I guess the war in Iraq turned out OK after all. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from recent newspaper coverage. The photos are devoted to showing Iraqis relaxing in the park or shopping, or US soldiers who don’t seem to do anything except dispense medical care or play with kids. The verbal reports are much the same. Oh, some bad news is there. On Saturday 11 people were killed in several incidents, but you had to read page 21 of the New York Times to know it. While US deaths are at 3893, the tally for November was only about one per day; down from four a day in May and two a day in September, just a trickle really.

So it is that we are on the verge of another betrayal: it is becoming all too easy for the American public to pretend that the war is winding down successfully and that the losses really weren’t so bad. I’d suggest we take another look at the war. This, for example:

This is from a story in the December 2006 National Geographic. That magazine is no longer the epitome of middlebrow distraction that it once was. The photographs by James Nachtwey provide wrenching witness to the horrific price paid by so many soldiers who die or are horribly maimed despite the heroic efforts of the medical corps to save them.

This photo of damage done by an IED blast is somehow intensely intimate. Perhaps because the boots look like Converse high tops, or the open wounds on the bare legs, or the fact that he doesn’t look too banged up, almost as if these were legs scraped badly in a game of sandlot baseball. You are instantly brought to care for the wounded boy and to be grateful that he will receive first rate care. He did receive first rate care, and he died anyway.

Just like this guy:

I saw this photograph a year ago, and it has been with me ever since.

In his odd, haunting novel about the Vietnam era, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, Peter Dimock’s narrator sets out to “invent some public speech with which to make the presence of the dead visible: some other history, some practical method by which to be able to speak capably concerning those things which law and custom have assigned to the uses of citizenship” (p. 29). It is the citizen’s duty to keep the dead present in memory, especially when they have died in a mistaken war. To do so requires some ability to resist official discourses and other forms of inattentiveness and amnesia. This can be done with speech and thus with the resources of classical rhetoric featured in the novel. Nachtwey demonstrates how it also can be done with photography.

The Right is crowing that the surge worked, while the Left is resigned to point out that it worked only because force levels were brought closer to what the Pentagon had requested and the Bush administration denied for the previous four years. And what is forgotten in this distorted debate? The simple fact that the surge can never restore what has already been irrevocably, senselessly lost.

There may be no harm in recognizing small victories, but good news should never be used to deny the presence of the dead. It is one thing to take credit where credit is due, and quite another to avoid responsibility for the past. And we do worse yet if we forget about those still to die.

Photographs by James Nachtwey for National Geographic. For the record, this month the total casualty figure for the occupation of Iraq exceeded 25,000 US troops, with an estimated Iraqi death toll at 1, 132, 766.

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The photograph above is of 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside. A graduate of the University of Virginia, she has served in the Army Reserve since 2001. Judged to be a “superior Officer” she consistently distinguished herself, first as an executive officer of a support company of 150 soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, and then as a the platoon leader of the 329th Medical Company at Camp Cropper, a detainee prison near Baghdad which housed 4,000 prisoners, including Saddam Hussein. When Hussein was removed from his cell to be executed, riots ensued and Whiteside stepped up, helping to restore order and ensuring the safety of the doctors in the prison. The next day, she suffered a psychic episode in which she locked herself in a room with a mental health nurse who was also her superior; agitated and noticeably paranoid, Whiteside fired her gun twice into the ceiling. Moments later, with armed soldiers advancing on the door to the room, she pointed her M9 pistol at her own stomach and pulled the trigger. She was returned to Walter Reed Hospital as a patient where she now faces a possible court-martial that could result in life in prison.

Read that last sentence again and let it sink in. It could be the beginning of a tale by Kafka. Tragically, it is an all too real story reported in the Washington Post (12/2/07).

Psychic trauma is certainly one of war’s dirty secrets, a condition all the more troubling when we recognize that even the most conservative estimates maintain that 20% of the more than 1.4 million troops who have or who are serving in Iraq will experience some form of war-induced post-traumatic stress. Indeed, it is hard to process the magnitude of this condition – after all how can one imagine, let alone “show,” 300,000 sufferers of what is characterized as a silent and invisible disease. And yet the tragedy being reported here is not that those who go to war suffer psychic trauma. This is something perhaps even worse: the Pentagon’s abandonment and betrayal of honorable men and women who have voluntarily put their lives on the line to serve their country and who have been seriously damaged by the experience in the process.

