From Christopher Dickey, the author of "Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South" and "Securing the City," this site provides updates and footnotes on history, espionage, terrorism, fanaticism, policing and counterinsurgency linked to Dickey's columns for The Daily Beast and his other writings; also, occasional dialogues, diatribes, and contributions from friends.
In 2003 I was asked to speak at Clemson University, James Dickey's alma mater, about his work as a poet and mine as a journalist. The speech was adapted afterward into this essay published by the Clemson University Press, but, I fear, no longer available on line.
I am re-posting now as we enter a new phase of war in the Middle East, the result of so many bad decisions that were apparent 16 years ago exacerbated, now, by the miscalculations of the current administration.
My apologies for the format. I hope to re-post shortly as a PDF.
In the early part of this century, I wrote a more or less weekly column for Newsweek Online under the rubric "Shadowland." Some of those are still available in the Newsweek archives, but others have to be excavated from old hard drives. And some appear to be lost forever. This draft from an aging drive was for Shadowland 149, raising themes I would come back to frequently over the years.
I am republishing it today because this weekend I expect The Daily Beast will publish a powerful story by Pesha Magid about the murder in Karbala of Iraqi novelist Alaa Mashzoub, and I think this history is relevant. Freedom of expression in Iraq remains a matter of life and death.
Book Burning in Baghdad
History today is not so much
written by the victors as by the vanquished
I was in Spartanburg,
South Carolina, a very long way from Baghdad, when I read the news that a
street where I once spent a lot time on my visits to Iraq, one where I learned
a great deal about its people and their history, had been the target of a
massive suicide car bomb. Al-Mutanabi [also spelled Al-Mutanabbi] was the
booksellers’ street. I’d gone there a few times when Saddam Hussein was still
in power and it seemed a sad, secretive, paranoid place. But I went there as
often as I could in 2003 and 2004, after the American-led invasion that toppled
the tyrant, because I thought I could find the spirit of freedom and liberty
that our troops were supposed to have brought with them.
What I discovered were
a growing number of stalls selling religious tomes and posters, especially
iconic portraits of Ali and Hussein, the sainted imams of Shi’a Islam. But, for
English speakers, there was also a thriving trade in histories. Under the dictator,
quietly and quite illegally, merchants had been photocopying whatever books
they could get their hands on that told of Iraq’s past. Now they were anxious
to sell them to the ancient capital’s new arrivals.
So I bought a copy of Gertrude
Bell’s letters from Baghdad, written when she was a leading architect of
British occupation in the 1920s. I acquired a British officer’s account of the
grim battles in the swamps of southern Mesopotamia during World War I. (In
those days, the Germans --“The
Huns” – supposedly were inciting radical Shiite militias to attack the
benevolent English.) I bought a rare copy of the national museum’s catalogue, with
wonderful old pictures of dozens of artifacts before they were looted under the
unwatchful eyes of American soldiers.
Walking down the booksellers’
street toward the Shah Bander café, where the city’s literati once smoked water
pipes, drank coffee, and debated the meaning of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” was a little like a stroll
through the stacks of a great library, except that the city, the history, the
culture and the passion for it, was right there, all around you.
The Reuters dispatch about the
bombing yesterday was spare and evocative:
“As firefighters doused the flames
which reached up to the third storey of some buildings, papers and book pages
fluttered on the ground, some blackened, others bloody. Charred bodies lay
almost unrecognizable, half buried in the rubble of shop fronts.”
In Spartanburg, I thought the story
of Al-Mutanabi street might be worth sharing. A good friend, poet and
naturalist John Lane, had invited me to little Wofford College in this, one of
the reddest corners of a very red state, to speak to students and townspeople
about press coverage of the Middle East. And I accepted the invitation, not
least, because I often feel that Southerners are the only Americans who can
understand in their guts the core problem we face in Iraq. They are the only
ones ever to have felt the corrosive humiliation of occupation, in their case by
northern forces after the Civil War <>. And
the memory of that experience, even 142 years after Appomattox, still informs –
some would say inflames – their view of the world.
This is not an original observation
of mine. The great historian C. Vann Woodward pointed it out in his collection
of essays, “The Burden of Southern History.” Writing in the 1960s, during the
Vietnam war, he showed that the brutalizing experience of occupation has never
become an acknowledged part of the American experience, so policy tends to be
“grounded on the legends of success and invincibility” and “illusions of
innocence and virtue.” “We sought no territorial aggrandizement, coveted no
‘colony,’ desired no subject people,” said Woodward. “We came to liberate, not
to enslave.”
