He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’s estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.

The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”

On April 28th, 2004, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.

Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.

Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.

The Road to Abu Ghraib

”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.

As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.

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Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.

In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.

In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”

Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Simulating Atonement

Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”

As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.

In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.

In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”

True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.

Weapons of American Imperialism

On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”

There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”

Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.

When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.

In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”

As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)

Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice

What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.

One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.

Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.

Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.

Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.

Copyright Maha Hilal 2024

Tomdispatch.com

The US was rebuked by China, according to Akmal Dawi at VOA: “‘Security Council resolutions are binding,’ Lin Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday.”

Beijing is correct on the law, and the Biden administration is being disingenuous. If President Biden did not want a ceasefire resolution to pass, he should have vetoed it. By abstaining and letting the world community vote on the matter, Biden has elicited a binding decision, and his officials should stop dancing around it.

The law here is clear.

Article 25 of the UN Charter, to which the US, China and Israel are all signatories, says, “The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

Moreover, we could consider the actual language of the resolution, in which the UNSC

“Demands an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire, and also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as ensuring humanitarian access to address their medical and other humanitarian needs, and further demands that the parties comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain”

You’d have to twist yourself into a pretzel to avoid concluding that the Security Council sees the ceasefire as binding, given the use of the verb “demand.” The UNSC isn’t suggesting. It isn’t hoping. It isn’t imploring. It is demanding.

BBC News Video: “Gaza: Fighting continues despite UN Security Council resolution calling for ceasefire | BBC News”

Washington’s hypocrisy on this matter is legendary and stunning.

After the Gulf War of 1990-1991 the UN Security Council passed resolutions demanding the disarmament of Iraq. We now know that Iraq complied. But the US and other major powers refused to believe Baghdad’s assertions or even documents in this regard.

One of the grounds that George W. Bush put forward for invading Iraq was precisely its failure to abide by those UN Security Council resolutions. He actually represented the US not as acting unilaterally for narrow American purposes but as upholding the authority of the UNSC.

Robert McMahon at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty wrote in 2002, “Expressing frustration and alarm, U.S. President George W. Bush says Iraq’s long defiance of United Nations disarmament resolutions has placed the UN’s credibility in question.”

So disobeying the UNSC according to Washington is so serious a matter that it could get you invaded and your government overthrown. I guess that’s not non-binding.

In 2007, the UNSC, disappointed in Iran’s non-compliance with demands for it to cease its civilian nuclear enrichment activities, imposed an embargo on weapons sales by Tehran. To enforce economic sanctions against Iran, the UNSC even allowed the boarding of vessels on the high seas suspected of carrying Iranian weapons.

The UNSC also allows ships carrying North Korean goods to be boarded. Ordinarily freedom of navigation on the high seas is an absolute right in international law. But the UNSC can do as it pleases. It has placed extensive economic sanctions on Pyongyang.

The only real sense in which UNSC Resolution 2728 is “non-binding” is not a legal one but a practical one. Since the US has a veto, if the UNSC tries to sanction Israel for its defiance, as it did Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the Biden administration would use its veto to protect the fascist government presently ruling Israel. But that action is not high diplomacy, just arbitrary and disgusting partisanship that makes a mockery of international law and of ethical principles.

Finally, consider the legislative history. What did the UNSC members intend? The UN News tells us.

Russian ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia said, “‘Those who are providing cover for Israel still want to give it a free hand,’ he added, expressing hope that the wording contained in the resolution ‘will be used in the interests of peace rather than advancing the inhumane Israeli operation against the Palestinians’”.

He opposed the Biden administration’s granting of a free hand to Israel to thumb its nose at the resolution.

Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana: “‘This demand [by the Council] comes at a significant time as Palestinians are observing the holy month of Ramadan,’ she said, noting continuing deaths in the enclave and a growing number of families left homeless.”

She called it a demand, and said that said that “after more than five months of a ‘war of utter terror and destruction’, a ceasefire is the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and others.

Doesn’t sound like a mere polite suggestion to me.

China’s Zhang Jun said, “The current draft is unequivocal and correct in its direction, demanding an immediate ceasefire, while the previous one was evasive and ambiguous.”

I note the term “unequivocal.”

Hwang Joonkook of South Korea said, “The situation must be different before and after this resolution. This will only be possible when both Israel and Hamas respect and faithfully implement this resolution.”

So, not voluntary. Binding.

The Party of God Brigades were founded by Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis. The organization is not related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon, though the two have a collegial relationship. Al-Muhandis was assassinated by President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 along with the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani. Ever since, the Brigades have sought to force out of Iraq the remaining 2500 US troops there and to force out of Syria the remaining 900 US troops stationed in that country. US troops were put into those two countries by the Obama administration during the fight against the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist organization, 2014-2018. In those years, the US was often de facto allied with Shiite militias such as the PGB and with their sponsor, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. In 2018, Trump destroyed the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 and placed a “maximum pressure” economic siege on the Iranian economy. That and his assassination of Soleimani and al-Muhandis set Iran and its allies, the Shiite militias of the Middle East, on an increasingly belligerent footing.

The Party of God Brigades and other Iraqi Shiite militias have launched around 150 attacks on bases housing US troops since the Gaza conflict broke out on October 7.

Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] printed the communique it received from the God’s Party Brigades:

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

“Leave is given to those who fight because they were wronged — surely God is able to help them .” [Qur’an 22:39].

Continuing our path of resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region, and in response to the massacres of the Zionist entity against our people in Gaza, at dawn today, Sunday 1/28/2024, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq attacked four enemy bases with unmanned aerial vehicles — three of them in Syria and they are Al-Shaddadi, al-Rukban and al-Tanf bases, and the fourth inside our occupied Palestinian lands, and it is the US Marines’ Zafulun Facility. The Islamic Resistance affirms that it will continue to destroy enemy compounds.

“Victory is only from God. God is Almighty, All-Wise.” [Qur’an 8:10].

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq
Sunday 16 Rajab 1445

God knows what Zafulun is, but apparently it is their term for the place that Tower 22 stands. It is interesting that the group views the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as part of occupied Palestine. Palestine and the Transjordan were conquered by the British army during World War I and Britain subsequently ruled the West Bank and the rest of Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate, while giving charge of the Transjordan to the family of the Sharif Hussain, the Naqib or leading noble of Mecca, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad and his clan, the Banu Hashem. Hussain and his sons had supported the British against the Ottomans during WW I because the British lied to them and promised them an independent Arab state after the war. In any case, this Shiite militia appears to view the Hashemite Dynasty (King Abdullah II is a descendant of Sharif Hussain) as illegitimate.

In return, the highly capable and effective Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, or GID, is even as we speak making plans to help track down and kill the PGB cadres behind this attack on Jordanian soil. Jordan will also have some harsh words for Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani, who came to power with the support of the Shiite militias and is thought to be close to them.

Aljazeera English Video: “Three US service members killed in drone attack on US post in Jordan near Syria”

The Ma`refa site says that al-Muhandis was born in 1954 or 1955 in Basra, originally named Jamal Jaafar Muhammad Ali Al Ibrahim. He married an Iranian woman. In 1973 he was in Baghdad, where he entered the Technological University in the Engineering School, being graduated with an engineering degree in 1977. While working as an engineer he did further degrees in political science. He also took off some time to study at a Shiite seminary in Basra that was part of the establishment of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, the clerical leader of Iraq’s Shiites in the 1960s.

Right from the time he was in high school in the early 1970s, he joined the Da`wa Party. Some say that Da`wa, or “the Call,” was founded in 1958 to compete with the Communists and Baathists, who were appealing to Shiite youths. Baathism is a mixture of socialism and Arab nationalism with a strong secularist cast, and it instituted an authoritarian Stalinist-style one-party state in Iraq from 1968. The Da`wa party, in contrast, theorized a Shiite state as a believers’ paradise in opposition to the Communists’ workers paradise. Its leaders made room for consultative government.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran began radicalizing Iraqi Shiites. Saddam Hussein came to power in an internal Baath Party putsch in 1979. In 1980 he outlawed the Da`wa Party, executed its clerical leader Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and made belonging to it a capital crime. For the past twenty years the post-Baath government has been finding mass graves in the Shiite south of Iraq, where the Baath secret police shot down suspected Da`wa members.

Al-Muhandis, his nom de guerre, which means “the engineer,” was forced to flee to Kuwait. There, he was part of a Da`wa cell that turned radical and committed acts of terrorism against the US and French embassies, given the hostility of those countries to the Islamic Republic. He then appears to have gone to Iran, where he left the Da`wa Party for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an even more radical organization founded by Iraqi expatriates in Tehran in 1982 at the suggestion of Khomeini. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the son of Muhsin al-Hakim, became the head of it in 1984. Thousands of Iraqi Shiites defected to Iran during the 1980s, and SCIRI organized them. Those who remained loyal to the Da`wa Party, who mostly rejected Khomeini’s vision of a clerically ruled Muslim state, tended to make their way to London instead. The Supreme Council developed a paramilitary branch, the Badr Corps, which was trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and which carried out operations against Baath installations in Iraq. Al-Muhandis Joined the Badr Corps and rose to become one of its commanders.

The independent Shiite site al-Khanadeq in Lebanon says that the Party of God Brigades was founded by al-Muhandis in 2003 when the US, as I wrote about, invaded Iraq, with the aim of forcing the occupiers back out. He appears to have broken with the Badr Corps at that point and formed his own militia, primarily out of armed groups based in the Shiite holy city of Karbala (the Ali Akbar Brigades, the Karbala Brigades and the Abu al-Fadl Abbas Brigades). By 2007, they had begun jointly calling themselves the Party of God Brigades. They mounted some attacks on US bases. I also wrote about the role of the Shiite militias in that era

The organization became prominent in 2014 when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Iraqi young men to rise up to defend the country from ISIL, which had taken Mosul, at a time when the Iraqi Army built by the Bush administration had collapsed. The Party of God Brigades and other Shiite militias armed themselves and went to fight, with training and support from the iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Gen. Soleimani, against ISIL in Amerli and later in Tikrit and Fallujah. They helped ensure that ISIL was defeated. The militias developed political parties which got a fair-sized bloc of seats in parliament. In 2018 parliament recognized the Shiite militias or “Popular Mobilization Forces” as a formal part of the Iraqi military — a sort of national guard.

After 2018, when ISIL was rolled up, the US kept several thousand troops in Iraq for mop-up operations and to continue to train the new Iraqi army.

Israel is accused of committing covert ops against Iraqi Shiite militias inside Iraq, blowing up a weapons depot in 2019.

In Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad initially faced a rebellion by civil society groups in 2011, but attacked the demonstrators militarily and turned the struggle into a civil war. It took on sectarian tones, since most rebels were Sunnis, while the elite of the government were Alawi Shiites. Lebanon’s Hezbollah came in on the side of Damascus, as did the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Party of God Brigades came up from Iraq along with some other Shiite militias. With help from the Russian air force, the Shiite militias defeated the Sunni rebels and drove their remnant into the far north Idlib province.