In Whiteside’s case the military gave her the option of resigning with a “general under honorable conditions” discharge that would have deprived her of most of her benefits, including medical care. She chose to fight the charges against her instead, and as a result Maj. Stefan Wolfe, the prosecutor for the government, argued last week that she should be court-martialed despite the opinion of the Army’s own surgeon general that Whiteside had experienced a “psychotic, self-destructive episode.” It is hard to imagine what the military can be thinking here, but their position seems utterly stupefying and totally devoid of anything like compassion. If the tragedy of the Vietnam war veteran was that he was abandoned and betrayed by the society-at-large, it seems as if the tragedy of the Iraqi war veteran is that they are being abandoned and betrayed by their own.

The photograph of Whiteside above is a telling and poignant portrait of the problem. Judged to be a model soldier in every regard up to the very moment of her psychic breakdown, and thus the best that the military has to offer, she is shown here in the hallway of her Walter Reed Guest House as she awaits a decision as to whether or not she will face a court-martial. Standing at attention, but without uniform, she bears the countenance of the “thousand yard stare,“ though it is hard to know if this is the result of her time in Iraq or her more recent “war” with the military. Billeted in the “Walter Reed Guest House,” she is caught in a chasm between being a private citizen and a soldier, neither clearly one nor the other. Illuminated by a yellowing light, her face is nevertheless shrouded by a dark and foreboding shadow; cast in sepia tones, she is locked in a past that she can neither understand nor escape. Thus, her trauma continues. Most of all, she is alone. Completely and utterly deserted by those who should be protecting her. If the aftermath of the Vietnam War taught us anything, it was that such isolation and abandonment is anything but a recipe for psychic healing – not for individuals and not for the culture writ large. And yet the military refuses to see what would appear to be right before its very eyes, insisting that her defense is mere “psychobabble,“ as if shooting oneself in the stomach could be imagined as an act of sanity.

The depth of utter betrayal by the military of its own is magnified by another photograph that is part of the same story. While living with a group of mental outpatients on the grounds of Walter Reed Hospital, Whiteside befriended Sammantha Owen-Ewing, a twenty year old Pfc. who had been “abruptly dismissed from the Army” against the wishes of her doctors and who had lost access to all military benefits, including her medical benefits. Owen-Ewing recently committed suicide and Whiteside traveled to her burial service in Utah. The last picture in the WP photo-essay that chronicles Whiteside’s story is of Owen-Ewing’s casket:

Its contrast with every one of the hundreds of funerals we have seen of military veterans in recent years is marked by the absence of a military honor guard, and, more noticeably still, the American flag. The argument of the photo-essay could not be more eloquent, as the substitution of flowers for the flag underscores both the simple dignity and decorum of a private funeral, as well as well as the military’s indecorous denial of its responsibility to care for its own.

Photo Credit: Michelle du Cille/Washington Post

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Two soldiers walking past a burnt out vehicle on a city street. It is an altogether ordinary photograph of what has become an altogether ordinary event in the Persian Gulf region, if not the Middle East more generally. A somewhat long caption tells the story in a passive, matter of fact voice, “U.S. soldiers pass by a damaged armored vehicle following a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan on Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2007. A suicide bomber blew himself up next to a convoy of armored vehicles used by foreigners in Kabul, in a huge explosion Tuesday that killed at least two civilians and left the wall of a nearby house in ruins, witnesses and officials said.” We have seen similar photographs hundreds of times in recent years and its only real distinction would appear to be its almost pure banality.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. The photograph was published on the Washington Post website on Wednesday, Nov. 28th as part of an AP story titled “Afghans: NATO Airstrikes Kill 14 Workers.” According to the report, NATO warplanes were tracking Taliban insurgents in eastern Afghanistan and mistakenly bombed a road construction crew while they were asleep in their tents. The deceased workers, civilians from nearby provinces, were paid at the rate of $5.00 a day by Amerifa, a construction company contracted by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers to build 135 miles of roads for the U.S. military. One NATO spokesman confirmed that two bombs had been dropped with “strong indication that we got a Taliban leader,” but another spokesman commented that the “situation is not clear … [and we are] trying to get a clear picture.” As if to mitigate the significance of the event, the reporter noted that “If confirmed that NATO hit the wrong target, the incident in mountainous Nuristan provice late Monday would be the first major blunder in months.”

