Iraq’s Lepers
August 9, 2008
This is why Al Jazeera is a head and shoulder above all competitors in the mainstream. You will never see something like this on CNN or BBC. As far as they are concerned, the ’surge’ is working and all’s hunky dory.
Untreated, it leaves sufferers with skin sores and weak muscles and can leave patients unable to walk. Leprosy, is a curable disease that’s been wiped out in most countries. But in Iraq - leprosy sufferers in the south are kept in appalling conditions, and receive little treatment.
Nicole Johnston has this report.
Erudite, Irreverent, Irrepressible, Dead
June 23, 2008
George Carlin, a genius, is dead at 71. Mel Watkins reports.
George Carlin, the Grammy-Award winning standup comedian and actor who was hailed for his irreverent social commentary, poignant observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and groundbreaking routines like “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” died in Santa Monica, Calif., on Sunday, according to his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He was 71.
The cause of death was heart failure. Mr. Carlin, who had a history of heart problems, went into the hospital on Sunday afternoon after complaining of heart trouble. The comedian had worked last weekend at The Orleans in Las Vegas.
Recently, Mr. Carlin was named the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He was to receive the award at the Kennedy Center in November. “In his lengthy career as a comedian, writer, and actor, George Carlin has not only made us laugh, but he makes us think,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Kennedy Center chairman. “His influence on the next generation of comics has been far-reaching.”
In an interview with The Associated Press, Jack Burns, who performed with Mr. Carlin in the 1960’s as one half of a comedy duo, said “He was a genius and I will miss him dearly.”
Photos of the Sea
March 14, 2008
A poignant essay from friend and freedom fighter Diana Buttu.
In September 2000, I decided to do my part to bring peace to the Middle East. As a Canadian attorney of Palestinian origin, I believed I could use my legal skills to help broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Naive? Perhaps.
I left my comfortable life in California and moved to the West Bank. Moving there was not easy: I did not know what life is like under military rule. My Western upbringing left me unprepared for life without freedom. Seven years later, I am still not used to it.
As a lawyer for the Palestinian peace negotiating team, I met Presidents, Prime Ministers, Nobel Laureates, Secretaries of State and other important figures. But none of these individuals hit me with the same emotional wallop as a young woman named Majda.
Nightclubs are Hell
August 15, 2007
Charlie Booker is right on the mark. “What’s cool or fun about a thumping, sweaty dungeon full of posing idiots?” he asks.
I went to a fashionable London nightclub on Saturday. Not the sort of sentence I get to write very often, because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to “do a PA”, and she’d invited me and some curious friends along because we wanted to see precisely what “doing a PA” consists of. Turns out doing a public appearance largely entails sitting around drinking free champagne and generally just “being there”.
Obviously, at 36, I was more than a decade older than almost everyone else, and subsequently may as well have been smeared head to toe with pus. People regarded me with a combination of pity and disgust. To complete the circuit, I spent the night wearing the expression of a man waking up to Christmas in a prison cell.
“I’m too old to enjoy this,” I thought. And then remembered I’ve always felt this way about clubs. And I mean all clubs - from the cheesiest downmarket sickbucket to the coolest cutting-edge hark-at-us poncehole. I hated them when I was 19 and I hate them today. I just don’t have to pretend any more.
I’m convinced no one actually likes clubs. It’s a conspiracy. We’ve been told they’re cool and fun; that only “saddoes” dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled “sad” - it’s like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.
Clubs are despicable. Cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can’t hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level. And since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.
Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.
Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor. And no one’s going to search you on the way in. Why bother with clubs?
“Because you might get a shag,” is the usual response. Really? If that’s the only way you can find a partner - preening and jigging about like a desperate animal - you shouldn’t be attempting to breed in the first place. What’s your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You’re a moron, and so is that haircut you’re trying to impress. Any offspring you eventually blast out should be drowned in a pan before they can do any harm. Or open any more nightclubs.
Even if you somehow avoid reproducing, isn’t it a lot of hard work for very little reward? Seven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who’ll snore and dribble into your pillow till 11 o’clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette? Really, why bother? Why not just stay at home punching yourself in the face? Invite a few friends round and make a night of it. It’ll be more fun than a club.
