Focus of the Gun
The picture shows a captured Iraqi soldier… possibly, from the star on his shoulder and his neatly trimmed, almost gentlemanly moustache, an officer - receiving water from an American GI. His head is tipped back, held gently yet firmly in place by the American’s right hand, and water is bouncing off his bottom lip and spilling down his chin from the flask, administered by the American’s left hand. The expression on the American’s face is purposeful - this is simply a part of the job he has been sent to do - yet there is, if we look closely, a soft, even tender quality to his features, as if he has recently felt for himself the intolerable desperation of desert thirst.
Another American sits to the right of the captured man, leaning forwards slightly as if to get a clearer look at him, his hands resting quietly on his knees. The picture, so far, is almost touching: it shows none of the swaggering machismo we might expect from the foot soldiers of a conquering army, and little of the supremacist arrogance we have come to associate with the world’s most powerful military superpower. It is a picture of a victor relieving the thirst of his defeated opponent; or, to dramatise the scene some more, a rare glimpse of human kindness shining through the blood and filth of warfare.
That is until you notice the gun. The gun juts from the top left corner of the picture and points directly at the Iraqi’s head, perhaps - the photograph is not clear - being held against it. The American aiming the gun is out of sight; we can only see his left hand supporting the body of his weapon, his right hand, presumably, lingering on the trigger. Of course, he is not about to fire; there is nothing to suggest, even, that he is actually threatening the captured man, whose eyes are closed in exhaustion, and can clearly think of nothing beyond the water cascading into his mouth. In every practical sense, the gun-bearer is taking a perfectly reasonable precaution; this is war, after all, his unit is inside enemy territory, and there are almost certainly troops in the area who will not lay down their arms with such docility. But the presence of the gun, projecting anonymously from beyond the camera’s frame, puts the picture in an entirely different light. We are no longer witnessing a straightforward act of charity, or - to use a phrase beloved of the US and British governments - of humanitarian relief. We are no longer simply observing a strong man giving assistance to a weaker man; a ‘have’ helping a ‘have-not.’ What we are seeing now - what the focus of the gun allows us to see - is a microcosm of the way in which American foreign policy operates, an insight into the attitude Western imperialism as a whole adopts to the rest of the world.
I am not an economist, a historian or a politician. I have no superior knowledge, no access to information that other people do not have. The only thing I can do is observe what goes on in the world around me - gathering information from media sources I never completely trust - and try to draw together some sort of pattern by which to make sense of it all. So far, I have not made sense of it all. I have mostly lost sight of what ‘it’ is that I supposed to be making sense of. But what I think I am starting to see - what the focus of the gun is making me see - are some of the things that happen behind what we are told, outside of the frames we are given, off-centre of the pictures that are displayed to us.
The US and British governments claim that the war in which this photograph was taken is a moral war, being waged for the benefit of the Iraqi people. We are told that - along with the removal of an evil regime and the destruction of its chemical and biological weapons - one of the aims of this war is to bring freedom and democracy to an abused and suffering population. No-one can argue that these are not wholly desirable things; no-one disputes the fact that Saddam Hussein is a murderous dictator or that the Iraqi people would be infinitely better off without him. But, when we step backwards to get a longer look at the scene, we see this is a very limited depiction of reality that leaves a great deal of the subject out of shot, screening from us a wider backdrop against which we might pose certain questions. For example, why - if the alleviation of Iraqi suffering has always been high on the agenda of the US and British governments - did they put Saddam Hussein in power in the first place, financing and supporting his regime? Why did they arm him when it was clear he was using those weapons to murder his opponents? Why did they remain silent when he gassed the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs? Why did they impose and maintain a system of sanctions responsible for killing one million Iraqi children and starving the population of even the most basic medical supplies? And why, to bring the picture up to date, are they now bombarding densely populated cities with high-explosive missiles, dropping cluster bombs and littering the desert with radioactive depleted uranium? The US and Britain claim to be a force for humanity, pouring water from the First World flask into Iraq’s thirsting open mouth, hoping this will make us ignore the presence of the gun against the sufferer’s head. But guns, especially for those who find themselves at the wrong end of them, are simply not this easy to ignore.
The war against the Taliban regime was similarly, we are told, fought to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Afghanistan. We were shown images of kites flying over Kabul, girls going back to school, music being played in the streets once more; again, by almost anyone’s standards, wholly desirable things. Yet, again, images such as these have been revealed to us merely to shield the wider picture from our eyes. Perhaps for the first time in the history of warfare, the Afghanistan conflict saw aeroplanes dropping food packages along with cluster bombs; an absurd combination of ‘aid’ and aggression, of token ‘life’ and very real death, a combination of the flask and the gun barrel. Once we move our heads to see the focus of the gun, however, the questions, as with the war on Iraq, start to make themselves apparent. Why, we have to ask - if the plight of the population of Afghanistan was as great a concern as it was always claimed to be - did the US arm and finance the Taliban in the first place? Why did they train Osama Bin Laden, fervently supporting him and his followers when it was clear that democracy and freedom were things that these people despised? Why did more civilians die in the bombing of Afghanistan than in the September 11th outrage that precipitated it? And why is the country now back in the hands of feuding warlords, drug barons, religious fundamentalists and rival ethnic factions out to line their own pockets at the expense of the civilian population? Every time questions like these are asked, the frame gets moved and the answers become rapidly blurred. Again, the picture displayed to us shows only the token flask with its life-giving water, while the truly consistent element - the anonymous, death-threatening gun - is positioned carefully out of centre.
Stepping back again, the frame gets still wider. In Columbia, in Palestine, in Nicaragua, Chile, Grenada or Vietnam, we are told to focus on the flask and not the gun. I do not have the space or the time here to go separately into all these separate pictures; all I can do is provide an impression. Since 1945, the following countries - China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq - have been bombed by the US in the name of freedom, in the name of that flask of water. Add to this the creeping imperialism of market capitalism, the neo-liberal agenda, the forced privatisation and the corporate takeovers, the structural adjustment policies, the ‘liberation’ of trade and services - swinging the panorama to a full three hundred and sixty degrees - and the picture becomes virtually meaningless with its size.
As I have said, I am not an economist, historian or politician. I do not know things that other people do not know. Everything I have written above is second-hand information, facts I have no direct experience of and no way of verifying; all I can do is look at the images in front of me and glean from them what I can. But it seems clear to me that what our governments are trying to do - what every government has always tried to do - is attempt to blinker one part of our vision, to make us blind in one eye, to prevent us from seeing this sickening backdrop as a whole, to divide the design up into little squares that can only be looked at one piece at a time. I don’t pretend to have seen all of the picture, to know which bits fit where or even begin to imagine what it all means in terms of my own eyes. But one thing I can see is the focus of the gun. Wherever we are shown water pouring from a flask - the trade concession, the poor relief, the food shipment, the humanitarian aid - into an open mouth, we must look in the corner of the picture for that long shiny barrel and the hands in which it is held. Somewhere in the background, it will be there. The principle is simply carrot and stick. But democracy, freedom and happiness - by their very definitions - can not and will not exist with a gun held to their heads. I believe that perhaps our only power is to alter the images we are given, to skew the angles in which they are shown us, to swing our fields of vision and reveal the things happening on the other side of the lens. By challenging what we see and the ways in which we see it, we can not only begin to push the aim of the gun from our own heads, but - in our wildest dreams we do truly imagine this - to remove the gun altogether.