Steve Mumford responds to the consternation in my last post (near the bottom).

To summarize, Steve recounts how his Iraqi friends see things as getting better and I ask “Better than what?” — things must have been pretty shitty if the current conditions in Iraq are better.

Steve’s response cut and pasted below (with a wee amount of formatting):

Hi Tim,
You ask: things now in Iraq are better than what - all-out war and constant bombings?

It’s a fair question, and highlights the psychological divide between Americans and Iraqis. I think it’s very difficult for us to really understand what life under Saddam was like. The problem is made more difficult because it’s impossible to frame without a political subtext, ie., if you say things were worse under Saddam you can sound like a propagandist for Bush, with his hall-of-mirrors justifications for going to war. When I say that things were indescribably worse under Saddam, I’m not justifying our going to war in Iraq, just explaining how it’s possible for an Iraqi to be more hopeful for their future now than in the last 30 years.

When you get to know Iraqis well and personally you begin to see the scars from Saddam. It’s not enough to catalog the bizarre and horrific crimes, the Caligula-like escapades through Baghdad, the arbitrary arrests and beatings, the sense of complete irrationality and injustice that marked these years. It’s the feeling of residual fear, frustration and hopelessness that I sometimes see in my friends. It’s a country suffering from post-traumatic stress, where ambition and courage are thwarted and even the lives of the living have, in a sense, been lost.

My friend Esam Pasha told me about a conversation he had with Naseer Hasan, the poet, back in the 90s. He was describing his anger at the Baathist regime, his having to live in fear, not being able to talk openly in public about anything related to politics (almost everything, you had to talk in kind of bland code), the abuses of his military service. Naseer is 15 years older. As a communist party member, he spent 5 years on the run, hiding with relatives, after a colleague was captured and he feared that under torture he’d give his name up.

Naseer said, “Look, you can’t think of it like that. You can’t wish for things to get better, because you’ll become obsessed. You must think of the regime as an unwelcome house guest that you can never ask to leave; instead you have to get used to them in your house, and all your daily life things are just done knowing that they are around you.” Esam says this helped him a lot.

Naseer feels he lost the best years of his life to this regime, the years we take for granted in the West, when you’re young, energetic, and the world seems new.

Another artist, one of Baghdad’s bright lights in painting, often suffers from depression. He says his military service still haunts him. And he wasn’t in any wars - just having to serve in an army where cruelty and arbitrariness marked each day. He often stood up to the abusive officers, yet he’s haunted by his failures, and the fear of those days which are often vividly recalled in his dreams.

Perhaps I can’t convince you that this is worse than war - but it is. I’ve seen a little of the war out here, though not much. I’ve found that I’m not greatly affected, on a psychological level, because these events are over relatively quickly and I have a relatively healthy ego. But imagine a trauma which is not as great, but goes on for years, with no end in sight, each hope dashed, each avenue of escape cut off, each slip of the tongue a cause for paranoia. This, your life since birth.

The only analogy that I can come up with for this is Stalinist Russia. In this sense the Bush administration got it wrong: they imagined that they were liberating the French from the Nazis. It’s obviously more complicated when we invade a country with a homegrown tyranny, and we’ve compounded the problem with inadequate resources and bad decisions. But even so, I think that many Iraqis feel they are better off now, and most look to the future as having real potential for positive change.

Steve’s words could be used to bolster the right-wing radical agenda of Bush and Co. but that would be a misuse. We Americans were sold the war on national security fears (many never bought of course). The WMDs do not exist so the Bush administration and its apologists fall back on the excuse of freeing Iraqis from Hussein’s tyranny. Would the majority of Americans have supported this war if it was to be fought only to free Iraqis? Of course not.

And, as the current administration continues to use fear-mongering and lies to bolster their political position, one must ask: are we buying Iraqi ‘freedom’ at the price of our own? permanent link to this post