Military and administration officials go to great lengths to distinguish between attacks on US resources in Iraq. A great number of them, we're told, are imported terrorists who have finally found targets in their own backyard. Others are Iraqi insurgents who are Ba'ath holdouts, nutcases, or local extremists.
The big question is whether many of them are Iraqi resistance fighters - people who are glad to be rid of Saddam, are not looking to destroy Western civilization, aren't particularly religious, but simply want Iraq to be free of military occupation.
The Bushies will say that by definition, none of the attackers are like that. The radical left wing will say they're all like that.
The recent attack in Fallujah don't provide a good argument for either side of this issue. It's hard for the Bush administration to say that it was simply the work of foreign terrorists when there was so much jubilation among regular passers-by. But the left wing can't exactly say these are noble freedom fighters, either - attacking random civilian Americans and mutilating their corpses goes far beyond the stuff propaganda posters are made of.
You have to wonder, though: what drives people to incinerate a random car, beat to death the one surviving passenger, mutilate the corpses, and hang them up for public display?
This sort of thing has happened before. Oliver Cromwell was exhumed and posthumously drawn and quartered. One of the American soldiers killed in Mogadishu of "Black Hawk Down" fame was mutilated. Palestinians also mutilated the bodies of the two soldiers who got lost in one of their towns. Mussolini and his mistress were pulled through streets and hung up like carcasses after they'd been killed.
But in the history of riots, lynchings, gang wars, and other collective madness, you don't usually see people taking it out on the bodies of the victims. Once they're dead, they're usually left to rot until someone takes pity and disposes properly of their bodies. In the war in Afghanistan, for example, Northern Alliance soldiers would leave Al Qaeda bodies to rot but properly bury Taliban soldiers. Mob informers will get shot in the eye. Brits condemned to being drawn and quartered would have their body parts buried in different parts of the country, their heads put on a stake for public viewing. But these are not expressions of rage against already dead bodies - they're intended to warn others.
What all the corpse mutiliation incidents have in common is this: the victims a) are overwhelmingly more powerful than the perpetrators; b) get caught in a moment of vulnerability; and c) represent order in a time of chaos. Corpse mutiliation is petty and childish. It is utterly counter-productive, in that nobody will feel proud over having witnessed it the day after, and it provokes rage among the targets' survivors.
So, to be cynical, who scores political points on this? Honestly, I think the neocons. This expression of rage among certain residents of Fallujah is not a function of American occupation; it's a function of a society that has been subject to violence for all too long, without any means of fighting back. The perpetrators know that if they had done this to Ba'ath operatives in Saddam's time, Fallujah would have been levelled to the ground, after all the men and old people were murdered, women raped and murdered, and children taken away. The Americans may threaten "overwhelming" retaliation, but it'll be nothing compared to what Arab despots would do.
Comments