In the east of Syria, the US enlisted the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia as ground troops to defeat ISIL in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces, with US air support. The US put in a small number of its own troops, embedded with the YPG. After ISIL was defeated, the US maintained a small military presence in Syria’s southeast. Again, they aimed to mop up ISIL and prevent it from reconstituting itself, and to lend continued support to the YPG in these largely Arab provinces. It is alleged that they also attempt to block Iranian activities, including shipments of weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, on behalf of Israel. Further, they may be helping the Kurds siphon off oil from fields in the southeast, denying the petroleum wealth to Damascus. If this latter charge is true, it is a war crime.

On January 3, 2020, Trump blew away al-Muhandis and Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani had just come on a civilian airliner with a diplomatic passport to negotiate better relations with Saudi Arabia via the good offices of then Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi.

The Party of God Brigades went to war with the US troops in the country, subjecting the Iraqi bases that housed them to rocket and drone strikes. The Iraqi parliament demanded that Abdul Mahdi find a way to kick US troops out of Iraq (he never did).

Since October 7, the Party of God Brigades’ secretary-general, Ahmad al-Hamidawi, has branded the US an equal partner in the Israeli war on Gaza and it and other Shiite militias have launched dozens of attacks on US bases. None had resulted in a fatality until Sunday.

In a historical irony, one of the reasons some Neocons around George W Bush wanted to invade Iraq was to stop it from being a danger to Israel. Over two decades later, the PGB hit a school in Eilat with a drone, and the US, having destroyed the secular Baath Party, is at war with political Shiism in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Maybe the problem is US policy in the region, and maybe no number of wars and conquests are going to reshape the Middle East in ways really favorable to that policy?

A panel discussion exploring the landscape of anti-war advocacy within U.S. universities at the outset of the occupation,

“Afterlife of Occupation : Iraqi Academia and the Peripheries of Resurgence”
14 November 2023, Hatcher Graduate Library

A panel discussion exploring the landscape of anti-war advocacy within U.S. universities at the outset of the occupation, the consequences of exile or execution on the framework and prospects of Iraqi academia, and the present-day role of public intellectuals in Iraq.

Panelists include U-M faculty Juan Cole (History), Renée Ragin Randall (Comparative Literature / Middle East Studies), and Ali Hussain (Middle East Studies); U-M undergraduate student Nooralhuda Sami (Anthropology); and Dr Mohammed Karim, retired professor of fine art.

Followed by reflections on the Shadow and Light Project from project founder Beau Beausoleil and contributor Persis Karim.

Offered in conjunction with the exhibit Shadow and Light: Solidarity and Connection with Iraqi Academics, curated by Zainab Hakim, Serena Safawi and Evyn Kropf in partnership with the Shadow and Light Project.

Co-organized with the Iraqi American Union at the University of Michigan and sponsored by the University Library and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

Transcript

Los Adam Fico. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your patience and for making space to join us for this learning event. We are honored to have you and to have with us contributors to our panel. Yes. Really? Looking forward to your engagement with us and reflections, and to your reactions to what is shared, and also to the memorial exhibit that you would have seen in the north lobby. I’m Evan Cropp, I’m a librarian and curator here in the university library. I have been fortunate to partner with some amazing undergraduate students over the last several months, both on the design of the exhibition and also organizing this event. Serina saw Zenakimsami. I will hand it over to A to give an introduction to the framing of our panel.

The US occupation of Iraq began in 2003 and formally ended in 2011, but continues informally through the US. Devised sectarian government and the mass privatization of health and education. The 1990 to 2003 sanctions placed on Iraq by the United Nations deteriorated Iraqi infrastructure, leaving the country especially vulnerable upon the American invasion. Our project focuses specifically on the damage done to institutions of higher education and the exile of Iraqi academics.

Currently, the Hatcher Graduate Library hosts the Shadow and Light Project, which is comprised of globally sourced memorials commemorating Iraqi academics assassinated during the chaos of the US occupation. Over the summer, Serena and I curated the materials for its installation and created a supplemental online exhibit intended to recenter Iraqi voices through the art they created. Today’s panel is the latest component in our efforts to confront the legacies of occupation, specifically in the name of the war on terror. Although today’s event centers Iraq, the global war on terror, which has already claimed 5 million lives, continues today in Palestine. With the ongoing genocide, taking Pz and the 75 year long assault on any form of social and cultural expression in historic Palestine. It is vital to comprehend the common threads that link various forms of colonialism and occupation. Thank you. That link various forms of colonialism and occupation and their impact on the social landscape of besieged nations and peoples. Thank you. So again, we are grateful to our panelists for what they are bringing to this conversation.

I’ll just briefly introduce them. Okay. Before we hear from each of them in turn, I would also like to mention, forgive me for this diversion. Please help yourself. If there is any food remaining, you are most welcome to it. Also, please sign in. If you didn’t have a chance to do that, we will be most grateful. Also, please browse. We have a display of books and paintings and so on in the back of the room. In addition to the exhibit which is in the north lobby. Just a few details there. Hospitality details.

Okay. Our esteemed panelists on speaking and sharing with us this evening and I will just begin across here. We have Dr. Ali Hussein, who is here to my right. Ali Hussein is a musician, poet, and has a Phd in Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan, Department of Middle East Studies. His doctoral research focused on the image of Jesus Ali Lam in the writings of Muslim poly Mathidib and later Muslim scholars. His other research interests include Islam and Sufism in America, art and creativity, and Islam and the creative engagement that Sufistics have with Arabic through the mediation of Dr. An. In 2018, he founded the Ada Center for Spirituality, Culture, and the Arts, a nonprofit organization devoted to exploring spirituality and creativity in contemporary culture. He has many publications, including a Nostalgic Remembrance, Sufism in the Breath of Creativity, Art and Memoirs, The Wayward Journey, and others.

To his right, we have Dr. Renee Randall. Rene Randall is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle Ear Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on narratives of historical trauma and memory. And she is currently finishing a book on narrative aftermaths of atrocity in the context of Lebanon’s recent civil wars. She published a piece with The Conversation earlier this year demonstrating how reading contemporary literature from Iraq can act as a corrective to a prevailing political narrative here in the US, in which the occupation becomes an exceptional event in Iraqi history, and long histories of political violence and imperialism in the region are elited.

To her right, we have Dr. Juan Cole on, Juan Ricardo Cole is a public intellectual, prominent blogger and essayist. And the Richard Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. And I would just like to add that Professor Cole was president of the Middle East Studies Association in 2006 when the Association and the American Association of University Professors issued a joint letter to Prime Minister Nurel Maliki to express grave concern over the killings of two of Iraq’s most prominent academics is Sama Ray, a professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Ardad and President of the Union of University professors. And Jasmine Asadi, Dean of the University of Ardad School of Administration and Economics.

To his right, we have Nur Damar Sami. She’s a 21 year old Iraqi writer and international Advocate junior here at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, majoring in medical anthropology and minoring in Mina studies. Having immigrated from Iraq to Syria after the 2003 occupation. Then from Syria to the US after the Syrian Civil War. Nor shares a similar story to millions in the diaspora. Being Arab American comes with its own range of inequities, lack of representation, misstated census, various cultural specific health issues as an agent of change from a culture of change makers. Newer has led international medical aid drives, raising over $500,000 Research funded by the universities. Richard Goodman grant working with the environmental militarism and its correlation to chronic illnesses caused by US military burn pits in Iraq. And works with multi ethnic groups across the US in pursuit of collective liberation. This year, she founded a foundation and education program for school age students taking their placement exams in Iraq. Working to expand further in the Middle East nuts, in pursuit of an MD Phd in Anthropology, to enhance her mobility as a perfect servant, please join me in welcoming our panelists and then we will begin to hear from them in turn, physical. If you’d like to take it away.

Juan Cole: Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming out this evening. The tendency in popular writing about Iraq, especially after the Americans invaded it, was to see it as a deeply divided country, Shiites and Sunnis. The American public finally seems to have figured out that there were more than one kind of Islam in the world during this adventure. There was a, it wasn’t Mark Twain, but there was a wit who once said that wars are God’s way of teaching the American public geography. Then there’s the Kurdish issue and so forth. The image of Iraq is one and you often hear this phrase of age old hatreds and sectarian divisions and so forth. While there were such things as a historian, I have to tell you that I spent some time with the American Diplomatic Correspondence from the US Ambassador in Baghdad back to Washington and his political reporters for the 1960s and ’70s. There were worries about Iraq going communist. There were questions about how friendly the Bath government of Arab Nationalists and Socialists would be towards US interests. There were reports, peasant and landlord disputes, and sometimes peasant invasions of estates. Because Iraq was an extremely unequal society under British Property law. From the time that the British conquered Iraq during World War One, until they actually relinquished it, which was 1958. Although Iraq became independent in 1932, under British Property Law, which was implemented, liberalism went wild. And it was possible for people to build up these enormous capitalist states. Date orchards and other enterprises feeding the world market. A time when the peasantry was often forced into landless nests, to emigrate to the cities where they congregated in these vast slums that became breeding grounds for communism and Baathism, of which the United States was so afraid. In that correspondence that I looked through in the 1960s and ’70s, Shiism came up once, when Grand Ayatollah Hakim Died and there was question who would succeed him. And Americans were interested in this issue because sometimes the successors were of Iranian extraction and that might affect Iraq. Aside from that dispatch, they never brought up Islam, Shiism, Sunnism. They may as well have been talking about Martians. Their interest was how left are they? Are they going left? Are they a threat to the capitalist world? Are they joining Moscow? That was the lens through which these diplomats were viewing Iraq. And it didn’t seem to them very clearly that Iraq was driven by sectarian hatreds. That, that wasn’t the engine that was running the country in that era.

I just tell you the story to emphasize that whenever you hear the phrase age old hatreds, it’s always false, it’s propaganda. Actually, what we have learned is that people learn to hate each other really quickly. It can happen in a matter of a few months. They did the same thing to the Balkans, you know, because the former Yugoslavia fell into disarray after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Serbs and Croats and Bosnian Muslims were at war with one another. And they trotted out this phrase in the newspapers, age old hatreds. But actually under Tito, things seem to be fine, weren’t hatreds. You know, there’s not a good reason for those people to fight. They’re divided by religion. Croats are Catholic and Serbs are Eastern Orthodox and Bosnians. A lot of them are Muslim, but under the communist people didn’t mostly practice their religion. Why would they fight then? Their languages differ slightly, but it’s all mutually comprehensible.

