Otherwise Known as Emo

On Friday morning, every paper ran the same cover story: Six Italian soldiers had been killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul. Corriere Della Serra, La Repubblica, even the local edition of The Metro, all seemed to be working with the same set of photos of the event’s aftermath. For the first time since we arrived here in March, it was like we were overhearing the entire country sighing, simultaneously. From left to right, the reaction was the same. Everyone was in a state of shock.

Taking the dogs out for their afternoon stroll today, I decided to walk them down a side street, two blocks from here, where I knew the traffic would be light, and the pedestrians at a minimum. Hemmed in by a vacant elementary school on one side, another undergoing renovation, and a college campus, Beroldo street also boasts some of the best political posters in the neighborhood. Lo and behold this unambiguous response to Thursday’s death toll in Afghanistan.

“Enough Italian blood for American petroleum,” it reads.

On the Home Front

Two weeks ago, my friend Gary and I were headed to Tooting to have Pakistani food. Sitting next to us on the train was a British soldier in desert camouflage, with two pieces of luggage: a backpack and a duffle bag. It was hard to tell whether he was going home, on leave, or returning to the United Kingdom after a tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. His face looked tired. The soldier looked like he had been traveling for a while.

Signs of Britain’s current military engagements are scant here, save for the typical wartime posters one sees in tube stations, like this Sky News advert above, or warnings to commuters to report any unattended baggage. Veterans of recent or ongoing conflicts are not as conspicuous or stigmatized as they are in the United States. Enlisted men, in uniform, unlike in Israel, still catch your eye because they are so rare to see.

Make Art About War

Last summer, discussing the new Bug record, London Zoo, an American friend remarked how many times he heard references to guns on the recording. “Its repeated so much, you’d think the record was made in the United States.” Indeed, the number of gun-related crimes in the UK pales in comparison to the US.

Though we can hear gunfire in our ‘hood (Brixton is considered Britain’s gun capital) most talk of violence in the UK news media has as of late either been in terms of reports of child abuse or stabbings. Nevertheless, certain icons, like this painting of an AK-47 on display in a Camden gallery, seem universal.

Given the current deployment of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prominence of such symbols, whether in the form of paintings, or in terms of musical references, makes a great deal of sense. Especially given how, this weekend, the country focused on the deaths of four soldiers killed in Afghanistan on Friday.

The fact that a thirteen-year-old suicide bomber was responsible for the deaths of three of these troops would be enough to make anyone want to paint a Kalashknikov, let alone one that appeared to be in the process of melting.

Military Ecology

My Fifth Anniversary

Every weekday morning, I turn on the news as I pick up our bedroom before heading off to work. Last Friday was no different. Hoping to catch the all-too-brief snapshot of CNN’s international channel that we get here in the US between eight and nine AM Pacific time, I switched on the TV, which, as I discovered, was already tuned to what looked like a European news program.

"Over ten thousand veterans have committed suicide since coming home from Iraq," I could hear an American-accented voice saying, as I folded my wife’s puppy dog-themed red pajamas.

Unnerved by what I’d just heard, I looked up at our television screen wondering if the channel was tuned to CNN. My suspicions proved correct. It wasn’t This was the morning broadcast of Russia Today, which, unsurprisingly, was covering America’s Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan conference, a reprise of the similarly-named 1971 event, in which Vietnam vets such as Senator John Kerry spoke out against the war in Southeast Asia.

As inclined as I was to dismiss this broadcast as a polemical exercise by an anti-American news channel, these figures didn’t seem all that far off. Our neighbor works as a physical rehabilitation specialist at a local VA hospital where the majority of her clients are soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories she’s told me about their state of mind, (and their bodies,) sound like obvious recipes for suicide.

Broadcast the day after the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this depressing disclosure capped off a stream of bad news issued forth throughout the week. From the rising US casualty rate (confirmed today at 4K) to the increasingly chaotic state of the economy, last week, it felt as though the entire country was taking inventory on the various ways in which the war has begun to tear at the fabric of life here.

This feeling is made more pronounced by the fact that my view is one that is both that of an insider as well as an outsider, as an Israeli as well as an American. Thus, reading all of the glowing reviews of Republican Presidential nominee John McCain’s visit to Israel last week in the Israeli press, especially the overt deference shown his candidacy, I felt myself growing increasingly uncomfortable with the correspondence between what Americans were waking up to and how we were reacting to McCain.

Though the Arizona Senator’s positions are largely indistinguishable from those of Clinton and Obama, there is a particular spirit to his approach to the region that, like Bush, is both ideologically and morally impervious to the mistakes America continues to make in Iraq. Or, to put it in the words of a US colleague, "Like Bush, McCain just doesn’t get it. His problem is that though his reasons would be different, he’d still be willing to do it all over again."

So, how might one explain the preference we showed for McCain? Is it ideological, or is it due to a justifiable anxiety about the mess that the Americans will leave Israel with if they withdraw from Iraq? Don’t discount how concern over how such a move might further empower Iran, (despite how the American invasion of the country has already done so), motivates such flawed judgment calls. Fear continues to play an enormous role in informing many Israeli positions on Diaspora politics.

The problem is that these kinds of dynamics do not necessarily play out well anymore abroad, especially in crisis situations like the one that America is presently undergoing. Everything that is wrong with the Bush Administration, and how it has run the country the past seven years is epitomized by how the situation in Iraq has impacted the US economy, and injured nearly thirty thousand American troops.  The figures are not as high as Vietnam, but the combination of events feels unprecedented.

This is how most Americans view the conflict, even if they believe the invasion was justified. Why make Israel complicit with this situation? This is the risk we take when we fail to properly qualify ourselves in relation to domestic American politics. This doesn’t mean we have to shut up about it. We can have our opinions, and share them. But only if we make a more serious effort to qualify our preferences with a more profound sense that as Israelis, we don’t take for granted the toll this war has taken on America.

Daniel Pearl as Metaphor

The killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 was of particular importance in reinforcing this understanding of Pakistan. A Jewish-American reporter engaged in a multiethnic marriage, Pearl’s murder by Islamic militants was promoted as an iconographic instance of the clash of civilizations thesis, transposed to America’s relationship with Pakistan. The ideological tensions inherent in emphasizing Pearl as though he were the US – multicultural, liberal, interfaith – to Pakistan as uncivilized, violent, politically corrupt and religiously intolerant – ought to be clear.

Pearl represented America, and its actualization of the ideals it was promoting on the War on Terror, which Pakistan, with its tribes, its madrassas, and its fundamentalists was in conflict with. This made Pearl a martyr-equivalent to domestic neoconservatives. If Americans wanted more nuance in news coverage of the country than Pearl’s remembrance allowed, they had to seek it out from foreign news sources such as the BBC and The Guardian.

- From a report I recently wrote about south Asian news coverage in the US