HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS: By th’mass and ‘tis — like a camel indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale.
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
“The world changed on September 11.” Yes, surely, of course.
But which September 11 would that be again? Even by the attention-deficit-disordered pace of the era’s news cycle, the Bush administration’s sudden grapple with Iraq is astonishing. For a year, a very long year, American time had largely repeated itself in the play-stop-rewind circle of blooming fire, toppling towers and falling masonry, culminating in the months-long, government-orchestrated, media-facilitated, excruciatingly perpetuated one-year memorial events.
The very next day, the President delivered a seismic rupture to the United Nations — rubber-stamp our “pre-emptive” war on Iraq, or let the assembled nations of the world be declared irrelevant as we assert our might in the “right.”
The swiftness with which the government and the complicitous American mainstream media have exchanged one obsession for another should be studied by three-card-monty men. Card-sharps are masters of distraction; if you spy the sleight-of-hand and argue for your money back, an accomplice lifts your wallet. The very obviousness of the Administration’s illogic in slipping us Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden occupies the fullness of our attention. Indeed, so swiftly and completely has our national attention been shifted — against our will and contrary to our desires — that on hindsight it’s not surprising opposition has been slow to reveal itself. So tenuous is the equation of bin Laden and Saddam, so meager (or nonexistent) is evidence of collusion between Al-Qaida and Iraq, that until September 12, it was natural to see it as mere political posturing. Only then did it become a deadly serious reality. There is yet method in this madness: the absence of reason forces floods of reasoning to spiral toward it. There is no periphery to an Iraq war now — it is an abyss echoing September 11 itself, when, in like silence, we thought, “Who? Why? How?” The debate has been manufactured in such a way that it appears as irrelevant to speak of a time before Iraq appeared as an “imminent threat” as it is to speak of a time before September 11, 2001.
We are held in this obsessional omnipresence of an Iraq threat, held against our will with little concrete evidence. We are asking for a Writ of Habeas corpus — we are demanding to be shown the evidence, the reasons for our detainment, or to be released from this persecution. (What persecution? The persistence of the insistence that we assume Iraq as an imminent threat.) On October 8, in his address (from Cincinnati, Ohio, a location chosen with political savvy to provide the illusion of apoliticality), the President sketched a simulacrum of evidentiary justification, which has been admirably parsed and dissected by the Institute for Public Accuracy, far better and with more historical and political background than I can supply. Intellectually, we still occupy a place physically held by American-citizen “enemy combatants” and suspected Al-Qaida conspirators who are, in the stricter legal sense, being denied their Habeas corpus rights and whose appeals are slowly making their way to the Supreme Court. Interestingly, since these prisoners are in ambiguous legal status (as the U.S. is warring against an organization, and not a state), it would appear that a declaration of war against Iraq would finally give Bush the legal justification to revoke Habeas corpus rights.
Habeas corpus: “you have the body” (of evidence). Of course, the present body of Saddam Hussein is to substitute for the un-presence of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently upbraided the press for “obsessing” about bin Laden. The Al-Qaida leader, who was to be presented “dead or alive,” is neither alive nor dead, but a ghost, a disembodied voice, ironically calling at precisely the moment of distraction, “Hamlet, remember!” I do wonder whether the Administration would be as impatient for an unpopular war if bin Laden were apprehended.
Our current amateur in the role of Hamlet insists, “the United States and our allies will help the Iraqi people rebuild their economy, and create the institutions of liberty in a unified Iraq at peace with its neighbors.” If the Prince, in his illogic, is distracted, he is just as distracting. That rhetorical bugle calls to assembly, not the American army, not the American electorate, but the American myth, building to a generality a particularity specific to the post-World War II Marshall Plan. As Roland Barthes notes in “Myth Today,” “this interpellant speech is at the same time a frozen speech: at the moment of reaching me, it suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, makes itself look neutral and innocent…. Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History.” And history is not kind to Bushite foreign-assistance commitments, especially during recessions. One need only remember the failure to adequately invest the “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War.
In a now-notorious statement, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card removed all remaining barriers between the business and the politics of this Administration. Speaking of the war plans against Iraq, he mentioned, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” As cynical and appalling as this statement clearly is, this bald commodification of war is yet still disingenuous. We’re not buying the war they’re selling us. But that’s all right, it’s been included as a complimentary gift with purchase of the executive branch. See the London Review of Books for the returns policy, and The Atlantic Monthly for the details of the government’s customer-service commitment. And if we return history to the myth, if we review previous models of the same product line, there are few assurances of quality in the long run. No sale. No sale. No sale. We are being weaseled into accepting that a cloud is a whale. The sea is deep.
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