Photojournalists killed in LIbya

Two committed and accomplished photojournalists, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, have been killed while working in Libya. You can find coverage of the story at The Guardian here and here and here, at The New York Times here and here and here, and at npr here.Needless to say, this is very sad.

Which is Worse - Photographs of Murder or Murder?

(L. to R.) Spc. Jeremy Morlock, Spc. Andrew Holmes,
Spc. Michael Wagnon, Spc. Adam Winfield.

What's wrong with this story from The New York Times? The topic is a set of photographs that putatively confirm that the fine fellows pictured above engaged in all sorts of bad behavior while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army. Of course, these men have not been convicted of anything. But the story in The Times suggests that the evidence against them is damning. Let the trial proceed as it should.

The first problem with the story is that the news reports do not show the photographs in question. My understanding is that the Army and a U.S. Court have issued orders to suppress publication. I have not found them anywhere on line. Your tax dollars at work. What ever happened to the idea of a free press?

The second problem is that the U.S. Army is continuing an official practice we've repeatedly witnessed when Americans do heinous things. They are apologizing, quite fervently, for the images and the distress they cause instead of the actions that the images depict. Pretty poor aim there soldier.
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P.S.: My thanks to Stanley Wolukau-Wanambra for this link to the report in Der Spiegel which published some of the images.

"Today, we are all Joan Miró."

So says Jonathan Jones in this essay in The Guardian. In so doing he places a finger on the moralistic types who condemn violence and oppression but, when the chips are down, are unprepared not only "to fight for justice but also to face and tell the truth." Miró, it seems, fell into that category during the Spanish Civil War. I'll take Jones's word for that since I don't know the actual history. So, let's assume that Miró both could've taken up arms in the Republican cause and didn't.

The hero of this piece is Orwell - the anti-Miró - who both set off to fight the fascists in Spain and (in Homage to Catalonia) frankly exposed the foibles and hypocrisies of the Republican coalition. I agree with Jones on the need to engage in politics not philanthropy or posturing. But I disagree that "fine words ... spoken in support of fine ideals" are necessarily empty or cheap. And I suggest too that it was difficult enough to set off to fight fascists in Spain - where it was relatively easy to tell the good guys from the bad. In many (perhaps not all) conflicts today the demarcation is murkier.

And the complicity is deeper too, I suspect. Mubarak, of course was our client; and so too was Saddam Hussein. Our Naval fleet, I believe, anchors in Bahrain. Ought we be taking up arms? Would doing so now be too late? Now, once the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and lord knows where else have taken to the streets, should we be there providing armed protection? Just what is Jones suggesting? Is he trading moralism for delusion?

Framing the War in Afgahnistan

"This mandating of what can be seen - a concern with regulating
content - was supplemented by control over the perspective
according to which the action and destruction of war could be
seen at all. By regulating perspective in addition to content, the
state authorities were clearly interested in regulating the
visual modes of participation in the war."
~ Judith Butler. Frames of War, page 65.

Caption (Toronto Star) : US Army flight Medic SGT Patrick Schultz
talks to a wounded US soldier in the rear of a medevac helicopter
while enroute to Kandahar Airfield after he was injured by an
improvised explosive device in Zhari District, Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Photograph © Louie Palu/Zuma Press.

A short while ago Michael Shaw wrote this post at BagNewsNotes.* He pointed out a striking similarity in the work of three terrific photographers - James Nachtwey, Tyler Hicks and Louie Palu - who had recently been embedded with military units in Afghanistan. More to the point, he noted the similarity in the way their respective work framed the ongoing war there.

The folks at PDN report that one of the photographers - Palu - has taken exception to Michael's post. To his credit Michael has updated the post to reiterate what I took to be clear in the first instance - namely that this is not about the intentions of the photographers, but the strategy of the Pentagon and the tone-deafness of the media organizations. That said. Palu has got to be kidding if he thinks that "accepting an embed" is a politically naive decision. think about the practice of embedding journalists: The military are going to send you to see what they choose for you to see. This is part of the "regulating of perspective" of which Butler speaks. And while that need not make any photographer a tool of the military, it does make is especially difficult to present anything resembling an oppositional or critical view of what is happening in Afghanistan.

So, Palu's complaint about the use of individual pictures misses the mark by a wide margin. The same goes for the self-serving - and I would add patronizing - rationalization of his editor quoted in the PDN piece. The problems with embedded reporting are ongoing - they are not, as the editor suggests, something from the past that Michael has simply dredged up. What we are getting is the regulation of perspective, a particular "official" framing, that is meant to limit what we see and how we interpret the war. The fact that photographers and journalists have no choice but to accept embeds if they want to cover the war does nothing to alter that state of affairs.

The images Palu and Nachtwey and Hicks made were taken up by large media organizations and used in ways that they may hardly have intended. But those images, taken from a military-sanctioned perspective, sustain an interpretive frame whether the photographers like it or not. The fact that, as Michael points out, the stories in Time, The New York Times and The Toronto Star are near substitutes for one another is telling in that regard.
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* For the record, I know and like Michael - he runs what I consider to be an invaluable blog. And if you scroll down the comments on this particular post, you'll see that I threw in my two cents early on.

