Anything You Can Imagine Is Here
The following essay was first published in The White West: Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity Sternberg Press, 2024
A twelve-year-old child in Sacramento, twenty miles from my home, is held down and cuffed. Although he committed no crime, he has been apprehended by a security guard who accused him of breaking into a car and called in the police. Weighing less than eighty pounds, he is kept stomach to the floor, a heavy-set female police officer bending over his small Black frame. Shouts for his parents are ignored; he spits in frustration. You’re just a little terrorist, the officer mutters, and they bring out the white hood. The gloved hands of another officer enter the frame, pulling it down over the boy’s face. I can’t breathe! Take this bag off my head! Take this bag off my head! He is now in the back seat of a police vehicle, still hooded, still cuffed. The bystanders taking videos are shouting too. They have been shouting the whole time, witnesses to an act of torture. For those protesting the use of force, the long history of state violence was made clear in the words of the Sacramento police chief, who proudly described his officers’ actions against the innocent minor as a necessary measure “to diffuse the situation.”
Isaiah was arrested and hooded on April 28, 2019, exactly fifteen years to the day the torture photos from the Abu Ghraib prison were first released to the public. Among the images of men piled naked on top of one another, leashed and dragged like dogs and rushed by dogs, was that iconic hooded figure, arms outstretched. The photos sparked an outcry from the public, but far more powerfully the photos baked in, visually, tactically, that on one side were the weak and humiliated, and on the other were the strong and proud. “Animal House on the night shift,” was how the former secretary of defense James R. Schlesinger described the findings of an investigative panel he chaired. This comparison of sexual and physical torture to a popular American comedy underlines the use of the Iraq Wars, torture and all, as a fearsome display of American culture. A culture that, along with its military, is of incomparable global influence.
Animal House was the second-highest grossing film of 1978. Though released three years after America’s war with Vietnam ended, it was set prior to the conflict and satirized the military and ideas of American innocence. In 2014, three years after the official “end” of the Iraq War, the highest grossing film in the United States was American Sniper. Directed by the quintessential American Clint Eastwood, the critically lauded film lionized its title character, the real-life US Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who had been killed the previous year. This hero was a man who found killing “fun,” who believed all Iraqis to be guilty (the film reinforces this assumption; there is not one decent portrayal of an Iraqi), and whose sole drive was to serve as his nation’s most effective killing machine. Kyle had also bragged publicly about shooting “looters” from a rooftop in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, though there is no evidence this actually took place. True or not, the act of shooting dozens of Americans, who would have been widely understood to be Black, did nothing to tarnish the view of Kyle as an American patriot.
The film is maddening but not surprising. Americans had been trained since the Gulf War in the early 1990s to dismiss Iraqi life. Iraqis were the first population to be targeted and killed by a broad international coalition on a live international broadcast—not once, not twice, but to a steady drumbeat of sanctions, bombing campaigns, and official wars over the course of two decades. During the war in 1991, America was awash in ticker-tape parades and yellow ribbons—“Support the Troops!”—despite the live footage of civilian carnage during the war and its immediate aftermath. By the time the invasion of Iraq began a decade later, global protests of the war dissipated as dramatically as the demonstrations of violence grew. The debate that followed the release of the Abu Ghraib images wasn’t about justice or reparations for the Iraqis rounded up in house-to-house night raids often without cause or due process. Like the countless uncounted atrocities committed in Iraq, there have been bitter few prosecutions of war crimes by governing officials or demand of accountability by the private companies that embezzled billions under the cover of war. Instead, inward-looking dismissals posed as questions dominated: “How do we define torture? Will this change America’s standing in the world? What are we doing there?” As if it were impossible to know.
By the time we see the contemporary use of hoods by police on American soil, they are no longer the heavy burlap sandbags used on foreign prisoners that reinforced the idea of Iraq as a primitive, crude site rather than the modern nation-state it was. For Western twenty-first-century policing, the hoods have been remade as pale plastic sheaths—compact, efficient, but no less psychologically punishing or physically strenuous.
