The Discourse of War: We’ve Been Framed

By Kristina M. Gronquist

The December 2006 report by the much touted Iraq Study Group (led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton) predicted “robust” and substantial involvement in Iraq for a “long, long time.” Although the report is seen by some as a rebuff to Bush policies, because it recommends gradual troop withdrawals by 2008 and negotiations with Syria and Iran, it does not offer substantial disengagement from the Iraq quagmire. The “study group” does not deviate from the administration’s long-term goal of hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East via U.S. bases and a pro-Western government in Iraq. Four years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that ultimate goal has never been taken off the table, and we have heard scant discussion in the media about dismantling our bases or super-embassy.  In fact, at the time of this writing, Bush has launched a doomed Johnson-style escalation of the war, called a “surge” or “augmentation” by an administration which still thinks it can mask reality with clever sound bites.

Several streams of incorrect analysis on the quagmire in Iraq dominate the media. You can hear these flawed points of view espoused on the news shows when they interview the think-tank pundits who like to call themselves experts because they have advanced degrees and sit in comfort at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the American Enterprise Institute, and other entities with equally prestigious-sounding names. While young men and women bleed far away on battlefields, these non-Muslim, non-Arabic-speaking Caucasian males spout off theories about what went wrong with the war and how to recreate the Middle East. Most of them supported “regime change” in Iraq in the first place and few advance the idea that the war in and of itself was a bad idea.

The wise men talk about what went wrong with the war, and they enjoy blaming everyone else, including people they coddled as the war began: Rumsfeld, for not increasing troop strength, Bremer for expunging the Baathists and helping to fuel the resistance (which they never call the resistance, by the way). They are upset that Iraq’s borders were not sealed off to keep “foreigners” out. Note that people from neighboring Muslim countries are deemed foreigners, not people from faraway continents like the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Australia. Also to blame, according to the all-knowing policy elites, are the Iraqis themselves, who are corrupt, tribal-minded, not well versed in democratic principles and thus need to be better “trained” so they can “stand up” while we “stand down.”

Historically, colonialists always blame the “natives” for being inept and unable to manage their own affairs. The latest trend is to hear politicians lecture about the failure of the Iraqi government; they discuss Iraq in the context of it being a welfare client. Just as one might address lazy misbehaving children, they bellow that Iraqis need to stop depending on the “generous” nature of the U.S. They carry on as if the lives of Iraqis are vastly improved, as if the four year war and occupation have left the Iraqi people with gold-lined streets and jeweled hospitals. Actual photos of Iraq show landscapes of burnt up cars and Iraqis sobbing over dead loved ones in blood drenched streets. The new talking points are designed to shift the blame for the war’s failures from the policymakers who supported the ill-advised war onto the Iraqis themselves. This is a classic “blame the victim” strategy, well known to those who have been subjects of abuse.

There is no need to ask what will happen if the troops leave Iraq, because we have already been told ad nauseam that it will surely get worse. 655,000 dead, over two million refugees, a crumbled infrastructure, massive unemployment, morgues overflowing, but trust them (the ones that got us into this mess) that it will get worse if we leave. Administration officials use words like “apocalyptic” and “disastrous” to describe what will happen if U.S. troops leave. Remember, folks, they have the big crystal ball that sees into the future, and we do not.

Of course, if the troops pull out and it gets better, then their failed policy will be exposed, won’t it? So better to maintain the occupation, dig deeper in, and even exacerbate the situation by a revengeful killing of Saddam on the Sunni holy day and by injecting more troops. A surge in troops will result in a surge of violence and create conditions to further justify a sustained military presence. The vicious cycle just goes around and around like a mad dog chasing its own tail. Another reason for the escalation might have to do with needing more troops on hand for a potential attack on Iran. A “Gulf of Tonkin” provocation, a phony incident like the one that dragged us into Vietnam, could be manufactured any day now and used to justify such an attack.

Even though Bush’s troop surge idea has been met with hostility by many members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, (Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran from Nebraska, called a surge “folly”) the framework that media and political discussion occurs in attempts to stifle intelligent debate. Language as a tool for confining debate to a certain set of assumptions has been explained by the brilliant linguist and prolific author Noam Chomsky. Language is very important, and critiques of the war – even today when it seems that some truths are being exposed – are still being placed in language frameworks that stifle dissent and try to mask realities.

