There but for the grace of God.
Thirty to forty days out—
The conversations turn quickly, from the health of friends, to the state of Jordanian politics to the impending war against Iraq. It is a race to catch up for lost time. A race everyone runs because no one know when the bombs will start falling and people won’t have time to talk. Mr. Mozen believes it will be soon, right after the New Year. Nassim agrees but thinks it will be thirty to forty days after the New Year. He doesn’t give a reason. Everyone has predictions, which I confuse with premonitions.
Celine and Jackie—
After a visit to an Iraqi family’s home, which usually lasts four to five hours, with the obligatory meal made from the food rations given out by the government and several rounds of sweet tea, they no longer look like the wretched of the earth. They are the eleven-year-old twins, He’be and Du’a, who loves Jackie Chan (Baghdad television broadcasts a movie every night at 11:30PM). And Shouruk, the twenty-two-year-old student who believes sadness is the primary value in music, and thinks Celine Dion is the pinnacle of this value.
My tax dollars at work—
The US government doesn’t help either. They have fined Voices in the Wilderness over $163,000 and have threatened members with twelve years of prison and fines of up to one million dollars for bringing toys and medicines into the country.
Here on the ground, Wolf—
I remember now the party last night at Farouk’s house. Members of the Iraq Peace Team were invited to a private party of musicians, journalists, and poets. Farouk dressed in casual black. He had sleepy eyes. He was gracious and demanding, ordering drinks to be constantly filled, especially for the women. The Socialist Baath Party banned public drinking in 1995. Ever since, Iraqis have taken their drink underground and at each other’s homes. Farouk’s second daughter is named Reem, which means one who is as graceful as a deer running. She doesn’t have her father’s eyes.
A droll pianist and a veteran of the Iran/Iraq war in the early ’80s played Bach and a jazzy funeral march. Earlier in the evening the pianist told me he killed six men in the war and that the men and women of Iraq are all trained in combat, and will take to arms and stones if need be to stop the Americans from entering Baghdad. I ask him if his experience in killing shaped in any way his piano playing. No response.
Upstairs, downstairs—
Most of the upper echelons of Iraqi society think that Baghdad will be ablaze with street fighters beating back the Americans. The middle class (if you can call it that) have largely left it to the fates, having had little to no history of political self-determination. The poor of Iraq wants to see the invasion over with. The sanctions have made their life already impossible, why not a war to shake things up a bit: what’s there to lose? A young poor Iraqi teenage girl summed it up nicely when she said that she can’t wait for the invasion so she can marry an American soldier.
There but for the grace of God—
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
There is more; there is so much more. And yet—
Perhaps we ought not invade; perhaps we ought to. But to badmouth America and imply that Saddam and his cronies are just plain nice folks and innocent is at best silly.
—MetaFilter comments on National Philistine
You’re sitting in Baghdad and, all of a sudden, you’re the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power and water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.
—Harlan Ullman, architect of Shock and Awe
There but for the grace of God.
Despite the differences on how one will survive a war and how a war will be waged in the country, they all agree that if there is a war, it won’t begin until after the invasion. It is incandescently clear that Iraq does not have the capabilities to fight the American military juggernaut. The real story of Iraq’s survival will begin after the Americans come (if they come, yes there is still time and the means to stop the war, there is always time because tomorrow is today) and set up their puppet regime. A media escort and veteran of the Iran/Iraq war said, “They will have an occupation in hell.”
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