If this does not shake your conscience...then you too, are a war casualty

Its idolisation of 'the face of Falluja' shows how numb the US is toeveryone's pain but its ownNaomi KleinFriday November 26, 2004The GuardianIconic images inspire love and hate, and so it is with thephotograph of James Blake Miller, the 20-year-old marine fromAppalachia, who has been christened "the face of Falluja" by pro-warpundits, and the "the Marlboro man" by pretty much everyone else.Reprinted in more than a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Timesphotograph shows Miller "after more than 12 hours of nearly non-stop, deadly combat" in Falluja, his face coated in war paint, abloody scratch on his nose, and a freshly lit cigarette hanging fromhis lips.Gazing lovingly at Miller, the CBS News anchor Dan Rather informedhis viewers: "For me, this one's personal. This is a warrior withhis eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger. See it. Study it.Absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And ifyour eyes don't dampen, you're a better man or woman than I."A few days later, the LA Times declared that its photo had "movedinto the realm of the iconic". In truth, the image just feels iconicbecause it is so laughably derivative: it's a straight-up rip-off ofthe most powerful icon in American advertising (the Marlboro man),which in turn imitated the brightest star ever created by Hollywood -John Wayne - who was himself channelling America's most powerfulfounding myth, the cowboy on the rugged frontier. It's like a songyou feel you've heard a thousand times before - because you have.But never mind that. For a country that just elected a wannabeMarlboro man as its president, Miller is an icon and, as if to proveit, he has ignited his very own controversy. "Lots of children,particularly boys, play army, and like to imitate this young man.The clear message of the photo is that the way to relax after abattle is with a cigarette," wrote Daniel Maloney in a scoldingletter to the Houston Chronicle. Linda Ortman made the same point tothe editors of the Dallas Morning News: "Are there no photos of non-smoking soldiers?" A reader of the New York Post helpfully suggestedmore politically correct propaganda imagery: "Maybe showing a marinein a tank, helping another GI or drinking water would have a morepositive impact on your readers."Yes, that's right: letter writers from across the nation are unitedin their outrage - not that the steely-eyed, smoking soldier makesmass killing look cool, but that the laudable act of mass killingmakes the grave crime of smoking look cool. Better to protectimpressionable youngsters by showing soldiers taking a break fromdeadly combat by drinking water or, perhaps, since there is a severepotable water shortage in Iraq, Coke. (It reminds me of the jokeabout the Hassidic rabbi who says all sexual positions areacceptable except for one: standing up "because that could lead todancing".)On second thoughts, perhaps Miller does deserve to be elevated tothe status of icon - not of the war in Iraq, but of the new era ofsupercharged American impunity. Because outside US borders, it is,of course, a different marine who has been awarded the prize as "theface of Falluja": the soldier captured on tape executing a wounded,unarmed prisoner in a mosque. Runners-up are a photograph of a two-year-old Fallujan in a hospital bed with one of his tiny legs blownoff; a dead child lying in the street, clutching the headless bodyof an adult; and an emergency health clinic blasted to rubble.Inside the US, these snapshots of a lawless occupation appeared onlybriefly, if they appeared at all. Yet Miller's icon status hasendured, kept alive with human interest stories about fans sendingcartons of Marlboros to Falluja, interviews with the marine's proudmother, and earnest discussions about whether smoking might reduceMiller's effectiveness as a fighting machine.Impunity - the perception of being outside the law - has long beenthe hallmark of the Bush regime. What is alarming is that it appearsto have deepened since the election, ushering in what can only bedescribed as an orgy of impunity. In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqisurrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civiliantargets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics,journalists - who dares to count the bodies. At home, impunity hasbeen made official policy with Bush's appointment of AlbertoGonzales as attorney general, the man who personally advised thepresident in his infamous "torture memo" that the Geneva conventionsare "obsolete".This kind of defiance cannot simply be explained by Bush's win.There has to be something in how he won, in how the election wasfought, that gave this administration the distinct impression thatit had been handed a get-out-of-the-Geneva-conventions free card.That's because the administration was handed precisely such a gift -by John Kerry.In the name of electability, the Kerry team gave Bush five months onthe campaign trail without ever facing serious questions aboutviolations of international law. Fearing that he would be seen assoft on terror and disloyal to US troops, Kerry stayed scandalouslysilent about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. When it became painfullyclear that fury would rain down on Falluja as soon as the pollsclosed, Kerry never spoke out against the plan, or against the otherillegal bombings of civilian areas that took place throughout thecampaign. When the Lancet published its landmark study estimatingthat 100,000 Iraqis had died as result of the invasion andoccupation, Kerry just repeated his outrageous (and frankly racist)claim that Americans "are 90% of the casualties in Iraq".There was a message sent by all of this silence, and the message wasthat these deaths don't count. By buying the highly questionablelogic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone's livesbut their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters becamecomplicit in the dehumanisation of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea thatsome lives are expendable, insufficiently important to risk losingvotes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than theelection of any single candidate, that allows these crimes tocontinue unchecked.The real-world result of all the "strategic" thinking is the worstof both worlds: it didn't get Kerry elected and it sent a clearmessage to the people who were elected that they will pay nopolitical price for committing war crimes. And this is Kerry's truegift to Bush: not just the presidency, but impunity. You can see itperhaps best of all in the Marlboro man in Falluja, and the surrealdebates that swirl around him. Genuine impunity breeds a kind ofdelusional decadence, and this is its face: a nation bickering aboutsmoking while Iraq burns.