The paramount example is the unvarying use of the misnomer the “war on terror.” If our government, the policy experts, the pundits, and the media constantly discuss “the terrorists” and “terrorism” as something “out there,” something outside of us, then they perpetuate the myth that U.S. actions can never be terrorism. Our nation’s illegal war, which includes but is not limited to massive bombing, depleted uranium contamination, shooting Iraqi families at checkpoints, kicking in the doors of homes, annihilating cities like Fallujah, detaining innocents in secret prisons, torturing, etc., is accepted as good and necessary action, it wins the moral stamp of approval. Why is this? Because, as the assumption states,  we are fighting the war against terrorists: Thus it cannot be correspondingly considered that the strategies we use also make us into terrorists, even though such methods obviously result in civilians being brutally and tragically killed, maimed, tortured, and imprisoned.

Faulty frameworks say: We are the war, they are the terror. But in Iraq, war and terror are blood-drenched synonyms. War and terror are not opposites; they are interchangeable, which informs us that the so-called “war on terror” is an illogical, unsupportable concept. Last year’s My Lai-style murders of civilians at Haditha, wartime rapes, the sexual and physical abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, the invasion and occupation of a nation that posed no threat to us in order to steal their oil, resulting in 655,000 dead, are not deemed terrorism only because the media-propelled discourse framework won’t allow the concept to emerge.

Part and parcel of the notion that the U.S. is fighting terrorism in Iraq is the incorrect assumption that the insurgents are monolithically “terrorists” and not, in large part, some combination of angry, unemployed, nationalistic Iraqis trying to defend their nation’s culture and religious traditions and resources against a foreign incursion. No one denies the complexity of what is happening on the ground and the fact that Iraqi society is highly fragmented. There are many internal wars taking place: The resistance to the occupation comprised by a variety of groups (secular and religious) in different parts of the country; fierce sectarian wars; regional wars (Kurds fighting for an independent state); and there is criminality, people in dire economic straits taking advantage of the chaos of war to smuggle, kidnap, sell drugs, turn in their neighbors, and partake in other schemes to make money illegally.

There are also organized resistance movements opposed to the occupation that are secular or religiously moderate which do not advocate violence; people not unlike those working in the U.S. peace and labor movement. However, the debate in the U.S. focuses on a simplistic idea that the U.S. if fighting one war against “bad guy terrorist insurgents” who are uniformly against the “democracy” created by and exuding from the bright and shining Green Zone. It is this simplistic black and white portrayal of “the insurgency” that disallows the reality that there is a justified nationalistic resistance movement in Iraq. One of those organizations is the Iraqi National Foundation Congress (INFC), a broad coalition that includes leftists, nationalists, and Islamists who opposed Saddam’s regime and who refused to be part of any U.S.-installed body. How often does anyone in the mainstream media interview someone from a resistance group like the INFC? One won’t learn about this aspect of the resistance, because the existence of such groups negates the faulty framework that the warmongers have built and the compliant media obey.

Although the faulty framework bubble tries to keep ignorance afloat, the bubble has been fully deflated in the real world. (Especially in the last year, the U.S. public is quickly catching on.) Sadly, the United States is now hated and feared in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, as poll after poll reveals. Policies that promote war, occupation, and terrorism in the Middle East have helped to destroy the image of our nation as a beacon of human rights, and the U.S. is widely regarded now as brutal occupiers and members of an overstretched, violent but declining empire. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Adviser during the Carter Administration), the American war on Iraq “can’t be won because of history.” In a discussion on PBS’s NewsHour debating the surge plan, Brzezinski pointedly told Jim Lehrer and millions in the television viewing audience: “Iraq is a colonial war in postcolonial times. The war is out of sync with historical times, and for that reason it cannot be won.” Occasionally, once in a blue moon, if only for a few brief seconds, someone permeates the faulty framework of the mass media and speaks the truth.

Kristina M. Gronquist is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She specializes in foreign policy analysis and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Minnesota.