Rumsfeld's Unknown Known, or Iraq's Initiation into Democratic Practice

“Nobody said this was going to be pretty.”

By Slavoj Zizek
Image by Rita Leistner/Redux

Does anyone still remember the unfortunate Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Saddam’s information minister who, in his daily press conferences, heroically denied even the most obvious facts for the sake of the party line? When US tanks were only hundreds of yards from his office he insisted on continuing his broadcast, claiming the televised shots of tanks on the Baghdad streets were just Hollywood special effects. Who in the wider world, entranced by the spectacle of the war, could help but react to the absurdity of such a person, who, via some obscene fidelity, did not know what was so obviously known? In all this, however, al-Sahaf did strike upon a strange truth; when confronted with the claims that the US army was already in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped back, “They are not in control of anything—they don’t even control themselves!” Later, when the news broke about Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, we got a glimpse of this very dimension—that Americans are not in control of themselves.

To assert that American forces are not in control of themselves is to assert that George Bush’s regime is not truly totalitarian, something proved by the very fact that Abu Ghraib came to light. In a genuinely totalitarian regime, the case would simply be hushed up. (In the same way, when the Iraq Survey Group did not find weapons of mass destruction it was a positive sign: a truly totalitarian power would have planted evidence to be “discovered.”) But what actually happened in response to Abu Ghraib was that, instead of instigating a cover-up, the Bush administration went on the defensive, emphasizing how the deeds of the soldiers were isolated crimes and not indicative of what America claims to stand for and fight for: the values of democracy, freedom, and personal dignity.

However, a number of disturbing facts complicate this simple picture. In the months before the release of the pictures, the Inter-national Red Cross was regularly bombarding US Army authorities in Iraq with reports about the abuses in military prisons there, and these reports were systematically ignored. It was not that US authorities were getting no signals about what was going on—rather that they only admitted the crime when (and presumably because) they were faced with its posture of transparency. One of the new torture-prevention measures was a prohibition against prison guards possessing digital cameras or cellular phones with video display—perhaps not so much to prevent further acts of photographic humiliation as to disallow the public circulation of the photos themselves. Also, the immediate reaction of the US Army command to the revelations of torture was noteworthy in this regard, to say the least: the explanation given at the time was that the soldiers were not properly taught the Geneva Convention rules about how to treat prisoners of war—as if to say that one must be taught that humiliating and torturing prisoners is a violation of common decency, not to mention international law.

But then again, this hasty obfuscation may have contained more truth than the Army had intended. There is something distinctly familiar about the type of humiliation performed by these otherwise ordinary Americans—more familiar perhaps than the notion of a few reservists going bad (in the sense of bad apples) in the desert. But what is this familiarity, or, why are the Geneva rules foreign? There is a significant contrast between the typical way prisoners were tortured under Saddam’s regime and the acts perpetrated by these inexperienced guards. In the previous regime, the goal was the direct and brutal infliction of pain, while the US soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. Essential to this is the recording of the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators included in the picture, their faces stupidly smiling beside the contorted naked bodies of the prisoners. The American soldiers compulsively recorded what Saddam worked to keep secret, and ironically it is this behavior that made the American acts vulnerable to exposure.

When I saw the well-known photo of a naked prisoner with a black hood covering his head, electric cables attached to his limbs, standing on a chair in a theatrical pose, my first reaction was that this was a shot of the latest performance art from Lower Manhattan. The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which cannot but bring to our minds the whole scope of American performance art and the “theatre of cruelty,” the photos of Mapplethorpe, the weird scenes in David Lynch films, or even the consensual humiliation of contestants on popular reality shows such as Fear Factor.

And it is this feature that brings us to the crux of the matter: to anyone acquainted with the reality of life in the United States, the photos immediately brought to mind an obscene underside of US popular culture, say, the initiation rituals of torture and humiliation known as “hazing” that one has to undergo in order to be accepted into a closed community. Do we not see similar photos at regular intervals in the US press, when some scandal explodes in an army unit or in a high school campus, where an initiation ritual went overboard and soldiers or students got hurt beyond a level considered tolerable, were forced to assume a humiliating pose, to perform debasing gestures (like penetrating their anal opening with a beer bottle in front of their peers), to suffer being pierced by needles, etc.? Such humiliation would even be familiar to Bush himself, because of his membership in Yale’s infamous and secretive Skull and Bones society—quite apart from questions about his involvement in the torture policies the world witnessed at Abu Ghraib.

