American innocence

Margot Jefferson is one of the NY Times' greatest assets. She always writes beautifully and pulls into her essays long forgotten literary frontiersmen and women. Today, she writes about Constance Rourke and Zora Neale Hurston, two cultural critics from the 20s and 30s who helped make studying American myths and black culture and history respected fields. In the essay Jefferson writes something that struck me,

Rourke is a quiet writer, but her observations can sting. The American, she notes, "envisages himself as an innocent in relation to other peoples; he showed the enduring conviction during the Great War." And in most wars that followed, a modern reader can add.

Indeed, it's an enduring conviction during the Iraq war, certainly. If Americans stopped, en masse, to think about what is being perpetrated in that country, in our name, we would collectively march on Washington and demand an account. But we don't. Torture was the result of a few bad apples. We are killing exclusively "insurgents." The elections, dammit, look at the elections! Democracyyyyyyyy!

Nothing dents the armor of our sense of innocence. Even the notion that, in a war entered into on the premise that the enemy possessed chemical and other weapons of mass destruction -- weapons never found -- our troops are using...chemical weapons.

They claimed the flammable material was only used to illuminate enemy positions or create smokescreens but US soldiers had written about the practice in an internal army magazine and a spokesman later confirmed white phosphorous had been deployed as an incendiary weapon during the assault on Fallujah.

The admission backs up claims made in an documentary by the Italian state broadcaster, RAI, which alleged Iraqi civilians had died of burns caused by the weapon.

Witnesses described other victims, including women and children, left with "caramelised" skin as a result of their injuries.

The Ministry of Defence said today that British troops have stocks of the chemical and have used it during operations in Iraq to create smokescreens.

But unlike the US, the UK is a signatory to protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which prohibits the use of the substance as an incendiary weapon against civilians or in civilian areas.

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell said: "A vital part of the effort in Iraq is to win the battle for hearts and minds.

"The use of this weapon may technically have been legal, but its effects are such that it will hand a propaganda victory to the insurgency."

But Americans will remain blissfully innocent, smug in the "knowledge" that our boys are only killing bad guys. Trouble is, "by any means necessary" is being taken to its logical conclusion.