Anyway, back to Saturday night, and apart from the age gap, two other things stuck me. Firstly, everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. I’d still secretly like to be them, of course, but at least these days I can temporarily erect a veneer of defensive, sneering superiority. I’ve progressed that far.
The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that’s all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.
Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah - but I can’t remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It’s not enough to pretend you’re having fun in the club any more - you’ve got to pretend you’re having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends’ Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.
Mind you, since in about 20 years’ time these same people will be standing waist-deep in skeletons, in an arid post-nuclear wasteland, clubbing each other to death in a fight for the last remaining glass of water, perhaps they’re wise to enjoy these carefree moments while they last. Even if they’re only pretending.
Sartre and de Beauvoir
August 2, 2007
Lisa Appignanesi on Sartre and de Beauvoir’s relationship. This is a couple of years old, but interesting.
‘Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life’
‘Women, you owe her everything!” So read the headline announcing Simone de Beauvoir’s death in April 1986. It was a phrase repeated over and over at her funeral, where some 5,000 mourners gathered to pay tribute to the writer many consider the greatest French woman of the 20th century, author of The Second Sex, mother of the modern women’s movement. De Beauvoir’s ashes duly found their place next to those of Jean-Paul Sartre, her partner in life, though never in marriage. He had died six years almost to the hour before her, and her last book, Farewell to Sartre, was the only one he had never read prior to publication.
De Beauvoir had declared that whatever her many books and literary prizes, whatever her role in the women’s movement or as an intellectual ambassador championing causes such as Algerian independence, her greatest achievement in life was her relationship with Sartre - philosopher, playwright, philanderer, born 100 years ago this month.
There is something mysterious in De Beauvoir’s insistence. Given Sartre’s other liaisons, and that this was the height of the women’s movement, it seems to fly in the face of common sense. Yet the Simone who had flouted convention in the 20s by entering into an open liaison with an ugly, charismatic young unknown was not about to conform to expectations.
Whether we agree with her own startling assessment or not, it’s clear that De Beauvoir was neither lying nor, as some misogynist commentators have argued, simply writing herself into a life more important than her own. After all, for 51 years, whether they were living close to one another or apart, she edited and, as Sartre himself put it, “filtered” his work, which he dedicated to her (some have ventured that, on occasion, she wrote it too). For 51 years, the conversations between them created ideas, books, and a bond which other passions enraged or enriched, but never altogether ruptured. It was, for De Beauvoir, an experiment in loving of which “existentialism” was the child.
When I was growing up in the 60s, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were a model couple, already legendary creatures, rebels with a great many causes, and leaders of what could be called the first postwar youth movement: existentialism - a philosophy that rejected all absolutes and talked of freedom, authenticity, and difficult choices. It had its own music and garb of sophisticated black which looked wonderful against a cafe backdrop. Sartre and De Beauvoir were its Bogart and Bacall, partners in a gloriously modern love affair lived out between jazz club, cafe and writing desk, with forays on to the platforms and streets of protest. Despite being indissolubly united and bound by ideas, they remained unmarried and free to engage openly in any number of relationships. This radical departure from convention seemed breathtaking at the time.
De Beauvoir wrote about this in the autobiography she began to publish in the late 50s, after the scandalous success of her exposé of being female, The Second Sex, and her Goncourt prize-winning novel, The Mandarins, where she chronicles, among much else, her postwar affair with the American novelist Nelson Algren, whom she left in order to return to Sartre, abandoning passion for public responsibility.
De Beauvoir and Sartre met in 1929 when they were both studying for the aggregation in philosophy, the elite French graduate degree. De Beauvoir came second to Sartre’s first, though the examiners agreed she was strictly the better philosopher and at the age of 21 the youngest person ever to have sat the exam. But Sartre, the future author of Being and Nothingness, was bold, ingenious, exuberant in his youthful excess, the satirical rebel who shouted, “Thus pissed Zarathustra” as he hurled water bombs out of classroom windows.
Sartre was the pampered son of a widowed mother. Educated in French and German by his pedagogue grandfather, the young Sartre, diminutive, wall-eyed, was corresponding in alexandrines by the age of 10 and something of an outcast at his provincial school. By the time he returned to Paris, he had learned to make up for his physical lacks by the sheer force of his personality. De Beauvoir was captivated by the intensity with which he also listened.