Of course, the obvious difference is that in the case of such initiation rituals, one makes a free choice to undergo them, knowing what to expect, and with the clear aim of gaining membership. This involves both being accepted into an exclusive inner circle, and, of course, being justified in performing the same rituals on new members. Abu Ghraib is obviously a different case: the ritual humiliations were not a price to be paid by the prisoners in order to be accepted as “one of us,” but, on the contrary, act as the very mark of their exclusion.

But this is not to shift the focus too soon from the topic at hand: choosing to undergo a humiliating ritual of initiation is exemplary of false free choice. This instance of false consent and the justification of violence recalls a singularly disgusting ritual from the era of popular anti-Black violence in America’s Old South: a Black man is cornered by white thugs and then compelled to perform an aggressive gesture (“Spit into my face, boy!”; “Call me a piece of shit!”). Once the victim complies, the aggressors use the action to justify the beating or lynching that results. Ultimately, the preeminent cynical message is sent by applying to the prisoners the properly American initiation ritual: if you want to be one of us you must first have a taste of the darkest aspect of our way of life—the public exposure of oneself as an object of humiliation.

Recall Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992), a drama about two US Marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The case revolves around the so-called “Code Red,” the unwritten rule of a military community that authorizes the clandestine nighttime beating of a fellow-soldier who has violated or failed to meet the community’s standard. Such a code condones an act of transgression. This act is illegal, yet at the same time, perhaps because the transgression is so radical, it reaffirms the cohesion of the group. It has to remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable—in public, everyone pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence. In fact, the climax of the film occurs when the character played by Tom Cruise realizes that the exposure of this code is the only way he can prevent the burden of guilt falling solely on the shoulders of the Marines he is defending, and chooses to embody the superiority of the external legal code. He thereby provokes an explosive polemic from the commander (played by Jack Nicholson), which in turn serves to expose the fact that it was the commander’s own enforcement of communal code which caused the illegal acts of torture, humiliation, and murder.

While violating the explicit rules of community, such a code represents the community in its purest sense, via pressuring the individual members to enact group identification. In contrast to the written explicit law, such an obscene code is essentially spoken. The problem is that the Abu Ghraib tortures do not fit into either of these two options: while they cannot be reduced to simply the evil acts of individual soldiers, they were, of course, also not directly ordered—they were legitimized by a specific and perverted version of the already obscene “Code Red” rules. To claim that they were the acts of “mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field”A is nonsense akin to the claim that lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan were the acts of traitors to Western Christian civilization, and not the outburst of its own obscene underside—or that acts of child abuse committed by Catholic priests are acts of “traitors” to Catholicism. Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating acts of torture, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture; they got a taste of the obscene underside of the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom. No wonder, then, that it is gradually becoming clear how the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated matter, but a widespread practice: on May 6, 2005, Donald Rumsfeld had to admit that the photos rendered public are just the “tip of the iceberg,” and that there are much stronger things to come, including videos of rape and murder.

As to the institutional underpinnings of the Abu Ghraib “excess,” by early 2003, the US government, in a secret memo, had approved a set of procedures to subject prisoners in the “war on terror” to physical and psychological pressure as a means of assuring their “cooperation” (the memo is fantastically Orwellian: long exposure to strong light is called “visual stimulation”). This is the reality behind Rumsfeld’s dismissive statement that the Geneva Convention rules are “out of date” with regard to today’s warfare.

In a recent debate on NBC about the fate of Guantanamo prisoners, one of the arguments for the ethical and legal acceptability of their status was that “they are those who were missed by the bombs.” That is: since they were the target of US bombing and accidentally survived it, and since this bombing was part of a legitimate military operation, one cannot condemn their fate when they were taken prisoner following combat—whatever their situation, it is better, less severe, than being dead. This is, incidentally, the reasoning concealed behind every claim that the American torture is preferable to that of Saddam’s regime.

Yet this reasoning tells us more than it intends to: it transforms the prisoner into one of the living dead (their right to live forfeited by being a legitimate target of lethal bombings). They become cases of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, the one who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, his life no longer counts. It is the inverse of the problematic reasoning that informs the movie Double Jeopardy (1999): when imprisoned for murdering one who is in fact still alive, once the sentence is served one has effectively gained the legal right to actually perpetrate the original crime, since one cannot be punished twice for a crime in the eyes of the law. If the Guantanamo prisoners are located in the space “between the two deaths,” occupying the position of homo sacer, legally dead while biologically still alive, US authorities are also in a kind of in-between legal status which forms the counterpart to homo sacer: their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law—perhaps an unfortunate extension of the thinking which holds acts of war as justified at all. In any case, the US authorities operate within the law in the sense that the law itself contains an empty space. And the recent disclosures about Abu Ghraib only display the full consequences of locating prisoners in this place “between the two deaths.”