These ethnic divisions among people are constructed, they’re not givens. When the United States invaded Iraq, it found a country that did already have some of these divisions. And it’s often forgotten that after the Gulf War, George HW. Bush went on the shortwave radio and asked the people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. I don’t know what he meant by that exactly, but the Bush’s pretended to be common People like Bush tried to speak with a phony southern accent and would always get the idioms wrong. But they were from Connecticut and went to Yale, weren’t in fact common people at all. Their patriarchs included a banker and a senator. I think Bush was calling on his equivalents on the gentleman of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Because he had gotten the country into this pickle by invading Iran and invaded Kuwait, and then provoking a 16 nation coalition against himself. Bush thought that surely you upper class baths understand that this has been a failure and you should really move against this figure now. But instead, the Kurds and the Shiites understood him to say that if they rose up against the government in the aftermath of the Gulf War in the spring of 1991, that the US would support them. And they rose up, and Bush had promised France and other countries in order to get them into the coalition, that he wouldn’t go onto Iraq. The US didn’t intervene. Saddam Hussein didn’t deal well with criticism, much less an uprising. He mobilized tanks and chemical weapons and crushed the Shiite rebellion in the south. Killed very large numbers of people in the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, in particular. I know I have friends in Dearborn who their families are much smaller now than they used to be in the ’80s because of all this killing.

And then the Kurds were in danger of being genocided, because in 1988, Saddam had already shown that he was willing to gas them. They became afraid when the Americans didn’t show up to protect them. And they went up into the mountains, Well, there isn’t any food up in the mountains, and a lot of them went up there. There was some danger of 1 million people starving to death. On Bush’s watch, he did finally establish a no fly zone and sent in General Jay Garner to do aid to the Kurdish people. But basically the US. The people who wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein out to dry. They didn’t forget this. When the US came back in 2003, the Americans had forgotten about it, but the Iraqis had not. The crushing of those rebellions did also create a lot of bitter feelings and some of them were sectarian in character of the Shiites despaired of justice in, and had fled to Iran, or came under Iranian influence and had established organizations like the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, in which carried out operations against the Saddam Hussein regime. There was the Ha party among the Shiites that dreamed of a Shiite utopia, not a clerical state like Iran, a run one with maybe a parliament with consultation. That party had been banned by Saddam Hussein and belonging to it became a capital crime. I don’t mean to say that disputes of a sectarian character, but I have to say they were pretty minor in terms of numbers. You can see it in the Irani Rock War, 1980-1988 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. The US military doctrine is that you invade a country when you have an advantage in troop strength of three to one, they think you can defend it. Saddam Hussein did it backwards. He invaded a country three times larger in population than his own. This war was doomed. The Iranians rallied and fought back. And it was a horrible World War One style war with trenches and mustard gas. All the horrible mistakes that were made in World War One were replicated between Iran and Iraq. In the 1980s, I estimate about 40,000 Iraqi Shiites defected to Iran in the course of that war. The Iraqi army was largely Shiite conscripts. There are millions of Shiites in Iraq, almost to a person. They stood with their country against their co religionists in Iran, because Iran is also shiite.

It shows you that religion just wasn’t the dividing line. Here, it was the nation and people fought together for the nation. But when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it created a power vacuum. The expatriates that it brought along were devoted to what was called debaathification, which they likened to densification. They would tell you at end, less length if you asked them what they meant was, they said after World War Two when the US occupied Germany, a former Nazis were fired. This is not true. Former Nazis became prime ministers and things they taught high school. There wasn’t a denatification on that scale, but they did it in Iraq. What it meant was you fired large numbers of Sunni Arabs, especially from government jobs, which were the only jobs that were operating in Iraq under the Americans. And then these expatriates who came along with the Americans brought their cronies to fill those jobs. And so you had 70% unemployment in the Sunni Arab areas and you had lots of money flowing into the Shiite areas. The Kurds were relatively sanguine about the end of the Saddam Hussein regime and relatively favorable towards the Americans. So it was the American presence itself that threw up the s, the sectarian battles. And let me just tell you one story to end, once this all got going. They had a Civil War in 2006, 2007.

The Americans were supposed to be there to keep order, but they let a civil war unfold under their noses. People were killed on a sectarian basis in that time.

In 2008, I went to Jordan to try to do some research among the Iraqis who had gone into exile there to find out why they had gone, what their future plans were. I found it very difficult research to do. I don’t mean to be too delicate, because those people were really suffering. I was just an American researcher. I had plenty of money and opportunities, but it hit me in the gut, the stories that they told me. So I contacted the refugee agencies and they introduced me around. I went to dinner one evening with an Iraqi professional couple in Aman, an architect and a physician. I asked them, well, in 2008, now things are settling down a little bit. Do you think you’ll go back? They said no, we’re a mixed marriage. She’s she our neighborhood has been ethnically cleansed of the other s, we don’t fit in anymore in our neighborhood. We can’t go back to where we were from. Then I went to Eastman, which is very poor, and it’s where they dumped the Palestinian refugees. And the refugees were living amongst them often in these apartments. I talked to one couple and s are you going back They said, no, we can’t because the reason we’re here is that in our neighborhood, there was a militia that came and threatened us. We were the opposite sect of the Militia. They put a letter in our mailbox that Thad is still here on Thursday, he and his family are dead. We immediately packed everything into the car and drove to a Jordan is not a signatory of the 1952 refugee Act. Refugees can’t work there. They’re not regularized. They’re living on their savings. And the UN used to give them 75 dinars a month. The woman of the house had started, had been given a sewing machine. And so she was starting to tailor clothes for her neighbors. There was an Iraqi physician who had become regular and got citizenship and was providing these sewing machines, baking ovens, and things to the Iraqi refugee women so that they could make a little bit of extra money on the side, but they were trapped there. And I said, well, are you going to go back now? And they said, no, we can’t because the militia that threatened Us is still in power in that neighborhood. So we can’t go back. 4 million Iraqis were made homeless by the US invasion. Over time, by the US invasion and its knock on effects, 1,000,000 of them forced out of the country, and the rest displaced inside the country from north to south, or from parts of Baghdad to another. The city of Baghdad was roughly equally Shiite and Sunni when Bush invaded by 2007, after the Civil War of 75% Shiite. There were these massive sectarian fights and population movements and refugees in the same way that the Palestinians had exile woven into their identity. Now, the Iraqis had the same thing.

