Fort Apache, Iraq

It’s gotten to the point where I haven’t found much new to read about Iraq lately. Somehow it all seems hopelessly “spun” by whatever partisan side is writing, and there seems to be no end in sight, and no way out. But I’ve been reading the July 13-27 issue of Rolling Stone, and in it Matt Taibbi offers a powerful recounting of his time as an embed in Iraq. The whole article is very much worth reading, but it was the last couple of paragraphs that really have stayed with me:

"The Iraq war, the central political event of this generation, this crazy flash point that will find a way to touch the lives of almost everyone in the world before it's over, is here to stay. We must come to grips with the reality of this monstrous, rapidly expanding thing that is fast taking on far greater dimensions and meaning than a mere foreign-policy blunder."

"This is the place where two existential dead ends have come around in a circle to meet in an irreconcilable explosion of violence -- the bureaucratic ennui and intellectual confusion of modern civilized man vs. the recalcitrant, prehistoric fanaticism of Al-Qaeda's literally cave-dwelling despotic mob. Human history has traveled in two exactly opposite directions for the last thousand years, and the supreme irony is that both paths led straight here, to this insane stalemate in the Mesopotamian desert.

Beyond the walls of the FOB the chaos of Iraq is just a fresh take on the same old totalitarian double-think from the last century that sent Nazis and Communists on crazed quests for paradise by sanctioning the violence buried in their dumb hearts. All bloody revolutions rely for their success on ideologies that dehumanize the nonbeliever, and these Islamic fanatics roaming the streets of Baghdad, piously chanting "Allahu Akbar!" as they watch the bodies of ice salesmen or infidel teenagers cook, are no different. On top of everything else, they're not even original.

Nothing like that abject savagery is evident on the American side. But there is something very unsettling in the way that the war effort has re-created the cozy isolationism of the American suburbs in its giant military outposts. It's a concentrated dose of our culture, where Mom, her tennis lesson awaiting, sends the kids off to school and Dad, the sweetest guy you'll ever meet, brings home a paycheck earned on the backs of industrial slaves from China.

Walking the peaceful streets of Anytown, you'd never guess this -- although at night the family purges unconscious guilt by watching morality plays like The O.C. and Desperate Housewives, in which Middle America ritualistically confesses to a sizzling sex life it's never come close to having. Our defining characteristic is that despite a creeping fear, we know ourselves very poorly, and have willfully turned a blind eye to the world outside our easy, cocoonlike consumer lives.

In the same way, our soldiers on the FOB may be forgiven for not understanding the discontent over the wall, because the "Iraq" of their experience is not much different from the cable-ready communities, with the Burger King just down the street, that many of them came from in the first place.

Life is good and happy down the rabbit hole, but outside it, something is going terribly wrong. What's horrifying about Iraq is that none of our people, not even the ones running things, seem to understand why that might be. It's a terrible thing to be blind. Terrible -- and frightening."