But what Southerners know, if they
stop to think about it, is that motives do not matter. It is the fact of
occupation, the fact, as Iraqis often put it, that someone is coming into your
house and telling you what to do, that leaves such a long-lasting sense of
humiliation, with all its concomitant anger. Were the goals of the Federal
government laudable? Absolutely: to preserve the Union and to end slavery. And
yet, more than 140 years later, in many corners of the South, the resentment
remains.
You can get a fine, nuanced and
ultimately very disturbing sense of the durable and deeply ingrained anger
among the Iraqis from an extraordinary documentary film by Michael Tucker and
Petra Epperlein due for release later this month: “The Prisoner, or, How I
Planned to Kill Tony Blair.” The earlier non-fiction feature by this husband
and wife team, “Gunner Palace,” was a vivid depiction of the occupation in
Baghdad during the early days of the war, told mainly from the American
soldiers’ point of view. This powerful sequel tells the story of one of the men
they took captive.
On the basis of very vague
intelligence that was never confirmed, much less presented in court, journalist
Yunis Khatayer Abbas and three of his brothers were pulled from their beds one
night in September 2003. The allegation made by an unnamed source that they’d
somehow plotted to murder the British prime minister during one of his
grip-and-grin visits to Iraq.
After lengthy interrogations about
everything from their attitudes toward movie star Harrison Ford to their sexual
preferences and favorite songs, Abbas and his brothers were transferred to a
tent compound at Abu Ghraib prison reserved for prisoners who have not been
charged, much less convicted, and have also been classified as having nointelligence value whatsoever. They
were held there for eight months, exposed not only to the lousy conditions, but
to occasional mortar attacks by insurgents. While their guards had flak jackets
and holes to hide in, the prisoners were defenseless.
Abbas speaks good English in
measured phrases, and the extended interviews with him in “The Prisoner” are
sometimes quite funny. But the irony does not disguise the anger that will
likely endure as long as Abbas and his brothers live, or their descendants
remember them, “I am not a terrorist or monster,” he says. “I am not Dracula. I
am not a monkey or a cow. I am a man.”
One of Saudi Arabia’s veteran
envoys and spokesmen, Hassan Yassin, recently tried to define for me the
difference he saw in the world as it is today, and the world as it was in the
1940s and 1950s, when he was growing up. “Today history is made instantaneously
and forgotten instantaneously,” he said. “Before, history was made over time
and remembered over time.”
I think that’s probably true in our
era of non-stop news, or the semblance or news. (The theme I was asked to
address in Spartanburg was “Iraq Around the Clock: 24/7 News and the Evil of
Banality.”)But as I was talking
in South Carolina it struck me that there’s an important corollary to Yassin’s
adage, because some people most certainly do remember.
In the past, history was recorded,
and edited, and bent into shape by the victors. But today, when the factual
record is at once so overloaded and evanescent, enduring history is written –
or spoken into the camera in a film like “The Prisoner” -- by the vanquished.
They’re the ones who have lived it, felt it, suffered it, and will not forget
it. While Americans change the channel, Iraqis will be remembering for
generations.
I thought maybe my fellow
Southerners would understand this if I reminded them of a song, “Oh, I’m a Good
Old Rebel,”that many of us heard
from other boys when we were in elementary school, a century or more after the
end of the American Civil War. And indeed, a few gray beards in the audience
did raise their hands when I asked.
There’s one verse that really
stands out when I dredge it up from the dusty corners of childhood recollection:
Three hundred thousand Yankees is
stiff in Southern dust.
Yeah, we got three hundred thousand before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot,
But I wish they was three million instead of what we got.
I think my South Carolina audience
understood. There was some nodding. There was a fair amount of stillness in the
room. But I have no doubt that Iraqis would understand those lines, those
emotions, however unjust we Americans may think they are.
After all, U.S. forces did not blow
up Al-Mutanabi street. They’re “surging” through Baghdad trying to protect
people. They would have prevented the bombing if they could, if anyone had told
them that it was a target that needed protecting.
But, then, how do you defend a country’s history when it’s
not your own, when you don’t understand it, when you don’t speak their
language, when they don’t want you there? How do you protect a people’s sense
of who they are when you are a stranger in their house pulling them from their
beds in the small hours of the morning?
That’s a problem that few occupiers
have ever learned to address, but it’s one we’re going to have to think about
for many years to come.
I re-post this every couple of years, hoping some of the ideas will be useful to people. When it was first posted twelve
years ago, there was no need to mention Trump. One would have thought
the reference a joke. But the seeds for his political success were all
there ... (July 4, 2018)
I spent the early morning yesterday in my Paris apartment re-reading George Orwell's long essay, "Notes on Nationalism." It was written in 1945, but seemed the right thing for this year's Fourth of July when so many expressions of nationalism are in the air: the relatively benign World Cup competition, the blood-soaked tension between the Palestinians and Israelis and the ferocious violence of the war in Iraq.