Renée Ragin Randall: All right, so I think I’ll pick up where Juan left off, thinking about this question of exile, thinking about the question of history and how history gets talked about. Before I do that, I just want to say to Zena, where are you? Hi, And to Serena and Evan. And who did the hard work of organizing and curating the exhibit that is in the hatcher lobby and this event. Thank you for your work, especially in this particular time. I know that’s a lot of energy to put into something. I am a literary scholar, so my head in books and paper all the time. Excuse me, I’m going to be reading to you guys today, but that is how I’m going to talk about the shadow and light themes. Right? I’m thinking about how traumatic histories are narrated in literature. And in particular tonight I’d like to think with Iraqi authors who have written about the narration of histories. Such as the one that Juan described against the backdrop of both American military and local sectarian violence in a US. Occupied Iraq. And as Iraqi scholars in particular became targets of this violence, many writers of fiction from Iraq became preoccupied with the question and indeed the status of history and knowledge. Um, they point, as I show, not only to the question of the violent erasers of history and knowledge, but also to ideas about what forms historical preservation could even take in the future. Of course, fiction writers are not the only people who are interested in history and historicism during moments of cataclysmic violence and upheaval. It’s quite common for there to be a general preoccupation with history on the part of various actors in moments like this. And sometimes the questions are about, how did we get here to this moment, right? And other times, the turn towards history is an attempt to figure out how the present moment in conversation with the past could shape the future. It’s almost existential. This is the case for writers who have remained in Iraq, as well as for those who have left. I think in particular of the London based Iraqi playwright Hassan Adrazak, who, for instance, submitted an entry to this very shadow and light project. His entry is on display in the lobby. He wrote, In memory of Ism Sharif Muhammad, a professor of history and head of the College of Humanities at Barhdad University who was murdered in October 2003, exactly 20 years ago. Az describes why this professor of history was the person he chose to memorialize an explanation with roots and his family’s own flight from Iraq in 1981, just after Saddam’s invasion of Iran. Abra Zach writes that over the decades in between his exile and when he finally returned in 2019, as the dictator was replaced by the US. Military and the military by non state actors. The few precious childhood memories of Baghdad that I had had acquired a mythic quality. It was getting harder to know what was real and what was imagined, he said. When he returned to Baghdad in 20194 decades later, one of his first stops was the Iraqi National Museum, which he found nearly empty. It had been looted of its material history. Hi, welcome. Come on up. Commemorating the life and work of a professor of history, it seemed would necessarily be an imperative for Abraza because it could allow him to try and staunch the erasure of historical memory. Welcome, this threat of historical erasure is a preoccupation that’s also shared by the Basra based Iraqi writer A Gable. The contemporary history of the city of Basra as one layered with the violent histories of petro capitalist and ethno political violence, as well as political resistance infuses his writing, one of his short stories is set in Basra in the year 2013100, years after the start of the occupation. And in the story, a council of academic historians has been tasked by the region’s Governor General with verifying and the possible existence of historical occurrences more horrendous, more extensive or at least equal to the unfortunate phenomena and bloody events which have occurred in Basra in the past few years. The report’s executive summary continues specifying that these unfortunate phenomena and bloody events have included the exhaustion of Basra’s oil and gas, the drying up of the Hat Arab massacre, famine, trafficking of women and children, plagues and looting. In deep fear of this politician, this Governor General, the academics report concludes with the hope that their exhaustive archival research will satisfy his purposes. They have no idea why he needs this information. It does satisfy him. He reads about Iraq’s dictatorships and foreign occupations, but also about global plagues and famines and genocides. And he loads these stories into a sermon, which he delivers via Orwellian telescreens to his desperate citizens, condemning them for complaining about their lives. As the story concludes, we learn that the narrator of this story about the weaponization of history is a statute. One of the many monuments to history in the country that now languish on a trash heap. The statue finishes his story about the wretchedness of future Basra while looking at his abandoned companions, busts and figures of scholars and national heroes who have had their precious metals extracted. Or who are being created in preparation for being shipped to a European museum. From Abra, Zach’s elegy for Professor Muhammad, lamenting a profession endangered by decades of political violence, to Abel’s fiction about what may happen to history in the future. I move to one more example, perhaps a more hopeful one from the ouvre of one of the best known Iraqi writers in diaspora. Sinan Anton Ton attended the University of Baghdad, where he majored in English and minored in Arabic and Translation. He received an MA from Georgetown University and a Phd from Harvard, where he worked on medieval Arabic poetry. And he’s currently a professor at NYU. And I am mentioning this not because I want to wow you guys with his pedigree, but because it’s relevant to our talk today about Iraqi academics and to understanding this particular Iraqi academics novel. This novel is called Ferris, which translates to Index or Catalog. And it was published in 2016, later translated into English as The Book of Collateral Damage. The reference to the index or catalog is key for reasons that I’ll explain shortly broadly. The story concerns the intersecting fates of two protagonists. Namir, who’s a scholar of Arabic medieval poetry, who’s come to the US to pursue a doctorate in Arabic literature and a career in academia. And Wadud, an enigmatic bookseller and collector. The two meet in Iraq shortly after the US. Occupation begins on one of Namir’s return visits. And they encounter each other, not at all, coincidentally on Al Mutanabe Street, the century old bookselling and intellectual hub near Bada’s historic district, whose name pays homage to a prolific tenth century poet, and some of you may know the saying which many used to describe the literary geography of the modern Middle East. Right? El Cauda, right? So Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Barda Reads, Namir and Wadud are indeed the embodiment of Bada’s readers. They’re steeped in millennia of literary history. One festooned by the trappings of American academia, and the other surrounded by stacks and shelves of forgotten manuscripts in a small dark room. So after purchasing books from Wad, Namir strikes up a correspondence with him that they keep up. After Namir returns to the United States where he learns that Wadud has been painstakingly writing this index, this catalog, which consists of a series of vignettes told from the perspective of humans, animals and objects. And they narrate in the first person, the first minute that American bombs began falling on Iraq in 2003, and their own existence came to an end. These are objects which are ancient. In some cases, a priestess tablet and a musical instrument with ancient histories that evaporate in the Schellen. That the matter of historical erasure during the occupation is the subject of Adu makes even more sense when Namir learns the man’s history that years earlier, Adu had been jailed and tortured by Saddam’s regime for selling banned books. When he emerged from prison, he found his family and his home destroyed. He went mad, people said, and confined himself to a one room flat next to his shop, surrounded by First editions and his own writings. Back in the United States, Namirez pouring through this catalogue, losing his motivation to finish his dissertation, to write his own scholarly book, because he feels a destruction of his homeland and what he sees as the comparative uselessness of his historical re, reading of a medieval court poet in one of America’s ivory towers. It just drives him to despair. It doesn’t help that in this post 911 era, the ivory tower is smudged with the xenophobia and militant intolerance of his coworkers. But he does finish first his dissertation and then his tenure book, and finally, a novel about the life of Wadud. The novel, both Namir’s novel and Antun’s novel ends with the infamous 2007 suicide bombing on Al Muta Nab Street. The fictional Wadud is killed in the blast. Not very long after he had finally agreed to give, named permission to translate and to publish the stories of the first minute of the occupation. So I’m struck time and again by the beauty of this tale of not one, but two Iraqi intellectuals. One’s an academic who’s very uncomfortably ensconced in the halls of powerful institutions in a country that is hard at work destroying his own. And the other is an erstwhile collector and writer entombed in knowledge which risks annihilation until he chooses to pass it on. It’s a story which both critiques and celebrates the role of the academic in exile. It meditates painfully on the distrust of the ones who left on the part of the ones who stayed. And ultimately reveals the mutual dependence of the two for the task of protecting the past and the future. It’s unsparing in its representation of the steep personal, psychological and material costs of preserving knowledge amidst destruction. It offers some hope, I think, in the decentering of the custodianship and the production of histories. In other words, it encourages readers to sit with not just the loss to which authors like Abrazabli and Antun among others bear witness. But also to pay homage to and to celebrate the resistances of the lay intellectuals, the lovers of knowledge, and books like Wadud make that work possible for the futures that are still being written.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I would like to continue with Professor Randall’s Beautiful talk about History. I will go a little bit further back to the first Gulf War, which I personally witnessed as a child in Baghdad. The intertwined importance of art in that city, in bad, and really in the region, in the Middle Eastern region. As Professor Le also beautifully showed, there was quite a, especially in Iraq, a remarkable presence of Jews and Christians. My other half, my Egyptian half, also large presence of Egyptian Jews and Egyptian Christians until recently in the 20th century. We now find, for example, Iraqi Jewish academics, for example, Avi Schlaim for example, who is very critical of Zionism. The remarkable thing about art, I grew up in an artistic family. My mother, she worked in the Iraqi television as a set designer in the ’80s. My brother is an architect and my sister, she studied in Mahu Jamilla, she studied pottery. My childhood memories in Diaspora were memories of art and artists and galleries meeting actors coming to my house. And then when we moved to Jordan after the war, we continue to meet these Iraqi artists who are in diaspora, also sort of overflowing from Iraq to Jordan. There is a particular ability and of art to sort of resurface, even in situations where the artists themselves had not witnessed a particular genocide or a particular assault on their land and their people. For example. Now Mahmud Ish is, is as if he’s still alive and he’s still writing minus right, or Niza Bani, his poetry resurfaces. There is this particular ability in the case of specifically even the epic of Gilgamesh resurfaces as a part of national Iraqi pride. I remember the first time I came across a poignant ability of Iraqi artists to speak timelessly is one of the poems by Ahmed, who is a political, was a political exile from, and he has a very powerful poem called in English also, it translates very poetically to bullet pen, right. It has this idea of bullet right as means bullets like from a gun. In the poem is very short. I will translate it and read it in Arabic and translate it says just the Dr. measured my pulse and said is the pain here I said yes. The made an incision with his knife and took out a pen. The Dr. tilted his head and smiled and said it’s nothing but a pen. I said, no, my dear sir, this is a hand and a mouth, a bullet, and blood. And a lonely crime. Walking barefoot, walking footless, right. Our family personally felt this almost dangerous power of the artist, when a dear family friend was assassinated in 1994, even after the Bush regime. For the apparent silly reason is that she was the supervisor of a mosaic of George HW. Bush’s face being put on the floor in front of the one of the hotels in Bardad by order of Saddam. And both her house and her sister’s house was bombed and she died and she was my mother’s friend. Is this dangerous power of the artist, precisely because they continue to live after, after they physically die. Their poetry has this resurgence, this timelessness. Especially again, bringing the issue of philistine. A lot of, for example, Iraqi Jews were very prominent musicians in Iraq. They were even musical instrument makers. And some of them, when they were forced out of Iraq and they went to Israel to Tel Aviv, they actually opened Arabic musical instrument stores just to maintain a connection to. They have what are called the salons, as they do in Egypt nowadays. For example, where they play the music from the Good Old Days. They’re not singing Jewish songs, they’re singing Malum. They’re singing Navrazalr. They’re singing the songs that remind them of their childhood. This very powerful ability of art. And I wanted to share my own experience as somebody who likes to write in Arabic and English. How? Building off the question of history, I’ve always believed that literature is history told in the first person. It surpasses the bureaucracy of politics. This is why I think we are so affected by Ahmed’s poem because of being exiled. The idea of the idea of genocide, very personal. For example, in the last words in his poem, in where he says a Jundi un Fiji, Walt Eltulkaluau and Amuts female soldiers screamed in my face, did I not kill you? He said yes, but like you, I forgot to die. These very simple words has a very profound effect. I remember, for example, in 1973, in the 1973 war, the famous musician Bed insisted on going into the Egyptian television to compose a song. They refused, and they said, we don’t have a budget. He said, I will pay for it from my own money. The story is that he went with Daria and he started listening to how the janitors were responding to the war unfolding in the television. He saw that these janitors, very simple people, said bell. And then he wrote that as the first lyrics of the song, Ada. My experience, I was watching a video of the famous Iraqi actor Jilifari on his deathbed. He was visited by his friend, another Iraqi actor, Samotanamlotan, when he saw his friend on his death bed. He said, in Iraqi expression, now I’ve heard that countless times before, but for some reason it struck me. I never thought about what this expression actually means. Right. Does it actually mean truth or lies? Like, is this really happening? Is this really unfolding? But I didn’t see two Iraqi actors. I saw Iraq, Iraq, giving a eulogy to itself. Then maybe a week later, I was in $1 store, I see an Iraqi man and his friend is with him. He asks his friend, do you have $100 bill He says, No, I don’t. He says immediately, there was something that was transformed. That this is the state of the Iraqi abroad in a country that had caused his exile in $1 store, not even a fancy store, and he can’t find $100 bill. It’s like the old Iraq represented by Samuel Tan. And this idiom of such ties the present generation and diaspora with the past generation. It was a very creative moment. I think that it goes to emphasize that as Iraqi is in diaspora, it’s very important to keep this literature alive. Specifically, not only contemporary, just lost one of its major contemporary poets, Kim, but also to remember that past, to keep the memory of art alive, to keep the memory of Samuel Tan and that entire generation. I think this is a wonderful exhibit. And thank you very much, Evan and the library for opening this opportunity up. Thank you very much. Hi. Good evening. Just for people trickling in, I’m going to go through a little bit of the preface that Evan gave me because it will make more sense when I start giving my little spiel. My name is Nor, and I was born on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. 