Mother Jones Daily
May 5, 2003
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Victory Laps and Photo Ops There's a lot of symbolism washing around these days -- some aimed at election 2004, some just aimed.
Victory Laps and Photo Ops So it turns out that I have something in common with Don Rumsfeld and George the Younger. Our triumphant Secretary of Defense has just been taking his "victory lap" (or "victory tour") through the imperium via Afghanistan (where he declared the Afghan war officially over, though the country is so unreconstructed that the Taliban is still evidently attracting followers), Saudi Arabia (where we're withdrawing our troops -- watch out Saudi royal house), and Iraq where in Saddam's Abu Gharyb palace in Baghdad our homey conquering prince addressed the Iraqi people by TV and radio, a talk which, in most of that electricity-deficient country, no one could see or hear ("Back home in America, I have three children and six grandchildren... I want the same things for them that each of you wants for your children and grandchildren..."). Our triumphant president just took his "victory lap" in an S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance jet that gave him his "top gun" moment -- and his ultimate photo op -- landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier whose planes had released over a third of the three million pounds of ordnance that hit Iraq. After carefully taking off his helmet in private -- no goofy Michael Dukakis moments here -- he then made a top-gun victory speech carefully billed as a not-quite-victory speech.
And I too am on my modest victory lap, heading home after two weeks of teaching, coach class across an appropriately cloud-covered land at 35,000 feet. I'm on a Continental Airlines jet where, to judge by the space available, new rows of seats must have been inserted between already existing rows. Though no giant, I've been left with the sort of leg space that would suit a contortionist and, when the fellow in front of me leans back to catch the postage-stamp sized in-flight movie, not even the space to straighten out my computer screen. But as I was looking down on a land I can't see -- as we all look into a future none of us can see -- I suddenly realized that, like my leaders, I had had my own pleasurable photo-op moment this morning. Before I left the journalism school where I've been teaching, one of my students took my picture, as I sat at my "command" post, a computer in the school's pressroom. But I tell you, enjoyable as my brief circuit of my little imperium was, I'm quite sure I haven't had a hundredth as much fun as Rummy and W.
There's so much symbolism washing around right now, some aimed at election 2004 but some just aimed, that it's hard to know where to begin. There's that carrier, for starts, that was heading for San Diego when the President landed -- and was actually slowed down so that the photographers could take their perfect victory-at-sea pictures with no hint of land to mar the occasion. That ship the size of a large town with a crew of 5,000 was named for, god rest his soul, Abraham Lincoln. I try for a moment to imagine Abe piloting a plane with "Navy 1" and "Commander in Chief" carefully stenciled on its side, or giving anything like Bush's 1,800-odd word speech filled with his usual mix of threats, orders, prayers, and lies ("Our war against terror is proceeding according to principles that I have made clear to all...") Of course, all that comes to mind are those 272 modest words uttered at that cemetery in Gettysburg, words from a man with an awareness that war is an unbearable tragedy, not a photo op or a victory lap.
Then again, Abe didn't have the benefit of a childhood filled with glorious World War II movies or their triumphalist clones in our own times (like the recent Disney film Pearl Harbor, which also appropriated an aircraft carrier for its premiere and major photo op). Then again, Abe actually stood up in the House of Representatives to oppose an imperialist war against Mexico, and he never managed to utter a sentence like, "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." That's how David Corn in his Nation weblog recently quoted our president on his decision to join the Texas Air National Guard to do his best for our "noble cause," as Ron Reagan later dubbed it, in the now-forgettable Vietnam era (after which, it seems, he absented himself from that tour of duty for a healthy year and a half.)
So, for George, there may have been no victory laps back then. But -- rare as it may be -- sometimes the remake just turns out to be so much better, so much more satisfying than the original. (Note by the way, that in a bow to Reagan, who directed the first partly successful reshoot of defeat in Vietnam, Bush had this line in his speech at sea: "This nation thanks all the members of our coalition who joined in a noble cause...") Vietnam itself naturally went unmentioned in that shipboard speech. In fact, only one war was mentioned, and not just once either. So here's my quiz of the week. The first of you to guess which war that was gets a coach flight on Continental to the nearby city of your choice, but you have to pay for the physical therapist you'll bring along to unknot you afterwards. Okay, and the answer is.... "The character of our military through history -- the daring of Normandy, the fierce courage of Iwo Jima [I think he means from Saving Private Ryan to The Sands of Iwo Jima] -- the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies -- is fully present in this generation," whose "greatness" he didn't quite add seems to lie in turning allies into enemies. The speech, which is well worth reading, has World War II on the brain, even down to the cribs from Churchill ("We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide...")