P.S.: Updated 26 January 2011 ~ There is an interesting and helpful post here on this ongoing discussion.

Rogues Gallery?

January ~ Blackwater security founder Erik Prince.
Photograph by Nigel Parry.

January ~ Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein and C.O.O. Gary Cohn.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

May ~ General David Petraeus.
Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson.

It is funny how I discover things on the Internet. My nominee for the least charitable, most self-indulgent, resentful essay on photography ever is Ingrid Sischey's 1991 trashing in The New Yorker, of Sebastião Salgado.* It is a paper so incoherent, so devoid of plausible judgment, I've always wondered how the editors allowed it to see print.

Sischey, of course, has gone on to distinguish herself as editor of that bastion of serious thought and incisive commentary ~ Interview magazine. She now has ascended to the post of contributing editor at Vanity Fair. All this demonstrates that early failure is no barrier to success in the world of vacuous publishing ventures. It also establishes how easy it is to squander whatever meagre abilities you might have on thoroughly specious undertakings while still feeling justified in voicing sanctimonious criticisms of those who try, at least, to put their more substantial talent to productive use. I suppose that is the risk of swimming always in the shallow end of the pool.

I already have devoted enough time to Sischey here. So, . . . end of that rant. My point, in any case, is that for some reason my Google alerts flagged this interview with Sischey about what to do at Art Basel/Miami. And on the same page is a link to a photo essay: Vanity Fair’s Year in Review: January to June 2010. And that slide show is what I really wanted to talk about. How is that for circuitous?

The bulk of the VF half year review consists of pics of entertainers and their enablers (read Hollywood actors and directors). But, interspersed with tie sideshow, are the three images lifted here; they deserve comment.** We have, in order, rabid mercenary, rapacious financiers, and . . . well, everyone's hero, the good General David Petraeus. This seems to me to constitute a real slap at the General. Don't get me wrong, I've made it clear here more than once that I don't hold him in terribly high regard. But there are limits. Petraeus may be misguided, he may be committed to pursuing a losing policy in an authoritarian decision-making structure, but he is not a venal, ideologue like Prince or simply venal like the the boys from Goldman Sachs. That makes him culpable but probably not criminal. You cannot say the same of Prince, Blankfein, and Cohn. Apparently, our media have more or less completely lost the capacity to discriminate not just between the serious and the ephemera, but between between the honest (if deluded) and the crooks.

I have to say that one of the virtues of Blankfein and Cohn is that, as bald bankers, they deprived Leibovitz of the signature fan-induced, wind-swept hair that renders so many of her portraits formulaic.
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* If, after this characterization, you want to read it, you can find Sischey's essay reprinted in Liz Heron & Val Williams, eds. 1996. Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850's to the Present. Duke University Press.

** All three images © the photographers noted in the Vanity Fair caption/credit.

The Guardian Anoints Top Ten ...

We are Making a New World (1918)
by Paul Nash - © Imperial War Museum.

. . . British Art Works About War. You can find the story, with links to most of the works, here. Their list includes the Nash painting.

The Casualty Gap

Every once in a while people in my discipline get it right. They deploy their fancy quantitative methods to establish - at least as solidly as any piece of social research can establish anything - what grandma knows. In this book* two young guys named Kriner and Shen show that disproportionate numbers of poor and minority Americans are sent off and die when we have a war. And they show too that public opinion about war is inversely related to awareness about this "causality gap." I have spent a bunch of time here complaining about how our so-called liberal media has been complicit in the BushCo war effort precisely to the extent that it failed to report on the casualty numbers from Iraq and Afghanistan. And while I tend to agree with Andrew Bacevich's review in The Nation (he says that we ought not await public outcry based on democratic norms but hope instead for a "pay as you go" policy for wars, essentially hitting the civilian population in the pocketbook) the book nevertheless strikes me as an important contribution.
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* Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen. The Casualty Gap ~ The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Using Aisha ~ Can We Get Beyond Time's Propaganda (Again)

A couple of days go I posted a response to this essay by Susie Linfield in which she agonizes (and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense) about the fate of women in Afghanistan in the event the U.S. were to withdraw from military operations there. Linfield's essay was occasioned by the notorious recent cover of Time magazine, depicting a young woman maimed by Taliban thugs for resisting an arranged marriage. My comments on Linfield was my second post on the matter.

The folks at Time importuned: "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?" And their reply was that the Taliban would be unleashed, placing the modest but real gains women have made in Afghanistan at grave risk. In the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of articles [1] [2] in The New York Times that suggest that the problem in Afghanistan is not just the Taliban, but other trends in Islam* as it is institutionalized there, putatively "moderate" or "mainstream" clerics who are more than willing to accommodate fundamentalists. In other words, the claim that we might just stay long enough to quash the Taliban (no minor feat, in itself) seems radically to underestimate the cultural problem. We are not, by military means, going to overturn or reform or whatever a traditional culture.

