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CHAPTER 1
IRAQ
Your glass has destroyed their stones
On January 9, 2004, after serving nine months in Afghanistan, my son deployed to Iraq's Sunni Triangle. I'd spent his tour of duty in Afghanistan fretting about his safety but denying the reality of war. In my limited experience, American troops seldom were committed to prolonged ground wars. Instead, the U.S. military trained and supported militias (such as the Contras in Nicaragua and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan) or carried out sorties before the American people woke up to what was going on (such as the invasions of Grenada under Reagan and Panama under George H. W. Bush, as well as Gulf War I).
My acquaintances expressed condolences: "Don't worry. Your son will be back before you know it." None mentioned what invading troops do ... or what happens to the invaded.
I watched the green-tinted television footage of Shock and Awe. I'm not immune to images of overwhelming power, and my body shivered with awe ... then shock ... and fear: it was a matter of time before my child deployed to Iraq.
I couldn't spend another nine months worrying while he was deployed.
As a child I'd been mesmerized by the flash and mythology of war, but I understood nothing about the U.S. armed forces. Since my son's enlistment made me a military mom, I sought other military moms to learn what this meant. I quickly realized that none among us knew what was really going on, and after three decades of living here, I knew I wouldn't learn much from our media. I joined a women's delegation and traveled to Iraq for an empirical view.
My son was not pleased that I was bound for Baghdad. "Don't come. It is too dangerous. If you do come, go to a rifle range first and practice shooting. Then carry a big gun while you're here."
I didn't go to a rifle range nor did I carry a big gun. Instead, I talked to GIs and Iraqis. ...
Half an hour before landing in Amman our aircraft was engulfed in a thunderstorm; rain pelted the portholes and lightning illuminated the darkness we'd disappear into if the plane was struck.
It was the first of many times I asked myself, "What are you doing here?"
I repeated it twelve days later when an IED exploded amid a U.S. convoy on a Baghdad bridge: I believed my son was part of that convoy.
Amman was fresh and clear after the storm, and I was excited to be back in the region after 27 years. I had spent my honeymoon near a small reef cave at Sharm el-Sheik on the confluence of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. My son could have been conceived there.
As the delegation milled about Queen Alia International Airport, we learned that the three drivers with vehicles hired to convoy us across the desert hadn't shown up; they'd expected us to arrive the following night.
While the delegation head called around for alternative transportation, delegates introduced ourselves: delegation head Jodie Evans, Frances Anderson, Victoria Cunningham, Linda Durham, Robin Fasano, Anne Hoiberg, Leslie Hope, Kayhan Irani, Kate Raphael, and Roseyanna Yeap. I was the only military mom.
Two hours behind schedule (Baghdad's curfew was 8:00 p.m.) we scrambled into three late-model white SUVs — known locally as "bullet magnets," since so many private military contractors drive them — and departed Amman in the dark.
Soudoun, our driver, had draped blue velvet curtains on all the passenger windows (common in rural Iraq to hide female passengers from view), so Kate, Kayhan, and I were cocooned in the back. Linda sat in the front passenger seat with an elegant scarf hiding her face and blonde hair. We rolled our eyes at what we interpreted as Soudoun's dramatics as he explained that we'd drive "fast, fast, fast!" to avoid Ali Baba (highway robbers) for the next ten hours.
This conjured an image of lions — Ali Baba — picking off the slowest members of a stampeding herd — us! But it wasn't funny when news about terrified Iraqi civilians fleeing their homeland along this same route began circulating in the international press. By then other predators hunted alongside Ali Baba: militias, religious and political fundamentalists, small entrepreneurs, vengeful neighbors, and corrupt officials all wanted a bite of the vulnerable.
At dawn, silver light jabbed through gray clouds and backlit rocks the size of footstools scattered over the patchwork landscape. Kate shared her hummus and pita bread and explained that she'd joined the delegation after being jailed, then expelled from Israel, for working with Palestinians. Kayhan was a theater director in New York. Linda owned and ran an art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
At Jordanian border control, while two administrators manually checked hundreds of passports, I photographed the array of red-and-white-checked kaffiya headdresses of fellow travelers.
An avalanche of security guards hauled me off to the base commander, who demanded I smash my camera.
Through mime and truncated English — I speak no Arabic — I persuaded him that erasing the offending picture (and all the others I'd taken) was as effective as destroying the camera. We parted with nods, smiles, and iterations of "welcome," "good day," and "thank you."
By then five hours behind schedule, our anxious drivers sped across the desert at 140 to 180 kilometers per hour, the vehicles often within inches of one another.
Western Iraq simmers at midafternoon. Charred patches along Highway 10 suggested burnt vehicles, but otherwise it was as clean as any three-lane American highway. The electric power pylons dotting the landscape, however, had a peculiar cockeyed symmetry: all the tips twisted brokenly in the same direction as if a giant reaper wielding a scythe had trimmed each one 40 feet above the ground.
