I’m in an airport, again, and experiencing some non-consensual CNN. The anchor just introduced one of her expert guests for a segment on the latest on ISIS as “formerly with M-16”. Of course, she meant MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, not the rifle. Her first question was, paraphrasing, “who can we bomb?” So, here’s a thread to address that pressing question.
This Is Not Good News
And don’t say “yeah, except for John McCain”….
The Russian military has moved artillery units manned by Russian personnel inside Ukrainian territory in recent days and is using them to fire at Ukrainian forces, NATO officials said on Friday….
“Russian artillery support — both cross-border and from within Ukraine — is being employed against the Ukrainian armed forces,” [NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu] added.
Putin’s playing a very dangerous game, obviously, and we’re seeing the prescience of those who suggested that he hadn’t, or couldn’t, figure out how turn the knobs up and down on the nationalist wave he hopes to use to distract from his crappy governance.
And with that bit of obviousness, I’ll stop, given that my analysis of Russian politics and the regional dynamics is worth not what you paid for it, but quite likely less.
Discuss — and may the more knowledgable among us lead us to wisdom.
Image: Aruther Devis, Gentleman with a Cannon, 1741
Mission Creep
As a corollary to Tom’s excellent post on the realities and costs of war below, I have a question: How do y’all see this current US action against ISIS playing out? Are you worried about mission creep?
The original justification for airstrikes was rescuing the people who were besieged on that mountain. Then airstrikes were used to push ISIS back from the Mosul dam. And now god knows how many sorties are being launched to push ISIS back further.
Don’t get me wrong: I hate those ISIS fuckers, I really do. I don’t think the US needs to manufacture propaganda to portray them as evil barbarians; they do it themselves.
But, unless we have clear aims — something clearer than “smoke those fuckers whenever they raise their heads” — aren’t we at risk of getting dragged back into a regional war in the Middle East?
Shouldn’t we at least have a national conversation about the wisdom of that? Doesn’t our Congress — as fucked up and stupid as it is — have to be involved in approving such a measure?
Or am I being a Nervous Nelly?
For Our Own Good
If there was a golden age for American media, it was long ago and it was short.
Over at The Atlantic, Torie Rose DeGhett has an excellent, utterly unsurprising article about a photograph taken in the last hours in the first Gulf War.
The work of the the then 28 year old photographer Kenneth Jarecke, the image captures a fact of war hopelessly obscured by the shots that angered Jarecke enough to postpone a planned hiatus from combat photography. “’It was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank.” — or, once combat actually began, gaudy displays of gee whiz toys, the disembodied beauty of missile exhausts, or bloodless shots of tires and twisted metal. War as video game, or a spectacle for the folks back home.
Here’s DeGhett’s description of Jarecke’s riposte:
The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes.
Go to the link. Look at the shot.
It’s a great photograph — great technically, and better as a work of art, in that it tells a story and commands empathy, all in a single frame. Most of all, though, it is essential journalism. It said, clearly, what war costs. It reframed — really, it guttted — the narrative of violence without pain that was so much the preferred description of the Gulf War in Washington DC. Its viewers got to see what was done in their names.*
Or rather, it didn’t and they didn’t. DeGhett documents the photograph’s journey from the battlefield to it’s near complete obscuration. The in-theater Time photo editor sent it back to New York; Time passed and so did Life. The AP in New York pulled the shot from the wire. No one would touch it in the US, and in Europe, only the British Sunday paper The Observer, and the French daily Libération ran the image.
The key here, as DeGhett writes, is that there was no military pressure not to publish Jarecke’s photograph. The war was over by the time his film got back to the facility in Saudi Arabia where the press pools operated. The decision to withhold the shot from the American public was made by the American press, by editors at the major magazines, at The New York Times, at the wire service. The chokehold on information at the top of the mainstream media was tight enough back then that most newspaper editors, DeGhett reports, never saw the image, never got to make their choice to publish or hide.
You can guess the excuses. “Think of the children!” For the more sophisticated, a jaded response:
Aidan Sullivan, the pictures editor for the British Sunday Times, told the British Journal of Photography on March 14 that he had opted instead for a wide shot of the carnage: a desert highway littered with rubble. He challenged the Observer: “We would have thought our readers could work out that a lot of people had died in those vehicles. Do you have to show it to them?”
Why yes, Mr. Sullivan, you do.
This is an old story, and as DeGhett notes, it’s not one that would likely play out the same way today. It’s not as if, what with Twitter and ‘net journalism and the camera phones and all that, horrible images of value and images that are violence porn are not hard to find. (As always, for each of us, YMMV in drawing the line.) But her piece is still a very useful piece of journalism, for two reasons. For one — the picture is really extraordinary, and it has a minatory value that exceeds the tale of the moment it was not allowed to tell. When John McCain and Lindsay Graham and their merry band of bombers call for war here, war there, war everywhere — and even or especially when a situation like the rise of ISIS seems to a broader slice of our country to merit the attention of the US military — we should remember what such attention looks like on the ground.
For the other: this reminds us what it looks like when the media — national press in particular — conforms its narratives to the needs of its sources, or even just to the wisdom that prevails among a handful of fallible, comfortable, Village elders. They’re doing it still, as best they can — and their best is still pretty effective. This shot is a reminder of that power, and the amoral disdain for the reader, the viewer, the citizenry with which that power is too often wielded.
Let me (as DeGhett does) give Jarecke the last word:
As an angry 28-year-old Jarecke wrote in American Photo in 1991: “If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it.”
