Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents,vol. 46, no. 36, 2887-91).

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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When going on vacation this summer, you can be assured that the war will be there when you return.  Waiting, stealthily, ready to kill again.

This chilling image could well be the face of war in the 21st century.  He sits there quietly, comfortably, in no hurry.  There is no risk that the mission will be canceled or that the funding will be diverted to civilian projects.  His job doesn’t turn on any election or economic policy.  He sits at a ledge overlooking the street in Kabul, but the room behind him could be in any warehouse or empty building anywhere.  It might as well be a portal to hell; close one, and another can be opened around the corner.

As he sits safely in the darkness, we become aware of the light along the ledge, light that barely penetrates the dirty and boarded windowpanes.  The light limns his firing stand and headgear, while the binoculars (which double here as goggles) look like another set of darkened panes, as if light itself were a threat to this demonic creature.  Demonic, and fashionable: this cyborg is neatly hybridized as well: a NATO-ISAF soldier, his combination of high-tech weaponry and traditional headdress could fit in just as well on the other side, or sides.

He is not a massed army, and so the death toll is kept at sustainable levels, but he is lethal, and so specific individuals and their families are due to enter a world of pain and loss.  Above all, although the face of war you can’t see his face.  From sophisticated optical devices to protective eyeware, modern warfare is about equipping the eyes so that they can see but not be seen–and see but not question, judge, or look away in disgust.

And so we get to this awful reminder that the war is not just about deploying, shooting, or otherwise acting against others.  This US soldier’s sunglasses are splattered with some of the blood from an IED explosion in Afghanistan.  The glasses appear to be fine.  What looks like a fashion accessory is in fact essential gear, and not just to cut the glare.  Once again, however, we can see the optical instrument but not who wore it or what was seen through it.

The camera is another optical instrument.  These photos bring us closer to the war zone, but they also remind us how much remains unseen and unchanged.  One might ask how we should use such images.  Are we going to ponder what they may be telling us about the nature of war and the representation of war, or are they likely to become another form of protective eyewear: something used to see while safely at a distance or avoiding the glare and grit, and also to look without seeing, questioning, and demanding change.

Photographs by Ahmad Masood/Reuters and Bob Strong/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The war in Afghanistan is not only a difficult military mission, it’s also a hard war to report on as well.  And for the same reason: you have a modern army trying to subdue guerrilla fighters in a desolate land for no clear political purpose.  The deployment of heavily equipped troops provides continual demonstration of enormous organizational and technological power, but with no identifiable enemies, territorial objectives, or sound strategic rationale the sense of things seems to drain away into the vast, almost lunar terrain.  In these conditions, some photographers have managed to tap into mythic visions.

This photograph of troops on patrol was captioned to report that they are soldiers of the Royal Gurkha Rifles and Afghan National Police on patrol in Helmand province.  That information tells you very little, however, and not enough to understand either the image or the war.  Instead of reporting anything of note, the image evokes the mythic theme that war is eternal, and like other forms of eternity, a place where something elemental about moral life is revealed.

The patrol is moving out, two by two, across featureless terrain into some unseen, unknown future.  One figure is stopped for a moment, and the profile allows us to see the burden he carries.  Although he is equipped with a radio, he seems caught in silence, as are the others, their thoughts to themselves while everything else is reduced to being silhouettes.  We don’t know where they are going, but in the myth it doesn’t matter.  The long grey line continues forever, and they are simply carrying the load for their brief time.  They walk through history into the unknown, as good soldiers always do and always will, ennobled by their simple devotion to duty.

Like I said, it’s a myth.  I won’t deny it entirely, but I will note that it can expand into full sentimentality because there is so little in its way, and because mythic significance becomes especially appealing when no other, more pragmatic rationale is available.  Whatever the photographer’s intention, something deep has been evoked by this image.  What could be a parable of military activity without purpose  evokes instead a sense that war is, if not an end in itself, something close to that.

Myths are used to make sense of large forces that exceed understanding.  Mythic allusions may be particularly available in images of Afghanistan because there is a deep need to make sense of something that is becoming increasingly senseless.  It has dawned on me that I now have several posts that identify various mythic projections infiltrating the optical unconscious: how the war is a form of extreme sport, or Afghanistan a new frontier.  In each case, media culture digs into its storehouse to put up images that imply some otherworldly yet familiar narrative.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the image above does double duty in this regard, as it also could be a scene from a sci-fi movie where the heroes head out from their craft to explore a dry, unforgiving planet.  And so you can imagine my reaction when I saw this photograph:

This photo of the night sky over Camp Hansen in Helmand province is a stunning image of the firmament, so much so that I can feel the pull to go there and see the heavens so close, bright, vast, and deep.  But I see something else as well: another mythic vision, this time from science fiction.  Camp Hansen could be perched on some distant planet, a small outpost of humanity now flung across the stars.   Across the stars, but still at war.

