Thursday, May 13, 2004 (SF Chronicle)
Is this war, or ghastly reality TV?
Joan Ryan


    We awoke this week to the war of our nightmares.
    A line seemed to be crossed. Something came undone.
    As the jarring photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners were
still sinking in, another horrific image landed in our living rooms. Five
masked captors are seen on video about to behead a 26-year-old American
communications worker from Pennsylvania named Nick Berg. The full video,
available on the Internet, shows the killer holding up Berg's head like a
trophy. In a statement, one of the captors says the execution is payback
for the humiliation and torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
    "You will receive nothing from us but coffin after coffin slaughtered
in this way," he says on the videotape. Addressing Bush, he says, "Your
worst days are coming, with the help of God."
    This isn't 1991 and the Persian Gulf's video game images of tiny
bursts of light in the night sky and smart bombs detonating grainy buildings. That
war was a computer war, fought from a comfortable distance, delivered to
the folks back home mostly in diagrams and maps and narrated, from New
York news studios, by retired generals on retainer.
    There is something particularly unsettling and ominous about the
nature of this war. It is both unprecedented and familiar, high-tech and primitive.
Instead of battle lines on a map, this war shows us real people who have
sisters and goofy high school friends and posters of muscle cars in their
rooms back home. It shows how ordinary folks can be reduced to brutes by
a war and a leadership that casts the enemy as evildoers undeserving of
basic human treatment.
    This war is a home movie of "Lord of the Flies": chaotic, brutal and
as intimate as a stranger's breath on our necks.
    It was especially jarring to me to see female soldiers take part in
the brutalities at Abu Ghraib. I wanted to think, however unfairly or
irrationally, that women are better than that. When I mentioned this to a
man I know, he said, "Men are better that, too. America is better than that."
    The agenda of this war was unclear from the start -- weapons of mass
destruction, terrorism, liberation, the spread of democracy? Now,
whatever might have been the rationale has been swallowed up in the rising tide of
deadly insurgencies and retaliations. We won the war with such
predictable efficiency that it is so dismayingly astounding that we could be so
thoroughly unprepared for the peace.
    When Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba delivered his findings on prisoner
abuse at Abu Ghraib, he told Congress the mistreatment resulted from faulty
leadership, a "lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no
supervision" of the troops. The entire postwar occupation is a lot like
that prison.
    We were unprepared for the scope of the job. We were poorly trained
for the demands of it. We have been guided by, at best, murky goals and
uneven leadership. Just as the images from Abu Ghraib seemed to confirm what
many Iraqis believed about the godless brutality of the United States, so has
the war itself seemed to confirm what many around the world have come
believe: that the U.S. is imperialist, impulsive and incompetent, that we
are no longer the guys in the white hats.
    There is no reason to disbelieve the Islamic extremists who say they
will keep slaughtering Americans. And there is no reason to disbelieve House
Republican Leader Tom DeLay, who said of Berg's killers, "We are not
going to rest until every last one of them is in a cell or a cemetery." So the
question, as American sons and daughters die, and Iraqi civilians grow
angrier and more hateful, is how does this end? How do we stop the
bloody, fever-dream escalation of a war that has no clear purpose?
    That question, more than anything, feeds the growing pit in my
stomach.
    I was reminded this week of what Robert McNamara, the secretary of
defense during the Vietnam War, told Time magazine in a 1991 interview. He was
talking about his regrets and mistakes. "Because of misinformation and
misperceptions," he said of getting entangled in a conflict as messy as
Vietnam, "there are misjudgments as to where a nation's interests lie and
what can be accomplished."
    What regrets will be voiced when the soldiers of this Lord of the
Flies war have turned gray? What will be the answer when we ask what our
nation's interests were in this war and what was accomplished?
    Something came undone this week. Some line was crossed. The moral
center, whatever it might once have been, failed to hold. The nightmare is on us.
    E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.
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