Orwell wrote that nationalism is partly "the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects." He said it's not to be confused with patriotism, which Orwell defined as "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people."
July 4, I would argue, is a patriotic holiday in just that sense—a true celebration of so much that makes the United States of America unique. It's the party thrown by a nation of immigrants to mark the creation of something new on the face of the earth, a society devoted not to the past but to the future—the incredibly elegant vision of "certain inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
That's what the flags and the fireworks, the anthems, the civilians with hands on hearts, the soldiers at attention and saluting, the embassy receptions, and, yeah, not a few mind-bending beer-drinking binges, are most often about. I think most of us know in our hearts that the more we live up to our particular way of life, the more attractive it will be to others and the more they are likely to use its ideals to better their own lives. That's worth saluting, for sure, and raising a glass, too.
But American nationalism, unlike American patriotism, is different—and dangerous.
The second part of Orwell's definition tells you why. Nationalism is the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or an idea, "placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests." Patriotism is essentially about ideas and pride. Nationalism is about emotion and blood. The nationalist's thoughts "always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. ... Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception."
One inevitable result, wrote Orwell, is vast and dangerous miscalculation based on the assumption that nationalism makes not only right but might—and invincibility: "Political and military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties." When Orwell derides "a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war," well, one wishes Fox News and Al Jazeera would take note.
For Orwell, the evils of nationalism were not unique to nations, but shared by a panoply of "isms" common among the elites of his day: "Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism." Today we could drop the communists and Trotskyites, perhaps, while adding Islamism and neo-conservatism. The same tendencies would apply, especially "indifference to reality."
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts," said Orwell. "Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians—which does not change its moral color when committed by 'our' side.... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
It's this aspect of nationalism that peacemakers in the Middle East find so utterly confounding. The Israelis and the Palestinians, Iraq's Sunnis and Kurds and Shiites, Iranians and Americans have developed nationalist narratives that have almost nothing in common except a general chronology.
"In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown," Orwell wrote, in a spooky foreshadowing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's nationalist musings . "A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind."...
One vital aspect of the debate about patriotism and nationalism in the modern world, however, slipped by this great British apostle of humane logic when he was writing more than 60 years ago, and that's the critical peculiarity of the way Americans see themselves and their national identity.
Precisely because American society is built on an idea of the future, created by people who came to America for no other purpose than moving forward, America's interest in the past—even its own past—is limited. You are what you can create in the U.S.A., what you have now, and what you are going to have.
We are, yes, very materialistic. You could see that in the long list of corporate sponsors for yesterday's July 4 reception at the American ambassador's residence in Paris. But much more importantly, you can hear materialism in the way we talk about almost everything, from the family we have, to the faith we have, the house we have, the cars and diplomas and the jobs we have. We pushed westward because we wanted to have land, which was almost free, and we wanted to have the freedom to forget whatever histories bound us to the past. Ours has become a society based on "having" in a way that's almost indistinguishable from "the American dream," or indeed, "the pursuit of happiness." There's no need to apologize. That's what makes us who we are.
But in much of the old world, people do not "have" families; they belong to families, which belong sometimes to clans and tribes (the extended families we inevitably describe in pejorative terms). Those families belong to a land and a faith—and a history of that land and faith—that may go back thousands of years. Their patriotism is in their blood, not just their hopes, and so is their nationalism.
As we saw in the Balkans in the 1990s, this history-driven, blood-driven nationalism can become brutally racist and explosively xenophobic: we belong, you do not. In Africa, the forces of tribally based nationalism constantly threaten the future of a continent where most national borders were drawn by foreigners. In Iraq, well, we Americans have helped tear apart a state that now shudders at the brink of utter failure in the face of ever-strengthening sectarian and racial nationalisms.
What does not help in the process of encouraging peace (because no one is going to "bring" peace), is the notion that we Americans can apply our nationalist vision to people who never chose to participate in our immigrant aspirations to begin with: people who feel safer, stronger and saner in their worlds of belonging than in our world of having. When we make that mistake, threatening to the core their sense of who they are, all we do is invite hatred.
"The pursuit of happiness" is, indeed, what the Fourth of July is all about, and I'd like to see that wonderfully vague and evocative principle accepted universally as an inalienable right. But let's never imagine that the pursuit of happiness is, everywhere, the same as the pursuit of the American dream. That's something we can share, but never impose.
