Most people consider Abu Ghraib to have provided the most horrific photography from Iraq and the larger conflict in which the US is engaged (including very compelling work by Errol Morris and a tremendous tour de force from the dearly missed Susan Sontag), but something about this shot has always struck me as even more deeply disturbing, because it defies all the apparent logic of the Global War on Terror (of which there is already tragically little). This photo vividly manifests all those ways that our moment in history is one in which, as Hamlet would say, time is out of joint.
The GWOT sets an organic and unaligned netforce advocating theocratic anti-modernism against a nation-state brandishing the most modern military apparatus in the world. Already the temporal hierarchy is askew since, ironically, this very modern phenomenon of the netforce is the military and diplomatic front for a reactionary model of morality and government. Yet opposing this disorienting conflation of the ancient and modern in makeshift uniforms and second-generation weaponry is a highly sophisiticated military-industrial complex purportedly defending modern conceptions of democratic liberalism from within the auspices of the most ancient model of sovereignty.
This same vertigo is at work in the lopsidedness in which the opposing parties mobilized for this conflict: the US rolled out the old playbook with a lousy production starring Colin Powell in the role of Adlai Stevenson; it dropped $500,000 on a camera-ready briefing center in Doha with plasma screens and a chrome-trimmed podium. On the other hand, Al Qaeda recruited and mobilized with the web; and long before we’d had a chance to coin the word “fameball” they’d already mapped out the strategy: nineteen plane tickets and plenty of cameras was all they needed.
There’s so much more that my head spins just thinking about it, and it’s all here in this photo.
After moments like the Fallujah massacre and the Hussein beheading we firmly patted ourselves on the back for Not Being Like Them, and yet here a uniformed member of the United States armed forces—the very same armed forces whose coffins George Bush preferred not to see photographed—trots out a dead and bloodied Al-Zarqawi, framed and matted as if he were headed to the Louvre.
And as if all this temporal disorientation weren’t enough already, this dead representative of an archaic morality, paraded about in some stone-age spectacle by the forces of Good and Modernity, has slapped atop his final memorial a digital red timestamp, so poignantly out of place that one wonders if the military didn’t actually have the Louvre in mind from the outset.