The young Sartre already saw himself as a Don Juan, a seducer who ruptured outworn convention, and whose presence revealed things in their fundamental light. Seduction and writing, he believed, had their source in the same intellectual process.
Late in life, he admitted that he had fantasised a succession of women for himself, each one meaning everything for a given moment. De Beauvoir had astonished him by agreeing to the experiment he had outlined. She accepted the freedom he insisted on and became its custodian.
“What we have,” he said early on to De Beauvoir, “is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” Recording Sartre’s proposal, De Beauvoir writes: “We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.”
It is difficult to underestimate the sheer adventurousness of this pact forged in 1929. Particularly on De Beauvoir’s side, the break from accepted norms was monumental, as was the social stigma. For De Beauvoir, Sartre seemed only to be repeating what, from her father’s example and bourgeois practice, she understood as a male prerogative. What was different about their relationships was that she, the woman, would be equally free to engage in other affairs. Then, too, there was Sartre’s important dictum of “transparency” - the vow that they would never lie to each other the way married couples did. They would tell each other everything, share feelings, work, projects.
Yet in this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own. Between the lines of her fiction and what are in effect six volumes of autobiography, it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy. She wanted to keep the image of a model life intact. There were no children. They never shared a house and their sexual relations were more or less over by the end of the war, though for much of their life and certainly at the last, they saw each other daily.
With the posthumous publication in 1988 of her letters to Sartre, a good proportion of them written during the war years when he was at the front and then a prisoner, gaps that were left out of the autobiography are filled in. What the letters express is not only De Beauvoir’s overarching love for a man who is never sexually faithful to her, a man she addresses as her “dear little being” and whose work she loyally edits. They also underline the mundanity of De Beauvoir’s early accommodation to his wishes, her acceptance of what many women would reject as demeaning, her dependence.
But this dependence is hardly simple or passive. It is a shared attachment from which power also comes - as De Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, shows it does for all women. From early on, Notre-Dame-de-Sartre, as the wits dubbed her, organises the comings and goings of Sartre’s “contingent” women; she encourages, consoles, manipulates, and continues to do so until the very end for that loose grouping of friends and exes they called their “family”. With a few exceptions, she performs whatever Sartre at the Front asks of her, including finding money for him, or having an affair.
The voyeuristic narration of the details of sexual passion for the other’s entertainment, the ups and downs and seamy manoeuvres of these relationships give Sartre and De Beauvoir the aura of a latter-day Valmont and Merteuil, planning and reporting on their dangerous liaisons, analysing assaults and retreats, and deliberating over the propaganda which is to surround them. On top of all this are De Beauvoir’s lesbian pursuits and her sharing of Sartre’s partners. Bluestocking she might have been, but De Beauvoir was never averse to taking hers off, and then letting Sartre know.
It would be easy to condemn Sartre and De Beauvoir, to dismiss their sex lives as squalid and find therein reason to undermine their intellectual or political projects. This would be to miss the great edifice that De Beauvoir constructed out of their mutual experiment in living; the often gruelling honesty they both brought to bear on each other; and the ways in which the living and changing organism that was their partnership shaped both their philosophical writings and their fiction. It was clear to De Beauvoir that Sartre was a great thinker: thought needed tending. Happiness, that state she claimed she had a talent for, was not the point.
Then, too, there may be another very good reason why De Beauvoir thought her relationship was her greatest achievement. The Second Sex is her encyclopaedic and shocking account of woman’s condition as “other” in a world where the norm, with all its overarching and defining power, was male. The book analyses how women have been made over in a world of male descriptions, the contortions performed in order to draw something from the secondary role, the mutilation, the pain. In the experiment of her relationship with Sartre, De Beauvoir took over the power of description. She writes him in and through her life. Maybe that was partly what she meant by her greatest achievement - alongside a generous love, respect and abiding loyalty.
