I've just listened to Hillary Clinton telling a Rome press conference that she couldn't remember what they were all looking at when this photograph was taken. Well I think that is a shame. But rather than accuse Hillary of being very forgetful or worse , lets work out what this picture does tell us.
Well, in the early statements from the White House we were told that they were watching the raid in real time and then in a later statement they were watching it from a distance. Obviously there will have been a reason for this misunderstanding but I'm going to proceed with this analysis on the basis that whatever they are looking at is in sufficient detail as to be able to hold everybody's focus and attention, apart from General Brad Webb's who appear to be engaged in some technical aspect of the situation.
We can also be clear that whatever it is they are looking at is in sufficient detail so as to be able to bring about differing emotional responses from the people who are looking at it. Most of the men who are looking at the screen, are masking and controlling their emotional response to whatever it was that they are looking at. President Obama is carefully controlling his facial expression and emotional response to what it is that he is seeing, in a similar way that he controlled his emotional response to the question in the 60 minute interview about having seen the picture of bin Laden's body. He might well hate what he is looking at, but he is disassociating his instinctive emotional response from the representation of his self that he projects to the world: The president is being presidential.
Some of the other men in the room would appear to be less successful at suppressing their emotional response, with one or two of them finding it difficult to stop themselves from smiling at whatever it is that they are looking at. In itself that doesn't mean anything, but these barely suppressed smiles have to be juxtaposed with Hillary Clinton's strong expression of concern, which verges on sorrow. Hillary's expression is the least contrived and controlled in the room, it is the most caring and the most compassionate. Now we all know that Hillary Clinton is as tough as they come, we know that she can manage her emotional response with the best of them, but I think that deep down Hillary Clinton is disturbed and moved by her sense of shared humanity and that whatever it is that she is seeing has moved her.
But what is less re-assuring are the responses of the others in the room, whatever it is that is arousing compassion in Hillary Clinton arouses a barely suppressed smile in some, or a form of emotional disassociation in others. Of course we cannot know exactly what it was that they were watching at this point in time, because I really don't think they will ever tell us. What we do know is that in the course of this raid, bin Laden was shot twice, his son and his wife and another a woman, all unarmed, were shot trying to protect him.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of what happened to bin Laden; the sacrifice of his wife, his child and the other woman would have been an extraordinarily difficult thing to watch. The moral certainties with which a decent human being might have viewed the demise of bin Laden, would not have sustained them in watching the end of those who were not thought guilty of terrorist crimes. Now of course according to later statements they weren't watching the raid in real time, but regardless of what it was they were watching, it aroused compassion in a very tough politician- a very tough politician who cares.
No comments:
Post a Comment