It is really hard to know where to begin. According to the NYT, the road had been under construction for a year. And given that the project was under contract with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers one might think that NATO would have access to its whereabouts. Surely such “blunders” could be avoided, particularly given the history of the involvement of U.S. and NATO-led forces in causing civilian casualties—so called “collateral damage”—in Afghanistan. But accidents do happen and tragic mistakes are made, particularly in war zones. And more, bureaucratic spokesmen are skilled in the rhetoric of obfuscation and the deferral of responsibility. And so, perhaps, what we have is just an ordinary day in the life of a war that seems to know no end. But none of that explains the photograph above which seems to have nothing to do with the accidental airstrike. Why exactly is it here? What purpose does it serve?

Normally we might assume that the photograph accompanying a news article is designed to provide evidence of the reality of the story being told, illustrating its facticity in a “seeing is believing” sort of way. Alternately, it might function to enhance our affective or emotional understanding of an event by creating lines of identification between the viewer and what is viewed. But, of course, in either case, there is the assumption that the thing pictured is an index of the event being reported. Here, of course, there is no direct relationship between the photograph of the remains of a suicide car bombing in downtown Kabul and the accidental deaths of 14 Afghan civilians by NATO military forces in the mountains of Nuristan.

There is probably no shortage of alternative explanations for what the photograph is doing here, but it is hard to imagine how any of them reflect positively on the Washington Post or its motivations. For example, it could be a mistake caused by the pressure of meeting a deadline, but that seems highly unlikely given the source.

An alternate explanation, far more insidious, is that it functions to defer attention from and to mitigate the significance of the accidental deaths of the 14 Afghani civilians. It does this in two ways. First, while the absence of a photograph does not automatically deny the existence of the event being reported, neither does it do anything to enhance our understanding of the event or to enable our identification with the lives lost. Such pictures were available, and the NYT used one in its report and in its daily slide show, but the Washington Post went in a different direction.

Second, the photograph itself invites a perverse logic that models itself after a version of the quid pro quo: Yes, it seems to say, it is possible that NATO “blundered” (although it would be only their “first major blunder in months”), but that is a collateral effect of a war on terror, an insane condition where the enemy is impossible to identify and the most dangerous insurgents are suicide bombers who show no respect for the “rules of war.” And as if to prove the point, look at the photograph. Here we have two soldiers walking past the “ruins” of a nearby house (not actually seen in the photograph but marked by the caption) and a “damaged armored vehicle” destroyed by a suicide bomber the day after the accidental airstrike. That it is an armored vehicle that has been destroyed underscores the power of the threat. Protection is impossible to come by whether you sleep in a tent, live in a house, or drive in a vehicle fortified to withstand attack. And yet, notice that the soldiers are relatively nonchalant and inattentive as they walk by. There is nothing new here. Just as we have seen similar images over and again in recent years, so too have they, albeit up close and personal. It’s just another day on the job.

And so, perhaps, the placement of the photograph with this story is a somewhat subtle endorsement of administration policies. One more indication of the utter banality of war and all that it produces.

Photo Credit: Rahmal Gul/AP

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Since my post about Making Nice on a Day of Shame, Michael Mukasey has been confirmed as attorney general. More to the point, yet another attorney general has been confirmed to oversee rather than stop the American institutionalization of torture. Meanwhile, the news has moved on to more important things like the run up to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Along the way, you may have missed the few stories that appeared about an art exhibit that opened recently at the American University Museum in Washington, DC. The exhibition provides the first complete show of Fernando Botero’s 79 painting and drawings of the torture of Iraqis by American soldiers and private contractors at Abu Ghraib prison. Botero’s work draws on the massy bodies of pre-Columbian art, usually regarding cheery subjects. As Arthur Danto at The Nation remarked on the horrors of Abu Ghraib, “if any artist was to re-enact this theater of cruelty, Botero did not seem cut out for the job.” Others in the know will have shared that thought, until they saw what Botero has done through paintings such as this:

Botero has avoided reproducing those images that have circulated so widely: the cowled, cruciform victim hooked up to wires, or Lynndie England holding a leash or pointing her cocked hands. Instead, he has taken pains to depict scenes that were captured by print journalism. In fact, a Google search will turn up photographs of many of the abuses marked in his exhibition, but that is beside the point. If nothing else, Botero’s paintings provide another attempt to provoke renewed public revulsion, reflection, and debate. There certainly is need for that as the initial photographs are becoming either icons or curiosities. His images also place the scandal into the archive of Western painting while drawing on that tradition to strengthen protest; so it is that the exhibition is compared to works such as Guernica, among others.