Oxfam on the Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq
July 30, 2007
At the same time as the Independent’s report confirming that one out of every seven Iraqis is being driven into exile, an AFP report on the Oxfam study (download pdf here) released yesterday sheds light on some of the reasons:
Oxfam warned in a report Monday that unabated violence in Iraq is masking a humanitarian crisis that has worsened since the US-led invasion in 2003, putting at risk almost eight million Iraqis.
“While horrific violence dominates the lives of millions of ordinary people inside Iraq, another kind of crisis, also due to the impact of war, has been slowly unfolding,” said the report by international relief agency Oxfam and a coalition of Iraqi non-governmental organisations.
According to the 45-page report released in Amman, almost eight million Iraqis are in need of immediate emergency aid with children the hardest hit by worsening conditions. An estimated “43 percent of Iraqis suffer from ‘absolute poverty’.”
“Children are hit the hardest by the decline of living standards. Child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 percent before the US-led invasion in 2003 to 28 percent now,” it said.
Among the eight million Iraqis in dire need of assistance are more than two million who are displaced within the country and more than two million who have sought refuge in neighbouring Jordan and Iraq.
Many of those fleeing are professionals whose exodus leaves Iraqi services in an ever more precarious state, said the report by Oxfam and the NGO Co-ordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI).
“The brain drain’ that Iraq is experiencing is further stretching already inadequate public services, as thousands of medical staff, teachers, water engineers, and other professionals are forced to leave the country,” it said.
The report criticised the Iraqi government and the international community and donors for not “adequately addressing this deteriorating situation.”
According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Peter Kessler, “there has been an abject denial of the impact, the humanitarian impact, of the war,” it said
The report castigated the Iraqi government and world community for focusing too much on reconstruction and building political institutions while overlooking the everyday needs of ordinary people.
“Funding for development and reconstruction in Iraq from the 22 Development Assistance Committee donors increased by 922 percent between 2003 and 2005 … whereas funding for humanitarian assistance declined by 47 percent,” it said.
“Political will must be found to improve the emergency support system for the poorest citizens, including the internally displaced,” said report entitled “Rising to the humanitarian challenge in Iraq.”
It noted that of the four million Iraqis who depend on food assistance, only 60 percent have access to rations from the government-run public distribution system, down from 96 percent in 2004.
The number of Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies has risen from 50 percent to 70 percent since 2003, while 80 percent lack effective sanitation.
It urged the beleaguered government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki to decentralise the distribution of aid, reinforce the legal framework for civil society organisations to operate, and double emergency cash allowances to widows and families to 200 dollars a month.
Foreign governments, especially the United States and Britain, should provide technical and financial assistance to Iraqi ministries to implement these policies and provide basic services, it added.
The report charged that the US-led coalition of governments who sent forces to Iraq failed to predict the spiral of violence and “as a consequence their emergency preparedness plan was insufficient to cope with increasing basic needs.”
“If people’s basic needs are left unattended, this will only serve to further destabilise the country,” it warned.
Bringing Baghdad Home
July 29, 2007
It was only a matter of time before the murderous impunity encouraged by the US military came to haunt citizens back at home. Chris Hedges, one of the finest journalists and author of one of my favorite books, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, who had only recently explored the horrors inflicted by the military on Iraqis, now presents the flip side of the story — how the returning soldiers are turning their guns on family and neighbours. (Adbusters is a superb publicaton. I encourage all who can to subscribe)
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations.”
In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress pushes troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find.
The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing — the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm — to murder — the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.
After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal clash when soldiers and Marines return home, alienating these combat veterans from the world around them, a world that still dines out on the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. But slowly returning veterans are giving us a new narrative of the war — one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq for a lie and sustained because of wounded national pride and willful ignorance. “This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun,” remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. “And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that’s a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.”
“And they briefed this to the general,” Millard said, “and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, ‘if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.’”
Those who come back from war, like Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans, suffer not only delayed reactions to stress, but a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the lies and myths used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of American troops.
It has unleashed a new wave of embittered veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war’s death mask.
“And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of what the fuck are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq,” said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of convoys in Iraq. “It’s the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people, the only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi, I’m sorry, I’m sorry you live here, I’m sorry this is a terrible situation, and I’m sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff.