There are a couple of other matters. In the first place we are talking about a set of practices that we in the west deem 'barbaric' ~ "stoning — along with other traditional penalties like whipping and the amputation of hands." In the second place Afghanistan is hardly the only place where such practices ('stoning' specifically) are indulged ~ "in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria." These observations suggest that if we have concerns about human rights generally (you know, protection from 'cruel and unusual punishment') and women's rights specifically (since such punishments for 'sex crimes' tend to be meted out disproportionately to women) we ought to be intervening in those other places.

But let's set such messy, complicating factors** aside and focus exclusively and narrowly on Afghanistan. After all, such rhetorical narrowing is the point among pro-war types striking moralistic stances. Here is one telling passage:

"Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.

And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.

Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.

The controversy could have implications for efforts by Afghan officials to reconcile with Taliban leaders and draw them into power-sharing talks.

Afghan officials, supported by Western countries, have insisted that Taliban leaders would have to accept the Afghan Constitution, which guarantees women’s rights, and not expect a return to Shariah law."

So, all you pro-war types, what, exactly is the plan here? How long do you think we should we 'stay'? What would you count as 'success'? Uprooting the Taliban? Subverting the other "mainstream" actors who seem to endorse barbaric practices? When we finish in Afghanistan, shall we proceed to Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? (After all the connections between those countries and al-Quaeda are reasonably well documented.) What would count as 'success' there? If we want to pose the question the Time cover presses upon us, why not pose these questions too? The answer is that asking them does not allow us to be quite so moralistic, quite so certain of what we have grounds to do.

Military force is a blunt instrument. It is ill-suited to the task of trying to protect women - or anyone else - in Afghanistan from fundamentalist thugs or those who abet them. I am not sure how better to proceed. But that discussion is hampered by a preoccupation with 'winning' an impossible military mission. And propaganda of the sort that Time has spewed simply obscures that fact. But that, after all, is the point, isn't it?
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* Please Note: The practices under discussion, as the essays in The Times make clear, do not derive from the Koran but from ancillary sources. The extent to which they are "Islamic" is contested.

** We can set aside too the hypocrisy of the U.S. with its official commitment to the death penalty and huge prison population of disproportionately minority and poor men has much claim to be scolding others about barbaric practices. We'll leave aside too the newly found willingness of American administrations to blatantly ignore the principles of international law in the prosecution of the GWOT.

Talkng Back ~ Susie Linfield on Time and Afghanistan

"Bieber’s photograph of Aisha . . . is disgusting. I am very glad that Time ran it." So says Susie Linfield in this pointed essay at Dissent online. As is usual, Linfield offers smart and insightful comments on the fracas surrounding the image. She insists that "the photo, taken by South African photographer Jodi Bieber, did the opposite and is, in a sense, a model of how photography can be used."

Interestingly, though, Linfield doesn't actually discuss the use of the photograph as much as she excoriates "the antiwar Left and . . . feminists" who "[w]ith a couple of notable exceptions," have responded to the Time cover with "a dispiriting lack of appropriately complex thinking, or, one might say, a distressingly reductive reading of events and of what feminism, and leftism, might mean." Since I have already posted on the cover in a highly critical way, I feel as though it is important to engage Linfield. So, here goes.

In the first place there is ample room for agreement:

There were, however, some thoughtful responses to the Time photo and the larger issues it raises. And in this case, thoughtful means uncertain. (Contrary to what readers of this piece might think thus far, I am not an advocate of “staying in Afghanistan.” In fact, I am thoroughly confused about what the “right” thing to do is; the only thing I’m certain of is that there are no good choices—and certainly no unambiguously good choices—on offer.) For some, the agonizing question is how to respond to conflicting demands.

OK. That is a more or less accurate depiction of where I stand. Conflicted. However, nothing Linfield says there is incompatible with the following.

[1] Attributing a significant helping of hypocrisy and disingenuousness to the people at Time. As I noted earlier, to the best of my knowledge the editorial staff there showed scant concern with women's rights when, for instance, the "moderates" in the U.S. Congress negotiated to have the demands of our own fundamentalists (e.g., the Catholic Bishops on abortion rights) incorporated into the health insurance legislation.

Moreover, the notion that this story is not a brief for staying in Afghanistan is simply not credible. Linfield bemoans the fact that the Time story has not generated any debate. But, having read the report, let's be clear that it accords roughly zero attention to any alternative beyond 'stay the course.' If, as Linfield rightly insists, we read the report for evidence of what Afghan women think, why not read it for evidence of what the folks at Time think? Absent an argument to the contrary, it seems entirely appropriate to charge Time with trafficking in propaganda.

[2] Acknowledging that the Taliban are barbaric thugs and that the Afghan people and nearly everyone else would be significantly better off if they could be eliminated. Nothing I've said so far reduces to the position that "the ousting of the Taliban [is] inconsequential, or that a commitment to women’s rights is only a form of hypocrisy." I think ousting the Taliban is quite consequential. But not in the abstract. How many lives - Afghan and American and other - are we willing to expend? What means - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, imprecise drone attacks - are we willing to use? These are political questions, not as Linfield insists, questions of "conscience." And, beyond a protest about simplistic thinking she offers no answers to them.

