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KJ
BLOGOLOGY
Envisioning
the Unimaginable
(From KJ #67)
U.S.
presence in Iraq as envisioned by an Iraqi 10-year-old in 2003
During
the last few weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, more than 18 million
world citizens joined in an unprecedented spectacle of mass street protest
around the planet. Just briefly, it seemed that sanity had a chance of
prevailing. All too soon we were seeing the pyrotechnics of “shock
and awe” in Baghdad; looting of the city’s irreplaceable antiquities;
the symbolic yet meaningless felling of a statue. Then came the Abu Ghraib
torture photos, the capture, trial and execution of Saddam Hussein; all
punctuated by scenes of widening anarchy — mosque bombings, daily
suicide bombings — an accelerating cycle of carnage and human misery.
Over more than four years, as the occupation has proved itself even more
disastrous than was predicted, mainstream media coverage has inexorably
dwindled away. By late last year only a handful of reporters remained
embedded with the military or in the relative security of the Green Zone.
Even the most dedicated independent journalists like Robert Fisk and Patrick
Cockburn, who used to criss-cross Iraq to report first-hand on vital developments,
have weighed up the situation and now file their stories from neighboring
countries.
So what is actually happening? With just an Internet connection and a
few URLs, you can still find out how people’s lives are being affected
in the former “cradle of civilization.” But be warned: the
news is not good.
Khalid Jarrar, an intense 24-year-old engineering student in Baghdad,
states his beliefs as follows, at "Tell Me a Secret"
<http://secretsinbaghdad.blogspot.com/>:
“I am pro God, I am pro life, I am pro humanity, I am pro truth,
and when the American government chooses to be against all that then damn
it: I AM anti American-government.”
Sunday, March 18, 2007
For four years I have been pleading for peaceful ways of ending the occupation.
Trying to cooperate with the peace movements here and in the States to
find a way out, but as we can all notice, our efforts are in vain. The
US government cares about nothing at all, nothing, as long as they have
the guns and bullets to do what they want to do, they will do it, and
you wusses can condemn and protest all you want all around the world;
we have the guns and the guts, and we are staying the course, they say.
And I personally now don't believe anymore in any of that peace message,
simply because it doesn't work.
The young Iraqi woman blogger “Riverbend” became quite well
known in the early days of the conflict. Understandably, her posts have
become rather infrequent. See “Baghdad is Burning,”
at <www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com/>:
Thursday, April 26, 2007
I remember Baghdad before the war — one could live anywhere. We
didn't know what our neighbors were — we didn't care. No one asked
about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial
topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you
were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence
depends on hiding it or highlighting it — depending on the group
of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.
....
On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known
we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens
of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was
just a preposterous idea — leaving one’s home and extended
family — leaving one’s country — and to what? To where?
So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave
behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not
the classic refugees — the ones with only the clothes on their backs
and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply
a continuation of what has been one long nightmare — stay and wait
and try to survive.
... There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country,
simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming.
It's difficult to decide which is more frightening — car bombs and
militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified
place for a future where nothing is certain.
Although another Iraqi woman, Faiza [Khalid's mother], blogs with her
three sons as “A Family in Baghdad” <http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/>,
she has already joined the diaspora. (Most refugees from Iraq have two
choices: Jordan or Syria). As an engineer specializing in treatment plants
for drinking water, she does what she can with relief work from outside
her country. She chronicles the limbo that awaits refugees once they do
cross the border:
February 19th, 2007
What can I say about the Iraqis here, in Amman?
They spend their days in panic; thinking — will the residency permit
be extended or not? What would be the fate of their children in the private
schools, will they continue their studies, or shall we take them back
to Baghdad? That is, if the family was well off to pay for school fees.
But for the poor families, the children are just sitting home without
studies, because if you do not have a yearly residency permit, you cannot
put your children in the free public schools. And a permanent residency
means depositing the sum of $100,000 in the bank for one year.
Who has that much money?
The poor families are suffering, not being able to pay the rent of the
flat, the living expanses, or the medical fees. They are in a cross fire,
between the burning expanses here with the lack of resources, and going
back to the hell of exploding cars and the free killing in Iraq.
And the international organizations; the United Nations or the Refugee
Aid, are residing on the margins of what is taking place in Iraq, as if
they are organizations sleeping under the sand, and have nothing to do
with the calamities befalling the Iraqis.
Notably the Internet also gives unprecedented insights into the experience
of individual US military personnel in Iraq (and Afghanistan). Doonesbury
cartoonist Gary Trudeau’s “The Sandbox”
site <http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/>
provides a constantly updated online anthology of essential reading (soon
to be a book), and a plethora of links.
“The
Termite Mound” (posted April 23 2007), by Sgt “Roy
Batty,” is an illuminating example. Here’s part of his typical
day:
If all goes well, we get to our IP [Iraqi Police] station without anything
blowing up beside us. We pull inside, close up the gate, and settle in
for another fun-filled day. For me, this consists almost solely of standing
behind a metal gate and assessing everyone that comes through it. Are
they an IP? Do I know them? Are they a civilian? Do they have a hidden
weapon?
