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Thug Life Iraq
21 April 2004
Simon asks Sadr why he isn’t grateful to the U.S. for ousting Saddam; Sadr replies that “the little serpent has left and the great serpent has come.” Simon then tries to trap Sadr in the logic that fueled the Cold War: “Isn't the enemy of your enemy your friend?” Sadr responds by echoing George Bush, who sometimes says that freedom is derived from above: “Our salvation from Saddam was only from the grace of God.” Simon presses the specific means of “salvation”: “If it was a favor of God, why was it that God waited until the Americans came in to do the job?” Sadr bats it back: “All praise is to Allah. He works in mysterious ways.” Sadr sounds here like a kind of trickster figure, practicing verbal rope-a-dope on American journalists who, after all, are coming to the conversation with a distinct disadvantage: Sadr may have been watching the Americans on CNN for years, while "60 Minutes II" is parachuting into a culture it doesn’t understand. Seeking to find a referent, Peter Klein compares Sadr to David Koresh, the Branch Davidian leader. Bob Simon ups the ante: : “Frankly, you almost get a hint of something beyond mystical, there's something messianic there now and again.... I think some of his followers, and this is something they would not articulate... somewhere in their minds believe that this might be the second coming.” Simon is referring to the return of the Hidden Imam, but he’s using the Christian language of messianism. Appropriate, given that the Qu’ran does include the promise of a second coming -- that of the prophet, Jesus. But nothing in Simon’s comment suggests that he’s aware of this. Sadr may not be a religious authority -- he says as much in the interview -- but he can surely see that a novice, by his standards, has been sent to interrogate him. When Simon tries to force him to take responsibility for anti-American violence, Sadr has to remind him that he cannot issue a fatwa to that effect. Simon presses on, insisting, Sadr will be responsible for the carnage that will (and now has) occur should he not speak explicitly against it. Sadr goes for the truck-sized opening Simon has given him: “I have to obey this order whatever it might be. When the president of America decides to invade a country, shouldn't the people follow his orders?” Sadr has trapped Simon, leaving him with the options of implicitly validating Sadr's violence or rebuking the U.S. Simon fumbles and says, essentially, nothing, the media mouth forced to eat his words. This kind of fisking may sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, and maybe it is; but the war in Iraq isn’t football, it’s a war, and we need a press there that is at least as knowledgable as a young cleric Simon and Klein describe as “thuggish.” That’s a misperception a lot of angry listeners saw past. “What’s with a couple of white guys calling Sadr a thug?” one caller asked. “Doesn’t it make sense that he speaks street Arabic to reach the poor?” “What’s with describing Sadr’s followers as a ‘a motley crew, missing fingers, missing eyes’?” (As Klein does.) Klein’s defense? He cites an Americanized Iraqi who compares Sadr to Tupac Shakur. A revealing analogy? Sure. Perhaps most of all of a tendency in the press to understand Iraq as a warped reflection of America, the 51st state or worse, Detroit in flames. Sadr seems to be aware of this story, just as he’s fluent in American rhetoric. In his recent public statements, he’s been careful to cede gravitas to the more moderate Ayatollah Sistani, of whom he’s been dismissive in the past. Perhaps that’s because he’s aware that the colonial myth recycled by a clueless Western press forces Sistani closer to “thuggishness,” as all Iraqis get lumped in with the “motley crew,” “missing fingers, missing eyes,” victims of the Iran war, of Saddam, of the Americans. It’s worth noting that the word “thug” derives from a violent anti-British religious sect in colonial India. Simon and Klein rightly note that Sadr is “millenial,” which is to say, apocalyptic; they don’t seem to recognize that they’re playing a part in the revelation story he’s trying to spin. The narrative pull of the colonial myth is just too strong for them to resist. So they draw from its canon and add a link to its chain: The natives are restless, the brutes destroy their own. ***** "Nothing About Psalms" "Their young faces grim but dry-eyed, they listened to the chaplain, Capt. Robert Grove, read from Scripture. Then [Cpl. Daniel R. Amaya's] comrades, sometimes haltingly, remembered a funny young man sometimes called Kung Fu who loved ice cream, yearned for a Camaro and was learning to be a leader. Several soldiers used language not generally heard in church. "'I know nothing about psalms,' said Sgt. Maj. Dave Howell, the battalion's gruff, hardened, bull-necked senior noncommissioned officer. 'I couldn't paraphrase the Bible. I would be a hypocrite to do so. Stoicism is what's called for. Keep your heads up. You can't allow this to slow you down. Do you understand me?' "'Yes, sir,' the marines said." --John Kifner, New York Times
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