On the charge of hypocrisy, let's agree that the matter is best addressed by attributing bad faith not to some indeterminate "we," but to identifiable actors and agencies. When discussing members of the Bush administration, various right-wing war-mongers, and, as I've just suggested, the folks at Time and other bastions of corporate media, I have no problem claiming that the newly discovered commitment to women's rights is "only hypocrisy," false concern trotted out to rationalize a disastrous policy. (By disastrous I mean a policy that has been poorly executed from the start and for which there is no plausible criterion of "success.")

[3] Questioning just what it means to speak, as Linfield does, of "the NATO presence." If this is not to work simply as euphemism for a war prosecuted by American troops, we need to be clear. How many non-American military personnel are in Afghanistan? I don't know but I suspect the answer is someplace in the vicinity of "few." And what about consequences? I recall hearing a report on npr recently that stated that Taliban and other 'insurgents' cause roughly three-quarters of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. American troops and their allies cause the remaining quarter. But, the report went on, many Afghans remain convinced that something like the opposite is the case. If we grant that our campaign in Afghanistan is of a 'hearts and minds' sort, this is troubling. Continued military intervention may simply be a losing strategy on that dimension. I am not certain of that, but absent some evidence to the contrary, it is hard to discount skepticism.

Likewise, Linfield rightly insists that we "at least call barbarism by its right name." OK, let's do. The various tactics I just mentioned - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, 'collateral damage' caused by drone attacks, and so forth - are barbaric. Agreed? (And recall that I've already conceded that the Taliban and their terrorist tactics are barbaric.) What are the alternatives? Neither the Time piece nor Susie Linfield offer any suggestions. But that is where we ought to be headed - a discussion of how to proceed that does not simply assume that our current policy and tactics will "work" (whatever that means).

[4] Questioning what it is that Afghan women (is that a homogeneous category?) "want"? There is a strange ambiguity in Linfield's essay. On the one hand she thinks we ought to be paying attention to what Afghan women say (at least as the Time folks report that). On the other hand, she dismisses those who are concerned with attributing "agency" to those same women. This ambiguity is perhaps unavoidable. I agree that the downtrodden generally are not going to, without significant aid and support, throw off their oppressors. Conversely, it is unclear that clauses in the constitution alter underlying realities in the hinterlands. And I am not so sanguine that the Time report offers an even-handed assessment of the views that Afghan women articulate. Those views, as I have noted here before, are complex. They are not, in short, determinative. They do not mitigate the uncertainty that Linfield herself feels. To assert otherwise, I think, displays a dismaying level of credulousness.

[5] Recalling that much of the current disaster in Afghanistan is the result (wholly or partly) of U.S. policy. We funded the precursors of the Taliban against the Soviets. And we prosecuted a war in Iraq instead of dealing with the Taliban and their links to al-Qaeda. How confident are we - Linfield, I, others who think the Afghan campaign is a mess - that the folks who brought us those policies can clean up even part of the mess they've made?

Being a progressive or a leftist indeed requires avoiding knee-jerk reactions. The latter, after all, make one a reactionary. Insofar as the Time cover story has prompted debate it has proven valuable. But, I suspect that any such debate has been an unintended consequence. The folks at Time used the cover photo for a quite specific purpose - to shore up support for continued American military intervention. In other words, they are seeking to thwart debate by painting those who criticize the war as fools who are willing to sacrifice women's rights. (How does their report differ from the claims of BushCo to which Linfield refers?) In my view, they have undertaken that task in what I think is a hypocritical way. That brings me round to my initial claim: Time has used photography for propaganda.
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Update: Lest you think I am overly suspicious of the good folks at Time, I recommend this post which not only claims that the CIA has been pushing the "women's rights" angle on defending the Afghan mission, but makes the following point, which should be especially pressing for a news weekly:

It’s worth noting that the Taliban are Sunni, not Shia, and that the US-backed president has enacted a law for the non-Taliban sector of society, rolling back rights for women that were written into the constitution. Before the elections, the Times Online reported that “the United States and Britain [were] opposed to any strong public protest [against the law] because they fear[ed] that speaking out could disrupt [the] election.” The bill was pushed through parliament in February of 2009 and came into effect in July of last year. Afghan women fumed, while US and UK leaders stood by, and where was Time’s cover advocating for women’s rights then? Here are the covers they ran in February 2009.

Update 2: See also this post at Conscientious.

Aftermath Project ~ Call for Applications (2011)

The folks at the Aftermath Project fund photographers who undertake projects aimed at countering the too common propensity to sanitize war and its consequences. You can find them and download an application here.

War, Propaganda, Censorship: The Military Reveals the Actual Power Relations "Embedded" in Their Relations to With the News Media

Michael Hastings at the ISAF base in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Photograph © Mikhail Galustov for RollingStone/Redux.

