The Impotence of the Serial Killer

In the United States, our official mythology is heroic individuality, but we actually live highly cooperative lives in our families, neighborhoods, at work, and when we go shopping.

In serial killing, the killers try to make the myth a reality for the rest of us. The story is the serial killer against everyone else--their revenge, their rage, and their destructive sexuality against the ordinary lives of other people. Serial killers think of themselves as one or two person "tipping points" that will change the way other people live. In Phoenix, the two "Serial Shooters" who were just caught terrorized an area of "aging strip malls and older homes" for a year keeping the business people and residents of the area in fear as they did their jobs, pumped gas, walked dogs, and did other ordinary things.

But group life in the United States is stronger than the serial killers. That's why serial killers never win. Serial killers can escape detection for years. They can thumb their nose at the cops. They can be romanticized in film and television. But serial killers can never bring the ordinary lives of people to a halt. The Serial Shooter could never make people stop coming to the aging strip malls of the neighborhood they targeted in Phoenix and the Son of Sam could never stop kids from making out in New York. Serial killers can never make the people in the rest of their towns and cities stay to themselves. They can never succeed in opposing their will.

What the Bush administration, the neo-conservative policy elite, and the activist right needs to learn is that they cannot impose their vision on Middle Eastern Arabs any more than serial killers can impose themselves on ordinary Americans or any more than bin Laden can impose his vision of a new caliphate through terror. The U. S. has had an outstanding army in Iraq for almost 3 1/2 years and the American army has disrupted Iraqi life in ways that serial killers and terrorists can only dream of. Nevertheless, the U. S. has not achieved any more control over the currents of Iraqi society than the Serial Shooter achieved in Phoenix. The rise of the insurgency, the blossoming of the Shiite militias, the new religious fervor, and the Taliban-like religious supervision have all been much more profound than the elections and the forming of a new government and have all been shaped by the Iraqis against the will of the occupiers.

The Bush administration and the American public need to rethink what we're doing in Iraq in the most profound way, to ask ourselves what shape Iraqi society is taking, what impact our initiatives have had, and how we can change directions. The American invasion was a tipping point. It tipped Iraq to a point somewhere between civil war and complete breakdown and it tipped the American military into a position of fruitless impotence. If we're going to change directions, we need to start now.