Years ago, someone wrote, ‘One day, like in Afghanistan, those journalists will get bored and go write about Syria or Iran; Iraq will be off your media radar. Out of sight, out of mind. Lucky you, you have that option. I have to live it.’
That someone was a blogger by the name of ‘Salam Pax’
(that’s ‘peace’ in Arabic and Latin) who was voraciously read during the first
days of the US-UK led invasion of Iraq. In October 2002, 5 months before the
invasion, Salam Pax posted the following comment: ‘Excuse me. But don't
expect me to buy little American flags to welcome the new Colonists. This is
really just a bad remake of an even worse movie. And how does it differ from Iraq and Britain circa 1920. The civilized
world comes to give us, the barbaric nomadic arabs, a lesson in better living
and rid us of all evil (better still get rid of us arabs since we are evil).’
Prophetic. David
Swanson in an article titled ‘Sociocide: Iraq is no more,’ written a few
days ago, tells us what happened.
‘In Iraq, the United States has spent or wasted trillions
of dollars over two decades, destroyed trillions of dollars worth of
infrastructure, killed millions of people, injured and traumatized many
millions more, driven several million people from their homes creating the
greatest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Nakba, encouraged ethnic
and religious strife, segregated towns and neighborhoods, empowered religious
fanatics, set back women's rights horribly, effectively eliminated gay and
lesbian rights, nearly killed off some minority groups, decimated the nation's
cultural heritage, and created a generation of people without the experience of
peace, without education, without proper nutrition, without tolerance, without
proper healthcare, without a functioning government, and without affection for
or even indifference to the United States.’
The other day I wrote about a man called Raymond Allen
Davis, a US citizen who was
arrested in Pakistan
following a shooting. The US Government
spared no pains to get his out. Barack
Obama himself intervened. US lawmakers
threatened Pakistan with
aid-withdrawal unless Davis
was released. The judicial system stood
tall. And the US
finally admitted that Davis was a CIA agent and
part of a well-oiled US
operation run without the knowledge of Pakistani authorities. The Davis
story was off-radar or at least gave only faint media signals courtesy the
recent eruptions in the Middle East. His victims, unlike Salam Pax, have no
reality to live. They are dead, as are thousands and thousands who were deemed
exterminable collateral in the so-called war against terror.
It’s the Washington Style, one might say. Or, as Salam Pax puts it, ‘a bad re-make of
an even worse movie’. There’s less noise
about Egypt
now, did anyone notice? Did anyone
notice that Hillary was almost cheering the Egyptians (who have got a lot of
promises but not much to show for their efforts) but was less enthusiastic
about the people of Bahrain? Isn’t it strange that the only visible impact
of the Wikileaks exposures is a buttressing of the argument for invading Iran?
David Swanson recommends a book: ‘Erasing Iraq: The Human
Costs of Carnage,’ by Michael Otterman and Richard Hill with Paul Wilson, with
a foreword by Dahr Jamail. The authors claim that every Iraqi they spoke to
reported similar things: houses bombed, dispossession, kidnapping and lives
destroyed. One person observed, ‘Americans
-- when they hear one shot -- even if it's like 10 kilometers away -- they'll
just open fire on everything.' The
corroboration comes from American soldiers.
One of them reported, ‘We had a pretty gung-ho commander, who decided
that because we were getting hit by IEDs a lot, there would be a new battalion
SOP [standard operating procedure]. He goes, 'If someone in your line gets hit
with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherf***** on the street.’ Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
‘mother-whatevers’ were also killed by destroying water supplies, sewage
plants, hospitals and bridges, especially in 1991 and 2003 but also through
sanctions.
Iraq’s
now ‘done’ or almost, some might say. I like to think that a people who are
heir to a civilization such as the one whose present-day manifestations the US have more or
less reduced to rubble are more resilient than Madeline Albright or Hillary
Clinton might believe. Still, Salam Pax
wasn’t off the mark with respect to ‘going off media radar’.
The cameras move from place to place. They know how to pick up this and throw away
that. That’s machination. To be
expected. People and countries go off the
media radar. Suffering, though, is not a
photo-op matter. Cameras may move but as
long as we have eyes, there’s nothing to stop us from looking.
I am pretty sure that Obama, for all his glib talk about
people-power and democracy, freedom of expression and the sanctity of human
life, is in the end not very different from the ‘gung-ho commander’ quoted by
Ethan McCord. We are all mother-whatnots. This is why I keep my eyes open.
Focused. Ears too. There’s one place I am not taking off my
radar: Washington DC (and of course all that is entailed in
that name, from Obama to Butenis and everything in between).
This article was first published in the Daily News on February 23, 2011. Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be
reached at malindasenevi@gmail.com
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