In late June Michael Hastings published this story in Rolling Stone. The picture above accompanied that story which cost a high ranking military officer his job and career. I think Hastings was right to publish the story. To the best of my knowledge, while many commentators questioned the 'propriety' of his doing so, none actually contested the details of what he wrote. Well, it turns out that the military apparently doesn't much want Hastings around any more and has canceled his next scheduled "embed" in Afghanistan. You can read the news here at Mother Jones.*

Is there anyone who is really surprised by this? I'd be surprised if there were. Tit-for-tat, and so forth. What is outrageous is not this decision to kick Hastings to the curb. That is simply authoritarian reflex. Predictable. What is outrageous is that the news media has voluntarily embraced the legitimacy of the entire system of "embedded" reporting. Having done that, they really cannot complain that the military unilaterally dictates the rules of engagement. This episode simply reveals in especially stark form the power relations to which the press has acquiesced.

The press should pride itself on being untrustworthy (which is not the same thing as being dishonest, quite the reverse) when it comes to political and military authorities. In the current context the premium seems to be quite the reverse.
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Update (8/6/2010): More here.

TIME & War Propaganda

You will likely have seen the original cover (top) and may be interested in this shameless rationalization TIME printed. The editors insist: "We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground." Right. You ought also to see the second, photo-shopped version (Thanks Stan!) and read the reasoning of the fellow who took license with the original (scroll down the comments). His claim is only modestly less credulous. For some sensible discussion go here.

You might ask: So, you oppose the war? What about the Taliban and women's rights? Good questions. But, yes, I still oppose the war. And my simple, visceral retort is "What about, say, the Catholic church and women's (or children's) rights? What about the medieval attitudes that our own fundamentalists display regarding women's rights?"

My more complicated retort is, "OK, we can agree that the Taliban are fundamentalist thugs. But we are not going to get rid of them in any plausible scenario. And the ineffectual and corrupt Karzi regime is hardly an enlightened replacement. You might say the same of "our" fundamentalist allies in Pakistan. And, oh, by the way, let's have a graphic TIME cover story on the many various families we have bombed into oblivion in predator drone attacks - you know, the people we treat as collateral damage - and then talk support for the war." After all, we are deploying the drones mainly in hopes of avoiding American military casualties! I suppose Afghan lives are not worth quite as much?

This cover story is propaganda, pure and simple. TIME hardly is a font of feminist politics when it comes to our own relatively comfy lives. And, whether they admit it or not, they've adopted a moralistic stance in the service of a losing war.
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P.S.: The cover photo was taken, in the words of the TIME folk, "the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber."

Changing Conventions in War Photography (2)

So, I thought perhaps I was being too hasty in talking about the emergence of a new convention in war photography, one that places a premium on the 'human interest' aspect of American troops. You know, shots of the military personnel being just guys. So I had a quick, admittedly unsystematic look. The top two images below made it into the pictures of the day at the Lens blog at The New York Times last week. The top one, though, I lifted from The Washington Post who had also published it. The rest were easy enough to find on-line. Note - three different agencies, a half dozen different photographers. And we end up with the soldier in tee shirt and shorts, again.

Life in a war zone can mean improvising, including for exercise,
as illustrated by a U.S. soldier from the 1st Squadron, 71st Cavalry
at a forward operating base in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan.
The number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan is expected to
peak at 150,000 in coming weeks. July 19th, 2010
(Manpreet Romana/agence France-presse Via Getty Images).

A U.S. soldier watches an Afghan movie on TV while relaxing at
Combat Outpost Nolen, an outlying base for the 2nd Brigade of the
101st Airborne Division, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, Wednesday, July 21, 2010. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd).

A United States Marine from Bravo Company of the 1st
Battalion of the 2nd Marines eats watermelon as he rests
following a gunbattle as part of an operation to clear the
area of insurgents near Musa Qaleh, in northern Helmand
Province, southern Afghanistan, Friday, July 23, 2010.
(AP Photo/Kevin Frayer).

U.S Army First Lieutenant Sean Snook from Concord,
Massachusetts, and Alpha Company, 4th Brigade combat
team,1-508, 82nd parachute infantry regiment tees off
at FOB Bullard in Zabul province, southern Afghanistan,
February 12, 2010. (REUTERS/Baz Ratner ).

A U.S. Marine throws a football at Delaram base in
Nimroz province, southern Afghanistan January 24,
2010. (REUTERS/Marko Djurica) January 24, 2010

Spc. James Lollis, right, who was on his way to the gym, and an unidentified
soldier from the 2nd Battalion 12th Infantry take cover as incoming fire
hits inside Command Outpost Michigan at the Pech River Valley
in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009.
(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills).

There are, of course, many, many pictures of American troops, mostly in full combat gear, on patrol - sometimes they are engaged in firefights, sometimes they are menacing Afghans of various descriptions, sometimes they are talking to groups of kids or even kicking a soccer ball with them. These images are familiar enough. So the sorts of images I've lifted here are not exactly crowding out those more 'standard' images. However, with the exception of the occasional photograph of marines mourning the death of a colleague, images of death and destruction - the actual consequences of war for Afghans and the U.S. military - are exceedingly rare. In fact, other than the image of Joshua Bernard that generated so much controversy last fall, I don't recall seeing any. That may not be intended by the photographers who are covering the war, but it surely is politically convenient.

