Unqualified Offerings

The foxes begin looking into the recent problem of disappearing chickens:

At this time, Iraqi police say they’re starting to gather evidence about the case, and don’t know who might have killed Vincent.

OJ has no idea who killed Ron and Nicole either, but he won’t rest until he finds the bastard.

The body of the 49-year-old American reporter and author was recovered shortly after midnight in the southern city of Basra, where he’d based himself for the past three months writing about the Shiite militias, and rampant corruption among local politicians and cops.

Here, on the evidence of the reporting of Vincent himself and others, the Monitor’s Dan Murphy uses three nouns for the same thing signified: “Shiite militias”; “local politicians”; and “cops.” In today’s Basra these are simply not distinct categories.

Despite all the talk of “Islamofascists” by Vincent’s conservative eulogizers, and of American arrogance and naiveté about other cultures in places like here, the evidence suggests that the story of Vincent’s murder is a universal one. He probed into a port city’s rackets and the gangs involved whacked him. In various eras, Vincent could have suffered the same fate in Marseilles, Palermo, New York City, Los Angeles or Hong Kong. The extra pity of Basra is that, since the gangs draw their membership from religious fanatics, you get all the corruption of the classic seaport but none of the fun.

I’m not for a moment denying that war and sectarianism played a significant role, nor do I doubt that, for all his acuity, Vincent was in some ways as much “the Naive American” as the earnest young captain he profiled in his final substantial blog item. War and the aftermath of war foster crime. Scarcity and rationing attract fixers, who need enforcers, who thrive in the chaos war engenders. The very salience of violence in the lives of people in war and occupation zones normalizes violence as a social strategy. What was unthinkable antebellum becomes unremarkable postwar. And there’s nothing like religious fanaticism – Islamism in this case – to add that twist of righteousness to one’s brutal impulses. As to Vincent himself, we can’t really know another person’s mind. How far he realized he was pushing his luck, whether he trusted the bubble of imperviousness every American imagines surrounds him, how he solved the difficult calculus of discretion, courage and curiousity must remain opaque – really, it must humble us.

But Vincent’s murder is a symptom not just of Iraq’s descent into fundamentalist Muslim terror, but of the durable criminality of its governance. We have exchanged new crooks for old.