Reflection on Some Stray Rhetoric

Last month, I heard a story on the radio this morning about a raid on the Iranian consulate in the mainly Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq. As I followed up this piece in the New York Times, I found this:

Today, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said in a news conference in Washington that the United States would act to defend American troops from attackers in Iraq, regardless of the nationality of the attackers.

He said that “with regard to those who are physically present trying to do harm to our troops, regardless of nationality, we will go after them and defend ourselves.”

What fascinates and saddens me is a violation of citizenship that will likely spawn more violence. The “we” Pace refers to are U.S. nationals (mostly) in Iraq (another nation) after an invasion prompted by the defense of U.S. national interests. The U.S. forces have become taken on a role that is interestingly nationless. The raid was done without informing local leaders and with U.S. hardware. The U.S. forces are acting in their own interest of survival, but their interest, in this instance, seems not to support the interests of the groups who have to live long-term in the space (at least the physical space) in which they are acting. The men and women serving the U.S. in this space cannot act as citizens, cannot come into conversation, cannot win (unless winning is defined as enslavement or genocide). Condoleezza Rice and General Pace may decide that this is the only way to respond to the situation; they may be accurate in this judgment. But they are surely promoting a sort of agency that can guarantee no one’s security, particularly not that of the world’s vulnerable. Moments like this make talk about a U.S. “victory” in Iraq more and more out of alignment with any notion of the success of a democratic people.

What does this have to do with writing students? Guess the sort of writer that I want to be and to work with makes note of these sorts of contradictions and tries to make them productive.