'Have a Nice Day, Buddy:' What The Actions of a Few US Marines Say About Us All

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Jan 13, 2012 Iraq
[Left: US Marines urinating on dead Afghans. Image from AFP. Right: Afghan civilian dead on the road. Image from unknown archive] [Left: US Marines urinating on dead Afghans. Image from AFP. Right: Afghan civilian dead on the road. Image from unknown archive]

"Have a Nice Day, Buddy:" What The Actions of a Few US Marines Say About Us All

By : Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi

Golden, like a shower, said one of the US marines as he urinated, along with three of his fellow officers, on three dead Afghans. Over the last forty-eight hours this grizzly spectacle has resuscitated the horrific images of US soldiers’ torturing and sexually humiliating men from Abu Ghraib prison to Guantanamo Bay.

Then as now, brown bodies are the raw material through and upon which US soldiers realize their darkest fantasies and their deepest secrets. The pornography that popularized the “golden shower” and the Islamophobia that fuels the War on Terror inspire these scenes. In them, US soldiers feminize Muslim men and demonstrate their power over them. US soldiers can and will sodomize, piss on, and otherwise sexually humiliate Muslim and/or Arab men. And the world will witness this confident hierarchy of masculinity through the dissemination of the torturer’s documentation.

In the face of the standard US official military response to Abu Ghraib—just a few bad apples in an otherwise principled and ethical army—the journalist Seymour Hersh laid out the systematic policy of “Copper Green.” Donald Rumsfeld had approved this clandestine task force, Hersh asserted. It built on the deeply nuanced work of Rapheal Patai’s The Arab Mind. The men and women of this “black op” molded an interrogation technique based on the two codes central, the profound argument went, to breaking the Muslim man. One, he only understands force. Two, his deepest weakness is shame and humiliation.

It would be wrong to assume that strongly held beliefs such as Patai’s were limited to the actions of a few “black ops.” Culturalist arguments have saturated the logic of the War on Terror since its inception. They shaped the US “shock and awe” bombing campaign of Iraq. They informed the stated aim to drain that cultural swamp which breeds terrorism in the Muslim world. They guided the smearing of menstrual blood on a Guantanomo detainee. They inspired the posing of Abu Ghraib detainees in homosexual relations. They underlie the latest subjection of an Afghan’s body to the “golden shower” of the US soldier who may have killed him just before unzipping his fly.

Then, as now, these images unleashed a dastardly slew of military officials’ and pundits’ reflections on how the sole actions of these US soldiers would awaken the deepest cultural alienation among the Arabs and the Muslims. Apparently, the real risk that the Abu Ghraib images revealed was not that brutal sexual torture was routine. The real risk was that US soldiers would now become the targets of Arab and Muslims’ rage and violence.

After all, it is these soldiers’ security that justified the censorship of the most “sensitive” photos that document some of the harshest realities of life at Abu Ghraib. If Arabs and Muslims “saw” American soldiers raping male and female Iraqis, it might unleash their cultural essentialism. Thus US torture has nothing to do with a US military culture of misogyny, violence, and Islamophobia. Instead, it is the Arabo-Islamic culture of misogyny, violence, and hyper-sexism that somehow manages to both inform and challenge US torture!

Last March, Rolling Stone published a full expose of the atrocities that Jeremy Morlock, Andrew Holmes, Adam Winfield, and Michael Wagnon, among others committed. These men formed the “Kill Team” in Kandahar province. They executed the innocent, they hacked off bits of skull and fingers as trophies, they placed severed heads on sticks, and they cheered as they conducted airstrikes on civilians. It was not enough to partake in brutalization, the “Kill Team,” watched themselves again and again through a roving usb that featured all the bloody details. Journalists asserted that the Kill Team operated in plain view of the rest of their company.

Then, as now, the Pentagon confidently explained the exceptional and clandestine nature of these US troops. From the top leadership to the rank and file, the forceful argument was that these actions were “not consistent” with American values nor “indicative of the character” of the US military.

Kill Teams, Piss Teams, and Rape Teams--these are all exceptional, US officials would have us believe. The fact that one in three female US soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in US uniform is also an abberation of what the military truly stands for.

