Berg Execution Escalates Iraq Media War

by William O. Beeman

(PNS) -- The widely disseminated video of the gruesome beheading of Nicholas Berg demonstrates the degree to which the current conflict in Iraq has become a hollow war of media-driven symbolism and images, rather than one of substance-one, moreover, that the United States is losing.

Berg's decapitation was shocking, but its main purpose was to create the occasion for a cynically and brilliantly, calculated show. It was literally a "snuff film," designed to horrify and titillate. Eventually, Berg's murderers knew that if they remained significantly anonymous, the United States itself would eventually be blamed for the crime; and indeed, these diabolically clever, media-savvy operators have proved correct. With no one specific to point to, it is President Bush and his administration to whom the blame for Berg's death is slowly being attached.

The war has proceeded to the point that all current imagery is polarized and polarizing. It is polarized because it is designed to play to extremists rather than the moderate core of the citizenry in both the United States and the Arab world. It is polarizing because it creates monolithic, monstrous enemies, utterly undifferentiated in the eyes of those doing the attacking, whether they be American or Iraqi.

The result is that nothing is ever taken at face value, and nothing is proportionate. All actions are elevated to become mythic, dramatic enactments of the struggle between absolute good and absolute evil at every turn. An accidental weapon discharge from Iraqi forces? Evil attacking freedom. A stray shell from an American soldier? An oppressor of the Iraqi people.

In this strange, media-dominated world, every action is set up in advance, played for the media and designed to have maximal rhetorical impact. President Bush mouths empty platitudes about fighting the "enemies of freedom" for the benefit of his extremist Republican core constituency. The heinous thugs carrying out acts such as the Berg beheading do so to indicate their willingness to exact a crowd-pleasing revenge on Americans recast as colonists, crusaders and captors.

Both positions are dishonorable, for they bypass completely the welfare both of the combatants and the innocent citizens who are slaughtered in the fray.

In the never-never land of reified images and rhetoric, all Iraqis who oppose the American occupation are labeled by President Bush as terrorists. Little wonder that the American military, taking their cue from the commander in chief, rounds up innocent farmers and urbanites wholesale, and tortures them at random just to see whether some crumb of information might fall about those who are planting bombs and shooting soldiers.

When all Americans become colonist, Crusader captors, then anyone can be killed at random by the resistance, since to kill one American is to attack them all. Beheading a hapless innocent like Berg is equivalent to beheading President Bush, and if Americans are revolted at the sight, so much the better.

Trouble arises when the images are no longer in the control of those who want to manage them. Then the media war spins out of balance. Such is the case with the photographs of humiliated and tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. It was clear that White House officials were not nearly so upset at the actions of the American soldiers in the prison as they were at the fact that they were not able to control the images. Administration flaks such as Fox News Host Bill O'Reilly went so far as to declare CBS "unpatriotic" for airing the photographs.

Because the Bush White House lost media control over these horrific images, the climate for the Berg beheading was created. What would have been an international outcry against the Iraqi perpetrators of this barbarism was muted significantly by the Abu Ghraib barbarism.

What will both sides do next to capture the media limelight? The United States is in an almost unredeemable symbolic position at this point. The Abu Ghraib pictures were ruinously damaging both for America's reputation in the Arab world, but more importantly, for the administration's reputation before the American electorate.

For a nation that has the most sophisticated media industry in the world, America has been incompetent in the Middle East -- largely because Washington officials have never tried to understand the discourse that drives the cultures of the region. In an earlier age, Americans didn't understand the rhetoric of powerful Middle Eastern leaders. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was able to banish the United States into the outer darkness of the Middle East's moral universe by equating America with the Great Satan.

Today, Americans fail at understanding the power of visual media imagery wielded by the Iraqi opposition. By besting Washington in the media game, the Iraqi oppositionists have been able to once again cast America into the void. The video image of Berg's decapitation was the seal on American crimes. It will be preserved in horror, fascination and triumph as another nail in the coffin of the abortive American Iraqi adventure.