Armed violence has been unremitting this summer, the centenary of the First World War. A Malaysian passenger plane was shot down over Donetsk. Thousands of civilians have perished, in Syria, in Ukraine, in Gaza, and now in Iraq, where violence against ethnic minorities has triggered an American military intervention. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” President Obama told the press on the morning of August 9th. About an hour later—at some point between the third and the fourth U.S. air strikes of the day in northern Iraq—a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot an unarmed black teen-ager named Michael Brown, and the summer of violence came home to America.
“This isn’t Iraq—it’s Ferguson,” commentators noted, as social and news media were flooded with pictures of the Ferguson police firing tear gas and arresting journalists. Given the timing, the association of Ferguson with Iraq—and perhaps with the Middle East in general (“Fergustan”)—was inevitable. But what does the comparison say? What is being asked, when we are invited to consider whether an image of security forces on military-style vehicles is more appropriate to Iraq or Missouri?
The most simplistic, least charitable interpretation is that “Iraq” is shorthand for any unfortunate place, like Beirut was in the eighties, or Sarajevo in the nineties—a dismissive way of invoking another country, and a dissociative way of talking about one’s own. (To say nothing of the fact that the levels of violence are nowhere near commensurate.)
Why, though, should it be either Iraq or Missouri? Why should anywhere look like that? To an extent, these kinds of comparisons are part of the way we see the world. Military violence is more common in Iraq than in America, so when we see images suggesting military violence, we are more prepared to think “Iraq” than to think “America.” That’s how the mind works, by making generalizations from limited experience. But we know to override our generalizations sometimes—to have the sense, for example, that it might be in poor taste to report on one’s misfortune by commenting that this misfortune more frequently befalls other people.
To say that the police action in Ferguson would be “more at home in a 3rd world dictatorship than the US heartland” is to risk implying that repression is “at home” anywhere. It’s to risk implying that anti-civilian violence is “un-American” but not “un-Iraqi,” and that these designations aren’t historically contingent but rather have an essential truth. Comparisons to foreign dictatorships, even when well intentioned or historically grounded, often do open the door to essentialism.
In his useful book “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” the journalist Radley Balko describes a militarized American police force that handles protesters and journalists in a way that “you might envision happening in a Latin American country headed by a junta, or one of the countries of the Soviet bloc”; he notes the seeming irony that “This is how the country that gave the world the First Amendment now handles protest.” Yet the way our police handle protests seems less an ironic development than a built-in contradiction. Isn’t America’s military and economic dominance what enabled it to “give the world” the First Amendment? Enlightened nations aren’t necessarily the ones where people are born with a deeper love of civil liberties. Enlightened nations tend to be the ones that can afford enlightenment, thanks to a certain level of affluence and security. And they got there, often enough, with a legacy of brute force and racial injustice.
We don’t have to look at Iraq for an analogue to Missouri. We can look instead at Missouri, or elsewhere in the United States.* In 1917, the East St. Louis race riots left six thousand black people homeless; the death toll is estimated at between forty and two hundred. The National Guard was called in but did not stem the violence. In 1932, the Washington, D.C., police and the U.S. Army, equipped with tanks, bayonets, and tear gas, forcibly dispersed the so-called Bonus Army, a group of ten thousand veterans of the First World War who were encamped near the Capitol, demanding payment of their service bonuses. The iconic nineteen-sixties photos of fire hoses in Birmingham and National Guardsmen in Watts may look old, but they record events in living memory. And then there are the photos that don’t even look old. This isn’t Gaza, and this isn’t Iraq—they’re both Los Angeles in 1992, during the Rodney King riots.
“Iraq or Missouri?” makes a catchy hook, because the juxtaposition sounds so exotic, so unlikely. How could Iraq and America look the same? But then America played a non-negligible role in making Iraq look like Iraq. Under its Excess Property Program, the Department of Defense has passed along billions of dollars’ worth of equipment from the 2003 Iraq invasion—an action not obviously more morally defensible than the police and National Guard’s handling of Ferguson—to local law-enforcement agencies, including in Missouri. The rhetorical value of “Iraq or Missouri?” is undercut when it becomes possible to show two pictures, taken seven years apart, of the exact same armored vehicle and ask the question literally.
Indeed, one problem with the Iraq-Missouri comparison may be that the ways in which it’s trivial or misleading overshadow the ways in which it might have some truth, or even some profundity. One year ago, I was in Istanbul, packing up an apartment in preparation for my return to the States. In the aftermath of the Gezi protests of June and July, there were still armored vehicles in the streets, pot-banging at night, and the occasional gust of tear gas. Many of last year’s Gezi protesters now tweet about Ferguson, expressing solidarity, sharing advice about how you should wash your eyes with milk after a gassing.
In my brief encounters with protest culture, I have not found it to be free from grandstanding, or from the tendency to lump together every single oppressed person ever as allies in a single “Lord of the Rings”-style showdown. And yet—when people feel solidarity, solidarity is real. I remember seeing American tear-gas canisters rolling around the streets of Istanbul last summer. They were manufactured by NonLethal Technologies, of Homer City, Pennsylvania (which really is named after the author of the Iliad). I remember it made the world seem very small.
*Correction: This sentence has been clarified to remove a suggestion that East St. Louis is in Missouri, rather than in Illinois.
