The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (47 page)

To say that battlefields are everywhere is to say that war is a miasma, a condition in which nations live, notably ours, which has several hundred bases around the world, in sixty-three countries, on every continent but Antarctica, and spends nearly as much on its military as all other nations put together. This condition—of pervasive war on a global scale—is invisible to most Americans, as is the imperial oddness of the premise that the United States may and must intervene globally. Reversing the situation to ask whether Korea or Kuwait should have military bases in the United States, or to imagine Cuba running an outlaw gulag in Florida, makes the uniqueness of the situation clear. An online article by geographer Jules Dufour, president of the United Nations Association of Canada, put it thus: “The surface of the earth is structured as a wide battlefield.” He added, “The U.S. tends to view the Earth surface as a vast territory to conquer, occupy and exploit. The fact that the U.S. Military splits the World up into geographic command units vividly illustrates this underlying geopolitical reality.” That is, shortly after 9/11 the Bush administration divided the world into USNORTHCOM, USAFRICOM, and so forth. Nothing was left out. And everything was under one command or another. It is all battlefield now, at least in concept and designation, every place on earth overseen by one military command or another, with implicit permission to act there, and potential for violence anywhere. The militarization of outer space is another arena few recognize. Paglen tells me that the next arena
for a U.S. military command is virtual space, though whether WEBCOM or FIBERCOM, or whatever it is to be called, will be a new branch of the military or a new department or departments in existing branches remains to be determined. In that territory, the battles, the exposures, and the secrecies will be purely about information, which has always been part of war’s arsenal, never more than now.

War is a series of landscapes, from the manufacturing, testing, training, and storage sites to the battlefields and hospitals—and cemeteries. Cemeteries for the official casualties of war, as well as those who died of contamination from some of its products, or from the violence it generates outside its official battlefields, or of the deformed financial landscape of a war economy. If there is a warscape, there is also a war economy, and it’s worth noting that when the economy collapsed in 2008, all sorts of cuts were proposed and many made to the federal budget, but despite the fact that the military was half that budget, a serious cutback was never broached in the mainstream. In 2009, Congressman Barney Frank remarked in the wake of that crisis and the widespread claims that we could not afford universal health care, “It is particularly inexplicable that so many self-styled moderates ignore the extraordinary increase in military spending. After all, George W. Bush himself has acknowledged its importance. As the December 20
Wall Street Journal
notes, ‘The president remains adamant his budget troubles were the result of a ramp-up in defense spending.’ ” People who were aghast at the idea of a $700 billion bailout hardly noted that the sum was only slightly larger than the annual military budget; universal health care was made to sound unaffordable by describing it as a trillion-dollar program, though that was the cost over a decade, with substantial benefits, and no one was saying that by such measures, a $6 or $7 trillion military budget was a burden, let alone an outrage.

There are other kinds of absence: the absence of funding for a host of other concerns, all of them constructive in opposition to war’s destructiveness, but our country has remained on a war footing since the Second World War began, ducking the “peace dividend” that was supposed to appear after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Essentially Americans are told that they cannot have health care, or decent education, or a well-cared-for
infrastructure and environment because defense comes first and takes all. If war is an act of violence to compel others to do our will, you can speculate on how the American people have been essentially subjugated by the war economy to keep paying for it, the way that Germany paid reparations after its defeats, the way that subject nations and colonies pay tribute to their masters. In this sense, we civilians are a conquered colony of an imperial war mission; this is the other war, the war within our society, the one we have so far largely lost, though the battle is ongoing. If it were visible the outcome could be different. And secrecy and invisibility are at the heart of modern warfare. William James imagined a war against war; if it is being fought today, it is fought in part by making the invisible visible. War is a stain that has sunk so deeply into the fabric of our society that it is now its ordinary coloring; we now live in war as a fish lives in water. Ours is a society of war, and a society at war with itself. This is so pervasive and so accepted that it is invisible. And its invisibility is a shield seldom ruptured. But it is ruptured here.

II: VISIBILITY

There are many kinds of invisibility. There is the invisibility of what is so taken for granted that few see it, the custom of the country, the water in which the fish swim. Thus to perceive that the United States is an empire on a permanent wartime basis is to be alien to, or become alienated from, the mainstream. There is the invisibility of what is literally out of sight on remote military bases and in weapons laboratories—and kept out of public scrutiny. There is the less geographical invisibility that is the secretive workings of the military and the related work of the Central Intelligence Agency—and here the word
intelligence
means covert information in a military context, as in “we have intelligence on the secret weapons labs.” That is, you can see the Pentagon, the massive building near the nation’s capitol, but you may not see much of what the Pentagon, the military, does. The unseen is itself a vast realm, the black budget of the Pentagon and the “black sites” Paglan documents. Most people don’t make much effort to know about this realm, and the knowledge that emerges is quickly forgotten or dismissed. “We are a peaceful nation” is a popular thing to say
in the United States. Those who might say this have been denied the intelligence to know what is done in their name and to decide democratically whether it should be done. Or they have ducked it. The blank spots on the map that Paglan writes about have their corollary in the blank spots in the mind and in public dialogue. We do not debate developing new systems of killing, the militarization of space, the cost of our military budget; and most of us know little or nothing about the programs in question. Then there is the invisibility of what is literally hard or impossible to see. This includes planes, space, shuttles, satellites, and drones above the earth, as well as forces—radioactive, biological, chemical—that are not visible to the naked eye.

