Forgetting Iraq and the Discourse of Responsibility:

There are No Longer any Innocent Words

–Pierre Bourdieu

Asked towards the latter part of his life how he came to define his interest in a series of diverse problématiques, Michel Foucault responded by stating that he was driven by a very basic and fundamental question—the desire to comprehend what is happening around us, to inquire, “What is our present?” In an age of contradictions, when “invasions are touted as interventions” and “occupation as liberation,” that question poses a difficult challenge.

Presently, the United States is at war in Iraq. Yet beyond that simple statement of fact, not much else seems clear. With an absence of clarity and an abundance of ambiguity surrounding the conflict, our collective memory is intoxicated. As the battles continue and guilt is assessed with the talk of civil war, exit strategies and the now famous dictum, “no end in sight,” it is necessary to return to Foucault’s question and ask—how do we make sense of what is happening around us?

Over the past couple of years, the dialogue surrounding Iraq has shifted on all sides of the political spectrum. A discourse of responsibility—insisting that Iraqis be held accountable for their own country—now provides the framework within which our discussions about Iraq take place. Resounding from the echo chambers of political pundits from right, left and center have been calls for increased Iraqi responsibility regarding everything from security, to the curtailment of violence and the financing of reconstruction.

Many have followed Carl Levin’s suggestion that “it is indeed long overdue that we cut the cords of dependence and push the Iraqis to take more responsibility and ownership,” and have stressed the need “to change our current course in order to shift more responsibility from our troops and taxpayers to the Iraqi government.” The overriding sentiment has been to “force them to take responsibility for their own future, politically, economically and militarily.” Recently, Democrats in the House have introduced legislation that would require Iraq to become liable for funding its own reconstruction. Florida Democratic Representative Allen Boyd’s recent article in the Tallahassee Democrat—“It’s Time for the People of Iraq to Share in Reconstruction Costs”—demonstrated his “renewed efforts to require the Iraqi government to take more responsibility” by touting the merits of a federally mandated shared investment in Iraq’s future, reaffirming his belief that “it is time for the Iraqi government to step forward to meet more of its security and reconstruction expenses.”

But how do we make sense of this discursive framing of Iraq around issues of responsibility and accountability? What exactly does it mean to be held responsible or to assume a greater share of responsibility? What types of identity do such interpolations construct? In sum, what are the consequences of this discourse for both the people of Iraq and for the United States? To speak about Iraq’s current state of affairs and future possibilities through the medium of Iraqi responsibility does further violence to Iraqis by casting them as resentful and pathological, while trivializing the traumatic sense of loss endured as a result of war, invasion and internal conflict. Additionally, the responsibility discourse allows the United States to simultaneously lay blame and escape blame. It induces a kind of psychological displacement and collective forgetting regarding the war in Iraq, making it tougher for us to understand what our present is and limiting our space of comprehension by masking and obscuring reality.

Responsibility, Violence and Iraqi Identity

The concept of responsibility is Janus-faced. While on the one hand, we instinctively need to assign blame, to attribute guilt, and determine levels of culpability, it is not clear that the attribution of responsibility to an individual or group of individuals will be commensurate with reality. It is not always the case that the subject labeled “responsible” is truly the responsible party. Hence, responsibility is marked by a certain ambiguity because rather than simply calling our attention to those who should be held responsible, the ascription of responsibility may actually serve to produce the subjects it marks. As a result, anytime responsibility, or the lack thereof, is attributed to an agent, it presents a reason to reflect on who is being labeled and why.

Calls for the Iraqis to assume a greater share of the responsibility for their country continue incessantly. But who exactly are the “Iraqis?” Instead of simply reporting or reflecting objective reality, such statements produce a unified Iraqi subject—one that blurs the lines of ethnic and religious cleavages. They serve to further distort what is taking place in Iraq by speaking in terms of a fictive universal Iraqi identity. This practice of naming is a political act of the first order; an exercise of power that recalls Nietzsche’s argument in the Genealogy of Morals that “The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should conceive of the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers.” The power to name an event or a group of individuals is the power to construct identities and meaning. Thus, to inscribe the discourse of responsibility on Iraqi bodies is to establish a bifurcated framework wherein those who take responsibility for themselves, their future, and their livelihood are deemed normal. Conversely, as Alyson Cole argues, those who fail to take responsibility for themselves are placed within the category of abnormal, resentful and pathological. It is within this later category that the discourse of responsibility places Iraqis.