“The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you’re holding a duffle bag in each hand,” Millard remembered. “You’ve got your weapon slung. You’ve got a web sack on your back. You’re dying of heat. You’re tired. You’re jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then, you’re scared on top of that, because, you know, you’re in Kuwait, you’re not in the States anymore … so fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can’t trust any of these fucking Hadjis, because all these fucking Hadjis are going to kill you. And Hadji is always used as a term of disrespect and usually, with the ‘f’ word in front of it.”
War is also the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power to the divine, the power to revoke another person’s charter to live on this earth. The frenzy of this destruction — and when unit discipline breaks down, or there was no unit discipline to begin with, frenzy is the right word — sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects — objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in air strikes and firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they became sick and demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap and the gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of another’s dignity or life.
“A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want,” said Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. “And you know, when 20 year old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg and we’re picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day to find a dirty weapon. But over here, it’s like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can — do you know what I mean? — we have this power that you can’t have. That’s really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food’s going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol and to stay alive.”
“It’s like you feel like, I don’t know, if you’re a caveman,” he added. “Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullshit.”
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, who seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war to speak the truth, to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative the essence of war which is death.
Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be “shitting like dogs.” The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals. The word “Hadji” swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way “gook” was used to debase the Vietnamese or “rag head” is used to belittle those in Afghanistan.
Soon those around him ridiculed “Hadji food,” “Hadji homes,” and “Hadji music.” Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. “I experienced horrible confusion,” Mejia remembers, “not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them.”
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejia watched, not daring to intervene, yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gun point, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.
“After we arrested drivers,” he recalled, “we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.
“But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice,” he also notes.
Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, “this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.” Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. “It’s fun to shoot shit up,” a soldier said. Some open fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices go off the troops fire wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who become, in the callous language of war, “collateral damage.”
“We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED,” Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. “This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road, and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics.”
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man’s body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterwards and determined that he fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
“The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us,” Mejia writes, “led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them.”
He watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. Mejia related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck.
“Take a picture of me and this motherfucker,” one of the soldiers who had been in Mejia’s squad in third platoon said, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
“Damn, they really fucked you up, didn’t they!?” the soldier laughed.
The scene, Mejia noted, was witnessed by the dead man’s brothers and cousins. Senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely saw combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejia notes, “was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks.” This pattern meant that “very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong.” When the badges, bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath, were finally awarded, the commanders immediately brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.
“This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front,” Mejia noted bitterly. “They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts.”
The war breeds gratuitous and constant acts of violence.
“I mean, if someone has a fan, they’re a white collar family,” said Phillip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. “So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy ops [psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they’re needed, and it’s also a good show of force. And we were running around, and we’d done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people, but I don’t really remember.
“And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area, they’re, like, built up into little courtyards,” he said. “So they have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and then, they have like a storage shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn’t — mother fucker — he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog — and I’m a huge animal lover. I love animals — and this dog has like these eyes on it and he’s running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, the family is sitting right there with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And I’m at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I’m like what the fuck are you doing.
“And so, the dog’s yelping. It’s crying out without a jaw. And I’m looking at the family, and they’re just scared. And so, I told them I was like fucking shoot it, you know. At least, kill it, because that can’t be fixed. It’s suffering. And I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but — and I had tears then, too, — and I’m looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them 20 bucks, because that’s what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I’m so sorry that asshole did that. Which was very common. I don’t know if it’s rednecks or what, but they feel that shooting dogs is something that adds to one’s manliness traits. I don’t know. I had a big problem with that.
“Was a report ever filed about it?” he asked. “Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not. He was a sycophant down to the T.”
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chest for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak and rule. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits — few people in pulpits have much worth listening to — but it is the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us to barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies alone that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”
Fisk on Zahir Shah
July 24, 2007
In 2001 when the United States was contemplating reinstating the long exiled king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, one leader of a group with Taliban sympathies had suggested that the only way the Shah could possibly return is sitting on an American cruise missile. In the event he did return without the assistance of American ordnance, but it soon dawned on the Americans that the Shah’s hiatus had been a little too long, and he would command even less authority than the mayor of Kabul, Hamid Karzai. The Shah also couldn’t match Karzai’s fab robes.
