KurdistanObserver.com

How American Politics Manipulates Kurdish and Iraqi Narratives

By: Sabah A. Salih

January 9, 2006

Only a few short weeks ago, Kurdistan received yet another group of its dead, the remains of some 500 men, women, and children shot on Saddam’s orders execution style—a tiny fraction of the thousands upon thousands recovered so far from the dictator’s many killing fields dotting the Iraqi landscape.

Such stories, alas, have no takers these days in the gaudy market of American politics—discourse produced by politicians, pundits, and media outlets.  Despite all the raging talk about the war in Iraq, American politics remains steadfastly focused on its here-and-now obsessions: television images, gross simplifications, quick fixes, and dogged self-centeredness. In this world, Kurdish and Iraqi narratives, if not trampled upon or ignored, get ideologically appropriated.

Look at the way a clueless congressman from Pennsylvania, John Murtha, went about having his way with the Iraq story.  He went, repeatedly, for the flimsiest television slogans, acting as though the Iraqi government, the Kurdistan government, and the millions who put their lives on the line to help end Ba’thist tyranny were not even part of the equation.

For his grotesque performance, clothed for good measure in the folksy language of small-town America, Mr. Murtha was immediately rewarded with wall-to-wall praise, his made-for-televisions simplifications played and replayed as a kind of coveted wisdom.  That Murtha spoke without even a rudimentary understanding of the Iraq story didn’t seem to matter one bit.  The man, we were reminded over and over, was a war hero.  Blackmail by means of patriotism, thus, turned a war hero’s imperial arrogance into a patriotic absolute.  For their parts, Kurdistan and Iraq became empty spaces to be classified and labeled and quarantined according to the whims of an outsider.  

The same kind of imperial manipulation is at work in the way Saddam’s trial is being discussed.  Here America’s leftism, with its current modes of thought determined squarely by its vociferous opposition to Bush, takes the lead. The gruesome past that makes up Iraq’s narrative under Saddam—especially the Kurdish past—is shamelessly sacrificed on the altar of the man they so intensely hate.  It is no longer fashionable to speak of Saddam’s victims; it is now more fashionable to speak of Saddam as the victim.  Judge Rizgar Muhammed Amin is doing a superb job.  He has put tyranny to shame by offering a democratic alternative to it.  He has not allowed Saddam’s thuggish brutality and unpleasant demeanor to stop him from giving the dictator a fair hearing. Judge Amin is a careful listener and a precise questioner.  It is hard not to be impressed with his fairness and civility.  Yet in American politics even that is run through ideological blinkers; the trial is summarily dismissed by many as a Kangaroo trial.  What is obvious here is that anti-Bushism has mutated into a full-blown dogma, allowing for some of the crudest and banal things to be said about Iraq and Kurdistan by people who think of themselves in progressive terms.

Even naked racism is allowed.  Recent Iraqi elections were no less successful than recent American and European elections—perhaps even more successful.  People voted, and voted in very large numbers.  But this hugely important democratic exercise was quickly sacrificed at the altar of anti-Bushism as well.  Those who were not satisfied with just leaving the story alone quickly reminded themselves in their very high-minded fashion that the Iraqis were still along way from producing their own Jefferson.  Pure and simple: this is racism.  It cannot be anything else.  People who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the realities of others are blinded either by ignorance or dogma.  In this case it is mostly the latter.  Historically, such colonialist mindset used to be the hallmark of the Right.  In a shocking reversal, it has now become part of the Left’s unabashed platform against the Bush administration. 

Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University.