After the United States cuts and runs from Iraq – when, and not if – and leaves the Iraqis to sort out their own society, figure out their own government, and alter or abolish the choices we’ve spent the last 18 months making for them, the veterans of this pointless and foolish war (and the families of those who did not come back alive) will surely clamor for a monument of their very own.
Committees will be formed. Money – probably in great big drippy gobs – will be raised. Legislators will be lobbied. Architects will be hired and designs unveiled. This being America, there will be an indecent argument over who is more entitled (in other words, who suffered more) to have final say over the memorial – widows, orphans, the wounded, Fox News and Weekly Standard pundits. People who could not have been bothered to actually volunteer and fight the war will cry buckets of tears for the veterans, for their widows and orphans, and will eagerly impugn the patriotism of anyone who opposed the war or even wonders if America really needs another war memorial on an already monument-clogged Mall.
Well, being as the thing is going to be built whatever anyone feels about the issue, I’ve decided to offer a little advice on what it ought to look like and maybe even where it ought to be built.
See, I’m fortunate enough to, on my morning bike rides across the Mall to work, to pass by five national war memorials. So, I’ve learned a little something about memorial design through simple observation. Ride with me. I’ll show you.
(This, of course, doesn’t count the great marble Temple to Father Abraham, which really isn’t a war memorial so much as it is a memorial to war…)
First, on our right as we come off the Memorial Bridge from the Commonwealth of Virginia and navigate the now partially blocked roundabout where Father Abraham sits, staring at a nonexistent teevee or a terrified Congress, is the Korean War Memorial. This is a visually complex and stunning memorial – ghost soldiers marching in formation, a fountain, the number of American dead (and, separately, "UN" dead, who really are mostly Korean allies) etched in stone along with the names of all the countries that sent forces (the morning I took these photos, a group of Colombian soldiers were laying a wreath to honor their fallen), and the pictures of soldiers and civilians carefully etched into a polished stone wall.
It is, in fact, the most interesting war monument for anyone with a short attention span. There’s simply so much to see. The slightly larger-than-lifesize soldiers themselves look more like ghosts than men, like something that Rod Serling may have dreamt about and then written into a Twilight Zone episode. Perhaps that was the idea.
The photos etched in stone are, so the monument itself claims, drawn from actual photos. So they are ghosts in the wall. This whole memorial is haunted. It’s an interesting idea.
There’s no "space" for contemplation here, except maybe to ponder the "ghosts" or what the makers of the memorial intended by carving "Freedom is not Free" on one of the walls. (Guess…) You simply cannot help but think about this war when sitting or standing within this monument. You immediately sense it when you visit – this memorial is clearly about US, and not about anyone else. Surely not about the Koreans.
But this monument’s main problem is that it is simply too complicated. The etched photos probably won’t last longer than a few years without constant maintenance. The soldiers probably require regular maintenance (spiders appear to really like the statues). In short, this monument assumes there will always be a United States government to care for it. It is not so much, then, a monument to the Korean War as it is a monument to the Department of the Interior.
No, despite its obvious self-absorption, this is not the model we are looking for in an Iraq memorial. We are not out to honor the groundskeepers of the US Park Service.
Onward. (That smell is the Park Police stables. Just move on…) Do you see that little building on the right, hidden in the trees? Why, betcha didn’t know the District of Columbia built itself a World War memorial a little more than 80 years ago. It looks like a tiny Greek temple, and it’s as gentle and quiet a place as you can probably find on the Mall.
The names of the dead are carved on the side, but you can sit inside this beautiful little memorial and not think about war even once! And that’s the problem – it prompts, possibly, the wrong kind of reflection, and certainly doesn’t focus the mind on the war. Because our memorials have to be about us, about what the war did to us, about what it continues to do to us.
This little white marble structure, lovely as it is, contemplative as it might be, is clearly not about us. An Iraq memorial cannot be allowed to foster anything but the right kind of contemplation. No, this isn’t it either.
Okay, so on we go. Ahead of us is the National World War Two Memorial. It’s huge, quite possibly the size of the Vatican City, with a giant fountain, at least 50 large columns (one for each state, which seems oddly out of place), two giant entryways ("Atlantic" on the north and "Pacific" on the south), an elevated pond (the ducks really like it), and a giant field of glittering stars.
It’s gray marble and concrete combined with already-weathered bronze make this memorial look like something Albert Speer would have designed to celebrate Nazi Germany’s final victory against the decadent West and Bolshevik Russia. The wreaths each look like they’d easily fit a swastika, and I cannot get images of harsher-looking eagles with much straighter lines hanging over each entryway. This is not so much a memorial to World War Two as it a memorial to the American version of National Socialism, of state supremacy, of rule by rightly guided elites, of global conquest and domination. Much like the Temple of Father Abraham, this memorial is designed to awe and overwhelm anyone who visits – "this is the state, and it means everything. You mean nothing."
This memorial is always full of people. Buses pull up and disgorge visitors, young and old alike. The old, wearing their legion caps, come to remember and consider the dead, talk about the war with the living and reunite with friends. The young come to learn whatever it is the young are supposed to learn about the Second World War these days. Mostly they look bored. Aside from watching the ducks (which is a great hobby I suggest anyone take up; ducks are fun to watch and far more interesting than politicians, think tank scholars, 24-hour teevee news or war memorials), there isn’t much to contemplate here except death, destruction and the obliteration of the individual soul.