Like the use of torture, most people think of privatized forces as shadowy players in international war games, mercenaries playing whack-a-mole with terrorists in far-flung countries. In some cases this is true. In others, mercenaries are survivors of previous wars of mass atrocity who are now used to do low-wage or high-risk work, or sometimes both—for instance, the former child soldiers from Sierra Leone recruited by British firms to serve as guards on American bases in Iraq. Private security is a routine sight in the US—personnel outnumber law enforcement almost two to one domestically. Their purpose is not simply to fill a demand but to allow private interests to access the power of the state which both protects their own assets and delineates class forcibly and visibly. The security guard in the museum hall, boutique entrance, or military base signals the capital strength of each site as well as the relationship of the individual to it—viewer or collector, window-shopper or buyer, soldier or commander. The first person to apprehend Isaiah and bring him to the police was a private security guard. “Winning hearts and minds” wasn’t aimed at the occupied Iraqis, but at us.
Privatized force is driven by, and made possible with, the cooperation of state and private interests, which allows for the further reach of power while staying outside or above the law within its juridical borders as easily as on foreign land. This strategy was illustrated in a deal that became public in late summer 2020. A newly formed American company, Delta Crescent Energy, had signed a contract to produce and export oil in a contested area of northern Syria. The agreement was signed not with the Syrian government, which was engaged in a protracted civil war on top of a protracted dictatorship, but rather separatist militias supported through deals enabled by American government and corporate cooperation. American soldiers stayed in Syria to assist in protecting the oil fields, now under contract with Delta Crescent, which received not only the soldiers but also a waiver from the US Treasury Department to do business in Syria despite sanctions against the country. The deal was landed by Delta Crescent’s three well-connected founders—a former US ambassador to Denmark, a US oil executive, and the CEO of TigerSwan, a private security firm, who had been a US Delta Force commander in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Describing itself as a “global risk management” company, TigerSwan is the same firm that was hired by the developers of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 after government tactics had failed to break the protest movement fighting the encroachment. TigerSwan used a different approach, that of spying, infiltration, and intimidation, using the military framework of war. The protestors were “terrorists,” their nonviolent actions “attacks,” and the tribal land the protests were situated on “the battlespace.” The goal of their intelligence gathering, likely their contractual duty, was to “eliminate threat” (i.e., protesters). Nothing about this work was illegal. In fact, when TigerSwan was taken to court, it was not for the surveillance they were conducting, which would have been illegal if done by law enforcement, but for operating without proper state licensing.
TigerSwan’s CEO went from protecting the assets of an oil company in the United States to gaining ownership of an oil field overseas. Syria had become a site of domestic and multinational proxy battlefields, with the torture of civilians paving the way for multinational resource extraction. TigerSwan used the frame of war to attempt to dissolve peaceful protests in the US, but actual warfare remains the most effective means to quell, even exterminate, resistance. Chaos such as Syria’s current political reality is an exceptional opportunity for arms dealers, private contractors, and oil explorers, just as the wars in Iraq have been.
Chaos is good for business. And most of the world’s business today is that of social division, terrorist/militia/proxy warfare, and the accompanying record corporate gain. Before social media, divisions were often perpetuated through racist, misogynistic, and nationalist film, television, and news media. Today, mainstream discourse sees social media as an unprecedented breeding ground for hate and disinformation, though these platforms rely on preexisting sociohistorical conditions and the beliefs that go along with them. Calls to “be more responsible” in preventing threats of violence or the promotion of false stories are made with the belief that this phenomenon is unparalleled, and with the idea that these corporations are not being responsible because it’s “bad for business”—the more sensational and heightened the users’ experience, the more clicks, data, and dollars. What is not mentioned is the big business that comes after creating social chaos—billions of dollars in heightened “security” needs, reconstruction bids, lucrative real estate, and trafficking (humans, drugs, energy, arms, artifacts), to name just a few.
The Trump administration’s greatest feat was not in “dividing” America but in enabling greater visibility of the opportunities for wealth and exploitation when promoting division, employing an extensive array of tools—historical, corporate, and governmental—to do so. In the lead-up to the 2020 US elections, the news often reported on fears of a “civil war” that might break out over a contested outcome. This looming threat of violence was realized to some extent by the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, widely referred to as an “insurrection.” Four police officers on duty that day died by suicide soon after. Couldn’t this be called a form of sectarian violence, the construct that was supposed to only apply to Iraq? This construct was codified in Iraq in a hasty, American-penned constitution mandating religious quotas and ethnic divisions in what was previously a secular state—a ready-made ablution for those with little understanding of Iraq’s history couched in an unwillingness to believe that the invasion was not a series of missteps but rather a how-to guide to dismantling a country for profit under the cover of determined, engineered violence.
