As David Dayen writes, “The location of the ceremony gives away exactly how this war is ending, and it doesn’t read ‘triumphantly.’” Quoting the NYT:
In a fortified concrete courtyard at the airport in Baghdad (emphasis his), Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta thanked the more than one million American service members who have served in Iraq for “the remarkable progress” made over the past nine years but acknowledged the severe challenges that face the struggling democracy.
This is what victory looks like in the new imperialism, no grass crowned Caesar triumphantly riding through public streets. What we see here, the muted, understated ceremony from within the heavily fortified barricades is the visualization of the neoliberal restructuring of global geography into green zones and red zones. From Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:
At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.
There’s a lot going on in this image, and the rest of the set at the link, none of which portray confidence or “victory!” The color guard is out of sync with a single cable running along the ground between them, separating them two by two, faces obscured with one soldier hopelessly out of step with the rest. The soldiers in the background seem out of place, no display of uniformity. Then there is the cluster of cables running through the shot under and out to the other side of what is clearly one stark partition.
Photo: Michael Kamber NYT, caption: A ceremony ending the American military engagement in Iraq.UPDATE: Dec. 19, 2011
Looking around at TIME.com’s Lightbox I thought their “Pictures of the Week, December 9 – December 16” speaks even more dramatically to this concept of partition.