Changing Conventions in War Photography & the Disaster in Afghanistan

U.S. Army soldiers of the 1-320th Alpha Battery, 2nd Brigade of
the 101st Airborne Division, look towards insurgent positions
during a firefight at COP Nolen, in the volatile Arghandab Valley,
Kandahar, Afghanistan, Saturday, July 24, 2010.
(Photograph © AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Over the course of the afternoon I had an interesting and helpful exchange of comments on this earlier post. My interlocutor, photographer Tim Hetherington, has taken exception to the post, interpreting my comments as questioning his integrity. I certainly did not intend the post in any such way and indeed stated as much at the outset. I apologize to Tim if I created that impression.

Having said all that, I thought it might help to depersonalize the disagreement. Let's not talk about Tim's work. My concerns are two. The first is directly political in the pedestrian sense; it centers on whether whether our troops in Afghanistan are serving our national interest. I stand by my judgment that they are not. They are there enacting a misguided policy. We can argue the question, but I am pretty confident about where the preponderance of evidence will fall.

My second concern has more to do with the politics of photography. Here is the nub of the issue: why is it acceptable to depict our military adventures in Afghanistan with images like the one I discuss here, whereas images like the one I discuss here generate an uproar? My concern is that we are witnessing not just the sort of censorship (and accompanying official rationalizations)* of images of war that prevents the media from showing even flag draped coffins being unloaded at military bases, but also the emergence of a parallel convention wherein we will get sanitized views of war dressed up in tee-shirts and boxers as though the soldiers just happened to be camped out there and came under attack totally by surprise. That is what I meant by visual euphemism.

As if on cue, I just found the image above festooned across the top of the home page at Huffington Post accompanying a story on the publication of classified records of the Afghanistan debacle (here and here too). Given the information that was released today, the confidence I noted above is growing.
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* For examples of censorship see, e.g. [1] [2] [3] ...

War Photography as Visual Euphemism?

On a pretty regular basis I receive emails announcing exhibition openings, new books, and so forth. Sometimes I post about the event or appearance, sometimes I don't. Today I received the following from HOST Gallery (London):

"HOST gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition and book launch of Tim Hetherington’s Infidel. 20 September - 15 October 2010. More information below:

Infidel is an intimate portrait of a close band of warriors – a small battalion of US soldiers, posted to an outpost in the remote and dangerous Korengal Valley in North Eastern Afghanistan. Shot over the course of a year, Hetherington’s photographs prove surprisingly tender – arguably the strongest among them a series of the men asleep. This is a body of work as much about camaraderie, love and male vulnerability as it is about the horrors of war. The book’s title ‘Infidel’ is taken from a tattoo the men adopted as a mark of their comradeship. Hetherington’s photographs are sharp, moving and full of humour; they stand as a tribute to a group of men risking their lives in the interest of their own nation, and a provocative contribution the documentation of war in our time.

Please see attached press release and for more information please contact Harry on harry@foto8.com 0207 253 2770."

Let's be clear, Tim Hetherington is a very good photographer. He is no doubt a decent, sincere fellow as well. And the men he has photographed for this project are indeed risking their lives in the name of a national policy. I am not calling into question their motivations - and here I mean both the photographer and the soldiers - for doing what they are doing. I am asking about the consequences of the policy in which they (and we) all are caught up.

Having said those things, it is a considerable stretch - indeed, a stretch that I think cannot be sustained - to claim that these men are "risking their lives in the interest of their own nation." The war in Afghanistan is an ongoing disaster, in large measure because the Bush administration wasted resources and attention in Iraq. But, having inherited a mess, Obama is now prosecuting what is, despite his vigorous denial, a "war of choice." The current administration is asking these young men to risk their lives in the name of a policy that is demonstrably wrongheaded and, in all likelihood, doomed to failure. Neither the fraternity of the soldiers nor Tim Hetherington's images of it do anything to alter that basic reality.

So here is my question: If we can decry the way politicians and the print media consistently trade in (verbal) euphemisms (as I have done here repeatedly) isn't it possible to see the 'human interest' approach to war photography as a form of visual euphemism?

Tunnel Vision on the Costs of War, Or Why People Around the World have Reason to 'Dislike Us'

TAKING SHELTER: Afghan workers employed to clean debris
after a suicide attack took shelter underneath their wheel
barrows Tuesday after a sudden downpour in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Photograph © Ahmad Nazr/Associated Press.

This one falls in the 'what's wrong with this picture' category. Not the picture above, which reminded me of school kids hiding under desks during air raid drills. No, a reader, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, called my attention to this terrific graphic display at CNN.* It is visually striking and makes a strong point about the increase and distribution of U.S. casualties in our two wars. You know, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the the ones that the hope and change mongers in the Obama administration continue to prosecute despite the futility of both. But, as Stanley succinctly pointed out, the graphic is radically incomplete; there is no mapping of the domestic casualties in either war. Afghan and Iraqi deaths do not register (here either). Try Iraq Body Count instead; I cannot find an analogous site for the Afghan foray.

