The media will be full of stories of the beheading of Nick Berg. The implication is clear: we do horrific things to them, and they do horrific things to us, so it’s all fine and even-handed and okay.
Joe Lieberman apparently said in the media, responding to the lack of an apology: “I have to point out that no one apologized to us for 9/11. No one apologized to us for the killing of US servicemen and women in Iraq.” I was sent this by email along with a translation: “I would just like to point out that some unrelated brown people did some bad things.”
And that is about all the logic you need. The Red Cross report on the torture at Abu Ghraib apparently says that 90% of the prisoners were innocent. But does ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ have any meaning in a culture so deeply racist? If North Americans are incapable of understanding that the invasion of Iraq was international aggression, and the ultimate crime, the one that has made all the torture, massacres, abuses, and war crimes possible, then why would they be capable of understanding that some set of Iraqis was ‘innocent’? Innocent of what, in any case — would resistance activities, legitimate under international law, make them ‘guilty’?
In Stan Goff’s books, he refers to Vietnam as a ‘race war’. Whatever the US went there to do, whether it was establish ‘credibility’, or defeat ‘the threat of a good example’, on the ground it played out as a bloody race war. But that’s what all these wars are. Just bloody race wars, of escalating atrocities, justifications in terms of other atrocities, and dehumanization.
The murder of Berg is going to be used to try to take attention away from the tortures at Abu Ghraib (and all the other torture that’s still going on and hasn’t been discussed, like at Guantanamo and elsewhere). It’s also going to be used to justify future atrocities and a longer presence in Iraq. If this weren’t a race war, if there were some sanity in this situation, Berg’s murder would be further reason why the US should not be in Iraq. But that would be too much to ask.