One question is whether painting provides a unique form of documentary witness, one characterized by its superior capacity for moral response. Danto, for example, argues that “Botero’s images, by contrast [to the Abu Ghraib photographs], establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own. As Botero once remarked: A painter can do things a photographer can’t do, because a painter can make the invisible visible.’ What is invisible is the felt anguish of humiliation, and of pain. Photographs can only show what is visible; what Susan Sontag memorably called the ‘pain of others’ lies outside their reach. But it can be conveyed in painting, as Botero’s Abu Ghraib series reminds us, for the limits of photography are not the limits of art.”

Although the last clause is certainly true, I find this argument to be bizarre, and not only because it contradicts his claim, earlier in the same article, that “it was hard to imagine that paintings by anyone could convey the horrors of Abu Ghraib as well as–much less better than–the photographs themselves.” Of course, once you invoke Sontag, you had better be prepared to contradict yourself. I’m not questioning Danto’s subjective reactions, of course, but I know that he is wrong about mine. And I have to wonder how anyone could think that people were not feeling the pain of others when they reacted with disgust, shame, and outrage as they saw the photographs. Millions of people have reacted that way, which is precisely why the photos made torture a major topic of public debate. One hypothesis is that it may be difficult for those, such as Danto and Sontag, who are steeped in the pictorial traditions of the fine arts to identify with or respond emotionally to photographs. Fortunately, that is not true for the rest of us.

I won’t go on, for surely there is something obscene about turning the depiction of evil into an intramural debate about aesthetics. Whatever the art, there is need to confront the horrors–and the indifference–of our time. Botero has done that, and his artistic medium and style are important forms of witness. He asks, “Is this what 400 years of modern Euro-American civilization has come to? Is the indigenous body still being tortured?”

Look again at the painting. Keep it in mind when administration officials and neocon pundits obfuscate about torture, or when the leading Republican candidates and various editorial cartoonists joke about torture. This holiday weekend let’s not only give thanks for the good life with friends and family, but also renew our resolve to stop state terrorism.

You can see more of the images from the exhibition here and here.

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This photograph from a hospital in Iraq has all the elements of comedy except the laughter.

A man and a boy–probably father and son–are awaiting treatment following a suicide truck bomb attack. They are the lucky ones.

I’ve posted before on the normalization of war, and recently on the importance of seeing and valuing the little things in life to resist war’s empire. This photo is both engaging and troubling precisely because it rests on the cusp between those two attitudes. On the one hand, it is a hard news photograph that documents the arbitrary, unjust violence of war. On the other hand, it is a soft news photograph that draws on the techniques of Life Magazine human interest portraiture.

The hard news photo shows civilians drenched in their own blood, having to make do with improvised bandages while waiting for care in an overburdened and decaying hospital. The soft news photo shows two social types in all too typical poses: the boy in t-shirt and blue jeans peeking out from the mess he’s made, as if sitting in the principal’s office at school. The adult holding a compress to his aching head as he wearily, dutifully accepts yet another of the responsibilities of parenting. The one furtively studies the adults around him while wondering if he’s going to catch it. The other makes the call cementing his complicity in the mess, and, oy, what a headache.

If this were the only photograph of the civil war, there would be much to fault. Why make light of violence; aren’t we denying their suffering and our own culpability? Surely we could be shown more of the horror of war and the arrogance, viciousness, allegiances, and betrayals that are its cause. This photo is part of a very large archive, however, and so it has a different role to play.

I don’t want to come down decisively on one side or the other regarding the photo’s ambiguity. I do want to feature something else, something that may be the reason the photo is ambiguous and why that itself can be a resource for photojournalism and public understanding. I think the humor in the photo–the comedy without laughter–is a testament to the humanity and dignity of the ordinary Iraqi citizen. Look again at the jeans, t-shirt, slouching posture, and expression of the boy, and the man’s sweater, watch, cellphone, and richly complicated look of responsibility: these are the habits of people not yet remade by war. That a man carefully buttoned his cuffs and put a sweater on, perhaps because nagged to do so, is a commitment to normalcy. That he can make the call as if after a car accident, exasperated but relieved–and not terrorized–that is an achievement.

