A recent article at the Times online (h/t tlh lib) profiles six Iraqis, men and women, Sunni and Shia, who wanted to tell their stories about living in wartime Iraq. Please read them if you get the chance: they're horrifying portraits of a crumbling society, probably not much different than you'd expect, but the particularities of everyday life help bring them closer to home than the more detached journalism we usually come in contact with.
[Street-cleaning] was dangerous enough, but the work became even more perilous when insurgents began seeding roads with improvised explosive devices disguised as rubbish. Street cleaners were blown up, or denounced as informers when they betrayed the location of such devices. “You can’t just turn a blind eye. If you leave them there they might kill innocent passers-by,” Saad said through an interpreter.
If we really want to parse these stories, we can find evidence to support anyone's contentions about Iraq. Most of these people were happy to see Saddam go. On the other hand, they miss the sense of stability they had before. We can see how the evils of a strict, fundamentalist religion are crushing their spirits. Yet they don't remember this kind of sectarian violence before the war.
You can almost step back and imagine the Iraq war like a giant, impersonal machine. I'm not sure who's at the control panel, but somehow the competing interests of American foreign policy, Middle Eastern balances of power, and religious fanaticism are all working together smoothly to crush the people who, in other circumstances, aren't too different from you and me.
Anas stopped wearing jeans after hearing of women being killed or beaten for wearing Western clothes. Then she had to give up driving. Soon she could no longer go shopping or to the hairdresser. She stopped wearing make-up in public. She had to start wearing a veil and then an abbayah when she went out. Eventually she felt unable to leave the house at all.
What's doubly bad is that we've continued framing this debate in terms of what's in our best interest, or making assumptions about what's in their best interest. This is really the heart of the imperialistic mindset. Now we're not even so sure about what we mean by "best interests".
I say this because I'm guilty of this, too. In general I've tried to be careful of how I word my arguments, but every now and then I'll say something to the tune of "Iraqis want..." or "What would be best is..." It's bull. I don't know what Iraqis want, and I don't know what would be best for them.
Omar, who once played basketball for Iraq, comes from Gazaliyah, a mixed area of west Baghdad racked by bombings, shootings and kidnappings. His brother fled to the Gulf in March. In July Mahdi militiamen seized his two aunts and a 28-year-old nephew. Omar later found their bodies in a grave in Karbala; his nephew's mouth had been slit right up to his ears. A month after that his parents fled to Syria.
We may not know "what would be best", but I think we can all agree on one thing: if it were in our power to protect these people (on the basic level of stopping the killing) we'd do it in a heartbeat. That's not what we're debating. The source of contention lies in the first part: if it were in our power...
I don't think it ever was.
For a long while, it seemed we only had two options: continue doing what we were doing, or pull out and go home. I wonder if it was ever that simple. Did the Bush administration really follow the same strategy for years on end, or did they just tell us that to encourage stability at home while in actuality they were trying failed strategy after failed strategy? Believe it or not, I'd prefer the latter: it'd at least show that they weren't nearly as blind as they've pretended to be.
I don't expect much discussion here: this is just a late-night ramble on a topic we've been over, again and again.
But please read the article.
(original posted at SwordsCrossed- this version contains minor edits)
Update - a comment from tlh lib below:
i hope people actually click on the link to the article and then email the link to everyone they know whose outlook could be changed a bit closer to reality with a read of it.
i looked all over the times page for a link to email the article (like the NYTimes and many other news papers offer at article pages) but couldnt' find anything.
the original article...(3 pages long)
the print-friendly version ...(1 page)
this is the reality and the human face of this war.... hopefully this article will get some attention. if this kind of stuff had been reported 2 years ago, i doubt we'd have bush in office right now.
Amen to that: get this information out there!