One death is a tragedy. Six hundred thousand deaths is a statistic.
It was only one senseless death among hundreds of thousands of senseless deaths. But this time everybody noticed. A 17-year-old Kurdish girl named Dooa Aswad Dekhil, born into the Yazidi religious sect, is surrounded by a mob of over 2000 people led by members of her own family. As punishment for eloping with a Sunni boy, also a Kurd, and for converting to Sunni Islam, she is stoned to death. Patrick Cockburn of the London Independent gives the following description. "Many in the crowd hold up their phone cameras to record the scene. Nobody tries to help her as she is battered to death." The video is posted on the Internet and quickly goes viral, that most primitive of tribal rituals, the honor killing, recorded and distributed by the latest in western technology.
A week later, the international human rights organization Save the Children released a study. From 1990 to 2007, from the beginning of Operation Desert Storm to the present, Iraq suffered the worst increase of any nation in the deaths of children under 5. Iraqi child mortality had increased 150%. In 2005, 122,000 Iraqi children died before the age of 5 and over half of these were newborn babies. Very few people took notice, even though the report was the subject of articles in all the major newspapers including the New York Times. On the contrary, it fell into the memory hole along with those 500,000 Iraqi children who died in the 1990s under the UN sanctions and along with the medial holocaust in southern Iraq caused by dust made toxic by depleted uranium from American artillery shells.
My grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War, and a racist, used to talk about why the United States should never get into a land war in Asia. "If you took all the Chinese in the world and lined them up single file in front of a 50 caliber machine gun," he used to say, it would take you 600 years to kill them. Dante Allighieri, in the Third Canto of the Inferno looks out on the desolate plain at the souls of the angels who took no side in the war between God and Satan and those humans who believed in and fought for nothing and remarks he "had not thought death had undone so many." According to the United Nations, 50,000 children a day die from malnutrition and from curable diseases like diarrhea. The liberal Christian writer Jim Wallis compared the number to 100 jumbo jets a day being loaded up with children and crashed into the ground. Joseph Stalin once said that one death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
It's the policy of the United States government and the corporate media to make sure Iraq stays that way. Even if the military suddenly decided to allow unembedded journalism, even if they did decide to allow Al Jazeerah back into the country, it's probably too dangerous for the typical western journalist and there's already been too much propaganda from right-wing websites and media outlets for the reporting of any unembedded Arab or Muslim journalist to gain much traction. Western aid workers have also been either murdered, as in the case of Marla Ruzicka, Margaret Hassan or Sergio Vieira de Mello, or simply driven out of the country. What's more, the typical American is no longer a liberal. He's a neoconservative. Far from being outraged at the mass murder of Arabs in the same way his father would have been in the 1960s at the mass murder of the Vietnamese, the typical American thinks those sand niggers and camel jockeys are getting what they deserved as payback for 9/11.
To these already formidable obstacles, add two more. The American military in Vietnam was a draftee army and reflected the political ideology of Americans as a whole. The American military in Iraq is a mercenary army and overwhelmingly conservative. The anti-war movement (or what's left of it) is unlikely to have much contact with returning vets from Iraq. The individual soldiers who do join groups like Iraq and Afghanistan vets against the war are almost always the exception that proves the rule. Vietnam was also a Catholic and Buddhist country where American men and the Vietnamese people, in spite of the conflict, mixed easily. Iraq, by contrast, is a Muslim country, and any American soldier who tried to date an Iraqi woman would probably wind up getting his throat cut so his racist assumptions about Arabs or Muslims (and conversely the assumptions that Arabs and Muslims have about Americans) are unlikely to be undermined by any real personal contact.
And yet a single important cultural event can sometimes overcome the worst kind of cultural impasse. History does not move in a steady line. On the contrary, it's a violent, jagged line of screeching halts and breakneck curves. The right book, movie, photo, anti-war riot can grab the attention of the crowd like a spectacular auto accident on the side of the road and bring traffic to a halt.
The most significant cultural event leading up to the Civil War was not a slave narrative or a series of hearings in Congress. It wasn't a great slave rebellion or riot up north. It wasn't a meticulously crafted study with statistics and first hand testimony. It was a novel, a rather simplistic melodrama written by an upper class woman from Maine.
Harriet Beacher Stowe had not traveled extensively in the south and was not an expert on the subject of slavery. And yet it was the fact that she had had little personal experience with slavery that allowed Uncle Tom's Cabin to have such an enormous impact on the way Americans saw the politics of slavery that Lincoln was reputed to have said, on meeting Stowe, "so you're the little woman who started this great war". Instead of giving white Americans the "facts" Stowe re-imagined slavery as a familiar Christian melodrama. While black nationalists would later mock Uncle Tom as a racist stereotype, for Stowe's contemporaries, Tom was no caricature. He was the embodiment of Jesus himself. There was no longer a "negro question". Slavery was no longer seen as a "problem" to be solved. It was seen as a great evil, the moral responsibility of every decent human in the United States being to oppose.
Like the story of Dooa Aswad Dekhil, it took one million deaths and magically transformed them into one.
In other words, it's not facts or access to Iraq for the corporate media or exposing the occupation as a failure. Americans already know this. They know Bush is an incompetent. They know he's a war criminal and a liar. But they still see Iraq as a problem not a moral dilemma. They still see the war as incompetently fought, and not evil. They still see the Iraqi people as something less than human. As an overwhelmingly Christian culture, Americans cannot and will not see the Iraqis, a non-Christian people, as their equals until somebody is able to reframe the occupation of Iraq in Christian terms. Anti-Semitism in the United States ended when Americans became aware of the Holocaust and recast the Second World War as a Christian morality play, with Hitler standing in for Satan and the 6 million Jews transformed into Jesus suffering on the cross. The occupation of Iraq will not end until this strange, Islamic culture, these brown skinned foreigners Americans see as somehow evil and satanic are seen as Christ like. It's time for some artist, some filmmaker, some novelist, or some Democratic presidential candidate to give us an Uncle Tom's Cabin for Iraq.