Ass first in Iraq
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
The first LRB issue of 2006 contains a version of Eliot Weinberger's "What I heard about Iraq" that covers 2005. Last year's was quite simply the best thing in the LRB and one of the most poignant and telling collection of impressions of the Iraq invasion. (And huge cheers to the LRB for making this available online.) His method is simple: in a series of short paragraphs, listed in approximately chronological order, he repeats verbatim news items and the testimony of politicians, soldiers, and civilians. The effect is to underscore the duplicity of those in the shrubbery that took the decision to send so many men to die in the cause of killing so many more. Damned from their own mouths, for the most part. There are about 150 paragraphs. Here is one that manages to cover resistance, torture, the failure of the rebuilding programme, and the US capacity for leaving behind generations of ill will in one short sentence:
I heard a man who had been in Abu Ghraib prison say: 'The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.'This may be the season of good will but I don't think he was referring to his stable.