In Fallujah we lost track of one SUV in our convoy. When it came into view with its headlights flashing, we learned that Ali Baba had forced it off the road at gunpoint and robbed the passengers. No one was badly injured, although the robbers, while tugging Anne's money belt from her waist, had pulled her from the vehicle and she'd fallen onto her hands and knees in the road. Her money, passport, and return air ticket were stolen. Farther on, the same robbers were shaking down a truck driver: he stood with his hands in the air at gunpoint while the thieves searched his vehicle.
After dark, the four-lane freeway suddenly presented headlights coming toward us. Soldiers at an ad hoc checkpoint reported an unexploded IED in the road. Soudoun detoured through Baghdad's side streets to the Aghadeer Hotel, where another surprise greeted us: the hotel managers expected us the following day. We slept on mattresses on the floor.
The Aghadeer, closed now, was a low-budget hotel near Firdos ("Paradise") Square — actually a traffic circle — where a U.S. soldier had draped the stars and stripes over a statue of Saddam Hussein before it was toppled. Beyond the razor wire and the barricades encircling the square are the heavily fortified Palestine and Sheraton Hotels. The Green Zone, housing the largest U.S. embassy in the world, is on the other side of the Tigris River.
A brief history, looting, and other "stuff"
In April, 2003, television images around the world showed U.S.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repackaging Baghdad's tragic looting as "Stuff happens." "Freedom's untidy," he continued, "and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
The looting was, he asserted, "not as bad as some television and newspaper reports have indicated ... there was no major crisis in Baghdad." After all, as CNN's Sean Loughlin put it, "looting was part of the price for what the United States and Britain have called the liberation of Iraq."
What was the price of this looting "stuff"?
Baghdad dates back at least to the eighth century. It may have been founded on the west bank of the Tigris in 762, although it may be pre-Islamic. The Jewish Talmud mentions a city of Baghdad, whose name may derive from a Middle Persian compound of Bhaga, "god," and dad, "given," with the sense of "God's gift," or from Middle Persian Bagh-dad, "the given garden." Some researchers believe the biblical Garden of Eden was here.
Baghdad's long history includes the sacking of the city in 1258 by Hulagu Khan's Mongols, who massacred most of the inhabitants and destroyed its system of irrigation canals and dykes. Ottoman Turks conquered Baghdad in 1534 and remained in power until 1921 when the British established the kingdom of Iraq. This gerrymandered country gained formal independence in 1932 and increased autonomy in 1946. In 1958, the Iraqi army deposed the grandson of British-installed Faisal II. Ten years later, Saddam Hussein played a key role in the coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power.
Oil is key to modern Iraq. Oil funds built Iraq's modern sewage, water, and highway facilities and endowed Iraq's citizens with free education and free health care. Oil's potential also brought covetous Western economic interests to Iraq. Saddam Hussein temporarily thwarted these when he nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company, the West's monopoly on Iraqi oil.
Saddam Hussein's disastrous war with Iran from 1980 to 1988 not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Iranian men and boys, it forced Hussein to sell off publicly held assets to raise money to keep the military afloat.
If the economic sanctions applied after Gulf War I destroyed Iraq's social fabric and economy, Operation Iraqi Freedom snuffed out its history.
In April 2003, billions of dollars' worth of history and antiquities housed in museums — as well as more mundane supplies and equipment from shops, government offices, presidential palaces, even hospitals — were carried away in carts and wheelbarrows. Iraq's National Museum had closed at the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 and reopened to the public six months before Operation Iraqi Freedom. A BBC report summed up the stakes: "Treasures at the museum date back 5,000 years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia [including] items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs, and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing [and] gold and silver items from the Ur cemetery." The Los Angeles Times describes the devastation: "A 4,000-year-old inscribed clay tablet ... was pulled from eBay's Swiss website [and] a limestone head of a 2nd century BC king had been seized from the home of a Lebanese interior decorator and transferred to a museum for safekeeping. But experts suspect that most of the stolen objects are hidden in warehouses around the world because they are too hot to sell. The museum has recovered nearly 4,000 of the 15,000 pieces lost in looting ... some of the thefts spontaneous and some seemingly carefully planned." The deputy director of the Iraq National Museum said, "The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had [deployed] just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened." It is as if Hulagu Khan's Mongols had returned. Every member of the human family lost an ancient heritage in a matter of days for the lack of a tank and two soldiers.
But, as Donald Rumsfeld pointed out, "Stuff happens. ..."
The price is right
After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, President George H. W. Bush froze Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets and the U.N. called on Hussein to withdraw.
