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My Diddly, Right or WrongSeptember 01, 2005 During the Gulf War, the local papers ran interviews with returning soldiers with Vineyard connections; during the current war, they're doing the same. I've avoided them all. The interviewees may have been in Iraq or Kuwait or Afghanistan, and I haven't, but I started studying the Middle East at age nine and began college as an Arabic major. If I had been as ignorant as they about Islam, Arab history, and European imperialism, I never would have passed a course. However, a pissing contest has been going on in the Letters to the Editor section of the Martha's Vineyard Times, so I broke my vow: I read the interview that appeared two weeks ago and the counter-letter and then counter-counter-letters that it inspired. The interviewee, a marine, was the college graduate son of a college graduate, but he still didn't know diddly about the Middle East. At least he didn't know enough diddly to comment on U.S. policy in Iraq. But, really, why should he? When I was a chambermaid, I didn't know diddly about running an inn. Fortunately no reporter ever showed up with a tape recorder and asked me to speak at length about the economics of hotel management. This is where "Support Our Troops" rhetoric comes a cropper. I hope that U.S. troops in Iraq don't come to grief; even more, I hope that they won't bring grief to others. But I don't feel obligated to believe every word every returning soldier says about either the U.S. military mission in Iraq or the general political situation. When the emperor of legend paraded down the street in his undies, only one observer, a child, dared say that the emperor had no clothes on. The story as I heard it doesn't say so, but it seems fair to assume that of the adults who didn't notice or didn't dare speak, at least some were in uniform. (Some returning soldiers are speaking out, loudly and bravely, but so far none of them have been from Martha's Vineyard.) The Support Our Troopers rail against the "liberal media"; the anti-warriors rail against the "corporate-controlled media." They're all talking about the same newspapers, TV, and radio. I agree with them: most U.S. news coverage is pretty bad. You'll find out more about what's going on, and what the world thinks of it, by checking out the international press. The British and the French, for instance, have learned the long, hard way what these imperial adventures cost. Since they don't see the world through star-spangled glasses, they don't have the illusion that self-delusion is OK when the self-deluders are Americans. Check out in particular the reporting of Robert Fisk. He's been covering the Middle East for decades, and he writes for The Independent (UK). You can find some of his work online at
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