Yet as Saree Makdissi has pointed out, “the scandal consists in the urination rather than the killing itself.” We are told that this type of violence is extreme and unacceptable. But somehow, the 150,000 Iraqi deaths (estimated at about eighty percent of which are civilian) and the estimated 70,000 civilian Afghan deaths since the launch of the War on Terror is acceptable and normal.

The fact of the matter is that the dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims during the war on terror informs both the impunity with which civilians are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and the desecration of corpses.

US officials hailed, and continue to hail, the exemplary character of the US army and the great sacrifice of its members just as they fretted, and continue to fret, over the implications that these sole actions would have on the Arab and Muslim world. Indeed, what the depraved actions seemed to indicate more than anything else in the minds of these commentators is the exceptionalism of the Arab and Muslim world.

Apparently, piling naked bodies on top of one another, torturing them into wanton sexual positions, unleashing dogs on exposed genitalia, putting a gun to the head of a bound and hooded man while forcing him to masturbate, and urinating on the dead is ok everywhere else but the Arab and Muslim world.

Other people, not programmed with this culture, would not feel violated, helpless, and enraged at the public demonstration that their lives are worth less than American lives.

If we could just look beyond the pissing, the rape, and the torture and, for those of us who are trying to count as the US army claims it cannot “tell” the combatant from the civilian—the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would see that the US military is otherwise a force for good in the world.

Let us step outside the chorus of essentialism and ask: What do these acts of brutalization and depravity say to us about the United States? More still, what does the fact that the broad understanding that it is these acts alone that are brutal, excessive, and unacceptable say about us all?
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Jan 9, 2012 Lebanon
Maya Mikdashi By :
Maya Mikdashi

American Elections Watch 1: Rick Santorum and The Dangers of Theocracy

One day after returning to the United States after a trip to Lebanon, I watched the latest Republican Presidential Primary Debate. Unsurprisingly, Iran loomed large in questions related to foreign policy. One by one (with the exception of Ron Paul) the candidates repeated President Obama`s demand that Iran not block access to the Strait of Hormuz and allow the shipping of oil across this strategic waterway. Watching them, I was reminded of Israel`s demand that Lebanon not exploit its own water resources in 2001-2002. Israel`s position was basically that Lebanon`s sovereign decisions over the management of Lebanese water resources was a cause for war. In an area where water is increasingly the most valuable resource, Israel could not risk the possibility that its water rich neighbor might disrupt Israel`s ability to access Lebanese water resources through acts of occupation, underground piping, or unmitigated (because the Lebanese government has been negligent in exploiting its own water resources) river flow. In 2012, the United States has adopted a similar attitude towards Iran, even though the legal question of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz is much more complicated and involves international maritime law in addition to Omani and Iranian claims of sovereignty. But still, US posturing towards Iran is reminiscent of Israeli posturing towards Lebanon. It goes something like this: while the US retains the right to impose sanctions on Iran and continuously threaten war over its alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon, Iran should not dare to assume that it can demand the removal of US warships from its shores and, more importantly, should not dream of retaliating in any way to punitive sanctions imposed on it. One can almost hear Team America`s animated crew breaking into song . . . “America . . . Fuck Yeah!”

During the debate in New Hampshire, Rick Santorum offered a concise answer as to why a nuclear Iran would not be tolerated and why the United States-the only state in the world that has actually used nuclear weapons, as it did when it dropped them on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki- should go to war over this issue. Comparing Iran to other nuclear countries that the United States has learned to “tolerate” and “live with” such as Pakistan and North Korea, Santorum offered this succinct nugget of wisdom: Iran is a theocracy. Coming from a man who has stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools, that President Obama is a secular fanatic, that the United States is witnessing a war on religion, and that God designed men and women in order to reproduce and thus marriage should be only procreative (and thus heterosexual and “fertile”), Santorum`s conflation of “theocracy” with “irrationality” seemed odd. But of course, that is not what he was saying. When Santorum said that Iran was a theocracy what he meant is that Iran is an Islamic theocracy, and thus its leaders are irrational, violent, and apparently (In Santorum`s eyes) martyrdom junkies. Because Iran is an Islamic theocracy, it cannot be “trusted” by the United States to have nuclear weapons. Apparently, settler colonial states such as Israel (whose claim to “liberal “secularism” is tenuous at best), totalitarian states such as North Korea, or unstable states such as Pakistan (which the United States regularly bombs via drones and that is currently falling apart because, as Santorum stated, it does not know how to behave without a “strong” America) do not cause the same radioactive anxiety. In Santorum`s opinion, a nuclear Iran would not view the cold war logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as a deterrent. Instead, the nation of Iran would rush to die under American or Israeli nuclear bombs because martyrdom is a religious (not national, Santorum was quick to state, perhaps realizing that martyrdom for nation is an ideal woven into the tapestry of American ideology) imperative. Santorum`s views on Iran can be seen one hour and two minutes into the debate.

