War Post

"Waiting for the Marines"
Fadel K Jabr
Translated from the Arabic original by the poet

Twelve years have passed
And the Iraqis are turning over
Like skewered fish
On the fire of waiting.

The first year of the sanctions
They said: The Arabs will come
They will come with love, flour, and the rights of kinship.
The year passed with its long seasons
The Arabs never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The second year of the sanctions
They said: The Muslims will come
They will come with rice, goodness, and the predators’ leftovers
The year passed with its long seasons
The Muslims never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The third year of the sanctions
They said: The world will come
They will come with manna, solace, and human rights
The year passed with its long seasons
The world never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The fourth year of the sanctions
They said: The Americans will come
They will come with hope, sugar, and warm feelings
The year passed with its long seasons
The Americans never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The fifth year of the sanctions
They said: The opposition will come
They will come with victories, water, and air
The year passed with its long seasons
The opposition never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The sixth year of the sanctions
They said: We will sell whatever is extra
We will be frugal until relief comes
The year passed with its long seasons
The Iraqis sold all unnecessary things
Relief never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The seventh year of the sanctions
They said: We will give up our semi-necessities
We will be patient until we get support
The year passed with its long seasons
The support never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The eighth year of the sanctions
They said: We will sell some of our organs
We will be strong until the coming of justice
The year passed with its long seasons
Justice never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The ninth year of the sanctions
They said: We will sell some of our children
We will sacrifice until the coming of mercy
The year passed with its long seasons
Mercy never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The tenth year of the sanctions
They said: We will emigrate
To the wide world of Allah
We will entertain ourselves with hope
Until the coming of the gods’ orders
The Iraqis separated east and west
The year passed with its long seasons
The gods’ orders never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The eleventh year of the sanctions
They said: The best thing for us is to die
We will stay settled in our graves
Until the coming of the day of judgement
The year passed with its long seasons
Cancer, tuberculosis, and leukæmia consumed their bodies
The day of judgement never came
And sent no explanation for the delay.

The twelfth year of the sanctions
The Iraqis found nothing to wait for
They said: Now is the time
For the earth’s worms to devour us
They might rescue us from this hell
Where we are turning over like skewered fish.

 
Via The Middle Stage.

 

The Fall of Baghdad by Edmund Candler, Manchester Guardian, 16 March 1917

Our vanguard entered Baghdad soon after nine o’clock this morning.  The city is approached by an unmetalled road between palm groves and orange gardens.

Crowds of Baghdadis came out to meet us: Persians, Krabe, Jew, Armenians, Chaldeans and Christians of diverse sects and races.  They lined the streets, balconies and roofs, hurrahing and clapping their hands.  Groups of schoolchildren danced in front of us, shouting and cheering, and the women of the city turned out in their holiday dresses.

The people of the city have been robbed to supply the Turkish army for the last two years.  The oppression was becoming unendurable, and during the last week it degenerated into brigandage.  I am told that the mere mention of the British was punishable, and the people were afraid to talk freely about the war.

It appears that the enemy abandoned all hope of saving the city when we effected the crossing of the Tigris on February 23.  After that date, the Turkish government requisitioned private merchandise wholesale, and despatched it by train to Samara.  Thirty or forty thousand pounds worth of stuff is believed to have been officially looted, including five thousand sacks of flour.

The German Consul left weeks ago, and the Austrian two days since.  The bridge of boats, the Turkish army clothing factory and Messrs Lynch’s offices were blown up or otherwise destroyed last night, and the railway station, the Civil Hospital and most British property except the Residency, which had been used as a Turkish hospital, were either gutted or damaged.

As soon as the gendarmery left at two o’clock this morning, Kurds and others began looting.  As we entered from the east this morning, they were rifling, and among the first citizens we met were merchants who had run out to crave our protection.

Regiments were detailed to police, the bazaar, and houses and pickets and patrols were allotted, but there was much that it was too late to save.  Many shops had been gutted, and the valuables had all been cleared.  The rabble was found busily engaged in dismantling the interiors, tearing down bits of wood and iron and carrying off bedsteads.  They had even looted the seats from the public gardens.

Our entry was very easy and unofficial, and it was clear that the joy of the people was genuine.  No functionaries came out to meet us.  There was still fear of reprisals.  Our own attitude was characteristic.  There was no display, or attempt at creating an impression.