With increasing acceptance a similar legal nowhere, or utopia, forms the underside of global economics: the strategy of outsourcing—giving over the dirty processes of material production (but also publicity, design, accountancy) to another company via a subcontract. In this way, one can easily avoid ecological and health rules: if the production is done in, say, Indonesia, where the ecological and health regulations are less strict than those in the West, the Western global company that owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for the violations of the subcontractor, who, from their perspective, is merely complying perfectly with the existing laws, which, while perhaps flawed, are outside of the control and responsibility of the original owner of the contract.

Are we not getting something homologous in regards to torture? Is torture not also being outsourced, enacted in Third World territory, and even left to Third World allies of the US, which can do it without worrying about legal problems or public protest? Perhaps it is the acceptance of corporate outsourcing that has led to the audacity with which torture is recommended in the American media. Jonathan Alter, in a Newsweek article immediately following 9/11, stated “we can’t legalize torture; it’s contrary to American values,” but nonetheless concludes that “we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.”

This is now an essential practice of First World democracy: the practice of outsourcing the dirty and necessary underside to legal utopias. We can see how this debate about the need to apply torture was by no means academic: today Americans do not even trust their allies to do the job properly, especially given the political value of security, and therefore it is the practices of the US government itself which must become “less squeamish.” This is a quite logical result, once we recall how the CIA has for decades instructed Latin American and Third World American military allies in the practice of torture. And it is not only in this regard that the West no longer trusts the less enlightened aspects of life to be borne by the primitive Third World. In this context we can see in American fundamentalism another new resolve—taking on the previously unpalatable absurdities of religious faith. Perhaps in response to American televangelist Jerry Falwell’s claim that 9/11 was caused by “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians,” American culture is taking back the business of salvation and getting “right with God”—and in so doing adding cataclysm-proofing to the new security initiative.

In March 2003, none other than Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the “unknown unknowns,” the threats to operational success about which we cannot even hazard a guess, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows there are dangers in the “unknown knowns” as well. These are the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we enact but don’t allow ourselves to see, and which—via practices such as outsourcing—are becoming increasingly easy to ignore. In this context the assurance of the US Army command that no “direct orders” were issued to humiliate and torture the prisoners is ridiculous: of course no such orders were issued, since, as everyone who knows army life is aware, this is not how such things are done. There are no formal orders, nothing is written, just unofficial pressure, hints, and directives delivered in private, legally fictitious ambiguities reminiscent of the paper trail of the “final solution.” This is the increasingly innovative practice of sharing a dirty secret.

Bush was thus wrong: what we are getting when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages is the true image of “American values,” the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the US way of life. To invoke Samuel Huntington, these photos show a clash between Arab and American civilizations—not as a clash between barbarism and respect for human dignity, but as a clash between anonymous brutalism and good old American spectacle. It is the face of the “democratic” practice of torture, a total lack of guilt by way of remaining ignorant of what is known. And Rumsfeld, who certainly has mastered the double-think of press conferences at least as much as his Baathist counterpart Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, perhaps simply doesn’t know that the following is perfectly reasonable for his fellow Americans: if Iraq really wants to join the First World, it should be equally prepared to undergo the appropriate initiation.

One has here a proof of how, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, every clash of civilizations is the clash of the underlying barbarisms. The barbarism of sovereignty shows itself in Abu Ghraib: laws do not really bind me, I can do to you whatever i want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide so, I can destroy you if I say so. The universal and unconditional rule of Law can only be sustained by a sovereign power that reserves for itself the right to proclaim a state of exception, i.e., to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself—if we deprive the Law of its excess that sustains it, we lose the Law itself.

We can see that the idea of just preemption itself depends on a willful ignorance of democracy’s darker side. And we should not assume that an ignorance of democracy’s darker side is unrelated to the thought of a just preemption. Here another kind of lack of vision is present in the context that surrounds the Iraq War. There is now an invisible Enemy that legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike, similar to other Enemies in the twentieth century because it is also universally opposed, but distinct in that its face is never known. Precisely because the threat is virtual, the goal is always to strike before it comes into being—otherwise it is too late. In other words, the omnipresent invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all-too-visible protective measures of Security, which themselves pose an even more substantial threat to democracy and human rights. With the war on terror, the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization—not of itself, but of the measures against itself. Again we see the significance of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the power that presents itself as being all the time under threat, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power.

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