I love the word sectarian. How it rolls off the tongue. So imagine my glee over the past months as this once abstruse word sired new terms of art: "sectarian violence" and "sectarian conflict."
In contradistinction to its arcane usage, in which "sectarian" denoted interdenominational strife between groups whose doctrinal and political differences were too obvious to mention (originally between Presbyterians and Independents, for example), our new terms track our overwhelming inability to provide such an unequivocal account, or any account at all. Newsweek tells us that "sectarian violence claimed another 27 Iraqi lives Sunday..." and that is all we need to hear.
We all know who is involved: Sunnis and Shiites. Baathists, maybe, or Kurdish nationalists, Saudi-Arabian al-Qaeda operatives or Iranian nationals. You know, them. Luckily, since "sectarian fighting" really just means infighting, we don't have to keep track of the multitude of ethno-religious-politico-cultural-historico-regional forces at work. We can just count the bodies of those not on our side and dub them the result of sectarian violence. We don't even need to be able to say whether the process that killed them looks more like gang violence or civil war. This is quite convenient because of course we cannot say; we have no idea.
Perhaps it is not so surprising that in the post-Feb. 22, 2006 world, after the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra was bombed, some shift in discourse, similar to the one that has brought this locution to the fore, would have to take place. One cannot expect a country that four years ago was captivated by the alleged joint conniving of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein like a bull by a muleta to have jumped into a detailed understanding of what is going on. The new emptiness into which our talk of events in Iraq has slipped is a simple consequence of our increasing ignorance.
I seriously doubt not just the American public's current success at knowing, but also its ability to know much about what is going on Iraq. It is certainly true that very few of us take a diligent interest in Iraqi events, but even those that do face quite a few challenges.
Contra widespread East-coast opinion, the administration's rhetoric is far from the top of the list. Luckily, the dominant tone U.S. government officials have taken towards Iraq in the last five years has been one marked primarily by fantasy and hubris. There is no difficulty sorting through the skeins of public government discourse for precisely the same reason that there is no utility in doing so.
There is a slightly more grounded intuition that the Administration's univocality and secrecy about the war, Iraq, and most other topics have cut off certain channels we might have had for information. But while these elements have certainly played a role, the problems of reporting on the Iraq war stretch far beyond any alleged saturation of the media by the Administration's fairy-tale message.
By their own account, the greatest challenge that news correspondents in Iraq face is the difficulty of finding out for themselves what is going on. Sectarian violence (read: violence) has been escalating in the country ever since Bush declared victory there several years ago, accelerated by events in Fallujah and Samarra. In response to increasing attacks on journalists (over 60 have now been killed, many of them Iraqi), the major news agencies, always prescient, effected a retreat to self-contained regions of safety that prefigured the more recent consolidation of American military power in Iraq into a small number of enduring Forward Operating Bases. Air strikes have drastically increased as a replacement for soldiers on patrol, as field commanders have been urged to keep from going anywhere too dangerous, so that American casualties - the closely watched and recorded figure - can be seen to fall.
Such bases are quite self-contained, providing their own water, electricity and other necessities. Indeed, since the output of most everything in Iraq, including such basic utilities, is still sporadic and quite a ways from prewar levels, Iraqi Army and police forces must rely on the U.S. military's private infrastructure and supply lines as well, for everything from guns and cars to clothes, blankets and daily meals.
For those journalists not embedded at such bases, the media equivalent of the U.S. military cloisters is the fabled "Green Zone," a "resort-like" international encampment in central Baghdad where journalists can roam freely outside of their respective without a security detail, bomb-proof cars, and security arrangements worked out in advance. Journalists so confined are increasingly performing "journalism by remote control," trying to figure out what is going on in a country becoming increasingly remote from them and their readers.
Ben Rolfe is a senior majoring in philosophy. He can be reached at brolfe01@trumpeter-store.tufts.edu.
