Category Archives: Iraq War

How safe is home?

Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq War, Islam in America, Terrorism Issue


On March 11 an American soldier slipped out of his base before dawn and ended the lives of 17 Afghan civilians, who had returned to what they thought would be a safe home near the protection of the American military base. The general reaction to this is that the man “snapped,” an isolated act. Then there is the case of a Florida vigilante who shot an unarmed, young black kid wearing a hoodie and walking home; the man who shot him claims that it was in self defense. Someone must have “snapped” in the encounter. Yesterday an as-yet-unidentified killer took the life of an Iraqi mother living in El Cajon, California. The murderer snuck into her bedroom and bludgeoned her to near death, leaving a note that said “go back to your country.” Perhaps this was also an individual that “snapped”? A trial is now ending for a student at Rutgers who played a prank on his roommate by setting up a web-cam to record a homosexual encounter; his roommate killed himself. I guess one could say that the suicide happened because this young man “snapped”? Four different deaths, but all assumed to be because an individual acted in an abnormal way, a criminal act (suicide is still a criminal act in U.S. law) that goes counter to a society’s moral norms.

Such immoral acts have been going on since the get-go of human civilization; even ardent biblical literalists point to the fratricide of Cain. But assuming that an individual has “snapped” explains nothing, except to say “well, that is not supposed to happen.” Following the media, we are far too snap-happy in explaining away murder. Consider the bumper sticker mentality that “guns do not kill people, but people do.” To me this is like saying that malaria doesn’t kill people, but mosquitoes who carry the malaria do. Obviously it is a combination of the two. People use guns to kill people, either issued by the military (as in Afghanistan) or because of a constitutional American right to bear arms and stand one’s ground (as in Florida). People also use knives and steel rods, or even their bare hands. There are various means, but is it really useful to cite “snapping” as the rationale? Continue reading How safe is home? →

Babel: A New Post-Occupation Translation

Bible and Holy Land, Ethics, Iraq, Iraq War


Tower of Babel artwork in Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, c. 1500

The beginning of a year that is yet again an apocalyptic venue is as good a time as any to quote from the biblical book of Genesis. Many of the events in Genesis took place in the legendary space that we now call Iraq, a space that the United States military is unoccupying after a prolonged mission that appears to have accomplished more mayhem than a lasting peace (at least in the recent holiday “peace on earth” spirit). Remember the story of the Tower of Babel; well here is my take of a new translation, being as faithful as I dare to the original King James English:

Genesis 11: The Tower of Babel
1 And the whole earth outside the Axis of Evil was of one mind, and of one resolve about the WMD of King Saddam.
2 And it came to pass, as the coalition troops journeyed to the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, but no WMD; and they dwelt there for almost a decade.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make bombs, and burn them thoroughly. And they had billions of dollars in weapons for battle, and slime had they in mind for talking about the party of the king.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a democracy, and a puppet regime, who will sell us oil that reaches unto the ports of Texas; and let us make us a name to be feared, lest we not have economic hegemony upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the ones who lorded over came down to see the democracy and the puppet regime, which the children of the founding fathers builded.
6 And the ones who lorded over said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one dangerous religion; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined in their sharia to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there stoke their differences, that they may attack each other because of one another’s sectarian speech.
8 So the ones who lorded over scattered them with superior air power from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the democracy.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the ones who lorded over did there confound themselves, not knowing what they needed to know about Islam, Iraqi culture or the Arabic language.

A problem in the translation, you say? Continue reading Babel: A New Post-Occupation Translation →

Is it over “over there”?

Iraq War, Terrorism Issue

In the words of George M. Cohan from about a century ago, Johnny got his gun and the Yanks went “over there” and “they won’t come back ’til it’s over over there.” Billy Murray (the singer you probably do not know) sang it on Edison Records (the blue amberol cylinders you may never have heard). American troops have been over to several other “theres” since World War I, but ironically the longest lasting one has officially ended this morning in Iraq. There are only 4,000 troops of a high of 170,000 still left on the ground, a number less than the total of U.S. forces killed during the last nine years in Iraq. But if you think this is really “over”, think twice. The U.S. embassy will be the largest in the world with 15,000-16,000 people taking over a former air base.