On January 17, 1991, U.S. presidential press secretary Marlin Fitzwater announced, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun," and U.S. warplanes attacked Baghdad and other military targets in Iraq, inflicting severe damage on Baghdad's transportation, power, and sanitary infrastructure.
On February 26, U.S. aircraft attacked and destroyed retreating Iraqi army units and civilian vehicles caught in a massive traffic jam on Highway 80 (between Kuwait and Basra). The incident and its site became known as the Highway of Death, or as U.S. military personnel described it, the "turkey shoot." Journalist Robert Fisk reported, "I had seen hundreds of dead here; there must have been thousands. Shouldn't we have been referring ... not to the Highway of Death, but to the Massacre at the Mutla Ridge?" A number somewhere between Saddam Hussein's figure, 44, and U.S. commanders' estimate of thousands of Iraqi soldiers were buried alive during the assault, which lasted two days, February 24 and 25, 1991.
A New England Journal of Medicine article states that U.N.-imposed sanctions following Gulf War I destroyed Iraq's "power plants [and] brought its entire system of water purification and distribution to a halt, leading to epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, and gastroenteritis, particularly among children ... the destruction of the infrastructure resulted in devastating long-term effects on health."
60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl, interviewing then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, said, "We have heard that a half a million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And — you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it."
According to UNICEF, Iraq had by far the sharpest rise in mortality rate for infants and young children of any nation in the world during sanctions: "It is the only instance of a sustained increase in mortality in a stable population of more than 2 million in the last 200 years."
Reporting from Iraq
I awoke to a dawn explosion followed by the pop-pop of automatic gunfire and helicopters circling overhead. A cable news crew had been attacked, although it wasn't clear how many journalists and civilians had been killed or injured. During the ten days the delegation visited Iraq, many journalists died:
• U.S. cable news network's Duraid Isa Mohammed and his driver, Yasser Khatab, were killed when unidentified assailants fired on their two-car convoy.
• Qulan TV's Safir Nader and Haymin Mohamed Salih, Kurdistan TV's Ayoub Mohamed and Gharib Mohamed Salih, freelance journalist, Semko Karim Mohyideen, and Abdel Sattar Abdel Karim of the Arabic-language daily Al Ta'akhy died in twin suicide bombings at the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
• On April 8, Spanish Tele 5 cameraman José Couso died and four were injured when a U.S. tank shelled the Palestine Hotel. The same day, Jordanian cameraman Tarek Ayoub was killed when a U.S. missile hit and badly damaged Al Jazeera's offices near the Al Mansour Hotel in the city center. (In 2006, Spain's high court dismissed the Couso family's lawsuit against the three U.S. soldiers directly involved in the attack on the hotel.)
• Reporters Without Borders describes this war as "the bloodiest for the media since World War II." By 2006, more than 200 journalists and media assistants had been killed, 14 had been kidnapped, and two, Frédéric Nérac of ITV News (UK) and Isam Hadi Muhsin al-Shumary of Germany's Suedostmedia, were still missing when this book went to press.
During breakfast at the Aghadeer Hotel, we met a contingent of unembedded, independent reporters, including Dahr Jamail, Mike Ferner, and Rob Eschelman. After breakfast, the delegation set off to talk to Iraqis.
Dr. Ali Rasheed Hamid
Psychiatrist Ali Rasheed Hamid, then of the University of Baghdad, specializes in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in children. He explained that it was difficult to measure Iraqi children's psychological health since the country's nearly continuous string of conflicts, from the Iran–Iraq war, Gulf War I, and U.N. sanctions to the current war and occupation. Iraq's young parents, themselves victims of war trauma, are often incapable of addressing their children's trauma.
"While Americans and adult Iraqis were jubilant at Saddam's demise, Iraqi children witnessed a mythical figure disappear, someone who loomed larger than life, whose image was everywhere, for whom songs were sung at school, and national holidays celebrated," Dr. Hamid observes. "Filling Saddam's void, children saw TV images of statues toppling, mass graves exhumed, Iraqis huddling in ruined buildings, bombs destroying familiar places, family members wracked with fear, and children like themselves begging in the streets."
Some also experienced foreign soldiers smashing in the doors of their homes at midnight, shining blinding lights, yelling incomprehensible orders, and dragging family members outside in their nightclothes in a futile search for insurgents. Too often they witnessed fathers and grandfathers — the heads of families — humiliated.
Outside their homes, children saw razor wire and barricades in their streets, military tanks, Humvees, uniformed and heavily armed foreigners patrolling their neighborhoods, and arbitrary arrests in which Iraqis were forced to the ground with boots placed upon their necks or nylon bags covering their heads. In extreme cases, they witnessed civilians randomly shot in the streets and car bombs exploding.
Dr. Ali Hamid says, "No child should witness such events."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Susan Galleymore.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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