The troops entered, dusty and unshaven, after several days hard fighting.  Fighting between the 7th and 10th had been heavy, and extraordinary gallantry was shown in crossing the Diala river.

Source: Source Records of the Great War, Vol. V, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923. Find it online here.

Contemporary Baghdad reading can best be found here. The photo is from the Digital Journalist.

 

Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian from Tyre, Lebanon, argues that the three week-long of rocket and air strike exchange, no matter the outcome, is a victory for Hizbullah. "Hizbullah is already the hero, a desperately longed-for proof of success," against Israel’s image of invincibility. Versions of this opinion have been expressed already for the last few weeks, but now with 100,000 Shi’ite protesters in Baghdad, an elected, protected Iraqi government condemning Israel, Steele’s point that "Hizbullah’s victory may do less damage to Israel than to other Arab regimes" bears attention.

The success of a Shia insurgency will encourage other Shias around the region, including those in Saudi Arabia. To the consternation of his American protectors, Iraq’s Shia prime minister, Nuri al- Maliki, did not condemn Hizbullah. But the Sunni/Shia issue should not be exaggerated. Hizbullah’s appeal across the Arab world is a wider matter of Islamism and the struggle against corrupt despotism. Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Jordan - and even in the medium term Syria, which has backed and armed Hizbullah - will feel the shockwaves running through the Arab street.

Those who argue from their pulpits in the mosques that secular modernity inevitably means decadence and selfishness will have gained new followers. Those who say that only Islam can provide the pride and backbone needed to confront the west’s cultural and military interventions will be stronger.

Israel’s Lebanese adventure, and the Bush/Blair folly in supporting it, have done the west damage that will last for many, many years.

Read the rest here.

Something about Middle Eastern political commentary has me unsettled. Perhaps it is the knowledge that within the analysis and theories of how Baghdad might shape Beirut which in turn might shape Riyadh, or Cairo, are the thousands of dead bodies and hundreds of thousands of displaced ones. Considering how the Saudi government might cope with what other commentators have gloomily called a "Shi’ite crescent" from the Bekaa through Baghdad to Tehran overlooks, just like the New York Times and every other American media outlet, the appalling toll on Lebanon and Gaza. The complete devastation of a state and the continued leveling of any shred of modern, hopeful life in the Occupied Territories by the Israeli government are the obvious but shunned details in all of this political talk. In reading someone like Steele, I want to believe that he’s not treating the ruin of Lebanon and Palestine as just proof of a political theory, but rather another grim moment in the on-going and supported violence in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.

Most of all the damage of "Israel’s Lebanese adventure, and the Bush/Blair folly in supporting it" is that these officials, supposedly responsible leaders of free and democratic states, continued to endorse the dismantling of Lebanese life and society, and the deliberate, naive aggravation of anti-Israeli and anti-American emotion.

 

I recently picked up The Places in Between, Rory Stewart’s account of walking across Afghanistan during the start of the American war there. His new book is The Prince of the Marshes, an account of his year in Iraq. It seems as long as you are fluent in Farsi and have diplomatic experience on your resume, you can just show up in Baghdad and be made a deputy governor by the British Foreign Office. Stewart helped administer Maysan province in southern Iraq.

Slate is running excerpts of his new book. Stewart’s mind for history is matched by a drive to go, to see, and to talk to the everyday people whose identities are hidden by history books.

Friday, Oct. 10, 2003
Commentators abroad complained that the Coalition did not remember history. They believed we had ignored important lessons from post-war Germany and Japan and 1920s Iraq. But history has few unambiguous lessons. Many of my colleagues were well respected Arabists with extensive experience in post-war reconstruction, but none of them could guess the exact effect of a foreign invasion, the toppling of the President, and a society turned on its head. No library could tell you about the Prince of the Marshes; there were no polls that would reveal his popularity, now that events tested his strength. I continued to study Iraqi history; I visited neighboring governorate coordinators in four Shia provinces. But what mattered most were local details, daily encounters with men of which we knew little and of whom Iraqis knew little more.

The afternoon of my meeting with the Prince for example, I watched an elderly visitor enter the compound. He did not offer a bribe or an official letter at the gate, so he must have been known by the guard. The Iraqi police searched him and then a British sentry searched him. In exchange for a receipt he handed over his pistol. This indicated that he was not a policeman or a member of the supervisory committee. They were allowed to bring weapons into the building—loaded if they were policemen. Then he was made to sit for ten minutes on a decrepit wicker chair on the sidewalk. Some Iraqi sheikhs who were passing greeted him. It was probably embarrassing to be seen waiting in the sun, but they embraced each other warmly. The man smiled politely when a translator came out to greet him and, after a brief discussion, escorted him up the path to the reception.

