“Betrayed”

I’m in Nyack, New York at the moment, visiting a good friend who lives here–I will call her P. Nyack is a small, twee town on the Hudson River, whose silvery expanse I can see from the window of P’s office. The town is close enough to Manhattan to qualify as one of its bedroom communities, but insular, peaceful, and interesting enough to be a world of its own. It’s the kind of place I could see myself living in if I ever decided to come back to the United States from Paris, where I have now lived for 20 years.

P and I were supposed to see George Packer’s play “Betrayed” last night, but she got stuck on a deadline and had to bow out. So I borrowed her car and headed into Manhattan, crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, gliding down the Saw Mill Parkway and its continuum, the Henry Hudson Parkway, down to Soho where The Culture Project–which describes itself as part arts organization, part human rights organization–has been hosting the play since February (its run has now been extended into May, anyone planning to be in New York City between now and then should consider seeing it.)

“Betrayed” has received a number of very positive reviews, mostly notably from the New York Times’ former Iraq correspondent Dexter Filkins in the Times’ 3 February 2008 issue. The play is based on Packer’s New Yorker article last year about Iraqi translators who signed on enthusiastically to work with the Americans after the invasion of their country and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, only to be cast aside when threats from insurgents made it clear that their lives were in danger (threats that in some cases were carried out.)

I will leave it to anyone interested to read the reviews and check out The Culture Project’s Web site, especially while I figure out how WordPress creates links (a novice blogger, I can’t understand why they are created and then disappear when I save them; I will get it figured out soon, maybe with the help of my Boston University independent studies student who is doing a blog of his own.) My own thoughts are these: Packer, who initially supported the invasion of Iraq but soured on the war after it started going badly wrong–a process he details with great angst and skill in his book “The Assassin’s Gate”–likewise features Iraqis who rejoiced at Saddam’s demise but soon learned that the United States was no savior of their country. Given Packer’s great compassion for his subjects, and the obvious humanity he shows in his writing about Iraq for the New Yorker and in his book, it might seem churlish to ask how he and other supporters of “humanitarian intervention” in Iraq could have trusted their values to the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ronald Rumsfeld, et al. Yet it really is time to ask what those of us who opposed the war from the beginning saw in this situation that Packer and other well-intentioned observers and analysts did not.

I hope to expand on this issue in future posts, but meanwhile there is a corollary question to be asked. Why did so many Americans, including so many who consider themselves “liberals,” fall for the Bush-Cheney warmongering propaganda in the runup to the invasion? Some cite fear after 9/11, but Americans have routinely allowed themselves to be hoodwinked into wars, from Vietnam to Iraq and, a near-miss here, Iran. Indeed, it is depressing just how easy it has been to lead an entire nation into wars that suck up billions of dollars and destroy hundreds of thousands of lives. One might almost think that many Americans, who in this day and age find it easy to wage war and have the best means to do it, often don’t give a second thought to the blood and treasure they spill on a regular basis. We, and the victims of our callous carelessness, pay the price soon enough–but the lessons always come too late.

More soon on this.