The lingering question, for those who are even aware that Iraq is still on the current events map, is whether or not it was worth it. What started out as a big “if” (if there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) has made this an ever bigger “it.” As a ground war it was almost over as soon as it began. Sweeping through Iraqi territory to Baghdad was on the order of a Blitzkrieg; it was the ersatz policy for ensuring peaces that has been the problem. Iraq had no stockpiles of wmds. Yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator that most Iraqis were glad to see go, but few Iraqis have enjoyed the American occupation that ensued. The sectarian violence that continues to this day has ripped the society apart. Age-old fault lines of ethnic and religious were buried in historical rhetoric, but it was our invasion and inept mopping up that opened the wounds anew. The blood of tens of thousands of Iraqis is a legacy of this war that tarnishes any sense of having a “mission accomplished.” Continue reading Is it over “over there”? →

Over and almost out (of Iraq)

Iran, Iraq, Iraq War, Obama Administration, Terrorism Issue

The Iraq war is finally over. And it marks a complete neocon defeat

by Jonathan Steele The Guardian, October 23, 2011

The Iraq war is over. Buried by the news from Libya, Barack Obama announced late on Friday that all US troops will leave Iraq by 31 December.

The president put a brave face on it, claiming he was fulfilling an election promise to end the war, though he had actually been supporting the Pentagon’s effort to make a deal with Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep US bases and several thousand troops there indefinitely.

The talks broke down because Moqtada al-Sadr’s members of parliament and other Iraqi nationalists insisted that US troops be subject to Iraqi law. In every country where they are based the US insists on legal immunity and refuses to let troops be tried by foreigners. In Iraq the issue is especially sensitive after numerous US murders of civilians and the Abu Ghraib scandal in which Iraqi prisoners were sexually humiliated. In almost every case where US courts tried US troops, soldiers were acquitted or received relatively brief prison sentences.

The final troop withdrawal marks a complete defeat for Bush’s Iraq project. The neocons’ grand plan to use the 2003 invasion to turn the country into a secure pro-western democracy and a garrison for US bases that could put pressure on Syria and Iran lies in tatters.

Their hopes of making Iraq a democratic model for the Middle East have been tipped on their head. Continue reading Over and almost out (of Iraq) →

Heather Raffo at Hofstra

Gender and Sexuality, Iraq, Iraq War



“Art as Cultural Diplomacy – performance and talk with Heather Raffo”
Wednesday 10/26, 8PM in the Cultural Center Theater
as part of the Day of Dialogue

Celebrated actress and Playwright Heather Raffo comes to Hofstra University for discussion about the role theater plays in our understanding of contemporary war. Through the performance and discussion of selected monologues from her acclaimed play 9 Parts of Desire about the lives of Iraqi women, Raffo, takes the audience deep into the heart of why theater can best communicate the complex issues still facing Iraq and America today.

Heather Raffo is the recipient of a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Special Commendation and the Marian Seldes-Garson Kanin Fellowship for her play 9 Parts of Desire. Most recently she has received a 2005 Lucille Lortel award for Best Solo show as well as an Outer Critics Circle Nomination and a Drama League nomination for Outstanding Performance. Premiering in 2003 in, Edinburgh, the play then moved to London, where critics hailed it as one of the five best plays in London in late 2003. It ran for nine sold out months in New York City before touring the U.S. and internationally. Heather has also performed widely in a range of celebrated productions in NY and beyond, earning a Drama League Nomination among other accolades. She has also offered discussion-presentations in a variety of educational settings. She received her BA from the University of Michigan, her MFA from the University of San Diego and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. Originally from Michigan, Heather now lives in New York. Her father is from Iraq and her mother is American. For more information, see http://www.heatherraffo.com/

Co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department, Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies Program (MECA), The Center for Civic Engagement, Comparative Literature and Languages, and Dance and Drama

Tabsir Redux: Déjà Voodoo

Egypt, Iraq War, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism Issue

Consider the opening line of the lead story in yesterday’s New York Times:

BAGHDAD — Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior American military officials.