Many were shocked by Trump’s call, during the first presidential debate in 2020, for the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, to “stand back and stand by.” But his words were not surprising considering that America’s actual Civil War was centered on the determined, engineered violence of slavery. The continuation of the war is evident in far too many areas, particularly in Trump’s insinuation, in order to sow further division, that white supremacy is a legitimate American force. The utilization of race and fear of socialism fueling America’s newest sectarian turn is a logical strategy because it harnesses the latent divisions in the country’s own history of targeting communities to divide and build profit, whether via slavery, the war on drugs, predatory financial practices, environmental degradation, or the war on terror. The Black Lives Matter movement, as a response to police violence, follows a long history of Black protest of militarized force in the United States as well as the country’s history of policing, which evolved from slave patrols, militias, and vigilantism. It is devastatingly appropriate that the defense of the descendants of the enslaved who created the profits that enabled the United States’ ascendancy to nation-state supremacy would serve as the catalyst for a recognition of the force that endangers life as a whole.
With the superior capacities of technology aligned with private, unregulated financial gain, we are in a space primed for universal subordination under state and non-state actors. The lines between regular and irregular force are becoming more blurred, more pervasive, more difficult to detect and fight against. In the months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale protests for autonomy and equity around the world were met with increasingly similar tactics, uniforms, and weapons. Across America, and especially in the nation’s capital, the sight of tanks, tear gas, and rubber bullets at racial-justice protests has led journalists to call the scenes a “war zone” or “like Iraq.” But the comparison stops at the ammunition and camouflage gear; it does not extend to the engineered splintering of civil society that force accelerates.
In August 2020, on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, police forces emerged from their military tanks to hand out water and words of gratitude to members of armed white vigilante groups. One of these members, seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, had an AK-47 strapped across his chest, which he would later use to kill two protestors. A memo with talking points sympathetic to Rittenhouse’s claim of self-defense was provided to the Department of Homeland Security in a seamless display of how regular and irregular forces have been integrated in our wars overseas and at home—not simply to kill but to divide by currying favor with and protecting various groups and their respective ideologies. As the summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States had concluded, “It is now undeniable that the homeland is no longer a sanctuary.”
Militias, mercenaries, and armies are increasingly interchangeable in how they are defined and where they are deployed. The Proud Boys and the many militias in the US that have rapidly expanded their size and firepower in recent years are called to “stand by” not to fulfill their own agendas, as much as they may believe this to be the case, but to enable the same kind of sectarian violence, real and spectral, that enabled the comprehensive extortion of Iraq as a nation. With his professional showman’s tricks honed by years as a reality star, Trump was the right president to wield this hammer. Questions about his fitness for office took precedence over the long-standing structural chaos that provides financial windfalls for those at the top of increasingly stratified economic chains. Trump made obvious the great private wealth available to those who occupy and encircle the seat of world power that is the American presidency.
In Iraq, where a new precedent of violence for profit was announced, citizens have emerged from twenty-plus years of punishing warfare from the strongest military in the world to reject the torture-for-profit scheme unfurled under the banner of “sectarianism.” Some of the most prominent journalists and thinkers surmised that Iraqis simply couldn’t handle “Western-style democracy” owing to their location in the Middle East, that unlucky and inherently conflict-ridden place. In fact, Iraqis must be uncannily compatible with democracy, considering that October 2019 marked the beginning of a youth-led grassroots movement that has withstood more than a thousand assassinations to protest and fight for a just representative government free from sectarian claims and lethal corruption. These are the youth who grew up under the American appetite for destruction and sadism; who came of age seeing edifices collapse under the merciless demands of extraction; who, despite everything the world has shown them, have so stubbornly and freely believed that “another world is possible” that they don’t think to title conferences and books with those words, but have sacrificed their own lives and safety to demand a habitable future.