2002 Sofa. And that was the year before the occupation. Of course, as we know, when an occupying force enters a country, they enter, they give their full blows to the Capitol. And that’s where we were for the first eight years of my life. We lived, my family, my mom. Extended family without any male relatives were circling the preferes of the city. I say that because it’s relevant to why I am interested in conversations like this, that story and that origin, that experience is important to me. Yeah, I’m going to start giving a little talk about why, what I envision here, the word resurgence. I know our scholars here in contextualize different aspects of the post war after life, But I think it’s really important before we get into the post war after life conversation to talk about how we got there and not just what happened post 2003. But before that, in 1991, the US. Baker said bombed Iraq to the stone ages. Then from that period on to 2003, we experienced the worst humanitarian crisis. Through the form of really brutal sanctions where medicine, water, food resources, anything was not allowed to come into the country. And that killed over 1 million Iraqis. And then you have, of course, the physical occupation of 2003, which also took a toll on the social landscape of Iraq. So when we talk about resurgence, I think about reparations. And if you’ll allow me, I will read you what I actually prepared. Not this impromptu little thing I can’t do impromptu guys. I’m really bad at talking, but here, here it goes. In the Anthropocene, discussions about destruction and repair often take universalist tone as if a collective human we can recover from the impacts of capitalism, colonialism, and militarism. However, this discourse falls politically flat, producing common humanity. Only in the imaginations of those who profit from anthropogenic mass destruction, a category in which most of us unwillingly fall. This framing runs counter to the long history of critical disciplines like feminist studies, which calls for spesitivity and attention to political context. For example, global climate change is everyone’s problem, but it is produced by inequality and extraction. In just to give that a little reference here, I remember what happened in 2011 in Syria and Jordan. There were hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing Syria to enter Jordan that year. Jordan had an especially cold winter. You’re in this landscape in refugee camps and it’s really cold and you have tens of thousands or hundreds of a number of Syrian children freezing to death. Israel offers Jordan snow plows to mitigate the tension that exists there. That is especially ironic because it neglects the reason why Syrian refugees are dying there in the first place. So that’s what I mean by it’s produced by inequality and extraction. And it is a political nature. To me, reparations offer an opening to engage the historical and political sensitivity of each call for urgent and expensive repair, particularly in the wake of war. Reparations account for people finding a way to generate conditions for a resurgence in the best interests of the global. We fully accounting for the fact that there are victims, perpetrators, and players in between, but it can’t be simply imagined as repair plus politics or snowplow acknowledgment. The history of reparation implementation has always been fraught with misuse. Often repair is just a dirty ruptures that cannot or should not be closed. Many people rightly think that reparations are just hush money. Most of the US legal system is structured around this framework. Workers compensation, for instance, caps $1 amount injuries worth and requires confidentiality upon the receipt of funds. The framework for repair in this case, at the intersection of labor, private property law, marriage, slavery in the personhood of corporations is a symptomized version of the payment for silence and an unequal distribution of justice. This is why Tanahquot calls for the reparation of African Americans not for slavery, but for racist housing, employment and education policies directly linked to GI bills and US military efforts. He is quite clear about the importance of locating and quantifying individual cases rather than proposing a blanketed statement, a blanketed system for symbolic justice. Quotes. Specific calculations are central to the functionality of reparations work. Conversely, Susan Soman writes about her relatives debate on whether or not to accept German reparations for the Holocaust. She discusses quantification as a ratio. On one hand, to receive money from Germany is to accept acknowledgment that wrong was done. But on the other hand, to receive a sum of money is to accept that the sum represents an appropriate quantification of the age of the damage. And further, but on the other hand, to receive a sum of money is to accept that the sum represents an appropriate quantification of the damage and that further discourse is not necessary. The dilemmas on how to receive reparations index broader dilemmas on how to give reparations. Are there ever conditions when one could demand more or seek reparations that exceed the consent of the oppressor? Here I will outline some conditions that might allow us to achieve both political and restorative aims of the concept and try to sidestep some of the dilemmas. First, reparations, they have to be grassroots. I don’t think that we can dismantle the master’s house with a master’s tools. The bureaucracy of a state in this case is quantification and the distribution of devices. The bureaucracy of a state in this case, it’s quantification and distribution of devices and are often things that produce mass violence. How then can also be the same system by which reparations are determined and distributed? Reparations should be as grass roots as a grass roots practice and abolish as a state practice, and we should abolish them as a state practice. Reparations can be a matter of governments making post war deals with little or negative bearing on ordinary people, which they most often are. While I am respectful of the people calling for their governments to pay reparations, I am weary that the people can never determine the conditions by which such process is sustained or administered. Second, reparations have to be helpless. We must abandon hope to conduct ourselves in a way that is most directional toward liberation. One of the most precaneous components of de, politicized repair is the sense of helping or saving. It is part of that universalist call to clean up messes of war in the name of humanitarianism, rather than in the name of politically specific responsibilities. In the case of Iraq or Palestine, where US complicity is direct and ongoing, it is clear that people need as little help from Americans as they can get. It is precisely the condition of aid and dependency that produce the violations for which we are most responsible. On the other hand, the reverse is equally problematic. It is not the job of suffering people, to help perpetrators recover from the addictions and psychosis of plunder. Reparations need to be mutual and address ongoing dynamics of power and inequality. Third, reparations have to be ambiguous. Of course, there is no clear distinction between victim and perpetrator. For example, I, as an Iraqi American, do I owe reparations? Or am I owed reparations By whom? Which of the many violations made and endured in my name? So often academics take the stance of a witness as if they are absolved from the material involvement in war and violation. So often the claims are made that government of the devil and the rest of us are just people who all suffer at the hands of warfare. An American soldier suffers from war differently than than an Iraqi or an Afghani civilian. In other words, plunder, suffering, and responsibility are not simple or unidirectional. But we can’t have a world where people throw up their hands unwillingly to take personal responsibility simply because they too suffer. We can do better. There is no pure victim, perpetrator, or witness, but a lack of purity or clarity, and a lack of purity or clarity does not absolve us from the responsibility of being perpetrators. Lastly, I would like to argue that there is no such thing as the post war, and to imagine it is a very dangerous foreclosing. As Adra Simpsons argues, most violations are ongoing. I call your attention to the BDS movement in Palestine. It is a call from Palestinian civil society to boycott divest from and sanction the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is a call for reparations that accounts for ongoing financial, military, and social complicity in the US. Prevention and intervention are parallel and sometimes primary components of reparation work. Ongoing means that it is not ongoing, means that it ongoing that it is not enough to repair the congenital heart defect and send our child patient back home. We are bound by his mother’s spit on our cheeks to prevent the sale of weapons and aircraft to Iraqi governments dropping bombs on Fallujah in other parts of the world. In conclusion. I understand in conclusion. What am I going to conclude with, guys? Okay, I often fall back on a much demonized concept. An eye for an eye. Q Shut out Homer, Be my home boy, my ancestor. You know. Let’s remove for a second the white picket fence that liberals put around, acceptable notions of violence and non violence. For a second, the eye for the eye sets a condition of absolute equality. It means that my eye is worth the same pricelessness as yours. It is a notion that prevents violence by insisting from the beginning on real equality. If I pluck out your eye, you my equal might also pluck out mine. Your gaze upon me is no less meaningful than mine upon you. My ability to see depends on your ability to see. In conclusion, the real one, Reparations need to move outside of institution reparations to move outside of, in institutional or monetization. It requires us to move our children, our spit, our bodies, our ga, and our resources fluidly, intimately and painfully. Reparations have to be grass roots. They have to be helpless, ambiguous, ongoing, and without absolution. Reparations call for us to refuse private property. We are asked to engage in collective repair by opening up that thing we hold as our most private property, our morality. Thank you. Okay, so I would like to introduce another esteemed panelist who is joining us. Now we have Dr. Mohammed Karim. Dr. Karim was born in Basra in 1956. He has been a department head, artist union leader, and eventual refugee and US resident. He has carried his passion for art, mentorship and instruction across numerous displacements and transitions. A graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Bardad. He went on to teach at the Instructors Institute in Najaf and at universities in Libya. A university and university of to even when displaced by the Libyan revolution to a refugee camp in Usha, Tunisia. He went on teaching. He continues to contribute to festivals and exhibitions and to share from his knowledge, even as a volunteer docent at the DIA, enjoy with the English language, now enjoy with Arabic language Abraza Academy. Ajei M in Phoebe. Diet Juliette Heyden. We all academia academies A Eliava you understand me in Arabic language Trans Dr. Kim is explaining that he completed his studies at basically drawn from the introduction that I just gave. He completed his studies in bad 1979 and he traveled most recently, he mentions that he traveled to Libya. Continue. I speak English language but not perfectly the Taliban of summary Dallas A. Tied. All right. Okay. Okay. So let’s see. So at some point he’s mentioned that he’s taught in Libya. So in Libya the universities he has taught for about 13 years. But then because of certain circumstances, you know, you know, he was he was forced there. He was mentioning that they were they were forced to leave for economic reasons, for material reasons basically. And that he was able to take up teaching in Libya. The teaching of course. Then he has mentioned that there is not this direct relationship between politics, That they are separate. That they are distinct. Got drawn in virtual. Okay. Drawn into Thank you please. Yes. I’m trying to remember what was said. Translation difficult. Please go ahead and you’re using the mic if you want and the Taliban academia. When he was a student at the academy, he participated in a number of exhibitions and Asp, it was his ambition to become an important artist in and he realized his ambition of becoming a part of the artists of and we fund drawing and anatomy of art, perspective history of art. He taught at the Teachers Institute in Naje, and these were among the subjects that he instructed in assessed. And he founded the first department of our instruction in Iraq here at this Teachers Institute, Salia Mujiban. He was forced to travel to Libya. Libya Hablen were Bakalis. Ashman Libya welcomed his artistry and he stayed there for 13 years. As a Cobi, he and a number of colleagues from Egypt and others established a department of art education in mid composition. The course that he taught was color palette, I guess. Composition. Yeah, He held a number of exhibitions in Libya, and he was a member of those that actually put forward exhibitions in the Alibaba. Okay. Yeah. In Libya, Thai, Libya. After the Libyan revolution, they went to the refugee camp. Jill the heaven. Okay. So after they found him in the camp director of the camp said that truly they have found gold. Yes. In the person. Puna. Yeah, you might laugh at this, but this is what she said. His dream has been in and in Libya and here in America to serve art and artistry. Fab America, zero bet. For that reason he has chosen this path and continues to produce art. He has a studio in his home. Yes. He continues in this area? Yes. Okay. Yeah. He’s worked at the D as a do in Libya. He worked with the refugees that were coming from Libya to the refugee camp in Tunisia. And so and so they made something out of nothing amazing thing about art is that every person can make picture. Okay. And Yes. Thank you. S. Yes. And son. Okay. Yeah. So using a pen and brush the man can make a picture on his paintings are here and they are caught between his own self critique, between palette and composition, and so on. A So wish. And his ambition here in the States is to serve those with disabilities, Zb. Okay, so not only disabilities for example of mind, but addictions, other ailments. A business at this work, he took a course about this during his graduate training here, Sugar and Jazan, academia M. But this is just a synopsis from his life and from his experiences. And he’s mentioning another artist who was very important in terms of his contributions. Academy was a student with him there at the Fine Arts Institute. And for your attention, thank you. Thank you so much. In the interest of time, I would like to invite our guests who are in zoom to briefly speak. We are honored to be joined by doctors who is Nada chair and director of the newly established Center for Dip Studies at San Francisco State University. And a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. And we also have Bo, bo, S Hill, a poet and bookseller in San Francisco, California, who is the founder of the Admultonaby Street Coalition and who has devised the Shadow and Light Project. Both Ba and Perses have contributed work to the memorial exhibition, which is in the north lobby. We would just like to invite them. First of all, we would like to extend our gratitude for their partnership in supporting the exhibition here and this conversation which can emerge from it, and then invite them to share very briefly their thoughts. Thank you, Evan. I want to begin by thanking the University of Michigan and especially Evan, who maintained a long dialogue with me over almost two years to bring the exhibit to where it is. Now, one thing that I want to define at the beginning is what this project is a project of P. It is not an attempt to speak for the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people have their own voice and it is quite eloquent as we have heard tonight. It is a project of witness, memory, and solidarity. As a poet, I have always felt that the important thing about solidarity is to make it visible. And that’s what I have tried to do with all the parts of our project, which began as a response to the car bombing of Al Mu Tanabe Street in 2007. We have exhibited around the world. In so many of these exhibit spaces, we have had Iraqis who are in the who have left Iraq just pour out their own stories. That’s been an incredibly moving thing for everybody who has been part of this project. What I tried to do with shadow and light was to find some ground where artists and writers and academics in the west could find a common ground with the Iraqi academics that we are honoring. I didn’t want this just to be a memorial. I didn’t want the equivalent of laying flowers on someone’s grave. I wanted to try and engage imagination of the people who wanted to be part of this and try to get as close to that academic as they possibly could through their own writing and photographs as well. Or as badly as we have done it. We have done it with a very pure intent to stand in solidarity with the Iraqi people who have endured so much. I want to thank again, Evan, and let Pers speak. Hi everyone. Thank you, Evan. Thank you to all the panelists. I didn’t expect to learn so much, but I’m really happy that I was able to be a part of your listening audience today. I’m sorry I didn’t get your last name. Renee. I teach literature for me in many respects captures the stories that can’t be found anywhere else. When I became part of the Al Mutabi Street Coalition, I felt compelled to respond not just to the events of the bombing in 2006, but also to the idea that as an American, the great lies that were perpetrated to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq felt egregious when they were happening, but even more egregious as the time went on and we discovered how false they were. As several people in the audience noted, it’s just been war and one series of devastating consequences for the people in the region after another. It brings us to this current moment. I want to say that my interest in shadow and light, in particular, I participated in the Amutabi starts here anthology. But I was very interested in the role of academics when I was a professor at San Jose State University. One of my colleagues got an e mail from a professor of literature who was studying an American poet, an American woman poet. And he asked for books, and I can’t even remember the name of the poet we collected and sent them to him. It was a way in which we felt connected to this one professor in Iraq. In Baghdad. After this project, shadow and light came to me, I realized like we had lost touch with this professor. Later on, I found out that he was one of many who were killed in a kidnapping, a ransom that went bad. I saw the list of academics that Bo provided, 400 academics from a Spanish NGO. There weren’t that many women on the list. I selected a professor who was the Dean of law. I can’t remember the city anyway, it doesn’t matter. But I tried to imagine also the idea that as professors, as teachers, as educators, our role is so much bigger than disseminating knowledge. It’s about speaking to the future and speaking to young people. For me, this is a particularly important moment for this exhibit and for us to be talking about academics. Because I feel right now that in this country in the United States, academics and professors and knowledge and knowledge production are being attacked vigorously by right wing pundits and politicians. But also in the current situation in Gaza, professors with great knowledge about the region are being sidelined by these very. Reductive narratives about what’s happening. I think it’s especially important that we guard the role, not just of academics, but of education and educators for the future. It’s a great honor to be with you all. I hope you appreciate the work of the exhibit. It comes from people from all over the world and also people who felt compelled to respond. Because many of these academics, we don’t even know what happened to them. We just know that they died. And that’s it, thanks to Bo, especially for his dogged persistence, Iraq, and the role of the United States in occupying and invading Iraq in the hearts and minds of many of us, especially artists. Thank you. Thank you, Price and Bo for your contributions and for your advocacy. I just want to mention in the exhibition, we have tried to offer additional connection to the lives of these academics who were assassinated by tracing their legacies, and including where we could, examples of their publications, their photographs. Memorials from their communities remembering them after they have died. And in the case of Dr. Leyla G. Side who persis memorialized, she had a Phd in Law from Mussel University. Very significant, very prolific writer, an amazing scholar. And in the exhibition in the lobby you will find that we have included with the memorial that Pers provided, we have included her full CV and a photograph of her. So I hope you will take a look as you’re leaving. So thank you so much for your attention. Please feel free to continue the conversation and to approach any of our panelists with your questions. Thank you, especially to our Iraqi attendees who have been so generous with their time and with their insights. And thank thank you for being here. Take care, I’ll tell.

Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman was killed in Iraq in August 2003. His story is one of many untold episodes in the terrible history of human conflict

By Ibrahim Al-Marashi |

( San Francisco Chronicle ) – If someone had asked the students at my Monterey high school which one of us would be the first to go to Iraq, everyone would have probably said me. After all, my parents were the ones who emigrated from Iraq in the 1970s to escape Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. We were just waiting for a safer time to visit our relatives and make pilgrimages to Iraq’s many shrines.

But Kylan Jones-Huffman, a student I ran track with, ended up being the first. He would lose his life there in August 2003 as an intelligence officer temporarily assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force during the Iraq War.

Kylan was a well-liked, well-read student — a “jock-nerd” if you will. We didn’t speak much but he was always kind to me and even stood up for me when other students picked on me for being Iraqi and Muslim. He was a year ahead of me in school and we lost touch after he graduated. But from his obituary, I saw how his life had paralleled mine. During his undergraduate years at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., he studied Arabic and Persian just as I had at UCLA. He, too, had wanted to become a university history professor. In early 2003, he’d been accepted to a doctorate program at George Washington University and presumably would have started that fall. Meanwhile, I would go on to graduate a year later from my own doctorate program in history.

Kylan was also a budding poet. He was a member of an online haiku group in which he shared his poems while abroad. The last one he ever wrote:

uncomfortable — / body armor shifting/ on the car seat

My old classmate would lose his life in that same body armor in the scorching heat of Al-Hilla, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, not far from where my family is from. He was there to brief arriving Polish and Spanish troops on Iraqi cultural sensitivities and differences. While sitting in the passenger seat of a Humvee stuck in traffic, a gunman approached and opened fire.

His final poem — more poignant words, I could not imagine. Art reflecting reality.

I picture Kylan, sitting uncomfortably, sweating under his body armor in the last moments of his life. His killing was one of the first acts of an insurgency that grew from the official end of combat that President George W. Bush had declared on May 1, 2003. That insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq would last until 2011 when U.S. forces finally left the country. Kylan was the 64th fatality out of an eventual 4,424.

But he, like everyone else who lost their life, was more than a statistic.

It would take 20 years for America to have any sort of meaningful reckoning on why our country went to war and the repercussions for the nation, the region and American foreign policy. However, as a historian who spent much of the past 20 years studying the aftermath of the invasion, what’s always been missing from these conversations is the human element — the individuals, both Iraqi and American, who became victims of the war and occupation. I have written about some of the Iraqi victims in the past, such as the 2006 Mahmudiyya murders, when five U.S. soldiers gang-raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, murdered her father, mother and sister, dousing the family in petrol and setting the home on fire to hide the evidence. I also wrote about how in 2007, U.S. private military contractor Blackwater massacred 14 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad. 

Kylan was a victim, too — alongside the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans who died as a result of the invasion. All of their lives were lost due to faulty intelligence in Washington, D.C., used to justify the war. The politicians behind that deadly decision will never be held accountable for their actions.

It’s these same misguided rationales that historians like myself see driving most wars, and the toll on society is always heavy. Kylan’s life is one episode in this greater history of combatants and civilians — untold numbers of people who have died or endured post-traumatic stress disorder. There are victims of gender-based violence during conflict, those maimed by landmines and amputees, many reliant on prosthetics. Landscapes and waterways are poisoned by Agent Orange, depleted uranium or white phosphorus. Animals killed on the frontlines or dying underneath rubble. And eventually, there are always internally displaced people and refugees desperate for any sense of peace and safety.

Over the years, I’ve been working on a course that centers these stories instead of the conventional military history so commonly taught. It’s a course I call “Victims of War.” My hope is that one day I’ll be able to teach it, and I know Kylan will be right there beside me — as the history professor he always wanted to be.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is co-author of “Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History and The Modern History of Iraq.”

Reprinted from San Francisco Chronicle with the author’s permission.

Featured photo: “Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash“

Georgetown University Qatar “Closing Plenary: U.S. Foreign Policy towards the Region: the Bush Presidency and Beyond”

Here is GU-Q’s description of the video:

The Hiwaraat Conference Series at Georgetown University in Qatar
The Invasion of Iraq: Regional Reflections Conference

Day 3
Closing Plenary: U.S. Foreign Policy towards the Region: the Bush Presidency and Beyond

Edward Kolla, Chair (Georgetown University in Qatar)
Juan Cole (University of Michigan)
Flynt L. Leverett (Pennsylvania State University)
Trita Parsi (Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft)
Randa Slim (Middle East Institute)

Closing Remarks
Dean Safwan Masri (Georgetown University in Qatar)

About the conference: The 2003 invasion of Iraq marked a critical turning point in America’s relationship with Iraq and its neighboring countries, a region of strategic importance encompassing vital energy and military interests, and reshaped its diplomatic relations worldwide. This conference is convened by the Dean of Georgetown University in Qatar, Dr. Safwan Masri, in collaboration with the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS).
#hiwaraat #guq #iraq

( Human Rights Watch ) – (Baghdad) – The United States government has apparently failed to provide compensation or other redress to Iraqis who suffered torture and other abuse two decades after evidence emerged of US forces mistreating detainees at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons in Iraq, Human Rights Watch said today.

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US and its coalition allies held about 100,000 Iraqis between 2003 and 2009. Human Rights Watch and others have documented torture and other ill-treatment by US forces in Iraq. Survivors of abuse have come forward for years to give their accounts of their treatment, but received little recognition from the US government and no redress. Prohibitions against torture under US domestic law, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, as well as customary international law, are absolute.

“Twenty years on, Iraqis who were tortured by US personnel still have no clear path for filing a claim or receiving any kind of redress or recognition from the US government,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “US officials have indicated that they prefer to leave torture in the past, but the long-term effects of torture are still a daily reality for many Iraqis and their families.”

Between April and July 2023, Human Rights Watch interviewed Taleb al-Majli, a former detainee at Abu Ghraib prison, in addition to three people with knowledge of his detention and his condition after his release who wished to remain anonymous. Human Rights Watch also interviewed a former US judge advocate who served in Baghdad in 2003, a former member of Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights, and representatives of three nongovernmental organizations working on torture. Human Rights Watch also reviewed media and nongovernmental reports, as well as US government documents including US Department of Defense investigations into alleged detainee abuse.

In May, Al-Majli told Human Rights Watch that US forces subjected him to torture and other ill-treatment, including physical, psychological, and sexual humiliation while detaining him at Abu Ghraib prison between November 2003 and March 2005.

He said he was one of the men in a widely circulated photo at Abu Ghraib that shows a group of naked, hooded prisoners on top of one another in a human pyramid, while two US soldiers smile behind them. “Two American soldiers, one male and one female, ordered us to strip naked,” al-Majli said. “They piled us prisoners on top of each other. I was one of them.”

Al-Majli said that US forces detained him while he was visiting relatives in Anbar province in 2003.

“On the morning of October 31 [2003], US forces surrounded the village my uncle lived in,” al-Majli said. “They took boys and old men from the village. I told them I’m a guest from Baghdad, I live in Baghdad and just came to visit my uncle. They put a cover on my head and tied my wrists with plastic zip ties, then loaded me into a Humvee.”

After a few days at Habbaniya military base and at an unknown location in Iraq, US forces moved al-Majli to Abu Ghraib prison. “It was then the torture started,” he said. “They took away our clothes. They mocked us constantly while we were blindfolded with hoods over our heads. We were completely powerless,” he said. “I was tortured by police dogs, sound bombs, live fire, and water hoses.”

While Human Rights Watch is unable to conclusively verify al-Majli’s account, including whether he was one of the men in the “human pyramid” photo, his story of detention at Abu Ghraib is credible. Al Majli presented corroborating evidence, including a prisoner identity card with his full name, inmate number, and cell block, which he said US forces issued him at Abu Ghraib after taking his photo, iris scan, and fingerprints. Al-Majli also showed Human Rights Watch a letter he obtained in 2013 from the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, a governmental body with the mandate to protect and promote human rights in Iraq, confirming his detention at Abu Ghraib prison, including his date of arrest (October 31, 2003), and listing the same inmate number as his prisoner identity card.

