LONDON, 1 December 2004 — Understanding of the war in Iraq, like understanding of other wars, has changed over time and the images we see of it play a vital role in that necessary process of re-evaluation. Very many who watched the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdaus square in April 2003 were hostile at the time — warning that, while it was easy enough for the world’s only superpower to overthrow a tin-pot Arab dictator, it was wrong, illegal and dangerous to try to impose democracy on any other country.
Others who were initially thrilled by the demise of a cruel regime have been forced to reconsider in the light of subsequent failures. The resources applied to the war were not devoted to winning the peace. Stuff happened and terrible errors were made in the early days of Donald Rumsfeld’s occupation: Disbanding the army and de-Baathizing as if Iraq were Nazi Germany helped fuel an insurgency in which Iraqis now far outnumber the “foreign fighters” we have heard so much about.
It emerged only afterward that the statue-toppling was staged for symbolic effect, a piece of political theater as carefully managed as George Bush’s wildly premature action-man “mission accomplished” gig on an aircraft carrier’s flight deck a few weeks later. And we know, from the 24 7 TV news channels and their extraordinary pictures, that this story is far from over.
Many will remember the footage shot by an NBC cameraman of a US Marine killing an injured and apparently unarmed Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque, the Americans’ laconic profanities and blank faces washed in eerie green light.
Others will think of the casually posed snapshots of Lyndie England and the abuses of Abu Ghraib prison as the moment that the brutality of occupation came home to them.
Ordinary Iraqis killed and maimed in violence far from Baghdad’s “Green Zone” attract far less attention, of course. And few focus for long on the mass graves containing the still-bound corpses of the 1991 Shiite uprising, encouraged by the US and its allies and then cruelly suppressed, or of “Chemical Ali’s” 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds: The blood of America’s Iraqi victims is fresher than Saddam’s more numerous ones.
My own most striking Iraqi image was part of the footage screened by the BBC correspondent Paul Wood, “embedded” with a Marine unit in the recent Fallujah operation. The scenes were familiar enough: Jerky Saving Private Ryan shots of street fighting showing Marines peering into a cellar, fearing grenades or shooting, and running for cover. But then the soundtrack picked up the voices of perhaps three or four fighters — chanting the Arabic words “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” (God is Great) — who presumably believe that this is the moment of their death.
Fallujah has since been declared a success and Red Crescent aid convoys are returning to the ruins. But those haunting cries linger on, as resonant a representation of martyrdom as any Iraqi fighter could pray for: They’ll make an unforgettable addition to those split-screen clips on Arab TV channels of Americans in Fallujah and Israelis in Gaza, reportage-as-propaganda displaying the twin evils of Crusaders and Zionists and their Muslim victims.
Other modern wars have left enduring images that we too easily call iconic, some staged, many real: The screaming, napalmed girl in Vietnam, exhausted Tommies on the Western front in World War I, Robert Capa’s dying Spanish militiaman, weeping Israeli paratroopers in Jerusalem in 1967, piles of Rwandan skulls, the Soviet soldier raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag in Berlin, New York’s collapsing Twin Towers on 9 11. Powerful and troubling pictures from Iraq will join them as they fill our TV screens — and occupy our minds — for a long time to come.
