Iraq – Bowblog

Abu Ghraib Reading

2023 UPDATE: when I read my old posts from this period I’m surprised and sometimes apalled at how apparently forgiving I was of the solecisms and straightforward lies of those who supported the various hideous adventures of the Americans and their ‘coalition of the willing’ in the middle east and Afghanistan (and elsewhere). Of both the hardcore, unreconstructed neo-cons and the ‘liberal intervention’ merchants who found their leader in Tony Blair. What’s changed? Did it just need enough distance to see how these actions fitted into the whole story of European colonialism and theft? Or did I actually learn something in the meantime?

The Sontag article has gone from the Guardian web site but I think this is the same essay. The other links still work, which is encouraging, after 19 years. 2004 post follows:

A photograph from the collection of pictures taken in the Abu Ghraib prison during the American iinvastion of Iraq - the photo shows the hand of a torture victim with a label to provide scale — One of the Abu Ghraib photographs

Susan Sontag on the Abu Ghraib torture pictures: “The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us ideology of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives.” Mark Danner on reports from the Red Cross and the American military: “dispatches from the scene of a political disaster“. The man who built Abu Ghraib (and was subsequently gaoled there) thinks it shouldn’t be demolished. Update: I missed David Aaronovitch’s reply to Sontag’s piece (thanks to Stephen Newton).

Memory at the British Museum

The British Museum's Great Court, showing the glass roof and the rotunda that used to accommodate the British Library — The Great Court

Bloggers will love ‘The Museum of the Mind’, a new exhibition in The Great Court at the British Museum: odds and sods assembled to support a larger purpose – a sort of physical semantic web. The show is a clever window onto the museum’s vast collections focused on memory in all its aspects. Materials from just about every collection in the building are gathered together, in a well-organised single-room show.

There’s a gorgeous (and specially made) Mexican Day of the Dead shrine to the museum’s founder Sir Hans Sloane, an amazing twig-and-shell mnemonic device used by Pacific navigators, ancient Roman and Greek memorial statuary and a Ghanaian coffin carved in the shape of a Cadillac.

The paradoxical thing about clever, information-rich shows like this is that they can only undermine the case for retaining the huge Western hordes of looted artefacts. Once you wrap the object in its human context – making connections – its status actually declines. It may be a beautiful, haunting object but here it’s just part of the information mix – a plaster cast would work just as well. Retaining the originals just seems like more indefensible Imperial greed.

There’s also an instructive comparison to be made between the ancient artefacts, most of which were looted, and the more recent items, most of which were probably bought on the open market or commissioned from their makers: the expropriatory economics of empire vs. the consensual economics of trade.

The accompanying book, by the museum’s top ethnographer, John Mack, is also pretty good.

Said on the war

I supported this war. I did it in a queasy, compromising way ? like all the pro-war lefties I know. I have a phrase: “…conditional support”. I don’t feel any more comfortable now than I did before the invasion began but my support holds, although I’m keeping open the possibility that I’ve made an enormous mistake. It’ll probably be a brilliant article like this one, by Edward Said, a man I admire hugely, that convinces me I have:

“This is the most reckless war in modern times. It is all about imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in its violence and the cruelty of its technology. What winning, or for that matter losing, such a war will ultimately entail is unthinkable. But pity the Iraqi civilians who must still suffer a great deal more before they are finally ‘liberated’.”

Pilger vs. Lloyd in The New Statesman

Absolutely compelling war writing in this week’s New Statesman. John Pilger’s article is bitter, Messianic, despairing stuff. For him, the actual conduct of the war confirms everything he said and thought in advance: “…a glimpse of fascism”. John Lloyd – one time editor of the magazine – is a pro-war Blairite. His angry article is the last he’ll write for the anti-war Statesman.<(You can now buy a 24 hour pass to read New Statesman articles online for a quid. Very clever idea and a pioneering effort for a small, impoverished political zine. Admirable)