Zahir Shah passed away yesterday. Here is Robert Fisk on the man’s legacy followed by Independent’s potted history of Afghanistan.
When I arrived in Afghanistan to cover the 1979 Soviet invasion, I mischeviously purchased a huge tin of talcum powder, produced by a German factory in Kabul and called – for local consumption – ” Buzkashi”. The front of the tin was illustrated with a portrait of a massive Afghan warrior in long red robes, riding towards the purchaser upon a fiery steed and with an expression of utmost ferocity on his bearded face.
What puzzled me was why a talcum manufacturer would name his product after one of the bloodiest of Asian sports: a mounted version of rugby football played with a decapitated goat – riders were supposed to tug the bloodied corpse of the wretched creature from each other, often ripping the beast apart in the process. Of course, someone German had concluded that this manly sport emphasised the romantic warrior of the desert, the spirit of Afghan individuality amid the rugged landscape – Afghan landscapes were always “rugged” or “forbidding” – although I noticed that the only buyers of Buzkashi were foreigners. Afghans had no interest in this exotic talcum powder.
Zahir Shah was much the same. We in the West loved him. He was a king. He was a unifying figure in a country that many people suspect does not really exist – it was the country’s first king, Ahmed Khan, who created Afghanistan in the 18th century – or so we thought. In reality, Zahir was never a really a king. Like the Buzkashi talcum powder, Afghans did not greet his accession in 1933 with roses and song – any more than they did when the Americans freighted the old man back from his Roman exile after the overthrow of the Taliban government. His supporters – those who could remember his calls for democracy, the “free” period as Afghans called it – approved of his written constitution, his enthusiasm for a free press and for the spread of legal political parties. But Zahir was essentially disinterested in this much-trumpeted democracy and the moment that his courtiers warned him that a party system would prove a threat to the monarchy, he refused to sign the new party legislation into law – even though it had been passed by the new parliament. Parties were closed down. So were the newspapers. He created democracy – and then he destroyed it.
Afghanistan has proved a mirage to every foreigner, a land whose images and history – however ferocious – draw back the doomed armies of countries that have already been humiliated over two centuries. The British suffered their greatest pre-Boer War loss of arms in the Victorian age when an entire army was massacred in the Kabul Gorge in 1842. We lost again in the Second Afghan War when the British were defeated at the Battle of Maiwand; young, black-turbaned Afghan students would choose a grenadier and hurl themselves towards this one man, drag him from the ranks of his comrades and cut his throat. They were called “Talibs” or “Taliban”. Many of the Afghan warriors were led by a girl called Malalei – she later fell victim to British bullets – who tore off her veil to use as a flag. The young Zahir Shah, when he ascended the throne at the age of 19, would have approved. He was, after all, a man who believed in modernisation and women’s rights and the unveiling of women. The Russians, after a century of diplomatic humiliation in Afghanistan, spent 10 years in occupation, only to leave in further humiliation – a frustration that they finally vented on the equally innocent Muslims of Chechnya.
But there was another Zahir Shah, who liked to “unveil” women in a far less liberating way. In his early years as king – when he was a mere boy by Asian standards – his two uncles, who effectively ruled the country, supplied him with a driver and a black Chevrolet. The job of “the man in the black Chevrolet” – as he was known in the streets of Kabul – was to tour the colleges of Kabul and choose the most desirable girls for the king’s bed. The Afghans has a word for their pleasure-loving king – ” ayoshi” – which roughly translates as “having a good time” . “Ayoshi” is not a polite word. Even so, in a country whose kings were alost all cruel – Amanullah, the reformist Shah was an exception – Zahir was a peaceful man. He did not want to involve himself in politics; indeed, he had no interest in political life. He was an artist who loved paintings and books. He was actually taking a mud bath in Italy when his cousin Daoud – a highly ambitious prime minister who adored politics – staged his bloodless coup d’etat in 1973.