Photographs by Bay Ismoyo/AFP-Getty Images and Hyunsoo Leo Kim/AP/The Virginian-Pilot, thanks to The Big Picture.

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I was at Yankee Stadium recently and as has been customary every since World War II, such sporting events begin with a standing salute to the “Star Spangled Banner—America’s national anthem.  During the seventh inning stretch, when one  expected to hear “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” an announcer  implored all of the fans to stand facing in the direction of the American flag, to take their hats off, and to honor the singing of “God Bless America.”  This latest paean to American exceptionalism became a practice in New York after the tragic events of  9/11 and although it resulted in a law suit initiated by the NYCLU, it continues to the present day unabated. That said, such a flag fetish is not unique to New York, as we see in the  photograph of a red, white, and blue shrouded “Green Monster” in Boston’s Fenway Park on the Fourth of July.

There is of course nothing wrong in celebrating America’s heritage with displays of the flag, especially on the anniversary of our national “birth,” but notice here how the elongated flag (one of three U.S. flags in the photograph) is completely out of scale with its surroundings—both in size and dimension—as if to imply that there is nothing that can’t be covered by its reach.  Such hubris is accented by the military fly over and honor guard which frame the image across the diagonal from upper left to lower right. Though barely conspicuous in comparison to the magnitude of the flag, the martial presence in the image nevertheless emphasizes the normalization of a war culture in American life, even as the flag serves to articulate commitments to nationalism and militarism as if naturally and necessarily connected.

The relationship between nationalism and militarism is naturalized in no less subtle terms in this photograph of a young girl reaching for the flag that cloaked the coffin of her father, an Army Specialist recently killed in Afghanistan.

The child is absolutely beautiful; her skin soft and unblemished, her hair neatly combed into a pony tail, she exudes childlike purity and innocence. The expression on her face teeters between wonder and desire as receives the flag being handed to her from a member of the military honor guard. At some later date she might question with tears and anger why her father had to die in a war of occupation before she got to know him, but here her rapt attention is focused on the symbolic remnant that stands in simultaneously for his absence (as her biological father) and presence (as her national father), and she accepts it with open arms.  That she is dressed  in red, white, and blue only serves to accentuate the connection between the military hand offering her the flag and her own significance as a metaphorical representation of the nation.

The implication of these two images is no different than many more images regularly put on display in newspapers and website slide shows, and more is the pity, for the flag should be a symbol of patriotism—love of one’s country— and not an unguarded cipher for normalizing a military culture.

Photo Credits:  Elsa/Getty Images; Kelly Presnell/AP/Arizona Daily Star.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The New York Times made it the lead story: “U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan.”  The question remains of who will get the riches.  The Times danced all around that one, and the key words sound like a Hot Button list for those who pay attention to how imperialism is coded in public discourse.  The report was filed by a Pentagon task force for business development that had recently been transferred from Iraq.  (Did you know that the Pentagon has a deputy undersecretary for defense for business?)  The research was conducted with geologists from the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs office.  (Yes, they have an international affairs office.)  The relevant Afghani law was written by advisers from the World Bank (just happened to be passing through Kabul).   Mining contracts are being drawn up by “international accounting firms,” and the technical data is about to be turned over to “multinational mining companies.”

Needless to say, with talent like this, we can look forward to the day when, according to the internal Pentagon memo quoted by the Times, Afghanistan will become “‘the Saudi Arabia of lithium.'”  Coming your way soon, yet another obscenely wealthy beacon of authoritarianism and Islamist terrorism.

But that’s the future, and of course the future could turn out otherwise.  What is interesting for the moment is how the conversion of Afghanistan into a mineral extraction colony for multinational capitalism is being framed both verbally and visually.

This is the photograph that the Times appended to their article.  It is one of many amazing images of Afghanistan by Tyler Hicks, and I believe I’ve seen it some time ago.  In short, this is not Tyler Hicks working up the mineral story, but rather an appropriation of the image to frame that story.  As such, the implications are clear: there really is nothing and almost nobody there; the pastoral herders who are there are incapable of the capital- and technology-intensive development necessary to convert the rocks to wealth.  Where have we heard that before?  Well, in the American West.

Let me suggest that the idea that Central Asia is a new Wild West has been present often enough in the visual coverage of the American military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.  This photograph was part of a slide show at the Washington Post on Marine efforts to secure the area around Marja in southern Afghanistan and train Afghani police at “Camp Leatherneck” there.   This shot was the last in the series.  Don’t say there are no more frontiers, because this is an image of a frontier outpost.

Photographs by Tyler Hicks/New York Times and Andrea Bruce/Washington Post.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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This photograph from Kabul, Afghanistan could have been captioned “Return of the Body Snatchers.”

