Imaginary Fiends

What to make of it? All soldiers' talk is difficult to believe, goes the proposition, and some truths are just as incredible, thus there is some truth to soldiers' talk. The general experience, cultural impressions, corroborate. But the conclusion does not logically follow the premises, which is why validity ever demands proof.

Exhibit A is one Army private who has gotten himself into a lot of trouble. He deployed to Iraq within the last year and, from his post, submitted to leftward magazine The New Republic a series of accounts, since abbreviated, from time on duty. The private's articles were lurid and derogatory of men in war, written in a narrative conscious of that and contrived to ensure readers were, too. The private's articles were also false, according to a statement from the military — and dozens of refutations from communities of readers and some journalists on the right who as a group prompted the Army's investigation.

The soldier's game should have ended at a retraction from The New Republic. Instead the published tales are an introduction to a larger story, as The New Republic, along with a diffuse part of the left, haven't disavowed the fictionist, while sounding less and less concessionary to fact than a goodness of fit. Disapprobation of the military, when one listens in, sharply moves from broad epithets to ambiguous charges of atrocities; probably because the view of the former is preconditioned by certitude in the latter. One of the private's stories told of drivers of tracked vehicles habitually chasing down stray dogs. No one familiar with the vehicles, or the relationships of the men inside them, says it could have been possible as described. And from the direction of the left slides this: worse acts have been carried out, so why not a few dead dogs?

Exhibit B is an Iraqi interpreter whom embedded reporter Michael Totten interviewed two weeks ago. In a leading photograph the native, "Hammer," is wrapped up like the Invisible Man, all the better to conceal his identity from those who would kill him for wanting to live like a Westerner. Totten asks Hammer two basic questions: What was life like? and What has life been like? Hammer speaks floridly, and with his recitation of crimes — first Saddam's, then those of the new state's enemies — sounds cagey. A well-meaning tramp? He goes roundabout, and some abominations are detailed.

Held to the same standard as the private's pulp, Hammer's individual claims are without evidence, and so it should be conceded when a doubter asserts it. But such is done by ignoring the categorical differences between the American military and the natures of the Hussein regime, al Qaeda and the Mahdi gangs; all three to which violence and cruelty are essential, the organizations' agents having institutionally recorded torture and murder.

Further clarification is unnecessary: the respective environments of Exhibits A and B are in patently separate classes. The New Republic hasn't budged in deference to this, however, because its editors seem to believe that A and B aren't so far apart. The thrust of the articles, after all, was the ethical miasma, the dehumanization, of armed conflict. If so, The New Republic may not be temporizing to protect employments but to preserve a wartime mythos, which in popular culture abounds. Most heartbreaking is that the private may have made it all up because he couldn't find in war exactly what he wanted, and so tried to novelize the last quarter-century's revisionist cinema, the kind of emulation induced by historical pornography.

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