Well, give the guy credit. He's proved himself the anti-Dukakis of presidential mock-battle footage, the man who could don a military uniform get in a military vehicle and carry it off. He may be a better actor than old Ron R himself. (His on-board Tom Cruise "swagger" was a staple of press coverage yesterday.) And let's get with the program here -- he loves it. He's visibly having the time of his life, going from army base to naval vessel to defense contractor -- today he was at United Defense Industries in Northern California, the maker of the Bradley fighting vehicle, for yet another military photo op and speech. His is a domestic victory tour of the skeletal structure of the military-industrial complex -- the bases, weaponry, and corporate sinews of a great military empire. His Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was taking a spin through the foreign version of the same out there at the peripheries where the snipers still snipe and the Iraqi oil will someday flow again. But the president knows where the key screens are for showing the movie he's enacting and Karl Rove and his other handlers are directing. For the unilateralist president of the fiercely unilateralist last empire, it turns out that there is only one real audience on earth -- and it's in living rooms and bedrooms all across America.
And so far he's proved skilled indeed at playing to it. Who else matters? Not even the Brits, who, as Anatol Lieven comments, are only likely to be offered a role in a US empire of the sort "fulfilled by Nepal in the British Empire -- a loyal provider of brave soldiers with special military skills," and who have been thrown the bone of dominion in the satrapy of Basra to relieve the Americans of the need to tie down troops everywhere in Iraq. In the eyes of the men directing "Bush at War," after all, the American people are all that potentially stands between them and endless dominion, endless fun, endless victory laps and photo ops.
What a change between two administrations, both shepherding the world's hyperpower through its paces. The last president was selling sleeping space in the Lincoln bedroom and having sex in the oval office; this one slept over on Lincoln, the aircraft carrier, and seems to be getting what can only be called an erotic charge out of war, which for the overgrown boys of this administration (as opposed to the overgrown boy of the last one) seems to be the sexiest thing on earth. If you oppose empire and, in fact, everything this administration stands for, then you have to imagine yourself right now on the Peter Brooks' film version of that Lord of the Flies island, and those wild boys armed with spears, streaked with ochre, hunting boars out in the wild, have just smashed your glasses, so you know where you're likely to end up.
The public photo ops have not only been masterful, they've been based on the pleasure principle and enacted by men who can hardly bear to keep the grins or smirks off their faces. Sometimes, however, private photo ops can tell you a great deal about the more carefully planned public ones. Here, for instance, from Vernon Loeb of The Washington Post is a description of a telling series of snapshots:
- "Numerous members of Rumsfeld's staff expressed disbelief, after working virtually nonstop for months on the war, that they were inside one of Hussein's palaces in Baghdad. They took turns having their pictures taken in a vast throne-like chair with lion's heads on each arm."
Sounds like a kind of imperial Huey Newton fantasy moment.
But of all the photo ops I've seen in recent days, the one I happened to find stunning took up a staggering four columns across and close to a third of the page top to bottom, smack in the top center of Wednesday's New York Times. It was a shot -- and I've never seen the like -- of the inside of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's plane on his recent victory lap. The caption said, "Defense Secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, right center [for those who might have mistaken him for the military man bent over a note pad at left center of the first row of seats], on his aircraft in Saudi Arabia yesterday. U.S. forces will leave the kingdom within months."