In the long durée, as Napoleon might say if he were alive today, politics makes strange embedded fellows of nation states. There are three nations at play here in the field of lording over by the world’s reigning super power. Iraq and Libya had European imposed (and later revolution-deposed) monarchs at mid-stream in the 20th century. At the same time Saudi Arabia’s royal line evolved an iconclastic religiously mandated kingship that has withstood toppling and seems likely to do so far into the security based future. All three states are where they are today largely because of the world’s thirst for crude oil. The same three states, should Iraq survive de facto federation, face a future defined by a mega-politicized war on terrorism, a war with no state-like enemies being fought by a coalition of nation states willing to arm themselves to the teeth with conventional weapons and make airline passengers take their shoes off each and every time they fly. Two centuries from now a future Napoleon, whatever his or her nationality, may look back on the current political climate and have a hindsight sense of déjà vu, or will it be more of the voodoo politics mass mediated today? Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Déjà Voodoo →

By their books, ye shall know them

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Ethics, Iraq War, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue


For 10 years, we’ve lied to ourselves to avoid asking the one real question

by Robert Fisk, The Independent, Saturday, 3 September 2011

By their books, ye shall know them.

I’m talking about the volumes, the libraries – nay, the very halls of literature – which the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 have spawned. Many are spavined with pseudo-patriotism and self-regard, others rotten with the hopeless mythology of CIA/Mossad culprits, a few (from the Muslim world, alas) even referring to the killers as “boys”, almost all avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.

Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?

American publishers first went to war in 2001 with massive photo-memorial volumes. Their titles spoke for themselves: Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of Swords… Seeing this stuff piled on newsstands across America, who could doubt that the US was going to go to war? And long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, another pile of tomes arrived to justify the war after the war. Most prominent among them was ex-CIA spook Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm – and didn’t we all remember Churchill’s The Gathering Storm? – which, needless to say, compared the forthcoming battle against Saddam with the crisis faced by Britain and France in 1938.

There were two themes to this work by Pollack – “one of the world’s leading experts on Iraq,” the blurb told readers, among whom was Fareed Zakaria (“one of the most important books on American foreign policy in years,” he drivelled) – the first of which was a detailed account of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction; none of which, as we know, actually existed. The second theme was the opportunity to sever the “linkage” between “the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict”.

The Palestinians, deprived of the support of powerful Iraq, went the narrative, would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians’ “vicious terrorist campaign” – but without any criticism of Israel. He wrote of “weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses (sic)”, the standard Israeli version of events. America’s bias towards Israel was no more than an Arab “belief”. Well, at least the egregious Pollack had worked out, in however slovenly a fashion, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had something to do with 9/11, even if Saddam had not. Continue reading By their books, ye shall know them →

Crisis Hopping

"Arab Spring", Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq War, Syria, Terrorism Issue, Yemen


As someone who has a long standing interest in the peoples and cultures of the region geographically maligned as the “Middle East,” I am beyond being overwhelmed by the daily turn of events. To see the streets of Yemen turned into bloody confrontation after three months of amazingly peaceful protests is so sad. I had always wondered if Ali Abdullah Salih was really trying to be a father-of-his-country figure (despite the widespread corruption and nepotism) or if it was mainly his inability to be a brutal dictator in the Ben Ali mode that ruled the day. His recent flirtation with leaving office, only to back down each time, suggests that he has no intention of leaving and is looking for any way to prolong his rule. The Al Qaeda on the doorsteps alibi has not fooled anyone, including the U.S. terrorism money machine. So it seems his latest insane step, right out of a really bad thriller movie, is to foment civil strife. Today’s news about his attempt to alienate the leader of the Hashid confederacy has indeed plunged the capital into street fighting. One thing is clear: Ali Abdullah Salih loves Ali Abdullah Salih and the country he has ruled over for over three decades be damned.

Then there is Syria, where Bashar al-Asad, once thought to be a rather weak version of his towering (at least in all the statues strewn about the former Umayyad enclave) father, has decided to be the old-fashioned Stalinesque strongman. Not content to believe that the mere 96.7% of the votes in his last presidential referendum meant anything other than the normal one-man-rule politics, he is apparently trying to get rid of anyone who opposes him by whatever mean means work. To protest in Syria, as in Libya, means to risk life and limb. Continue reading Crisis Hopping →