Gallows humor is pretty cheap, but it may be as sane a response as any other to another suicide bombing.  The attack last week killed 18 people, wounded at least 47 others, and generally made a mess of things in the center of the capital.  And somebody has to clean up.   I could be snide and say “Your tax dollars at work,” but the US occupation of the country is one reason the bombings occur, and US troops are as logical a choice as any for the clean-up detail.  Even so, there is something unnerving about this image.

The caption said that the body was being loaded onto a truck, but it also looks as if it is being loaded into a shredder.  Or worse, some mobile rendering vat–everything processed, nothing wasted.  One neatly wrapped body is being conveyed up and into the machine, while another lies on a gurney waiting its turn to be fed into the industrial maw.  In  fact, they will be transported and unloaded while respectfully wrapped against additional harm, but nonetheless one senses that something awful has been revealed.  Something about how life and death alike are being captured by the routinized violence of military occupation.

Whatever the motives of the suicide bomber and whatever the intentions of the clean-up crew, this photograph has captured the  anonymity, repetitiveness, and pointlessness of 21st century warfare.  Death and destruction are spreading like global plagues–as I write this, ethnic violence has erupted again in Kyrgyzstan–and entire societies are transformed into that strange late-modern hybrid of new technologies and demolished infrastructure.  In rubble world, you can see cell phones and twisted rebar, digital cameras and gashed streets. And in place of thriving marketplaces, we see soldiers and other state functionaries going about the business of restoring the city, not to what it was before the blast, but to what remains after the worst of the damage has been carted away.

This dual character of being both modern and degraded is evident in the photographs themselves.  The photo above depicts both an efficient funereal detail and the degradation of seeing bodies being treated like they were being recycled.  It documents a modern military machine–not only the truck itself, but the entire military organization that so effectively manages violence and chaos–and also the waste and wreckage spread by war.  And the image itself is a marvel of digital reproduction that will become lost among many other images much like it, each another fragment in the growing detritus of seemingly endless conflict.

One way or another, violence in the 21st century is a story of modern technology strangely implicated in the production of ruins.  So it is that photographs of the machinery of death are both factual and allegorical.  The facts are tied to the present; the allegory extends into the future.

Photograph by Ahmad Masood/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Sometimes a photograph seems to focus on something incidental but actually captures the deep structure of a situation.

Nice back, isn’t it?  And the tattoos look pretty sharp, although it’s hard to appreciate the detail from here.  And that would seem to be about it: an anonymous Marine is physically fit and tattooed.  Interesting, but hardly news and surely not the key to ending the war in Afghanistan.

The photographer’s skill begins to emerge when one reads the caption for the photograph in The Washington Post: “A Marine tries to talk to residents of southern Marja, who gathered in front of a small outpost to voice complaints to the troops stationed there.”  I assume that the caption is referring to the guy in the blue trunks, as he’s the one doing the talking.  But perhaps he’s an interpreter instead of a Marine.  The text refers to one Marine, after all.  If so, the Marine “talking” is in fact waiting, lost in translation, you might say.   Things are getting complex, aren’t they?  The visual composition emphatically features the Marine in the center of the photograph, while the text seems to refer to the other foregrounded figure and to the villagers while leaving someone unmentioned.

And so the photo may not be showing communication at all.  The more I look at the picture, the more it seems like something out of an extreme sports event.  The dude in the center looks like he could be a surfer, mountain biker, base jumper, or some other high-risk, outside the box athlete.  The rest of the scene can lock into that theme.  Dude is waiting out the preliminaries, maybe even getting into his zone, while his agent or some media flack briefs the locals about their part in the event.  Dude is cool, focused, totally able to get it done; just don’t ask him to talk and you’ll be fine.

The intermediary carries his share of derivative cool–check out those shorts–but he definitely is working in a more familiar mode.  And the villagers?  Oh, yeah, the extras in the scene: distant, fuzzy, a vaguely illegible mini-mob there to be pacified, they are only today’s background while the show goes around the globe.

Of course, this analogy is unfair to the actual people in the photograph, but photojournalism is not about its literal referent.  Young men in arms are going to dig getting big, sporting tattoos, wearing sunglasses, listening to metal, and otherwise acting their age, and the dude actually could be a captain listening astutely on behalf of effective negotiations, and the villagers are in fact being pro-active by voicing complaints. What the photograph captures, however, goes well beyond those facts.  If the central figure is the one “talking,” then it is through an interpreter with people whose interests are barely in the picture.  If he is not the one talking, then talk is being backed up by force that waits to be unleashed with  little regard for whatever was being said.

And whatever the story, one can’t help but think that a basic tendency in American culture is being revealed.  Whitman celebrated democratic athleticism, but we are further down the line now.  Vernacular grace has been harnessed for powerfully focused, high-adrenaline competition.  Whatever the complexity of the world, Americans are turning war into an extreme sport.

Photograph by Andrea Bruce/Washington Post.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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