(However, several hundred years from now, when the faces of the ghost soldiers have melted off the Korean wall and the names too hard to read on the Vietnam wall, the World War Two memorial will make absolutely stunning ruins! I can imagine future symposia discussing the meaning of truth and beauty in the midst of vine-covered columns and weed-clogged pools…)
Because this memorial is so oppressive and bleak, it simply fails at being properly self-absorbed (and therapeutic) like either the Vietnam or Korea memorials. This memorial is clearly NOT about us. It aggrandizes the state too much. And in all the wrong ways. This is not a good model for our Iraq war memorial either.
Okay, now we ride north, cross Constitution Ave., wait at the light, and then cross 17th. See that gap between the concrete blocks that now restrict access to the Ellipsis? Ride through it. That’s right, this is now a parking lot for White House employees. Look carefully, on your right, you see the giant flaming golden sword in the salmon-colored enclosure? That’s the 2nd Division memorial.
The only time you’ve probably seen this is when you’ve been stuck in traffic on Constitution Ave. And you’ve probably wondered what it is. The location stinks. It’s hard to get to. The Ellipsis is closed to through traffic now, and while the field inside is open to amateur athletic events (when it isn’t used for state business), you really have to go out of your way to gaze upon the flaming sword and the list of the 2nd Division’s battlefields, places scattered across Europe and a couple of world wars.
This is not about us, or glory, or the state, or an idea, or anything. This simply doesn’t belong on the Mall; it belongs near the entrance of a military post somewhere. No, this certainly is not our Iraq war memorial. Not by a long shot.
(The less we say about our ride around the Ellipsis the better. Notice, there are more rapture-oriented bumper stickers here than you’ll see on a normal ride through a District of Columbia neighborhood. And see that plastic scrotum hanging from that truck’s trailer hitch? That’s family values for you!)
Ah, the fifth war memorial, tucked in just south of the Treasury and just east of the White House complex – the memorial to The Army of the Tennessee, built by the society of said army a little more than a century ago. This is definitely old school. A big granite pedestal topped with a bronze statue of a guy on a horse. A Yankee general, I’m guessing. Four federal soldiers stand a dour permanent guard, lest some quarter of Atlanta, Columbia, or Chattanooga decides to get uppity again and needs a little more burning. Because the lesson wasn’t learned the first time around.
For us moderns, however, there are some serious problems. First, this memorial could sit anywhere – New York, Cincinnati, Urbana, Montpelier – and Mall memorials have to be something you couldn’t build just anywhere. It borders on the banal. Would New York City set aside an acre or two for a platoon and a rock photo album of ghost soldiers? For a tiny Nazi Vatican with really cool waterworks? For black walls carved with the names of nearly 60,000 dead men and women? Would Denver? Los Angeles? Minneapolis? But a guy on a horse could stand just about anywhere, and could mean just about anything. It could even be a memorial to the wrong side. Can’t have that.
Second, there are naked people on this statue. That may have passed muster with decadent and depraved Americans 100 years ago, when they believed in clearly pagan and artificial goddesses like Columbia, but statues of naked people – even to honor a war (especially to honor a war) – simply will not work for the America we live in today. Not in George W. Bush’s America.
From all these examples, it’s clear that Iraq war memorial will have to be – first and foremost – about what the Iraq war did to us. Iraqis? The people we set out to liberate? We meant well. We always mean well. Because God made us better than everyone else. It will have to be designed in such a way that it focuses the mind on us, who we are, and what happened to us. And it must assume that a government will always exist to care for the memorial. We Americans don’t really build for the ages anyway.
So here’s my suggestion. It borrows a little from Saddam Hussein’s architectural inclinations, but since Bush has often mused in public that it would be much easier to be a dictator anyway, I don’t think he’d mind. Saddam built several of his memorials – most notably the swords memorial of central Baghdad – from the melted steel Iranian helmets. It was both utilitarian but also hugely symbolic, and the swords memorial actually starts out as a pile of helmets and eventually becomes giant castings of Saddam’s hands holding the swords that cross the avenue.
So here’s my suggestion – the US Iraq memorial should be a giant statue of George W. Bush in his flight suit, suitably packed and manly, towering over the world and holding his hand out to the people of Iraq (and probably America too) in the fashion of Kim Il Sung (a like-minded "fatherly" leader who understood how much easier leading was as a dictator), with the grateful hands of the millions he’s liberated reaching up to him out of the ground, the spectators in a drama that really is all about us and how really good and noble we are anyway.
It would be quite a sight, one that would likely comfort the many true believers, and one that would focus the mind and soul on the goodness of the war, the value and purpose of sacrifice, and the godly nature of American political leadership, and the virtue of our God-blessed state.
We could cast it out of the casings of all those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction we found.
(As for the Iraqis, if they ever get around to building some kind of monument to the occupation or liberation or whatever they will eventually call it, I would suggest depleted uranium – it probably casts better than Kevlar.)
October 7, 2004
Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.