And what did our favourite Afghan king do as his country descended into foreign invasion, occupation, mass murder, civil war and Islamic puritanism of the least educated kind? He enjoyed Rome. Just as he ignored the possibility of war with Pakistan when he was King, so he largely ignored the catastrophe of his country when he was enjoying his long years of exile. His life in Rome, his visitors reported back to Kabul, was very much like the life he had lived in his royal palace at home. He was happy with his art and archaeology books and sport, and with his friends among the Italian upper classes. True, he occasionally – very occasionally – expressed his sorrow at the chaos of Afghanistan. But he was a man of the past, a victim of politics rather than a leader, a long-forgotten figurehead – until the Americans rediscovered him – for whom the dramas of his homeland were like the shadows in Plato’s cave, mere ghosts of the titanic tragedy played out 2,000 miles from Rome.
His life, of course, encompassed a familiar narrative of the 20th and early 21st centuries; exile amid the ambitions of others and then the resmption of colonial rule, first under the Russians and then – after the overthrow of Mullah Omar (a man who at least understood the history of Afghanistan and acted a role in it, however perverse) – under the Americans and British. As the poppy crop was reborn under Nato’s gaze, the British found themselves fighting for their lives in Helmand and on the very site – did they realise this? – of the Battle of Maiwand. The Taliban know their history even if the British do not.
And yet, it was to the ageing king that the Bushes and the Blairs turned when they needed a “unifying” figure to reunite the Afghans. In reality, it was folly to think that the old man culd be taken from his Saturnalian life of ease in Rome to play the one game in which he was never interested: politics. Yes, he was exotic. He was, after all, a king, even if he had no robes to match those of Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s impotent President. But he was attractive to us in the same way that all monarchs appear useful in the West. He was educated, pro-Western, pro-democracy (up to a point) and, though a Pashtun, a supposedly popular figure across all Afghanistan’s tribes. He was not. But we like to promote these people because we feel they are “safe”. We understand monarchies, and Zahir, though he was closer to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in his desire to ” secularise” his country (why must we always expect Muslim countries to be “secularised”?), was a king and we are familiar with kings and queens. We liked King Idris of Libya and King Farouk of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, just as – after we were forced to dispense with Idris and Farouk and replace them with supposedly pro-Western colonels and generals – we continue to love King Abdullah of Jordan and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and all the other princes and emirs of the Gulf.
That is why the Americans – and, to a lesser extent, the British – thought that they could return Zahir to create a land of peace. His welcome was supposed to be as glorious as that which was supposed to be accorded the Americans and the British in Iraq. It was a dream; it was our Orientalist view of how the Afghans should behave. We thought the natives would admire this symbol of old-world élitism because – and here’s the rub – old Zahir Shah was more like “us” than “them”, more European than Afghan, more secularist than Muslim. If he was trained as a soldier in Afghanistan, he was educated in France. “I wish just to do things for my country and serve it,” he said pitifully when he returned to Kabul, to be proclaimed by Karzai and the Americans – but few others – as “Father of the Nation”. When he ascended the throne in 1933, he was hailed as a new star in the Afghan firmament, a foreign-educated man who could modernise his country, govern during a period of rapid transition to ” modern political institutions”. I’m quoting from a US history book published the year before Zahir’s overthrow by Daoud. The same words were pulled out of the drawer for reuse in 2002. Will we ever learn?
Afghanistan: a history soaked in blood
Compiled by Simon Usborne
1919 - Afghanistan gains independence after a third war against British forces, which for decades have sought to annex the country from India. Amir Amanullah Khan appoints himself king in 1926 but flees two years later after his campaign of social and economic reform leads to civil unrest.
1933 - Zahir Shah becomes king. Afghanistan would remain a relatively stable and progressive monarchy for the next 40 years. The US recognises the state in 1934; in the 1950s the Soviet Union becomes a strong ally.
1973 - Mohammed Daoud Khan overthrows Shah in a military coup. He abolishes the monarchy and establishes the Republic of Afghanistan, with firm ties to the USSR.
1978 - Khan is killed in a Communist coup led by Noor Mohammad Taraki (below), who becomes President and bases his policies on Islamic principles. Conservative Islamic leaders begin an armed revolt and the mujahedin guerrilla movement is created to fight the Soviet-backed government.
1979 - The USSR invades to support the faltering Communist regime. Britain, the US, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia supply money and arms to various mujahedin groups fighting Soviet forces. Osama bin Laden visits in 1984. By 1985 half the population is displaced and Gorbachev vows to withdraw Soviet forces.