*You’ll note the obvious. Unusually for me, there is no image accompanying this post. Jarecke’s photograph is under copyright and can be seen at the link. No allusive work of fine art really works against that shot, I think, so, none is offered.
No Victor, No Vanquished
T. Friedman of the NYT published a column that didn’t suck. That’s because instead of giving us yet another dreary round of “how the 1% interprets cabbie chatter,” T. Friedman stood back and let someone else do the talking, and the speaker was President Obama.
Some excerpts after the jump.
The Massive Set on Those Two
War-boner twins John McCain and Lindsey Graham are slightly tingly about the recent bombing of ISIS forces in Iraq, but they’re begging the president to grant them full engorgement by engaging in further sorties in Iraq and Syria (I’m sure Assad and the Russians won’t mind!) and distributing weapons more liberally throughout the region:
We need to get beyond a policy of half measures. The President needs to devise a comprehensive strategy to degrade ISIS. This should include the provision of military and other assistance to our Kurdish, Iraqi, and Syrian partners who are fighting ISIS. It should include U.S. air strikes against ISIS leaders, forces, and positions both in Iraq and Syria. It should include support to Sunni Iraqis who seek to resist ISIS. And none of this should be contingent on the formation of a new government in Baghdad.
As insane as the first part of that paragraph is, their waving away concerns about the dysfunctional clusterfuck of a government in Baghdad truly reveals the pair’s stupidity and shortsightedness. Why do they suppose the Iraqi military flung its weapons down and ran away from ISIS faster than Rand Paul from an immigrant schoolgirl? Why have Iraqi Sunnis allowed the ISIS dirtbags to roll into their territory relatively unopposed?
Maybe it’s because the Sunnis and Shia don’t trust each other, and the Sunnis despise the Baghdad government. The Iraqis have to sort out their government or this shit will keep happening over and over. Adding more guns to the mix will just give the crazies more guns to pick up next time it all falls apart. That’s why Obama declined to get involved before, despite McCain, Graham & Co. bellowing like ruptured cows from the sideline.
You can make a credible case for US military strikes to prevent an imminent massacre, and Obama did yesterday. (I thought the regional players whom we’ve armed for decades should take the lead on that, but what do I know? Maybe they couldn’t or wouldn’t.) However, the US taking a central military role on an ongoing basis sounds like a perfect recipe for a giant cock-up as well as an obstacle to ever achieving a lasting resolution.
McCain and Graham again:
“If ever there were a time to reevaluate our disastrous policy in the Middle East, this is it. Because of the President’s hands-off approach, the threats in the region have grown and now directly threaten the United States. We are already paying a very heavy price for our inaction, and if we do not change course, the costs of our inaction will only grow.”
Well thanks, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte! Jesus, I wish Obama would sign an executive order that requires McCain and Graham to punch themselves in the face if they ever utter the phrases “disastrous policy” and “the Middle East” in the same sentence again.
This is the same bullshit those two were spewing back when they were pissing themselves about Saddam’s WMDs and mushroom clouds. Do they think we don’t remember that? Probably. Their media hosts are rarely rude enough to bring that up when they make the Sunday rounds.
Anyway, I hope and trust President Obama will have the good sense to continue to ignore that pair of foreign policy trolls.
Somewhat Good News In Iraq
I fully and completely support this:
U.S. President Barack Obama said Thursday that he’s authorized “targeted airstrikes” in Iraq to protect American personnel and help Iraqi forces.
“We do whatever is necessary to protect our people,” Obama said. “We support our allies when they’re in danger.”
A key concern for U.S. officials: American consular staff and military advisers working with the Iraqi military in Irbil, the largest city in Iraq’s Kurdish region.
Obama said Thursday he’d directed the military to take targeted strikes against Islamist militants “should they move towards the city.”
Rapid developments on the ground, where a humanitarian crisis is emerging with minority groups facing possible slaughter by Sunni Muslim extremists, have set the stage for an increasingly dire situation.
Thousands of families from the Yazidi minority are reportedly trapped in the mountains without food, water or medical care after fleeing the rampaging fighters of the Islamic State, also known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS.
Throngs of refugees, many of them Iraqi Christians, are on the run — their largest city now occupied by fighters who gave them an ultimatum, “Convert to Islam or die.”
Obama also said he’d authorized targeted airstrikes “if necessary” to help Iraqi forces protect civilians trapped on the mountain as brutal Islamist fighters advance.
“When we face a situation like we do on that mountain with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale, when we have a mandate to help, in this case a request from the Iraqi government, and when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye,” Obama said. “We can act, carefully and responsibly to prevent a potential act of genocide.”
I don’t have any qualms with a massive airlift of humanitarian aid, and I have no problem with a much more aggressive air campaign against ISIS. This is, as far as I am concerned, an extremely easy call to make. I’d also probably be in favor of arming the Kurds to defend themselves against these monsters, but I’d have to know more about the extent to which we can trust them.
At any rate, I like the moral clarity with which President Obama spoke, and it was so refreshing to have someone come out and straight up call this what it is- genocide. How many times in the past have we heard world leaders struggle to come up with pained euphemisms like “ethnic cleansing” so we don’t have to seriously address what is clearly happening- genocide.
Not a day goes by that I regret my votes for this man. I’d crawl over broken glass to vote for a third term for him.
On another note, the phrase “targeted airstrikes” pains me- we may not always be accurate or know what we are shooting at, but I am reasonably sure every airstrike is targeted.