When it comes to Islam, religion is scary, violent and irrational, says the American Presidential candidate who is largely running on his “faith based” convictions. This contradiction is not surprising, given that in the United States fundamentalist Christians regularly and without irony cite the danger that American muslims pose-fifth column style- to American secularism. After all, recently Christian fundamentalist groups succeeded in pressuring advertisers to abandon a reality show that (tediously) chronicled the lives of “American Muslims” living in Detroit. The great sin committed by these American Muslims was that they were too damn normal. Instead of plotting to inject sharia law into the United States Constitution, they were busy shopping at mid-western malls. Instead of marrying four women at a time and vacationing at Al-Qaeda training camps in (nuclear, but not troublingly so) Pakistan, these “American Muslims” were eating (halal) hotdogs and worrying about the mortgages on their homes and the rising costs of college tuition. Fundamentalist Christians watched this boring consumer driven normalcy with horror and deduced that it must be a plot to make Islam appear compatible with American secularism. The real aim of the show, these Christian fundamentalists (who Rick Santorum banks on for political and financial support) reasoned, was to make Islam appear “normal” and a viable religious option for American citizens. Thus the reality show “All American Muslim” was revealed to be a sinister attempt at Islamic proselytizing. This in a country where Christian proselytizing is almost unavoidable. From television to subways to doorbell rings to presidential debates to busses to street corners and dinner tables-there is always someone in America who wants to share the “good news” with a stranger. Faced with such a blatant, and common, double standard, we should continue to ask “If Muslim proselytizers threaten our secular paradise, why do Christian proselytizers not threaten our secular paradise?”

As the United States Presidential Elections kick into gear, we can expect the Middle East to take pride of place in questions pertaining to foreign policy. Already, Newt Gingrich who, if you forgot, has a PhD in history, has decided for all of us, once and for all, that the Palestinians alone in this world of nations are an invented people. Palestinians are not only a fraudulent people, Gingrich has taught us, they are terrorists as well. Candidates stumble over each other in a race to come up with more creative ways to pledge America`s undying support for Israel. Iran is the big baddie with much too much facial hair and weird hats. America is held hostage to Muslim and Arab oil, and must become “energy efficient” in order to free itself from the unsavory political relationships that come with such dependancy. Candidates will continue to argue over whether or not President Obama should have or should not have withdrawn US troops from Iraq, but no one will bring up the reality that the US occupation of Iraq is anything but over. But despite the interest that the Middle East will invite in the coming election cycle, there are a few questions that we can confidently assume will not be asked or addressed. Here are a few predictions. We welcome additional questions from readers.

Question: What is the difference between Christian Fundamentalism and Muslim Fundamentalism? Which is the greater “threat” to American secularism, and why?

Question: The United States` strongest Arab ally is Saudi Arabia, an Islamic theocracy and authoritarian monarchy which (falsely) cites Islamic law to prohibit women from driving cars, voting, but has recently (yay!) allowed women to sell underwear to other women. In addition, Saudi Arabia has been fanning the flames of sectarianism across the region, is the main center of financial and moral support for Al-Qaeda and is studying ways to “obtain” (the Saudi way, just buy it) a nuclear weapon-all as part and parcel of a not so cold war with Iran. Given these facts, how do you respond to critics that doubt the United States` stated goals of promoting democracy, human rights, women`s rights, and “moderate” (whatever that is) Islam?

Question: Israel has nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them in the past. True or false?

Question: How are Rick Santorum`s views on homosexuality (or the Christian right`s views more generally) different than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad`s or King Abdullah`s? Can you help us tease out the differences when all three have said that as long as homosexuals do not engage in homosexual sex, it`s all good?

Question: Is the special relationship between the United States and Israel more special because they are both settler colonies, or is something else going on?