Once again, the war against war can be seen in the details, and photography has to risk banalty and sentimentality to tell that story. What remains is for the rest of us to see it for what it is, and not simply conclude that war is a part of life and really not so bad after all. To do that would be another betrayal.

Photograph by Emad Matti/Associated Press and the Washington Post.

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This image is at once unusual and deeply familiar, no matter where you imagine it taking place.

The incongruity comes, of course, from seeing a dude in gangsta attire going down a buffet line within what looks like the perfect example of the Generic Hotel banquet room. More to the point, this guy is out of place, whether the place is Libya, where he actually was, or Atlanta or Chicago or any other city center.

For all that, the scene will be all too familiar to many viewers. This is the generic modernity inhabited by the middle class whether they are at work or at a wedding or some other weekend event. If you’ve seen one room like this, you’ve seen them all. And for all the effort that goes into pretending that today’s buffet is better than the rest, it rarely is. This one doesn’t even make the effort. The tackiness of the scene becomes obvious because of how he looks–that cheap jacket makes the aluminum warmers and stacked plates all the more obvious–while the long view exposing the table legs and chair backs makes all the decor seem all too typical.

And this is where things get interesting. The New York Times story captioned by the picture was titled “Rebel Unity is Scarce at the Darfur Talks in Libya.” It seems that the big fish boycotted the peace conference, leaving only small fry like our man at the buffet line. No one was interested in talking with the lesser lords of the desert, who were left to kill time in the hotel. In fact, the story reported that those present usually descended on the buffets together, but the photographer obviously wanted to show something other than eating.

So, what is being shown? It could be that small tribal leaders are out of place in modern diplomatic settings. Since he doesn’t really belong there–as you can see just by looking at him–then he ought to go back to the Darfur “street” from whence he came. In short, he shouldn’t have presumed to be there at all. (Never mind that he will have come at personal inconvenience, expense, and risk, and that he probably is able to wreak havoc somewhere if so inclined.)

That interpretation might do, but I think the photograph deconstructs on precisely that point. For one, he is behaving exactly as he should; from the measured manner in which he is holding the serving tongs, it looks as though he’s been through a buffet line many times. More important, the tackiness of the rest of the scene speaks volumes. The problem isn’t that he’s there, but that the room is otherwise empty (save for the single waiter at the end of the table). The room itself looks like a mere shell, an artificial trompe l’oeil of modern life superimposed on the backdrop of the desert, clan politics, and constant cycles of violence. Perhaps the conference would have worked had the room been full of all the leaders and their entourages, but this photograph hints otherwise.

Maybe the problem isn’t the homeboy but the hotel. More precisely, perhaps the problem is that peace is no more to be brokered in the neutral space of Generic Modernity than it could be found in the dangerous places of the Darfur borderlands. Nor are the scenes themselves the problem. The hotel, like the desert, brings with it a particular conception of politics, negotiation, and peace. Each activates different modes of organization, modes of speech, and images of the future. My guess is that if peace is to come to Darfur, and to many other places around the world, those involved will have to find another place to meet that is neither the war zone nor the modern hotel. That is, they will have to find another way to talk and think together that is neither entirely outside of modernity nor within its most typical structures and assumptions.

Photograph by Jihad Nga for the New York Times.

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Saturday’s New York Times included these stories: First, the confirmation of Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general had hit a “rough patch” because Democrats were suggesting that they might oppose confirmation if the nominee “did not make clear that he opposed waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques that have been used against terrorism suspects.”  Second, a review of the movie “Saw IV” advised viewers to “Imagine every conceivable form of torture, then add the inconceivable.”   Third, a report on the photographs, and photographer, used by the Khmer Rouge to document the arrival of those who had been brought to the Toul Sleng prison to be tortured and killed.  You might see a pattern. . . .