Read more here.  

 

Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006

Dear All,

We would like to announce our resignation from Fox News in Amman. Although we never actually worked for your organization, we helped for the past three years in facilitating your work in the Middle East.
We base our decision on moral issues. We can no longer work with a news organization that claims to be fair and balanced when you are so far from that. Not only are you an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propaganda, you are war mongers with no sense of decency, nor professionalism. You have crossed all borders and red lines. An Arab mother cries over the death of her child very much like an American and Israeli mother.
Arab blood is not cheap, and we are not barbarians. You ought to be more responsible and have more decency when you take one side against the other. You have a role to play and a responsibility to shoulder for the sake of your very naive viewers.
Throughout the three years we worked with you, and helped you, we thought you would develop a degree of respect to people in this part of the world. But the disdain and blatant one-sided coverage of all Mideast conflicts only highlights your total lack of humanity and bias toward Israel. Your lack of professionalism has made you a tool of ridicule throughout the world. Your inexperienced anchors with their racist comments are not only a shameful scar on the American Media, they simply represent state run Television networks in countries you despise in the Middle East.
Finally, our decision again is based on moral and professional basis and from now on we will no longer help in any Fox related matters.
Serene Sabbagh
Jomana Karadsheh"

via the Angry Arab News Service.

The war needs its fighters. As much as some fighters increasingly seem to need the war, touting their 60 kills ("It’s like hearing classical music playing in my head.") or threatening other soldiers after the murder of Iraqis ("If you say anything, I’ll kill you."), there are mothers in the America following their sons and daughters to Iraq. The AP is picking up the worst frequencies from Iraq, war fans might say, and of course so many of the soldiers over there, haggard and stressed, just want to come home, after finally securing that road or building that hospital.

Steven Green just wanted to go home alive, though he went to Iraq because he wanted to kill people. It was the morbid boredom of Iraq, he says, that got to him. "I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza.’"

Laurie-Ann Fuca, the Tucson mother in boot camp, is going to be a medic, which is a good thing. It doesn’t look like we need more killers.  

The photo is by Robert Capa, "Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936."

Runaway Raft on the Tigris (via Harper’s).

I’ve been going through Andrew Carroll’s two anthologies of war letters recently, trying to decide which letters to except and add to the archive here. Having just read Ken Silverstein’s feature in the newest Harper’s on the rise of Shi’a Iraqi death squads, this letter stood out. A Marine writes to his priest back home a month after Shock and Awe:

Father Bob,

With religious banners flying, truckload after truckload of cheering Iraqis pass our position. After decades of religious oppression, the Shi’a muslims are now free to worship as they wish. Old men have tears of joy and the younger generation try to thank us the best they can in their broken English. "Thank You America" and "Mr. Bush… good" are about all the Marines can understand, but the sight of the liberated people is an incredible gift to all of us on this most wonderful Easter.

Andrew Carroll, editor, Behind the Lines, (New York: 2006) p. 211.

Lieut. General Sir Stanley Maude issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Baghdad on March 19, 1917, after the city finally fell to the British-Indian forces and just over a week after their ceremonial entrance into Baghdad (depicted in the photograph in the header).  The proclamation began:

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.

And included the following:

Many noble Arabs have perished in the cause of Arab freedom, at the hands of those alien rulers, the Turks, who oppressed them. It is the determination of the Government of Great Britain and the great Powers allied to Great Britain that these noble Arabs shall not have suffered in vain. It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth, and that it shall bind itself together to this end in unity and concord

Maude hoped for a smooth colonial administration embodying just enough of the ideals expressed in the proclamation to keep the native population calm. That did not happen. What resulted instead was a Shi’a-Sunni-united rebellion against the British in 1920, known widely as the Arab Revolt, though memorialized in Iraq as the Great Iraqi Revolution.

Imperial British proclamations in newly-captured Baghdad can’t be compared directly to a soldier writing to his priest in 2003, relaying the joy of people free to worship. Some of Paul Bremer’s speeches are the more obvious comparisons to Maude. But in their contrast, the 1917 proclamation and this letter together express to how far things fell in Iraq in the years following both "successful" invasions. That, and the limits of "liberators."