Rumsfeld, a small man in a dark suit and a red tie, sits in that front row slightly slumped, perhaps cracking his knuckles, looking modestly satisfied, a battered briefcase on a surface in front of him and not a bit dwarfed by the vastness of the C-17 -- that looks like a cross between the Death Star and somebody's emptied attic -- filled with military men, assumedly aides, possibly traveling reporters, undoubtedly guards in rows behind him and along the walls. You certainly don't need the Times caption to know what you're looking at -- a traveling world. And Rumsfeld himself looks -- call it my overheated imagination -- a little like a rumpled, down-home Darth Vader surrounded by a pile of pillows, a mess of suitcases and hanging clothes and in the distance what looks like a mountain of duffel bags. It's not beautiful. It's not slick like the Bush photo ops. It's an actual working space and he's distinctly at home in it. But the Times, having given the photo imperial space on its front page, made a statement. And the statement is, I think: This is the imperial space that our new Khans carry with them whenever they decide to survey the distant frontiers of their new realms and meet the satraps. (For a vivid sense of the "bubble" in which Rumsfeld and his entourage zip around the world, see Vernon Loeb's piece in The Washington Post.
And make no mistake, those new realms are being reorganized in a major way right now. Basing emphases are being changed. Significant numbers of troops are about to be moved out of bases in the "old Europe" (perfidious Germany) and into the "New Europe" (Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria), where, as Duncan Campbell of The Guardian notes, it's cheaper, closer to the oil and the geopolitical action, and a slap in the face to the Germans.
They're also being moved out of Saudi Arabia, where American forces will be reduced perhaps to pre-Gulf War levels (though still undoubtedly with access to the impressive base structure that's there should we need it), and into Qatar and Iraq -- or, as David Hirst writes, also in The Guardian, rotated home to await the beginning of Gulf War III or Asian War IV or some such.
We're now undergoing the beginnings of what may prove a significant redistricting of the overstretched American imperium which is so purely military that we rule no territories, just stake out vast bases and move in for the duration. (I say, by the way, that any time we move out, however provisionally -- whether in Saudi Arabia, Germany, or South Korea and whether or not the government in a given country requested the move -- I would feel distinctly nervous.) Let's remember that these are men organizing for the future, who see themselves at the beginning of something like a thirty-year global war against "terror." In the pack of striking lies and quarter-truths that made up the President's speech on the Abe Lincoln is, for instance, this summary of the war against Iraq: ""The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because that regime is no more."
The real question is: where will the next frontier war take place and under what conditions? This is probably something that the members of this administration don't know. Events -- even disasters at home or, say, the inability to bring Iraq to heel -- may determine this for them. There are numerous potential targets of opportunity from Syria and Iran to North Korea. The other question, of course, is how you can run a distinctly overstretched empire, whose bases now extend from "Old Europe" (or for that matter Missouri) to the Horn of Africa and the Central Asian borders of China, on the single leg of military power and threats of force. The Romans may have been willing to slaughter resisters down to the last dog and cat, but they also offered their conquered lands a kind of universal citizenship in the empire. There was a way to join. Except at a military-to-military level there is simply no way to "join" our imperium, no way in the minds of the men of this administration short of obedience and subservience.
Honestly speaking, it's hard to imagine how such a conquering country will ever manage to translate its military power into any kind political power whatsoever (See Gabriel Kolko's essay below on this). Certainly, this is already a problem in Iraq as can be seen in the staggeringly woeful planning for a post-war occupation, which left even some of the oil fields we so wanted to preserve as a "patrimony" for the Iraqis looted.
The recent decision to appoint a "civilian," an expert on "counter-terrorism," L. Paul Bremmer III, a former assistant to six secretaries of state, beginning with Henry Kissinger, then a member of Kissinger Associates and now chairman of the crisis consulting practice of Marsh Inc, a global "risk services" company (whatever that may be), to oversee former General Jay Garner and his woeful crew in Baghdad is interesting. It's certainly a signal of how ineptly even Washington must think matters are being handled.
I happen to think that we're at a moment of almost incomparable peril. As historian Gabriel Kolko writes in "The Age of Unilateral War": "The Iraq war is only the first step in the United States' astonishingly ambitious project to recast the world... [it is] the beginning of a cycle." It may be an even more frightening moment if events spiral out of control in Iraq or for whatever reason this administration begins to lose its domestic audience, and so its ticket to the pleasure principle. As Kolko also says, "The men who lead [our country] are capable of anything."
