Mustansiriya U. and Virginia Tech

Last January 16th, a car bomb blew up near an entrance to Mustansiriya University in Baghdad -- and then, as rescuers approached, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the crowd. In all, at least 60 Iraqis, mostly female students leaving campus for home, were killed and more than 100 wounded. Founded in 1232 by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir, it was, Juan Cole informs us, "one of the world's early universities." And this wasn't the first time it had seen trouble. "It was disrupted by the Mongol invasion of 1258."

Just six weeks later, on February 25, again according to Cole, "A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives." The bomber in this case was a woman.

In terms of body count, those two mass slaughters added up to more than three Virginia Techs; and, on each of those days, countless other Iraqis died including, on the January date, at least thirteen in a blast involving a motorcycle-bomb and then a suicide car-bomber at a used motorcycle market in the Iraqi capital. Needless to say, these stories passed in a flash on our TV news and, in our newspapers, were generally simply incorporated into run-of-bad-news-and-destruction summary pieces from Iraq the following day. No rites, no ceremonies, no special presidential statements, no Mustansiriya T-shirts. No attempt to psychoanalyze the probably young Sunni jihadis who carried out these mad acts, mainly against young Shiite students. No healing ceremonies, no offers to fly in psychological counselors for the traumatized students of Mustansiriya University or the daily traumatized inhabitants of Baghdad -- those who haven't died or fled.

We are only now emerging from more than a week in the nearly 24/7 bubble world the American media creates for all-American versions of such moments of horror, elevating them to heights of visibility that no one on Earth can avoid contemplating. Really, we have no sense of how strange these media moments of collective, penny-ante therapy are, moments when, as Todd Gitlin wrote recently, killers turn "into broadcasters." Like Cho Seung-Hui, they go into "the communication business," making the media effectively (and usually willingly enough) "accessories after the fact" in what are little short of pornographic displays of American victimization.

Finally, articles are beginning to appear that place the horrific, strangely meaningless, bizarrely mesmerizing slaughter/suicide at Blacksburg -- the killing field of a terrorist without even a terror program -- in some larger context. Washington Post on-line columnist Dan Froomkin caught something of our moment in his mordant observation that, at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner the other evening, with the massed media and the President (as well as Karl Rove) well gathered, "the tragic Virginia Tech massacre required solemn observation and expressions of great respect, while the seemingly endless war that often claims as many victims in a day deserved virtually no mention at all." Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks took a hard-eyed look at the urge of all Americans to become "victims" and of a President who won't attend the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq to make hay off the moment. ("It's a good strategy. People busy holding candlelight vigils for the deaths in Blacksburg don't have much time left over to protest the war in Iraq."); and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll offered his normal incisive comments, this time on "expressive" and "instrumental" violence in Iraq and the U.S. in his latest column. He ends with this: "Iraqi violence of various stripes still aims for power, control, or, at minimum, revenge. Iraqi violence is purposeful. Last week puts its hard question to Americans: What is the purpose of ours?"

Sometimes, in moments like this, it's actually useful to take a step or two out of the American biosphere and try to imagine these all-day-across-every-channel obsessional events of ours as others might see them; to consider how we, who are so used to being the eyes of the world, might actually look to others. In "The Cho in the White House," John Brown, a former U.S. diplomat, one of three State Department employees to resign in protest against the onrushing war in Iraq in 2003, considers some of the eerie parallels between Cho's world and George's that wouldn't normally come to the American mind. He concludes: "Regrettably, I fear that, after more than six years of George W. Bush, Baghdad and Blacksburg are, to many on our planet, not that far apart. Woe to the diplomat who has to explain us to the world today."

Comments (20)

1. Of course its ignored...its in Iraq. "The surge is working"....Dubya said so, therefore it must be true, right? Of course, tehre were tose 200+ people blown all to shit last week. But the surge is working!

   ChimpCo....inventing reality one day at a time...

   Posted by leftofcenter at 04/25/2007 @ 08:28am

2. Okay, seriously....LVLIBERTY, PONTI, BARRY, any of the 30%ers...

   why is the Surge failing? And why does that NOT mean (according to your view of things) that we shouldn't just pull out?

   Posted by Mask at 04/25/2007 @ 08:57am

3. What adds to Engelhardt's frightening depiction of our bubbled media is the fact that the USA is "the one and only" world power. We have hundreds of military bases in scores of countries. We point the gun where and when we feel like pointing the gun, yet at the same time we are brazenly ignorant and detached from this world. Football statistics stir more passion and conversation than the wild numbers from Iraq.

   But then again, maybe a necessary condition for seeking to rule the world is a black hole sized ignorance of the world. Think of Shock and Awe!

   Posted by markws at 04/25/2007 @ 09:30am

4. I think there is a huge difference in the analogy here. Guys like Englehardt and others who advise pulling out indirectly support actions of those in Iraq who actually carried out the bombing. Kinda like making Cho the chancellor of Virginia Tech.

