On the Nick Berg Beheading
Col. Lounsbury writes what I think may be the definitive post here.
Lounsbury quotes the Washington Post:
The persistent violence contrasts sharply with U.S. officials’ optimistic calls for private companies to invest in Iraq. Over the past year, the Commerce Department has conducted a three-continent campaign to promote investment and reconstruction opportunities.
It was at one of those conferences that Berg was inspired to go to Baghdad, his family said. He dreamed of building radio towers in Iraq that would beam reports from a free press.
According to his family, Berg met businessmen at the conference who asked him to inspect radio towers damaged in the war. Berg hoped to make a bid for his company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc., to provide parts and repair services.
Berg’s mother said she had begged him to change his mind about the trip.
But Berg, whose family described him as a bit of a rebel, decided that the potential business was worth the risk. He took a flight from New York to Amman, Jordan, on March 14 and then traveled on to Iraq. He did not have a security guard, translator or driver lined up, his mother said, and he decided to stay at smaller hotels not frequented by foreigners..
Emphasis Lounsbury’s. Bottom line: Berg may as well have been wearing a sign on his back reading “Clueless American – Kidnap Me.” Of course, Lounsbury says this much more emphatically and entertainingly.
Aside: Don’t visit Lounsbury’s site if graphic language offends you.
Another aside: Berg’s body was discovered sans head.
The pornography of violence in the form of taped executions (Fabrizio Quattrocchi) and especially beheadings (Daniel Pearl, the infamous Russian conscript decapitation) is a staple of Islamist propaganda, and will continue to be even in the absence of crimes on our part. Which is not to excuse or apologize for those crimes — merely to point out that there’s cause and effect here only on a very shallow level.
I agree in part. If not for the prison scandal, Berg would probably have been executed the same way for another “reason.” There exists no shortage of grievances that would resonate for the real audience for this video, the Arab street. For the Western audience, it was sufficient to shock them with barbarity with the added bonus of giving Western contract employees added incentive to leave.
Here’s an interesting tidbit that Lounsbury throws into a later post:
On the other hand, I note my local shopkeeper (who likes me, I don’t think he knows where I am from come to think of it – he also has a pictures of Yassine and Co. up in his shop) showed me a weekly yesterday. It had, in connexion with the Abu Ghrieb incidents, a picture – genuine? who knows? – of an American soldier (art claimed from the prison, whatever – with a tatoo of the Israeli flag on his arm, along with some American stuff. Maybe a roughneck Jewish sort. In any case, that is an angle being highly played, that there is an Israeli connexion to this, that Israelis are helping. Unforunately there may be some truth to this.
Not surprising that this angle is being played up in the Arab media. Too bad most Americans are too clueless to realize how inflammatory this imagery is to Arabs.