For example, calls for increased Iraqi responsibility are often coupled with a focus on their inability or unwillingness to do so. For instance, Senator Carl Levin emphatically stated that “Iraqi leaders have not met their benchmarks to share power and resources, to modify de-Bathification laws, to schedule elections and to amend their constitution.” Additionally, Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe writes that “the inability of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense to assume full responsibility for providing life support to its more than 100,000 troops marks a setback in the slow process of turning over greater responsibility to the Iraqi government.” Underpinning these statements is the implication that failures in Iraq continue because of the failings of the Iraqis themselves. There is an implicit notion that it is time for Iraqis to move on and take control of their situation. As one local commentator in the Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel put it, “I think we should give the Iraqis one year from June 1st to get their act together and then we are out of there. If they can’t do it in the six years since we unwisely invaded their country, then they obviously can’t do it.” In other words, the invasion was five years ago—get over it!

By portraying Iraqis as unable or unwilling to move beyond their current situation, the discourse of responsibility draws directly upon Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment. For Nietzsche, the subject of ressentiment is one that fails to act with an eye toward the future, but instead cleaves to its suffering and clings to its past. Psychologically invested in its suffering, the subject of ressentiment becomes dependent, lashes out and searches for an agent outside of itself to blame. Iraq’s failure to take responsibility for itself is cast within this framework. The discourse commands the Iraqis to let go, reinvent themselves, and highlights their failure to do so as a deficiency. By refusing to assume command of their country, Iraqis are depicted as invested in their suffering and unable to move beyond their past, both dependent on, while simultaneously lashing out at, the United States for its current predicament through acts of insurgent violence and civil war. Portrayed as unable and unwilling to overcome their melancholic state and face their present, Iraq is deemed irreparable because of the Iraqis themselves.

In this regard, the attribution of responsibility to Iraqis is a practice fraught with violence. William Connolly has pointed out in the case of the alcoholic that he or she “has to contend not only with the debilitating effects of the disease but with the moral judgment of those who construed it as simply a willful abdication of self responsibility.” Similarly Iraqis, in addition to coping with the trauma of invasion, displacement and loss, must also asses their personal failings—their refusal to take responsibility for themselves. This ascription of responsibility perpetrates a second layer of violence on top of the physical violence that accompanies the horrors of war. It inflicts a psychic violence by placing the problems in Iraq at the feet of the Iraqis, all the while displacing any sense of culpability on the side of the invading and occupying power.

Forgetting Iraq…

That the discourse of responsibility also works to displace culpability presents another way in which to make sense of its power to shape our view of the war. Simply put, it provides a mechanism for the United States to escape blame for the situation in Iraq by repositioning the locus of responsibility onto Iraqis. For instance, in a 2006 episode of Meet the Press, as the discourse of responsibility was gaining traction, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Richard Haass, explicitly argued for the need to construct a frame through which people see the current debacle in Iraq. In a roundtable discussion he stated that, “If Iraq doesn’t work, I think it is incredibly important for the future of the Middle East and American foreign policy around the world that the principle lesson not be that the United States is unreliable or lacked staying power.” He concluded that, “It is essentially important for the future of this country that Iraq be seen, if you will, as Iraq’s failure, not as America’s failure.” This reimagining of Iraq facilitates a psychological displacement as to where responsibility actually resides.

Most importantly, Haass’ statement sets its sights beyond the present by calling for the need to alter the way in which the Iraq War will be remembered. In this regard the shift to a discourse that produces Iraqis as the responsible agents as opposed to the United States can be read as an attempt to shape collective memory in the present; an act of crucial importance for the nation. Ernst Renan, in his essay, “What is the Nation?” referred to the nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle,” sustained largely by the “possession in common of a rich heritage of memories.” For Renan it is a sense of collective memory that provides the nation with a foundation that bridges the past to the present and links the present moment with a vision of the future. Through a narrative of the past a group of individuals comes to know itself as constitutive of a collective body. It is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves that turns individuals into citizens or subjects; providing an adhesive for a disparate group of “I’s” to know itself as a “We.” Haass’ statement reflects the act of constructing a narrative, a story through which Americans will remember their nation’s role in Iraq.