So, as the futile efforts to clean up the oil spill on the Gulf Coast are attracting your attention, don't forget the death we are sowing elsewhere. They are even less susceptible to clean up.
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* Thanks!

The Price of Hypocrisy ~ Late is NOT Better than Never

The last young men to be drafted for military service during the Viet Nam war reported for duty in June 1973, a month after I graduated from high school. Their lottery numbers had been chosen in December 1972. So the draft ended just before I'd have been eligible. As I recall, the numbers pulled for 1973 included my birthday. I thought the war was stupid but likely would've gone off to fight (and I am sure, to die) had I been drafted. After all one can be a conscientious objector only if one's conscience is animated by religious thinking. Even though religion and morality do not overlap, simply finding the war morally repugnant was insufficient. I have never had a single regret about not serving in the military. I don't have anything against those who do serve; nor do I hold veterans, for reason of that status alone, in especially high regard. It depends on who they are and what they do. In any case, the notion that the only way one can contribute meaningfully to your society and fellow citizens is by entering an thoroughly authoritarian institution seems pretty much daft to me. This is a theme I have pursed here and here before. In the U.S. we confuse public service with military service. Big mistake. This is a democracy, after all.

All of that is by way of background to a convergence I noticed in reading the papers this morning. The first offering was this Op-Ed in The New York Times penned by a Viet Nam veteran and former U.S. Senator. The relevant bit goes like this:

"The Vietnam War drove members of my generation in different directions. Some served because they believed in the war, others didn’t believe in the war and protested, but when drafted felt an obligation to go. Others were simply drafted. Some refused service out of principle, others out of fear, and still others because they felt that taking the time to go to Vietnam would slow their careers.

Many of those who didn’t serve were helped by an inherently unfair draft. I don’t fault anyone for taking advantage of the law. Where I do find fault is among those who say they were avoiding the draft because they were idealistically opposed to the war — when, in fact, they mostly didn’t want to make the sacrifice. The problem is that for every person who won a deferment or a spot in a special National Guard unit, someone poorer or less educated, and usually African-American, had to serve.

[. . .]

Bizarre outcomes abound. Many of those who avoided the war became advocates of a muscular foreign policy. When I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I would be invited to meetings in the Pentagon or the White House to discuss troop deployments. In those meetings, I encountered far too many Democrats and Republicans who did not serve in the war when they had a chance, and who overcompensated for their unease by sending others into harm’s way."

The second offering is from this profile in The Guardian of the smart, if bombastic and politically misguided, writer Christopher Hitchens. Having turned his back on the left, Hitchens is notoriously pro-war and anti-Islam, having embraced the right-wing penchant for deriding "Islamo-fascism." I have noted the ignorance of such views here and here before. In any case here is a useful portrait of "Hitch":

"When the invasion of Iraq was first debated, one couldn't fail to notice the preponderance of left-wing men of a certain age who came out in support of the war. Radicals as adults, but often from conservative backgrounds, now beginning to confront their own mortality, and preoccupied by masculinity and legacy, their palpable thrill about military might suggested that, deep down, they secretly feared progressive principles were for pussies. Now here was their chance, before it was too late, to prove their manhood.

In 2006, Hitchens' wife, the American writer Carol Blue, told the New Yorker her husband was one of 'those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been. There's a whole tough-guy, 'I am violent, I will use violence, I will take some of these people out before I die' talk, which is key to his psychology – I don't care what he says. I think it is partly to do with his upbringing.'

Is there any truth in what his wife said? He pauses for a second. Then, unexpectedly: 'Yeah. Yes. One of the things I've realised, writing the book, is that it has to be true.'

[. . .]

Born in 1949, the second world war was 'the entire subject of conversation' during Hitchens' childhood. He was the eldest son of a naval officer – 'the Commander' – a quietly conservative, blimpish character in the Denis Thatcher mould, who would often say that war was the one time in his life when he "knew what he was doing". Hitchens' mother was a much more colourful character, and on the face of it the dominant parental force; he was her favourite son, and he adored her. 'If there is going to be an upper class in this country,' she told her husband, 'then Christopher is going to be in it', packing him off to boarding school at the age of eight. 'The one unforgivable sin,' she used to say, 'is to be boring', an injunction her son has observed faithfully. His father, by contrast, was a dreadful bore. And yet it is quite clearly the Commander's legacy that haunts Hitchens today.

With hindsight, there was an early clue to his appetite for combat in the ferocity of Hitchens' support for the Falklands Royal Naval task force, shared by few on the left. 'I couldn't possibly see the UK defeated by those insanitary riffraff!' he exclaims. 'This was a diabolical liberty.' But Islamic fundamentalism presented a more promisingly meaty foe than a tinpot Argentine dictator, and ever since the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Hitchens says, 'I knew there would be some huge intrusion into the heart of civilisation from barbarism.'