Do you also see a sliding scale?  Say, from the torture we do, which the administration would like to think is a matter of semantics, to the torture we imagine for cheap thrills, which receives the stern rebuke of an R rating while remaining business as usual at the cineplex, to the torture done by others, which is the subject of documentary reportage.  Even so, the Times story on the prison photographs is a service.  The problem they, and we, face is how to confront torture without inadvertently contributing to its normalization.  News media should be faulted at times for not showing the harm done by those acting in our name, but we don’t want the news to become “Saw XXX” in real time.  It should be said, however, that surely it becomes too easy to minimize torture when both Gonzales and Mukasey have said they oppose torture while condoning its practice, and when audiences watch torture scenes on film and TV that they know involve no real pain.  That is why we need to see this:

This is one of the images at the Tuol Sleng Museum website.   It should be said that the Times did not include this photo in its story.  Perhaps they should be faulted for that.  I don’t think so, because what they did show was even more horrific:

She is another “unidentified prisoner.”  She also is a young girl who subsequently will have been tortured and killed.   I can’t imagine. . . .  And if anyone says that at least the US government doesn’t torture little girls, we already have slipped too far into the abyss.

Photographs from the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, http://www.tuolsleng.com/.

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Note: This is the second of a two-part post on the “shadow army” of mercenary forces in Iraq. To see the first part, “Seeing the Enemy” go to BagnewsNotes.

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“Build it and they will come.” Those are the words that Erik [the] Prince of Blackwater used in a recent interview with the Washington Post, referring to his 7,000 acres, “Blackwater Lodge and Training Center,” as a “Field of Dreams.” Field of Dreams, of course, is an endearing but not so subtle, surrealistic parable for the American dream cast in the mythic registers of Christian redemption and our national fascination with baseball. When Prince quotes from the movie he invites consideration of the darker side of the national mythos, rooted in the imperialistic pretensions of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. His firm, Blackwater, Worldwide, formerly Blackwater, USA—and the change of name is notable in an age of empire and globalization—is a “private contractor” with multi-billion dollar government contracts to train U.S. military and paramilitary personnel and to provide independent security forces who serve, in Prince’s words, as “gap fillers” with the “skills the U.S. government needs to operate domestically and abroad.”

“Gap fillers” is a euphemism for “private armies” or “mercenaries,” terms that Prince steadfastly rejects. But there can be little question as to what Blackwater imagines its continuing “mission” to be, as indicated in the poster titled “The MISSION Continues,” available for purchase at the Blackwater Proshop for $15.00 (along with a catalog of “Apparel,” [Tactical] “Accessories,” and “Gifts” for “that special person in your life”). Shot from a low angle that accentuates their presence, the “gap fillers” are decked out in generic military gear, accompanied by a German Shepherd (vaguely reminiscent of the dog in the infamous torture photographs from Abu Ghraib), and supported by an array of high-tech weaponry and equipment, including helicopters, jets, tanks, and armored vehicles. The Blackwater brand in the upper right hand corner makes it clear who the agents represent. And at the bottom the poster announces, “Coming Soon – Global Stability.” The claim is as arrogant as it is wrong.

But there is a bigger point to be made, which has less to do with Blackwater per se than with the fantasy world within which the ad/announcement operates and the way in which it contributes to the larger normalization of a war culture. Blackwater casts itself and the problems of global instability within the fictional world of hyper-masculine, shoot ‘em up action movies in which the “hero” has access to an endless supply of high tech weaponry that he uses with impunity to destroy terrorists, aliens, and other barbarians—in addition to anything else that happens to get in his way—by day and then returns to his home and family by night, leaving a smoldering world in his wake. The only thing missing in this “mock” movie poster is the star power of a Bruce Willis or Keifer Sutherland.

And there is more, for the appeal here is not just to an action narrative driven by an adolescent attraction to pyrotechnics, but to a visual aesthetic of color, angle of view, background and gesture that draws directly from the lucrative, fantasy world of single-shooter video games such as Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

The visual analogy is both uncanny and frightening. But it should not surprise us. For we have seen this combination of militaristic fantasy and the realism of war over and again in recent times, whether it is with announcements of missions accomplished, government officials shooting weapons in high tech military simulators, or private citizens playing soldier at paintball parks. Erik Prince deserves our derision, there is no doubt about that, but what should really draw our attention is an increasingly normative culture of war that fuels and enables a world in which entities like Blackwater can prosper as they give new meaning to phrases like “Playground of Destruction,” or in which the fantasy that “global stability” can be accomplished by “gap fillers” is anything more than a surrealistic “field of dreams.” And that is something we all share a responsibility for.

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