1988 - As Soviet troops pull out, Osama bin Laden forms al-Qa’ida. The group claims victory over the Soviet Union and shifts its focus to the US as the main obstacle to the establishment of a pure Islamic state.
1992 - After rival militias vie to topple the Soviet-backed government led by Mohammad Najibullah (below left), the mujahedin forms an Islamic state, installing Burhanuddin Rabbani as President.
1995 - The Taliban militia seizes Kabul and establishes an ultra-conservative regime. Women cannot work and Islamic law is enforced via public executions. Ethnic groups, including those under the Northern Alliance, fight back.
1998 - After al-Qa’ida bombs American embassies in Africa, President Clinton orders missile attacks against bin Laden’s Afghan training camps. The Taliban rejects US attempts to have bin Laden extradited. The UN imposes sanctions in 2000.
2001 - US and British forces launch airstrikes on Taliban and al-Qa’ida targets following the September 11 attacks. By December, the Northern Alliance has ousted the Taliban and US-backed Hamid Karzai (above) is sworn in as leader.
2004 - As violence increases and Nato takes control of Kabul, the Grand Council adopts a new constitution and Karzai is elected President. Parliamentary elections follow a year later. But violence builds as Taliban fighters reorganise, especially in the south. In 2006, Nato takes control of security.
2007 - Coalition and Afghan forces launch Operation Achilles as the Taliban continues to engage in heavy fighting in the south. Former king Zahir Shah dies aged 92 after a long illness.
Hiatus
June 20, 2007
Last weekend I away speaking at the event linked below. It was a timely and important event aimed at raising awareness among students about the conflict in Palestine. There were also speakers from two other excellent organisations: Israeli Committee Against House Demolition and Jews for a Just Peace in Palestine. The event was very well organized and I was humbled by the hospitality. There were excellent discussions, and the audience seemed very engaged and eager to supplement its knowledge of issues.
On my return, however, I had a little mishap and lost the power adapter for my laptop, which means I’ve had to live in the pre-internet primitive state the past few days, and until I get a new one, I won’t be able to post much. I did not realize it would be this much of a pain to replace a power adapter. The generic ones don’t work, since HP for some reason has chosen voltate and amperage which is pretty hard to locate. I don’t think I’ll have anything before monday.
I’ll try to put this time to best use by catching up on my reading, and a visit to the cinema. Blogging will return to normal by Monday, hopefully.
Baruch Kimmerling R.I.P
May 23, 2007
Acclaimed sociologist and a courageous voice of Israeli dissent, Barcuh Kimmerling, is no more. Like his colleague, the late Tanya Reinhart, Kimmerling had challenged the Zionist orthodoxy and written scathing critiques of its practices. With Joel Migdal, he coauthored one of the finest scholarly works on the Palestinian people. He is also the author of the scathing polemic, Politicide, on Ariel Sharon’s attempts to destroy Palestinian’s as a people to preculde any chance of self-determination. Ha’aretz writes:
Renowned sociologist Professor Baruch Kimmerling of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem died Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 67.
Kimmerling was one of the first to apply post-colonial theories to the Zionist movement, and also involved himself in the study of hegemony within Israeli society.
Despite his lack of training as an historian, Kimmerling was identified with “the new historians,” although he actually preceded them by a good number of years.
Defining himself as a “sociologist of politics in the wider sense of the term,” Kimmerling was for many years a guest columnist for Haaretz.
He is survived by his wife, Diana, and three children. Kimmerling will be laid to rest in a non-religious funeral at Kibbutz Mishmoret, on a date to be announced.
His wife, Diana, said yesterday that Kimmerling had been hospitalized several times due to cancer, “but last Thursday he decided he didn’t want to be tossed around from one hospital to another anymore. He wanted to die at home.”
Over the weekend he went into a coma and died on Sunday evening.
“He loved to stimulate thought, he had ideas that were astoundingly original. He was a human being, a friend and a father,” she said.
Kimmerling was born in 1939 in Transylvania, Romania. He was disabled all his life due to cerebral palsy. He had speech difficulties and was confined to a wheelchair, yet traveled to conferences worldwide.