And so chief among Hitchens' emotions by the end of the day on 11 September was 'exhilaration. Because I thought, now we have a very clearly drawn confrontation between everything I hate and everything I love. There is something exhilarating about that. Because, OK, now I know what I'm doing.' Just as his father had felt during the second world war? 'Yes, exactly,' he agrees.

It seems that Hitchens, an apostate authoritarian (of the Trotsky-ite variety) has found a way to overcompensate for his own youthful failings by re-embracing authoritarianism. Hence his sneering pride in being "right" when others are "wrong." The only problem is that acting out one's emotional insecurities doesn't make one right. And on our current wars, at least, Hitchens is not.

"PowerPoint Makes Us Stupid"

Agreed. According to this story in The New York Times this PowerPoint slide has evidently been making its way around the Internet. It - no joke - purportedly depicts U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. It was part of an official presentation to General McChrystal last summer in Kabul. The military is evidently learning what Ed Tufte has been preaching for several years. Once he has finished with his current posting to Washington - as adviser to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board - perhaps Tufte can be transferred to Afghanistan?

And, of course, it goes without saying that the stupidity of our being involved in our current wars in the first place is not a product of PowerPoint.

A Reminder

Namir Noor-Eldeen.
Photograph © Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press.

There is now hubbub, reported in The New York Times for instance, about a newly released video showing American troops in 2007 killing Iraqi civilians from a helicopter hovering over Baghdad. The video is gruesome. The chatter from the Americans is worse. But neither should come as a surprise. Among the victims - and that is the proper word - was a talented young photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen. You can find a remembrance of Noor-Eldeen, along with some of his work, here at The Lede blog.

The post is touching. It also is a reminder. War is shitty. And the young men we send to fight are desensitized by the experience. War is kill or be killed. So we should be surprised not in the least about the crass attitude articulated by the American troops in the video sound track. In fact, this is precisely what you claim to be grateful for when you thank military men and women 'for their service.' If you find the attitude of these young men offensive - and you should - the proper response is to oppose useless military adventures like the BushCo invasion of Iraq. Obama said he'd end the war and instead authorized more troops.

More generally the video is a reminder of why government and the military seek so diligently to control access to information and visual depictions of their activities. On the one hand, they (sincerely, I think) don't want journalists to be in harm's way. On the other hand, our military leaders don't want we regular folks, sitting at home in our comfy chairs, to see the death and destruction and mayhem they are sowing in our name. This video is unique in that it has been released (despite official efforts). There are surely similar videos - well hidden under the military cloak of being 'classified' material - of similar killings. And there just as surely have been many, many other such episodes that were not caught on film. War is shitty. Always. Unavoidably. Unfortunately, it is sometimes unavoidable too. The tragedy here - or should I say crime? - is that our fiasco in Iraq was, and is, totally unnecessary.
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P.S.: There are useful commentaries on all this here at Newsweek and here at The Guardian. Notice that the latter includes the video whereas the U.S. media do not. And note too that the U.S. media can't even bring themselves to spell out the profanities the American personnel use. Are they protecting our delicate sensibilities?
P.S.2: Glenn Greenwald has written a series of very good posts on the episode too [1] [2] [3] [4].

Seeing Through American Delusions: No Glory in War

I've never been in the military. Neither has my father, nor was his father before him. Some of that is simply fortuitous. My Dad had a health deferment during WWII. Had the draft lottery not been canceled I'd have likely died in Viet Nam. I hope neither of my surviving sons ever join up or are compelled to do so. It is not that I don't want them to find some way to do good in the world. In fact, it is precisely because that is what I want for them - to have the opportunity to do good things - that the military seems a terrible option. Wars are sometimes necessary (although Obama's attempt to paint the Afghanistan debacle in that light is a bad joke) to prevent or end some bad thing. Preventing bad things from happening is not the same as doing something constructive and good.

All that is prompted by a 'review' of sorts of a new movie called "The Hurt Locker" about the ongoing and quite senseless Iraq War. I've not seen the film. You can find the entire review here, but I excerpt what I take to be the main point:

"War movies in general are great for what they are: entertainment. . . . But of course there is a darker side.

These movies glorify a situation that has no real glory in it. Turn to one of your relatives or friends who has been in combat and ask them what they think of war. I am sure that they will tell you that it is scary, gruesome and requires extreme intestinal fortitude. There are no Sgt. Strykers or Gunny Highways in the real Corps. We don’t have a director who can step in when all hell is breaking loose and yell, “Cut!” . . .

Please remember that when you watch a war movie you are watching stories about young Americans who went far from home and risked their lives; some of them died there with only their brothers in arms to witness. Hollywood is now taking our money by walking on their graves.

Maybe that’s extreme. Of course I understand why people watch war movies. I watch them, too. But I have seen my friends die and most of the movies just bring up very painful memories."

And, no, the piece was not written by some commie pinko. It was written by a guy who comes from a lineage of Marines, was a Marine himself, and nearly died in Iraq. I only wish some of our bellicose conservative cheerleaders, way too many of whom have never stepped near a battlefield, could see half as well as this guy.