However, while every nation needs a particular knowledge of the past, what kind of knowledge is, of course, of utmost importance. Nietzsche believed that “cheerfulness, a good conscience, belief in the future, the joyful deed—all depend, in the individual as well as the nation on there being a line that divides the visible and clear from the vague and the shadowy.” His notion that “we must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember,” highlights the fact that a nation’s existence is contingent upon not only a collective, but a selective, national memory. The nation commits itself to “historical error.” The imperative is not only, never forget, but in addition, forget to remember.

But while the art of forgetting is critical to the national imagination, what exactly is so imperative to forget? What is it that requires such collective amnesia on the part of the nation? In response, Renan maintained that historical inquiry could actually undo the national foundation by bringing to light “deeds of violence.” Selective memory and collective forgetting then become essential means of disavowing past incidences of brutality effectively reflecting Margaret Atwood’s contention that “we tend to remember the awful things done to us and to forget the awful things that we did to others.” This type of discriminating relationship with the past is perhaps best exemplified by the juxtaposition of 9/11 to the Iraq War. While our memory of 9/11 as an event of unprecedented importance and collective purpose remains indelibly burned into the national psyche, our understanding of the Iraq War, from its inception to the present remains muddled.

Every moment of remembrance for the nation is simultaneously an instance of forgetting precisely because memory fashions the past in a way that prioritizes a specific way of seeing history. The construction of national memory is a political project, where, to echo Aleida Assmann, “history is not only what comes after politics; it also becomes the stuff of politics.” As a result, the current discourse that surrounds the conflict in Iraq forces us to ask not only what is remembered, but how it is remembered. How will we remember Iraq tomorrow? A year from now? Twenty years from now? Moreover, what will we forget?

While answers to such questions will also depend in part on future political moments, the discourse of responsibility provides a social frame that helps mediate the experience and memory of the Iraq War. It allows the United States to begin the process of disassociation from the tragedy of Iraq by placing distance between itself and its actions. The continuous discussion regarding the need for Iraq to take responsibility for itself helps foster a collective forgetting of the cruelty associated with invasion. It renders it impossible to recognize our national deeds of violence, allowing for what William Connolly has called, “the forgetfulness of the present in the present.”

What’s Really Lost?

We return now to the question that marked our beginning. That is, how do we know, how do we make sense of, what our present is? Proving “Iraqi innocence” or “American guilt,” is not what is at stake here. Instead, my goal has been to illuminate how our reality is mediated and shaped through discourses of power and how these discourses construct identities, engendering ways of seeing, remembering and forgetting. With all the talk of responsibility there is, of course, everything that goes unspoken. This forces us to ask what gets lost in a discourse that attempts to reposition responsibility and inscribe other agents with its obligations.

When officials speak about the absence of Iraqi leadership or the need for Iraqis to assume greater responsibility, the United States effectively casts the Iraqis as delinquent and erases their status as victims. The mounting civilian casualties, the refugee crisis and the problems of internal displacement remain hidden from clear view. However, despite the great lengths to which the United States goes in its attempt to reposition the locus of responsibility from itself onto Iraqis, gaps between rhetoric and reality remain. The discourse and the reality, to invoke the language of Fanon, follow the dictates of “mutual exclusion.” Such a disjunction strikes at the heart of Judith Butler’s question of “who counts as human.” Whose lives count as lives? And finally, what makes for a grievable life.” To be able to recognize the significance and trauma of what Iraq and all Iraqis have collectively undergone in the past five years might provide an entry point into an important dialogue about Iraq’s present and future possibilities.

Pierre Bourdieu once wrote that “from a strictly linguistic point of view, anyone can say anything just as the private can order the captain to clear the latrines; but from a sociological point of view, it is clear that not anyone can assert anything or else does so at his peril.” I propose that it is imperative to assume the role of the private in Bourdieu’s formulation in order to assert all that the dominant discourse omits and attempts to silence. By struggling against the forgetting of the current moment, regardless of the potential dangers involved we begin to piece together a more comprehensive picture of what is actually taking place, producing a better understanding of what our present is. This commitment will no doubt guarantee the development of counter-narratives, despite attempts to ensure otherwise. 

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