As we approach the fourth anniversary of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” even the most blind and bigoted understand what a catastrophe it has been. Billed as a plan to liberate Iraqis, it has indeed liberated uncounted numbers from all earthly woes.
Next week, I’ll try to assess the big picture of this vast crime, but for today, a few stories that particularly affected me.
One is the recent suicide bombing on al-Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. A street of booksellers, Mutanabi was also the center of Baghdad’s literary and cultural life. In between the stands selling whatever could be scavenged in a country cut off from the world for 12 years (TIME magazines from the 1970’s, for example) to all those Iraqis desperate to find something, anything, that could take them away from the prison of their everyday lives were cafes where intellectuals would gather to talk for hours over endless cups of tea.
In 2004, I spoke to a man in one of those cafes who had been a political prisoner for 16 years, released only in October 2002 when Saddam almost emptied his jails. He had uttered some insult of Saddam in 1986. His timing was lucky – had he done it in the early 90’s or after, Saddam’s new laws would have mandated that he lose his tongue. Even so, he was fervently opposed to the occupation.
Somehow, Mutanabi Street had weathered the vicissitudes of occupation violence, suicide bombings, death squads, and the constant zealous efforts of narrow-minded fools to keep them from selling anything except the right kind of books, but I don’t suppose it will survive this blow.
Although March 20 is the official date when the invasion started, for me the war started on March 16, 2003, when Bush delivered his twin ultimata: to Saddam, to leave Iraq, and to the U.N. Security Council, to bow to his will.
Although in one sense this date was accidental – Bush had intended to start the war about two months earlier, but Tony Blair persuaded him to try one more time with the U.N. – in another sense, there was nothing accidental about it. That day was itself a macabre anniversary, the 15th of Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja as part of the Anfal, a systematic pacification and counterinsurgency campaign in northern Iraq.
That crime was committed with the full support of the United States. The Reagan administration and especially the current president’s now sainted father continued the flow of money to Saddam’s regime and made sure that the U.N. Security Council only issued a toothless president’s declaration rather than taking action.
Had even a single word about the humanitarian nature of the Iraq war actually been meant or even thought through for propaganda purposes, instead of simply providing a sanctimonious cloak for an assertion of American power and a reaffirmation, to ourselves, of our wondrous goodness, something would have been done for the victims of Halabja. After all, the regime change itself was an overt repudiation of George Bush Sr.’s heartless and cowardly crimes in Iraq, and “fixing the problems we created” was often cited as a reason for the war.
The victims of Halabja, coughing their lives out and drinking still-contaminated water, were the ultimate “righteous victims,” not like evil insurgents and Communists and hapless “collateral damage.” Yet virtually nothing was done for them, either by the United States or by the Kurdish leadership, after the regime change, except the building of a monument to the dead.
Two years ago, as part of a massive shift of U.S. “reconstruction” funds to “security,” $10 million that had been approved to renovate and extend the water system was cancelled, a final insult added to the injury that the United States aided and abetted. Last year, at the 18th anniversary commemoration, the victims vandalized their own monument during a protest over the use of the memorial for constant photo ops while no actual aid to the victims was forthcoming. Security forces killed one student in the protest, a young boy whose name, appropriately, was Kurdistan. Jonathan Steele, who recently returned to follow up on that story, quotes a young man who lost half his family in Halabja saying of the memorial, 'If they rebuild it a thousand times, I will burn it down a million times.'
There is very little I can add to that.
From Empire Notes
