this is one of the best articles on the war i’ve seen so far.
and that’s so weird to say, to think, to articulate words about the war, because as an american i get the luxury of being very removed and detached from it all. that right there is shameful enough, but still…it’s so easy to forget when i’m snug in my little office building or comfortable at home with my kitten or driving down the street completely carefree and happy that there is a war going on…and it is horrible.
taken from salon.
Shame
What we have done to the Iraqi people can never be undone. But there is one small gesture we can make: Apologize.
By Gary Kamiya
Oct. 31, 2006 | Americans are feeling many emotions about Iraq these days. There’s anger. There’s sadness. There’s despair, and vindication, and fear. But largely forgotten is the quietest, but most necessary, emotion of all: shame.
When we chose to invade Iraq, we made ourselves morally responsible for the consequences. This was not a debt we wanted to think about. And until the last few weeks, it was possible to repress it, by clinging to the hope that things would somehow turn out OK. That hope has now been dashed. Whether we stay or leave, Iraq is not going to be OK. And all we can do is watch as the deadly consequences of our folly, our rashness, our stupid self-righteousness, our inexcusable imperial hubris are visited on thousands of men, women and children — only a minuscule fraction of them those “terrorists” we were supposedly attacking.
We have turned Iraq into hell. In Iraq today, death can come from anywhere, for any reason or no reason. You can be killed because you belonged to the wrong sect, because you were seen talking to an American, because someone wants your car, because you wore shorts, because you were selling ice, because you drove too close to a U.S. checkpoint, because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There is an old Arab proverb: “Better a thousand days of tyranny than one day of anarchy.” It is not an inspiring sentiment, but perhaps there is a reason for it.
A recent study conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers and published in the Lancet, the respected British medical journal, estimates that the war has so far caused between 400,000 and 940,000 Iraqi deaths. Even if the actual number of deaths is only half of the low Lancet estimate, it would mean that we are responsible for an appalling bloodbath. Yet as Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell noted in a recent column, the U.S. media has displayed little interest in trying to confirm these figures, and appears rather uninterested in them. “The sad truth is: People who don’t want to face this sort of death toll won’t ever want to face it,” Mitchell wrote.
In fact, none of us want to face it. Or face the indisputable fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes, vast numbers of them leaving the country altogether — creating the greatest refugee crisis in the world. We cry over tsunami victims, but we callously ignore the Iraqi victims of a war we started. Instead, we argue, we point fingers, we carry on with politics as usual.
But politics as usual is a mask for moral indifference.
I was reading the Iraqi blogger Riverbend last week. If you don’t read her, you should. As Anthony Shadid did in “Night Draws Near,” she puts a human face on this war. It hurts to read her. Riverbend had not posted for months, and explaining her long absence, she wrote, “It’s very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia — with a detachment and lack of sentiment that — I suppose — is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush, constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.”
Riverbend’s words were a painful reminder that while we Americans argue about Iraq, she and 25 million other Iraqis have to live there. And her comments on the Lancet study are worth more than a hundred braying debunkers: “We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years.”
Think about every single family you know. Then subtract a brother here, a sister there, a father here, a cousin there, a grandfather here. This is the reality that we have created in Iraq.
I have sometimes imagined what it would feel like to be a drunken driver who smashes into another car and kills a family. Every day you would wake up, take a shower, make coffee, sit down to read the paper. It might take a while to remember what you did, but sometime in the morning you would. And then the shadow would fall. The shadow of knowing that you have no excuse. Of knowing that you took human lives. Of knowing that this will never, ever go away, that you will have to live with it forever.
This is the shadow we now live under because of Iraq. We did it. We can’t undo it. And we will never be able to make up for what we’ve done.
Our guilt would be somewhat mitigated, or at least easier to deal with, if there had been any real reason for this war. All wars are terrible, but some are justifiable. This was not. It was a frivolous war, perhaps the most abstract, pulled-out-of-thin-air war ever launched by a world power. It was dreamed up by hollow men who had never experienced war themselves, who made the decision as if playing a board game, and were supported by people who convinced themselves that the world was a board game.
To be sure, some war supporters had good intentions. But that does not exonerate them. If you start a war for no reason, you have to be right about the outcome. You don’t have the option of being wrong.
The war supporters’ good intentions were to get rid of Saddam Hussein, one of the great monsters of our time, and improve the miserable lives of the Iraqi people. These were laudable sentiments. I was bitterly opposed to the war, but I allowed myself to celebrate the moment when he fell. I thought it was inhumane and dogmatic not to celebrate the downfall of such a dreadful dictator, even though I feared what would happen next. But it turns out that I was wrong to celebrate.
Former weapons inspector Hans Blix says that Iraq today is worse than under Saddam. And Blix is not alone. More and more ordinary Iraqis are saying this. “Before, we were suffering under Saddam, but now there are many Saddams,” the Iraqi writer Hamid Mokhtar despairingly told Salon reporter Phillip Robertson. In a devastating recent article in the New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise described what amounts to the psychological collapse of an entire nation. Iraqi women told Tavernise that they had given up the simple pleasures in life, or were no longer able to enjoy them. “Life was also hard under Saddam Hussein, the women pointed out. Plans were equally impossible to build. But the basic fabric of life, visiting family, attending weddings and funerals, was for the most part intact. Now Iraqis are letting go even of those parts.”
It is true, of course, that everything happening in Iraq today might have happened anyway. After Saddam passed from the scene, there could easily have been a civil war. But this does not relieve us of our responsibility. Because we don’t know if that would have happened or not. And we do know what our war has done.
