TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040191/0401640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 138 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 82

A Moment for the Dead


By Lance Morrow


    The Pentagon ordered 16,099 body bags to be shipped to the
Persian Gulf to bring home dead Americans. In the end, 15,773
of the bags were not necessary.

    The Iraqi army would have needed -- what? One hundred
thousand body bags? More? No one knows or will ever know. No
one has counted the Iraqi corpses. Many of them were buried in
the sand, without ceremony; some have been taken care of by
vultures.

    That so few soldiers in the coalition died somehow seemed
to Americans a vindication. It was even a return of their
shining self, of Buffalo Bill, who (e.e. cummings wrote) could
"ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break
onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat." The unspoken text was
this: the nation had recovered its immunity, its divine favor,
or anyway its gift for doing things right. The victory was as
satisfying as anything Americans have done together since
landing on the moon.

    Would it be seemly to have a moment of silence for the Iraqi
corpses?

    It is not inconsequential to kill 100,000 people. That much
life suddenly and violently extinguished must leave a ragged
hole somewhere in the universe. One looks for special effects
of a metaphysical kind to attend so much death -- the whoosh
of all those souls departing. But many of them died
ingloriously, like road kill, full of their disgrace, facedown
with the loot scattered around them. The conquered often die
ignominiously. The victors have not given them much thought.

    Still, killing 100,000 people is a serious thing to do. It
is not equivalent to shooting a rabid dog, which is, down deep,
what Americans feel the war was all about, exterminating a
beast with rabies. All those 100,000 men were not
megalomaniacs, torturers and murderers. They did not all commit
atrocities in Kuwait. They were ordinary people: peasants,
truck drivers, students and so on. They had the love of their
families, the dignity of their lives and work. They cared as
little for politics, or less, than most people in the world.
They were, precisely, not Saddam Hussein. Which means, since
Saddam was the coalition's one true target in all of this, that
those 100,000 corpses are, so to speak, collateral damage. The
famous smart bombs did not find the one man they were seeking.

    The secret of much murder and evildoing is to dehumanize the
victim, to make him alien, to make him Other, a different
species. When we have done that, we have prepared ourselves to
kill him, for to kill the Other, to kill a snake, a roach, a
pest, a Jew, a scorpion, a black, a centipede, a Palestinian,
a hyena, an Iraqi, a wild dog, an Israeli . . . it's O.K.

    If Saddam Hussein was a poisonous snake in the desert, and
he had 1 million poisonous snakes arrayed around him, then it
was good sense to drop bombs and kill 100,000 snakes and thus
turn back the snake menace.

    But, of course, the 100,000 Iraqis were not snakes.

    To kill 100,000 people and to feel no pain at having done
so may be dangerous to those who did the killing. It hints at
an impaired humanity, a defect like a gate through which other
deaths may enter, deaths no one had counted on. The unquiet
dead have many ways of haunting -- particularly in the Middle
East, which has been accumulating the grievances of the dead
for thousands of years.

    In any case, there is not, or there should not be, such a
thing as killing without guilt -- especially not mass killings
without guilt. When people kill without remorse, we call them
insane. We call them maniacs, serial murderers.

    Americans almost unconsciously regard the victory as a kind
of moral cleansing: the right thing. But reality and horror
have not been rescinded. All killing is unclean. It has upon
it a stain that technology cannot annul or override. Americans
are not omnipotent, not all virtuous, they should remind
themselves, they do not bestride the world. Vainglory is one
of the sillier postures: it invariably precedes the rude
awakening. It is the sort of whooping glee that, in Daffy Duck
cartoons, goeth before the fall.

    Did the dead Iraqis need to be killed?

    In the circumstances, yes.

    Having killed them, how do the victors feel?

    They feel great.

    In Texas lore, there is a defense for murder that goes like
this: "He needed killing." Is there anything wrong with feeling
great about killing 100,000 Iraqis who needed killing?

    There is nothing wrong with feeling relieved. It is not
required, it is not human nature, to mourn the soldiers who
were arrayed to kill you. Killing the Iraqis meant that
Americans and their partners did not have to face them on the
battlefield and maybe die. As it was, the Iraqis who were left
in the field surrendered almost without a fight.

    Like some martial equivalent of the Reagan years, the
victory in the gulf makes Americans feel better about
themselves. It was splendid and necessary but also unreal --
an action-adventure that, like most movies, was divided into
three chapters, with decisive turning points: 1) the Iraqi
invasion and the buildup of coalition forces; 2) the onset of
the air war; and 3) the ground war and its denouement. The
victory came with such merciless ease that on the winners' side,
the deeper levels of experience (nobility, sacrifice,
endurance and so on) were not engaged. The victors now
celebrate mostly their relief that they have escaped what might
have been. By the Fourth of July, the glorious moment will seem
a long time ago.

    The prospects going into the war were horrifying: the fourth
largest army in the world, commanded by a thug whom we thought
cunning at the time and even invested with satanic powers.
Saddam was armed with chemical weapons and was working on the
nuclear kind. All those dark possibilities gave the coalition,
in effect, a license to kill. The killing was very well done.
I hope it does not give us too much pleasure.