   Posted by Sliver at 04/25/2007 @ 09:46am

5. it is bloody depressingly funny how many of the suicide bombers in the middle east, are indeed suffering from mental illness themselves, usually some form of morose depression. i've seen interviews. most would be admitted in a heartbeat to a pshychiatric intitution here, if they had decent insurance.

   over there, however, they are themselves victimized by evil medievalist fanatics, who send them out to their deaths with lies about paradise and virgins and crap like that. pathetic, is it not?

   what does the cho explosion have to do with suicide bombers? except for a commonality of mental illness and a few obvious analogies, nothing much. as pointed out by engelhardt, how would we react to the kind of casual violence we see in iraq, especially if such was the direct result of a foriegn power's actions?

   no intention of diminishing the pain felt by those affected by cho's rampage, but, well...

   ask just about any iraqi (who has almost certainly lost someone they know) how one goes about dealing with senseless violence enable death and suffering. they are experts.

   but for the actions of the current administration...

   Posted by ibbleblibble at 04/25/2007 @ 10:11am

6. Comparing these two cases can be risky if analysed by the facts, but very useful if compared from the media incidence, it is a clear picture of the US, needless to say that the picture is poor.

   Posted by areyouok at 04/25/2007 @ 10:28am

7. Politics, not morality will force US departure from the area.

   politics not morality got us into that war, Frei

   Posted by johannesrolf at 04/25/2007 @ 10:49am

8. only way to defeat that evil is to become that evil.

   yep, that's how we defeated segregation and apartheit. history according to Frei.

   Posted by johannesrolf at 04/25/2007 @ 10:50am

9. Ibble you are mistaken about suicide bombers. the Atlantic ran an investigation into that subject a while back, I'm sure it's still available out there. they are NOT mentally ill. in our materialistic society we cannot conceive a person killing themselves for a cause bigger than they. we better learn to understand them fast.

   Posted by johannesrolf at 04/25/2007 @ 10:53am

10. ...as Todd Gitlin wrote recently, killers turn "into broadcasters." Like Cho Seung-Hui, they go into "the communication business," making the media effectively (and usually willingly enough) "accessories after the fact"....

    The US Media is increasingly like Al Jazeera....glorify the nutjobs and body counts...Won't be long before Snuff Videos are shown, perhaps even LIVE, as more nutcases go off!

    Posted by Happy at 04/25/2007 @ 10:55am

11. Sorry, FREIHEIT, SLIVER...but according to your "rationale"...

    we can NEVER leave Iraq as long as ANY "terrorist" attack occurs......ever.

    Posted by Mask at 04/25/2007 @ 11:28am

12. Posted by MASK 04/25/2007 @ 11:28am

    ...and there's the rub, isn't it? I believe it was SF writer Joe Haldeman who wrote the book "The Forever War", and it seems that someone at ChimpCo has too.

    Posted by leftofcenter at 04/25/2007 @ 12:38pm

13. CHOrge W. Bush has an appropriate ring to it.

    Posted by OneVote at 04/25/2007 @ 1:16pm

14. Posted by JOHANNESROLF 04/25/2007 @ 10:53am

    i'll have to check that one out. i agree about the cultural difference and all, but i have seen interviews with some, and the content of their speech, their body language, reported behavior...all adds up to someone who could be helped by some good old psychotropic happy pills and some counselling.

    but they get hypnotic religiously sanctioned hate and happy forever after lies.

    cho now...well, some folks go insane and do evil. some people are already corrupted and fallen into evil...then they go insane. like cho.

    but when one's whole reference structure and spiritual message is corrupted by evil urges to violence...who's to say which came first, the evil or the insanity?

    Posted by ibbleblibble at 04/25/2007 @ 1:22pm

15. Posted by LEFTOFCENTER 04/25/2007 @ 12:38pm

    Excellent pick...as Haldeman's book was only a thinly veiled attack on the Vietnam War. Though actually the "forever" part came from the relativistic physics involved in the soldiers travelling to and from the battle field which left them decades, even centuries behind the Earth (and the resulting alienation...no pun).

    Posted by Mask at 04/25/2007 @ 1:42pm

16. "Suicide bombers walking into universities with the goal of killing as many innocents as possible and breaking the will of the American people to support our governmant's actions".

    they are not killing to break america's will. that battle was lost long ago. america has made up its mind, they want out. no the are killing out of revenge and for who runs Iraq. our Iraqis are the death squads that torture and murder "innocents" at a clip of 60 to 100 a day.

    your memory of the civil right struggle is very selective. it was the "evil" white southerners who did the bombing. four little girls in Birmingham, Goodman Chaney and Schwerner, Emmett Till and so many many others. we did not act as evil as they, to stop them, as you recommend.

    as for the japanese, the kamikaze were indeed air force soldiers. the japanese however, both civilian and soldiers committed suicide in great numbers, instead of being captured.

    Posted by johannesrolf at 04/25/2007 @ 2:00pm

17. Will our withdrawal from Iraq end the killing?

    it will not. it will however end the killing of americans. in addition without america's thumb on the scales, the violence will decide who runs Iraq. I believe it will be the Baathists, once again.

    Posted by johannesrolf at 04/25/2007 @ 2:02pm

18. Will our staying in Iraq end the killing?

    certainly not, as we have seen for four years. and no, they won't follow us home. the subway from Iraq to the US has not yet been constructed.

    Posted by johannesrolf at 04/25/2007 @ 2:46pm

19. you are a good man, jr.

    Posted by ibbleblibble at 04/25/2007 @ 7:12pm

20. thanks Ib. we don't always agree on details, but by and large we share views, and I am always glad to listen to yours.

    Posted by johannesrolf at 04/25/2007 @ 7:16pm