The New Iraq

By Crispin Sartwell

In the Iraqi towns of Ramadi, Karbala, and Hilla, the "Coalition Provisional Authority" (a.k.a. the American Army) is distributing soccer balls to children.

Soccer balls is a sweet idea. Independently, for example, a Mississippi soldier serving in Iraq, Lee Smithson, got his friends back in the States to raise money for soccer balls, after he noted that many children in Iraq had no toys.

That's the kind of direct gesture that means something and shows caring on a human scale. But the government's balls come imprinted with a slogan: All of Us Participate in the New Iraq. I hope the Coalition Provisional Authority has trademarked that.

That language and image create reality is the archetypal assertion of advertising agencies and totalitarian regimes.

One might call this the cult of euphemism. It is the imprecation and incantation of witchcraft: the right form of words give you the power to re-make the world.

Adam Hochschild has meticulously studied torture and genocide from the Belgian Congo to Stalin's Russia and apartheid South Africa. He writes in the New York Times about the euphemisms for torture, such as "sleep management" and "stress position."

Being put in a "stress position," according to Hochschild, involves being "kicked, tipped over, rolled around like [a] soccer ball." At least 37 prisoners have died in U.S. custody during the "War on Terror"; most were never autopsied.

Since American forces have taken to writing on their prisoners, perhaps they ought to tattoo them on discharge or burial with All of Us Participate in a New Iraq.

Indeed, there is a variety of advertising for the New Iraq, which may soon join the New Coke on the scrapheap of bad ideas. In a classic example of this moment in warfare and economics, much of this work has been outsourced or contracted to professionals in the advertising industry. We kill two birds: the Iraqi people quiet down and the advertising firms cash in.

The firm of Bell Pottinger is creating the ad campaign for television, radio, and print. The approach is to create a brand image of the New Iraq, a place of hopeful swelling reprocessed folk music and happy, industrious, voting Shi'ites. A barrage of beautiful or deeply touching images, with a voiceover slogan ("an Iraq of hope and peace") and, of course, a logo.

This is more sophisticated than leaden Stalin-style propaganda, but not by all that much. All the world's people have become inured to the approach. You can't buy everything, and the same style sells presidential candidates and beer, Metallica and tobacco-free youth.

Nevertheless, even as our military power continues to be contested, the syntax of our advertising conquers; it is an atmosphere of wavicles that enspheres the globe. That's the real occupation.

All of us participate in the new Iraq.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.