Photography has made visible each kind of invisibility described here. A project like
The Americans
by émigré artist Robert Frank portrays the country in ways that it might not see itself, or wish to; artists are, at their best, honorary aliens seeing the familiar through strange eyes and the unseen in plain view. What is literally out of sight has been depicted many ways—Richard Misrach’s photographs of remote and off-limits military sites in the 1980s and 1990s (including the Enola Gay hangar in Utah and the Bravo 20 Bombing Range in Nevada) did so spectacularly. Systems are hard to photograph, but consequences are not, and wartime atrocity photographs are one means by which the workings of the military have been made visible. Finally, warfare itself has become increasingly technological, full of extra-human perception, with its infrared night-vision goggles, its sonar and radar, its spy satellites and encoded data. At least some of this can be made visible—notably the satellites Paglan has captured in his series “The Other Night Sky.” To see and to make visible is itself often a protracted process of education, research, investigation, and often trespassing and law breaking, a counter-spying on the intelligence complex.

Invisibility is in military terms a shield, and to breach secrecy is to make vulnerable as well as visible. Invisibility grants advantage over enemies unable to predict your actions or counterattack; it protects exclusive knowledge and technology; and it sets its actions and modes of operating out of reach of criticism and dissent. Invisibility and secrecy have been more than a strategy or a mode of operation for the military and the CIA for the past
six decades; they have been its essence. Daniel Ellsberg titled his memoir about making public the Pentagon Papers—the documents revealing presidential duplicity and disregard for democratic process and human life in the war on Vietnam—
Secrets
. He expected to spend the rest of his life in prison for revealing them. The revelation of secrets is sometimes considered treason—Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for sharing atomic-weapons secrets—and sometimes does provide practical aid to the enemy. Often disclosure instead provides disturbing truths to the civilians the military is supposed to serve. Perhaps the most common disclosure is that the military violates our most fundamental values in the course of what is usually claimed to be defending those values. Civilians who oppose the military are often seen as traitors. The United States as a nation is officially a democracy, but as an empire it is no such thing. Since the 1950s, government agencies have routinely spied upon, harassed, attacked, and imprisoned domestic dissenters and antiwar activists. Far worse sometimes awaits dissidents abroad. When such action becomes visible, legislators sometimes denounce and rein it in, but these are temporary fixes. Democracy depends on public participation, which itself depends on visibility. Invisibility is thereby undemocratic.

There is another kind of invisibility with another status: that of unseen crimes, suffering, and death. If invisibility protects perpetrators, visibility protects victims, so much so that much humanitarian and antiwar effort has focused on witness and visibility. A group called Witness for Peace took Americans to Central America during the bloody civil wars there to stand with civilians and prevent, or at least witness, the crimes against them to make the violent accountable. Photographic theory of the 1980s often proposed that the camera was indeed like a gun, that to photograph was to shoot or otherwise violate the subject. Susan Sontag took this stance when she suggested in her classic
On Photography
that we will become overexposed to horror and thereby inured to it. There is considerable, but far from comprehensive, truth to this position. Sontag herself modified it in
Regarding the Pain of Others,
in which she critiqued Virginia Woolf’s reflections, in
Three Guineas,
on pictures of war atrocities. She is still suspicious of our looking: “Perhaps the only people with the right to
look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.” But we too, when it is our money and our military, could try to alleviate suffering, if not that of the depicted sufferer, at least by preventing future such inflictions; we could withdraw the money or the machinery of violence. And we could learn from it existential lessons about compassion and practical lessons about our tax dollars at work. It is for this reason that militaries and the regimes they serve desire secrecy and invisibility.

There is more to Sontag’s argument. Such photographs could be used and have been used, she reflects, to denounce war altogether, but they could also be used to advocate for supporting one side against the other. That is, to argue that war itself is not criminal, but the enemy is: you can just as readily say that this atrocity is the evidence of the barbarism of your opponents as the barbarism of war, and almost every nation makes visible the enemy’s inhumanities and hides its own. Photographs are manipulable and they can be used to these ends. Still, Sontag advocates for making visible. She argues against the positions that “the appetite for such images is a vulgar or low appetite,” that we are all inured to what we see on television, the position that derides “the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as ‘war tourism.’” In the end she mourns a lack of imagination and empathy that pictures may not amend.

Sontag’s subject is pictures. Pictures may serve or fail to serve justice and humanity. There is another subject, namely the lack of pictures. The war in Iraq was fought at home as an exemplary war of propaganda, and the best counter-weapons were photographs. A nondescript spy-satellite photograph of an installation in Iraq was used in the United States and Britain to buttress claims that the country had “weapons of mass destruction,” a term that entered the media then and that seemed to carry an ominous weight that would have been dispelled by pointing out that nearly every country owns such weapons. At key moments, more iconic images were made visible as propaganda: President Bush on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner a few months
into the war that had years more to run; an incident in which the occupying army in Baghdad pulled down an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein; the capture of a shaggy, feral-looking Hussein in a pit near Tikrit, Iraq. Far more images were suppressed, for to see the war was to see its monstrosity, the death, pain, bodily destruction, waste, and mess at its heart, the horror that is denied by all the hero-welcoming rites of the culture. (Native American cultures, a friend tells me, often instead treat the returning soldier as someone who needs to be ritually cleansed, acknowledging the dirtiness of war.) This is true of most wars, perhaps more true of modern ones with their preponderance of civilian casualties. The U.S. press obligingly avoided horrific and even difficult images that were widely seen elsewhere in the world, creating a parallel universe in which those maimed children, those bloody streets, and body fragments did not exist.