Exiting an Iraqi Heart of Darkness

Martin Sheen in Apocalypse NowMartin Sheen in Apocalypse Now 

As I listened to the president talk last night about the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, I found myself thinking of a book on his reading list, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. (See last Thursday’s post for the entire list.) In his talk, Obama mentioned how he had disagreed with George Bush about our entry into the war but that, despite having spent a trillion dollars and sacrificed thousands of lives, we had done as well as could have been expected. Did he wonder at all if we, like Kurtz, had lost our way in the process of fighting it?

Kurtz is a man with tremendous potential who goes to the Congo to “enlighten the heathen” but ends up becoming so thoroughly corrupted that, by the end, he just wants to “exterminate the brutes.” He does unconscionable things that call into question the West’s civilizing enterprise.

Conrad’s book has been applied to American engagements before. In 1979 Francis Ford Coppola set Heart of Darkness in Vietnam, with the Americans playing the Europeans and the Vietnamese the Congolese. Whatever idealistic intentions certain Americans had, the country witnessed the My Lai massacre and the use of napalm and began questioning its values.

America also lost its way in Iraq, first because its leaders misled us into a preemptive war with a foe that lacked the capacity to attack us and then imported torture and humiliation tactics from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, thereby corrupting American soldiers. The country, meanwhile, became polarized so that Obama had to stress that there were patriots on both sides of the issue. As he composed his speech, did Obama wonder if we had escaped with our souls intact? Is he aware that we are facing comparable questions in Afghanistan?

I like to think that, because he has read an author who shows us what we can lose, Obama knows that we must extricate ourselves. Literature has revealed the cost. Perhaps that’s why he did in fact pull our combat troops out of Iraq this summer. There was no guarantee that he would, despite his promises. Because he is aware of the costs, maybe he will indeed start reducing combat troops in Afghanistan next summer, again as he has promised. If he does, maybe we will have Conrad to thank, at least in part.

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