In his admirable book “What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building,” written in 2004, when Iraq’s nightmare was on the horizon but had not yet fully arrived, Noah Feldman warned Americans that we must do everything in our power to ensure a positive outcome in Iraq. “Removing security guarantees would mean allowing something that would closely approximate anarchy,” Feldman writes, “– a product, let me remind you, of our own choice to invade.” He pointedly notes that a failed Iraq would “be a humanitarian disaster almost entirely of U.S. making.”
Feldman’s book makes an unassailable moral argument: Whether you agreed with the war or not, once it started America incurred a moral responsibility to the Iraqis. Early on in the war, this idea came to me in a very strange way. Walking down the street one day, I had a sudden, piercing feeling that the Iraqis had become our children. I know this sounds paternalistic and condescending, but I didn’t intend it that way. The fact is that the Iraqi people had been shattered by Saddam’s tyranny, by the inconceivably bloody war with Iran, by the crippling U.N. sanctions; they were in no position to walk without help. When we smashed into their country, we in effect became their temporary guardians. We were responsible for their well-being. We needed to raise them, take care of them, until they could take care of themselves. And we failed them. This is a deeply shameful feeling.
And it was not only Iraqis we failed. We failed Army paratrooper Sam Ross, from Dunbar Township, Pa., who lost his eyes and his left leg below the knee when a bomb exploded in Baghdad. He was 20 years old. There are thousands of other Americans who have been as grievously hurt as Sam Ross, and more than 2,800 who will not be coming home. And for what? To invade a country that had done nothing to us, and to open a Pandora’s box of death and devastation that may have cost half a million lives and isn’t over yet?
What can we do about this? We have no vocabulary for it, no moral compass. What do you do when you have incurred a debt so great it can never be repaid?
In 1997, after a Jordanian soldier killed seven Israeli schoolgirls who were visiting a nature reserve, the late King Hussein knelt, weeping, before each of the girls’ parents as a sign of his sorrow, his responsibility and his shame.
America owes the Iraqi people the same gesture.
Protest marches mean little now. Anger can be expressed on Nov. 7. But we need to express our shame.
I would like to propose a national day of apology. On this day, all Americans, those who supported the war and those who did not, will come together without rancor and apologize to the Iraqi people for what we have done. It will be a day without politics, without anger, maybe even without words. A day simply to say we’re sorry. And to say it, figuratively or literally, on our knees.
In one of Riverbend’s blogs, I came upon this Arabic phrase. “Baqiya ib hayatkum… Akhir il ahzan…” It is a formal statement of condolence. She says it means, “May this be the last of your sorrows.”
To the people of Iraq, from one American: Baqiya ib hayatkum. Akhir il ahzan.
reading that is really harsh, actually. and it’s true…there is a giant sense of shame over the whole thing. because no matter how much i disagree with the war, no matter how much i disapprove of the current government, no matter how much i dislike it…i am an american. and being an american means taking on my portion of responsibility for atrocities the american people have committed against the iraqi people.
one thing i don’t agree with, however, is the author’s take on the iraqi people as our children. that’s just…well he says himself that it’s a shameful sense of entitlement or whatever, and misplaced. but i don’t see it that way at all. the iraqi are not a helpless people, not at all. it’s just, we’ve decimated them so horribly that they’re suffering unbelievably. we don’t own them, we are not better than them, we are just far more arrogant than them. the US as a whole is far more arrogant than about 90% of the rest of the world, with small exceptions for north korea (which is really just kim jong il’s arrogance alone). it’s thinking like that, even in introspective analysis essays like this article, that drives the US government, power & people to impose itself upon the rest of the world. it’s going to bite us in the ass someday, and probably someday soon.
what america needs — besides a government that is NOT run by blithering idiots and power hungry megalomaniacs (and stupid old white men) — is humility, and buckets of it. humility and compassion, or rather an awareness for something other than immediate needs. america is the fat, selfish child that will steal candy out of the hand of another kid just because he wants it, even if it makes the other kid cry. the fat, selfish child that will think it is better than another child just because he has candy. humility and a sense of responsibility, that is what this country needs.
and if you don’t believe it, you really should read the riverbend blog: here.
if you don’t…this ought to make it somewhat clear:
It’s like Baghdad is no longer one city, it’s a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It’s gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, “civil war… death… killing… bombing… rape…”
Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don’t report rapes here, they avenge them. We’ve been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can’t believe their ‘heroes’ are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?
In the news they’re estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes… Raise your heads high supporters of the ‘liberation’ – your troops have made you proud today. I don’t believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an ‘independent investigation’, ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn’t his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.
It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It’s been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can’t bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can’t bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can’t bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can’t bring myself to care because it’s difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they’ll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?
i hope this girl makes it out alive, i hope she gets to live life free of american oppression someday. if i can wake up in the morning and not face the day full of such horrors than so should she. and so should every iraqi man, woman and child whose lives have been so disrupted and destroyed.
i do feel for the us troops out there aimlessly carrying out the inane orders of a sadistic, maniacal leader…our president…but i don’t feel for them nearly as much as i do the iraqi people.
and no amount of boredom or frustration or confusion or whatever can justify killing innocent civilians, raping the country and it’s people, destroying all hope. nothing can justify that. all’s fair in love & war or not, it’s horrible. and i hope the soldiers responsible for such things, the ones that took part in such actions, i hope they get what’s coming to them.