We recently found out that a Mehdi Army sniper team was targeting me at
the gate, so now we keep out of sight and behind closed doors. This is
fine from a Force Protection angle, but it means that I now spend six
to eight hours a day standing in the sun, in full gear, about five feet
behind said gate, waiting and watching it for someone to open it and spray
me with an AK from close range. Think about that for a second. Imagine
spending every single day for five months, eight hours a day, sweating
your ass off in 65 pounds of gear, in the sun, watching a faded blue door.
Being bored to tears, yet having to remain vigilant at the same time.
You can't open the door, or look outside, because someone within the surrounding
300 meters, hidden behind a window curtain, might put your eye out with
a big freakin' bullet.
I never thought you would be able to put the words "boring"
and "lethally dangerous" together, but I was wrong.
[For a full listing of "Roy Batty"'s many finely-written Sandbox
postings, go here.Also
see update, below...]
Another milblog well worth browsing is Spc Milo Freeman’s "Calm
Before the Sand" <http://calmbeforethesand.blogspot.com/>
— where he tries to resolve being simultaneously a liberal, a soldier,
and a Buddhist...
Sunday, April 08, 2007
And so we are told that we are fighting a Culture War.
The running storyline: America, the last bastion of Christian democracy,
is locked in a battle-to-the-death with wild-eyed heathens in a distant
land. America, they tell us, is in grave danger of being wiped out by
dark-skinned foes; foes who want to burn down our churches, bomb our urban
centers, brainwash our children, and subjugate our women. They say that
unless we take the war to their soil, the hordes will descend upon us
like a plague of Old-Testament locusts. So to their soil we take it. And
all the while, good men and women die as powerful old men, safe in air-conditioned
offices, reap huge profits and tell us the economy has never been better.
The subplot: The Arab world, the cradle of civilization, is locked in
a war with pale-skinned occupiers from a distant land. The Muslim world,
they tell each other, is in grave danger of being crushed under the jackboots
of latter-day Crusaders; sinners and unbelievers who want to tear down
the mosques, ransack the local culture, brainwash children with dreams
of materialistic excess, and befoul the purity of Muslim women. They say
unless all Arabs take up the cause of jihad, the heart of everything Muslim
will be gutted and sold to the highest Western bidder. And yet as people
leap upon the sword of the American juggernaut, the clerics who sent them
there only grow in power.
There, as here, some people believe the hype more than others. Reasoning
minds rise above the bloodshed and call for peace. But for those with
little or nothing but faith, the perceived Divine call for vengeance is
tempting.
[See
also Milo's Sept 7 posting re Riverbend's move to Syria, "God-Willing":
"Riverbend," an Iraqi woman whose blog
I have read since the start of the war, years before I joined the Army
even, is gone. She is now a refugee in Syria, having chosen to flee her
home in Baghdad like millions of others. She can no longer accept the
way things are in her homeland, regardless of what we try to tell ourselves.
No matter what we say about the good we're doing over here, this woman's
testimony is a seething incrimination of all the ways in which we have
failed her... ]
The Sandbox
assures contributors that "all content, no matter how robust, is
currently secured by the First Amendment." In April this year, the
US Army issued new regulations on operational security (OPSEC) that require
military bloggers to “consult with their immediate supervisor and
their OPSEC Officer for an OPSEC review prior to publishing or posting
information in a public forum." (See www.estripes.com/,
May 4, 2007 — and also Milo Freeman's "The Problem of Perception"
on The Sandbox, June 29th).
Update,
June 13:
My brother Owen [aka "Roy Batty"] was
hit in the head by a sniper bullet yesterday in Baghdad. He’s uninjured,
through some incredible luck, or perhaps just leftover grace from one
of his myriad religions (ranging from Christianity to Harley-Davidsons).
The bullet pierced his hi-tech Army headphones, ripped through the kevlar
lining of his helmet, and… stopped. At first he thought he’d
been hit by a large and well-aimed rock.
He’s been in Iraq for a year. Coincidentally, yesterday is the day
he would have been climbing into a C-130 and heading home to his wife,
dog and margarita blender, had his tour not been extended as part of The
Surge.
[link]
Also
posted on KJ Voices page, KJ #67:
“When
I did not cooperate, the interrogator asked me whether I considered the
American army as “liberator” or “occupier”. When
I replied that they were occupiers, he lost his temper and threatened
me. He told me that I would be sent to Guantanamo Bay where even animals
would not be able to survive.”
—From a 38-point statutory declaration by Ali Shalal Abbas, the
Islamic education lecturer who was photographed hooded and wired at Abu
Ghraib, posted Feb 17, 2007 at <secretsinbaghdad.blogspot.com/>:
Additional
sites:
Iraq
Today <warnewstoday.blogspot.com/>
Iraqi Bloggers Central: <jarrarsupariver.blogspot.com/>
more
blogology
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