The ramifications of these recent wars cannot be fully considered without contemplating their related violence and environmental impact, and the inevitable outcome of both: the constriction of inhabitable land. Brown University’s Costs of War research group estimates that at least thirty-seven million people have been displaced by the war on terror. As armed conflicts and climate change intensify, so too has the fight over ever-scarcer resources, creating more and more frequent waves of climate and battle-scarred refugees. The expected rise in these numbers is taking place as immigration controls become more restrictive in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Images circulate the globe of migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Southwest Asia held in cages, drowned at sea, washed up on shores, spending their lives in sprawling, desolate refugee camps, or fleeing those that have been burnt to the ground. The public is growing as accustomed to these images as to those of Aleppo and Mosul in absolute ruin. The term “doom-scrolling” has been coined in America to describe the experience of consuming a stream of interminable apocalyptic events on social media. What these users do not acknowledge is that their own government has created actual apocalyptic worlds meant to be as captivating as they are quotidian, starting with the bombardment of Baghdad in 2003, the first assault one could watch while having a beer at a sports bar. It is grotesque but not impossible to imagine how acclimated we may become to the sight of the devastation of bodies both on-screen and off-, in the mass population losses to come.
The cessation of wars and the demilitarization of the police are notably absent from climate change remedies, which too often focus on consumer activities such as recycling and buying electric cars. Another finding in the Costs of War report is that “the DOD [Department of Defense] is the single largest consumer of energy in the US, and in fact, the world’s single largest institutional consumer of petroleum,” with over four hundred million metric tons of greenhouse gasses emitted since 2001 through war-related efforts. This plain measurement sits alongside datasets on the impact of toxic fumes, depleted uranium, trauma to human and nonhuman life, deforestation, water mismanagement, munitions residue and buildup, which can result in fetal deformities and habitat destruction. The fight to slow climate change in the US has gained traction, but mainstream groups and nonprofits still neglect to include demilitarization and a global fight against unregulated capitalism as a necessary strategy, despite the limitless profit motive that serves as the bedrock of anti-green pro-war efforts.
In 2020, the largest wildfires in California’s recent history raged over one hundred million acres. I along with many others mourned the loss of life and land, stunned by the enormity and physical transformation wrought by the fires’ fury. It had been years since I was last in Baghdad, and I was living again in the northern California town I’d immigrated to as a child. Its trails and walkways were choked with smoke, and ash fell for weeks, blanketing the grass and windows in a kind of alien snow. A renowned writer and climate change activist based in San Francisco shared a story on social media about the fires and Baghdad. I thought for a moment that the connection between the extreme environmental costs of waging war on bodies and the earth, and its implications for sites beyond Iraq’s borders, had been made. But the story was not about Iraq’s burning oil fields, the soaring emissions of heavy military machinery, the razing of trees and foliage, or the less understood future implications of the loss of life and destroyed geography. Instead, the story was about a man in the US who felt the need to go outside and breathe in the hazardous air, just like in the thirteenth century, when Iraq was invaded by the Mongols who burned the Grand Library of Baghdad and threw countless numbers of books in the river. Ink from the books turned the river black, and residents drank its waters in order to retain some of the knowledge from their pages.
I wonder when we will drink from the waters, or breathe in the air, of all that has burned in our recent wars in Iraq; when will we retain any of the volumes of knowledge that fall heavier than the ash from our wildfires. There is a saying that became popular in Iraq in the years since the invasion: “Anything you can imagine is here.” These words are typically used to describe vacation spots, utopias. In Iraq, this adage speaks to the details of the future we keep dreading and discussing, as if it would only relate to unbearable heat and species extinction. Iraqis have always dealt with unbearable heat, expanded the species despite it. The future we can’t imagine isn’t in the extra days of glaring sunlight, dead and decaying fish, or dwindling honeybee population. We don’t have to speculate about the Anthropocene or dystopias, or question what the edge of climate change, capitalism, policing, and warfare looks like. We don’t have to look for evidence in paper trails or forensic reconstructions. We don’t have to keep pretending that this is something we can’t imagine. It has all been laid bare for us, in torture videos, mass graves, civic fissures, and private glee, images of sulfur-dioxide levels equivalent to volcanic eruptions taken from space. In the moment a child’s voice shifts from defiant to desperate, the shroud is laid. We know, already, what the answer to mercy will be.
- Rijin Sahakian