He said he has kept them all this time as proof of what he endured.

During the US occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, authorities held thousands of men, women, and children at Abu Ghraib prison. A February 2004 report to the US-led military coalition by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that military intelligence officers told the ICRC that an estimated 70 to 90 percent of people in coalition custody in Iraq in 2003 had been arrested by mistake.

Al-Majli said that after 16 months at Abu Ghraib, he was released without charge. Though he gained his freedom, he said he found himself physically ailing, penniless, and traumatized. While he was detained, he said, he began biting his hands and wrists to cope with the trauma he was experiencing, and has continued ever since. Raised, purple welts were clearly visible across his hands and wrists.

“It became a mental health condition,” he said. “I did it in jail, and after I left jail, and I keep doing it today. I try to avoid it, but I can’t. Until today, I can’t wear short sleeves. When people see this, I tell them it’s burns. I avoid questions.”

More than the pain he suffered himself, al-Majli laments the negative effect it has had on his children: “This one year and four months changed my entire being for the worse. It destroyed me and destroyed my family. It’s the reason for my son’s health problems and the reasons my daughters dropped out of school. They stole our future from us.”

For two decades, al-Majli has sought redress, including compensation and an apology, for the abuse he suffered. Unable to afford a lawyer or access the US embassy in Baghdad, al-Majli sought help from the Iraqi Bar Association, which turned him away, telling him it did not handle cases like his. Al-Majli then went to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, but all it could do was issue him a letter confirming he is in their records as a former detainee at Abu Ghraib. He said he did not know how to contact the US military and raise a claim.

Human Rights Watch wrote to the US Department of Defense on June 6, 2023, outlining al-Majli’s case, providing the research findings, and requesting information on compensation for survivors of torture in Iraq. Despite repeated follow-up requests, Human Rights Watch has not received a response.

“I didn’t know what else I could do or where else to go,” al-Majli said. Human Rights Watch was not able to find any legal pathway for al-Majli to file a claim seeking recompense.

“The US secretary of defense and attorney general should investigate allegations of torture and other abuse of people detained by the US abroad during counterinsurgency operations linked to its ‘Global War on Terrorism’,” Yager said. “US authorities should initiate appropriate prosecutions against anyone implicated, whatever their rank or position. The US should provide compensation, recognition, and official apologies to survivors of abuse and their families.”

20 Years of US Silence

In 2004, then-US President George W. Bush apologized for the “humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners” at Abu Ghraib. Soon after, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that he had found a legal way to compensate Iraqi detainees who suffered “grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty at the hands of a few members of the United States armed forces. It’s the right thing to do, and it is my intention to see that we do.”

Human Rights Watch has found no evidence that the US government has paid any compensation or other redress to victims of detainee abuse in Iraq, nor has the United States issued any individual apologies or other amends.

Some victims have attempted to apply for compensation using the US Foreign Claims Act (FCA). The law allows foreign nationals to obtain compensation for death, injury, and damage to property from “noncombat activity or a negligent or wrongful act or omission” caused by US service members. However, it includes a so-called combat exclusion: claims are not payable if the harm results from “action by enemy or U.S. forces engaged in armed conflict or in immediate preparation for impending armed conflict.” Furthermore, for al-Majli and other survivors of detainee abuse during the invasion and occupation, filing a claim under the Foreign Claims Act is not an option because claims must be filed within two years from the date of the alleged harm.

Human Rights Watch was unable to find public evidence that payments have been made under this law as compensation for detainee abuse, including torture. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents detailing 506 claims made under the Foreign Claims Act: 488 in Iraq and 18 in Afghanistan. The majority of claims relate to harm or deaths caused by shootings, convoys, and vehicle accidents.

The only case of a Foreign Claims Act payment relating to detention in those documents was for a claimant who was paid US$1,000 for being unlawfully detained in Iraq, with no mention of other abuse. Five other claims were for abuse in detention, but they are among eleven claims that do not contain the outcome, including whether payment was made.

The US Defense Department did not respond to repeated requests for information as to whether the US government made Foreign Claims Act or other compensation payments to survivors or families of those who died of detainee abuse in Iraq.

Jonathan Tracy, a former judge advocate who handled claims of harm in Baghdad in 2003, told Human Rights Watch he did not know of any Foreign Claims Act payments to torture survivors by the Army. “If any of the survivors received a payment, I would doubt the Army would have wanted to use Foreign Claims Act money because it could be interpreted as an admission on the government’s part,” he said.

A US submission to the UN Committee Against Torture from May 2006 reported that 33 detainees had by that date filed claims for compensation to the US Army, 28 of which were from Iraq.

The submission stated that “no compensation has been provided to date, however, compensation has been offered in two cases.” Subsequent submissions to the Committee Against Torture do not contain updates to these figures, nor specify whether those payments were made. Notably, according to the document, neither of the two recommended payments was listed as compensation for torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Other Iraqis have attempted to find justice in US courts. But the US Justice Department has repeatedly dismissed such cases using a 1946 law that preserves US forces’ immunity for “any claim arising out of the combatant activities of the military or naval forces, or the Coast Guard, during time of war.”

So far, the only lawsuits able to advance have targeted military contractors. Those cases, too, face considerable obstacles. One such case, Al Shimari et al. v. CACI, has been slowly making its way through courts since June 2008. The lawsuit was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a US-based nongovernmental organization, on behalf of four Iraqi torture victims against CACI International Inc. and CACI Premier Technology, Inc. The lawsuit asserts that CACI, which the US government hired to interrogate prisoners in Iraq, directed and participated in torture and other abuse at Abu Ghraib.

CACI has attempted to have the case dismissed 18 times since it was first filed. On July 31, 2023, a federal judge refused CACI’s most recent motion to dismiss the case, which finally appears to be heading to trial.

Criminal Investigations into Detainee Abuse in Iraq

The US Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) opened at least 506 investigations into alleged abuses of people in the hands of US and other coalition forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2005, according to a US Department of Defense document reviewed by Human Rights Watch. The document details investigations into 376 cases of assault, 90 cases of deaths, 34 cases of theft, and 6 cases of sexual assault allegedly committed by US and coalition forces.

These US Army criminal investigations paint a stark picture of the scale and range of abuse that was alleged inside US-controlled prisons in Iraq. The most high-profile cases – like the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi – and hundreds more cases of abuse that never made headlines are outlined with clinical descriptions of violence.

The investigations concerned 225 allegations of assault and sexual assault in US-controlled detention facilities, involving at least 318 potential victims and 426 alleged abusers.

38 of those investigations upheld the allegations or found the accused guilty.

In 57 cases, investigators were unable to find sufficient evidence to prove or disprove the allegation or were unable to identify the suspect. In 79 cases, investigators declared the allegations unfounded. However, cases reviewed by CID highlighted several shortcomings in investigative processes, including a failure to identify and follow leads, failure to locate and interview witnesses, over-reliance on medical records without corroborating evidence, and failure to photograph or examine crime scenes. For example:

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In cases in which Army officials interviewed the victims and knew their identities, it appears that no attempt was made to couple punishments of abusers with compensation or other forms of redress.

Nineteen allegations of abuse were written off as standard operating procedure, leading the CID to conclude that the “offenses were unfounded” or “did not occur as alleged”:

Finally, 16 cases involved allegations of abuse committed by forces other than the US Army. Such cases were referred to investigators of the alleged abuser’s branch of the military, such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), for further investigation. For example:

A Climate Enabling Torture

When the photos of detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib went public, then-President Bush sought to minimize the systemic nature of the problem by calling it “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” But investigations including by Human Rights Watch have found that decisions taken at the highest levels of government enabled, sanctioned, and justified these acts. Abu Ghraib was but one of several US military detention centers and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “black sites” worldwide where US forces, intelligence agents, and contractors carried out torture and other ill-treatment, or so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

When the first detainees arrived at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from Afghanistan in January 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld labeled them “unlawful combatants,” seeking to deny them protections under the Geneva Conventions. The same month, the Bush administration intensified its efforts to circumvent domestic and international prohibitions on torture, with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issuing memos that sought to legally justify torture and protect those engaging in it.

Denying detainees these protections enabled Rumsfeld to expand the list of interrogation techniques for use against prisoners at Guantanamo between December 2002 and April 2003.

Subsequent US government investigations, including the 2004 Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations (also known as the Schlesinger report), found that “the augmented techniques [approved by Rumsfeld] for Guantanamo migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded.”

The use of these techniques violated the prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners under the laws of armed conflict and international criminal law.

The Bush administration limited the scope of these policies and practices in subsequent years, including by reducing the list of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but stopped short of banning torture. In January 2009, then-President Barack Obama rescinded all Bush-era memos allowing torture. However, he stated that his administration would prosecute neither the authors of the memos nor those who carried out the acts described in them in the belief that they were legal.

The Legacy of Abu Ghraib

Ninety-seven US soldiers implicated in 38 cases of abuse that the US Army Criminal Investigation Division investigated in Iraqi detention centers between 2003 and 2005 received punishments.

Just 11 of these soldiers were referred to a court martial to face criminal charges, where they were found guilty of crimes including dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault, and battery. 9 of the 11 served prison sentences. Fourteen others received nonjudicial punishments (e.g., a fine, reduction in rank, letter of reprimand, or discharge from the service). Reports of disciplinary action were pending for 72 individuals as of the document’s publication date, January 13, 2006.

There is no public evidence that any US military officer has been held accountable for criminal acts committed by subordinates under the doctrine of command responsibility.

Human Rights Watch reports in 2005 and 2011 presented evidence warranting substantial criminal investigations into high-level government officials for the roles they played in setting interrogation and detention policies following the September 11, 2001 attacks, including former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (now deceased), and CIA Director George Tenet. Additional Human Rights Watch research outlined the systematic nature of torture in Iraq, and the high level of command at which it was condoned.

Every US administration from George W. Bush to Joe Biden has rebuffed efforts for meaningful accountability for torture.

Some steps have been taken to change policies and introduce stricter controls on the treatment of people in US custody abroad. Congress passed new laws, including the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits subjecting anyone in US custody or control, “regardless of nationality or physical location,” to “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” as defined by the Senate reservation to Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture. The Defense Department also established various offices and positions related to “Detainee Affairs,” and initiated a department-wide review of detainee-related policy directives.

In August 2022, the Pentagon released a 36-page action plan aimed at reducing risks to civilians in US military operations. The plan directs the Defense Department to incorporate civilian harm issues into its strategy, planning, training, and doctrine; improve and standardize investigations of civilian harm; and to review and update guidance on responding to civilian harm. However, the plan fails to include a mechanism for reviewing past instances of civilian harm that have gone unaddressed, uninvestigated, and unacknowledged for 20 years.

Via Human Rights Watch

It would take a multi-volume book to detail all the horrible and catastrophic things Murdoch has done to the world. In Informed Comment, which is a sort of sprawling Great American Blog, Murdoch has appeared again and again as a villain, as Ernst Stavro Blofeld repeatedly showed up in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.

Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.

Murdoch’s response to the dangers of sea level rise, which could amount to six feet in this century? “We should all move a little inland.” (Reported in Informed Comment 2014.) Some 240 million to 400 million people now living along sea coasts will be displaced over the next 80 years, and Murdoch made a little joke of it. You can almost hear him say, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Murdoch’s billions have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general. He backed the Iraq War and that backing may help explain why Tony Blair joined in Bush’s quixotic misadventure in Mesopotamia. Murdoch told an Australian outlet as the Iraq War was building, “Bush is acting very morally, very correctly… The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” He observed at a business conference, like the sociopath he is, ”There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months.”

The war Bush launched against Iraq in 2003 was not really over until at least 2018, and it went on creating collateral damage all that time, i.e., hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed. As for petroleum prices, they were about $36 a barrel when Murdoch made his prediction and they went on up to $140 a barrel in 2008, fluctuating after that.

Hat tip Trading Economics

What brought oil prices down was the 2008 financial crash (to $40 a barrel) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they really did briefly hit $20 a barrel. Two years later, and despite Iraq’s production of 4.23 million barrels a day, prices were back up to $112 a barrel, and they’re hovering around $90 now.

Murdoch, despite his undeniably mastery of dirty tricks and sharp practices, whereby he has built semi-monopolies, seems actually to know very little about how the world works, being blind to the dangers of climate change and over-estimating the role one country like Iraq could play in a world that produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day globally and in which countries of the global south are increasingly adopting automobile transportation in the place of bicycles and donkey carts.

So maybe Iraq’s oil wasn’t worth all that collateral damage after all.

I pointed in 2011 to News Corp’s involvement in illegally tapping into people’s phone messages and wondered whether Rupert’s media conglomerate is a cult, working by blackmail and intimidation.

I don’t have space to go into Fox’s promotion of white grievance and its racism toward minorities, including Muslims, or its promotion of toxic masculinity and its backlash against gains in women’s rights. I once observed of Roger Ailes’s molestation of his bevy of blonde anchors that they appear to have been not so much hired as trafficked.

Nor can I treat at length here the way Murdoch held his nose and built up Trump, or how his organization is partly to blame for the big lie and the insurrection of January 6. I wish a special counsel would look into that.

The only sliver of good news is that Murdoch’s Fox News has largely discredited itself with anyone under about 70 years old, and its brand has become so toxic that one wonders if it can survive.

News Corp owns Dow Jones & Company, the latter’s Wall Street Journal, News UK (publisher of the Times of London and a raft of scurrilous tabloids), News Corp Australia, Realtor.com and publisher HarperCollins. Most of Murdoch’s film and television properties were spun off in 2013 and purchased by Disney in 2019. The exception was the television news channel, owned by Fox News, of which Murdoch retained control. His plan to merge News Corp and Fox News was foiled by the opposition of News Corp executives who viewed Fox News as a toxic brand that would sully their name.

That’s right, when Murdoch’s media empire was broken up into three in 2013, one of the three successor companies was the skunk at the party. Fox Cable News had become known as a dirty rotten liar of a television channel, with which even Murdoch’s own colleagues feared to be associated.

Their good judgment was borne out last April, when Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems to avoid a damaging public libel trial. The anchors of Fox Cable News, which is owned by Fox News and ultimately by Murdoch, had repeatedly alleged that Dominion voting machines delivered inaccurate ballot counts, allowing Joe Biden to claim the presidency even though Donald J. Trump had actually won. This rank falsehood did plausible damage to Dominion’s business, and it seems likely that the company would have won at trial and been awarded even greater damages. Smartmatic, another voting machine manufacturer, has launched a similar suit, and Fox turned over thousands of pages of discovery in April.

Murdoch allegedly believed that he could plead the First Amendment, which attests to a dismal level of knowledge about US law. The First Amendment protects individuals from the US government, it doesn’t give people carte blanche to destroy the reputations of others with malicious lies. And while courts seek a high bar for libel cases in the US because of the First Amendment pledge of free speech, unlike in the UK, they haven’t set them aside entirely, and there have been recent landmark libel cases. I’m only hoping that Dominion opened a floodgate, and that further suits against Fox are forthcoming. It is a cancer in the body politic, of deliberate lies, hatemongering and warmongering on behalf of big capital, and we desperately need to be cured of it as a nation.

To quote Bond, “Welcome to hell, Blofeld.”

Having lived several years in rural Maryland along the Virginia border, I’ve watched the local political landscape gain ever-deepening fault lines (as is true in the United States at large).

In election season 2020, in my enclave of largely well-educated political liberals, many with at least one public servant in the family (like my military spouse), you saw a sea of blue “Biden/Harris” signs as you drove among fields of corn and grazing cattle. However, as you approached the Virginia border, a smattering of black, white, and blue pro-police flags — like so many photographic negatives of the American flag — began popping up in response to growing protests elsewhere in the country against police brutality and violence toward communities of color. And the farther you traveled into Virginia, the more likely you were to see former President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” signs, as well as occasional Confederate flags, on houses and lawns. After President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, those Biden/Harris signs disappeared or were occasionally replaced by American flags, but the pro-police flags and MAGA signs remained, signaling an increasingly split nation.

Such changes in the landscape are still all too visible. A newcomer to our region might even assume that such a split between those still dreaming of a country reminiscent of the Old South, or perhaps a future Trumpland, and American democrats like me (who would generally rather ignore the existence of the first group than grasp why they came into being) was how it had always been.

America the Violent

These days, it’s anything but surprising to note that this country has become remarkably polarized. According to a recent Pew survey, 63% of Democrats view Republicans as immoral (up from 35% in 2016), while 72% of Republicans feel the same way about Democrats (up from 47% seven years ago).

In truth, there’s nothing that new about an American tendency to reduce our fellow countrymen to their political leanings. According to a 2014 Vox article citing sociological research, in 1960, just 5% of Republican parents said they would be against their children marrying someone who supported a different political party. By 2010, nearly half of such respondents reported that they would be displeased.

Such an atmosphere of increasing division is reflected in recent trends in gun purchases. In 2020, more firearms were sold than in any previous year on record and, in the years that followed, those sales would only increase. By now, almost one in five American households have a weapon, nearly 400 million of them, and that weaponry is only growing more deadly. In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country. And indeed, he responded (as he never thought he would) by purchasing a gun, fearing a future militarized coup the likes of which almost arrived on January 6, 2021.

Buy the Book

Even some of our youngest citizens have caught this fever of fear and violence. At a recent neighborhood party, a young child reported that if Donald Trump were ever to go to jail, she would bake a giant orange Trump-shaped cake, cut off the head, and eat it to celebrate. I had to laugh and then, instead of saying what first came to mind — that it would feel great to do so! — I found myself piously telling her that we probably shouldn’t dream of that kind of proto-violence, even when it comes to leaders who have caused as much suffering as Trump.

Over the past two decades, however, it’s a fact that Americans have grown ever more violent, as have our police. Mass shootings are spiking, for example. And despite the government’s longstanding preoccupation with Islamist militants, over the past decade more than 75% of politically related murders in this country have been committed by far-right extremists, just like the ones tending their fields in my region who, being white, the police would never assume to be “not from here” and so, by definition, dangerously sympathetic to extremists.

America’s Forever Wars Turn Inward

How did we get to this point of violence at home?

If you held a gun to my head (no pun intended) and demanded an answer, I’d say that our decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the military invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, as well as the launching of a “Global War on Terror,” played a major role in shaping the sort of worldview that’s now become all too American.

Since those initial invasions, after all, Pentagon spending has ballooned almost beyond imagining, being now about twice the 2000 budget in inflation-controlled dollars. Meanwhile, spending on healthcare, education, job creation, and infrastructure has increased so much more slowly. And don’t forget that, in the same years, our police became ever more strikingly militarized (on which more to come). In other words, while we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.

Another subtler reason is that most of us don’t get what violence is until we suddenly find ourselves caught up in it. In January 1973, after all, the government ended 25 years of the draft, turning our military into an “all-volunteer” force. So many decades later, most Americans don’t know anyone who’s served in our armed forces.

This, in turn, has meant that our twenty-first-century war on terror, the most prolonged set of U.S. conflicts since the Vietnam era, has been handled by volunteers who experience both longer and more frequent deployments and return home to ever fewer people who have the slightest idea what they’ve been through. As a result, many Americans are now unfamiliar with what killing people professionally does to you. Most have no idea what it’s like to see a family member return from a military deployment in the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa completely changed — with a 1,000-yard stare that makes eye contact hard, a tendency to startle at loud noises, and possibly a formidable temper. For many privileged Americans fortunate not to live that life or dwell in crime-ridden neighborhoods, violence is something left to Hollywood movies until, at least, someone opens up with an automatic weapon in your local supermarket or dance hall.

No wonder it’s been so easy for Donald Trump and many others to cast blame locally rather than on the effects of the omnipresent war on terror and so many related global forces of terror that are hard to capture in political slogans. In response to his recent Justice Department election interference indictment, Trump told his supporters, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”

In a sense, he was right when it came to the government in this century. Until recently, when President Biden led the way in injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into growing a clean-energy economy domestically, American policies had overwhelmingly been directed at fighting unsuccessful wars abroad rather than creating job (or life) security here at home for the high-school educated men to whom Trump unfortunately appeals so strongly.

The War on Terror Comes Home

Yet what Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has focused on just such policies. Most notably, anthropologist Jessica Katzenstein has shown how the Pentagon’s 1033 program, begun in the 1990s, funneled startling amounts of excess military equipment (sometimes right off distant battlefields), including armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles, to thousands of federal and local law enforcement agencies, including park, campus, and school police throughout the U.S.

That program grew dramatically with the post-9/11 buildup of the military-industrial complex. Police departments applying for such donations needed to explain that they would help them in the fight against drugs or terror. Chillingly, as Katzenstein notes, if police departments don’t have an obvious use for such weaponry, equipment, and vehicles, they have to find one fast, including quelling protests or executing home searches, which have increased significantly in communities of color in these years.

Under such circumstances, it becomes easier to imagine why, according to the assessments of some combat veterans, our police can now look more heavily armored than U.S. troops in foreign war zones. Officers wearing gas masks and bulletproof vests typically showed up in Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014 with K-9 units, pointing sniper rifles at peaceful protesters and using tear gas, stun grenades, and smoke bombs to disperse crowds in that small midwestern city where an unarmed black teenager had been shot and killed by a police officer several days earlier. And in the years since it’s only gotten worse nationwide.

At the same time, law enforcement of all stripes adopted a new approach called “intelligence-led policing.” The massive Department of Homeland Security, formed in response to the war on terror, has also been training police from across America in counterterrorism tactics, theoretically based on preventing crime rather than responding to it.

While such a focus may sound positive, it’s helped bring the war on terror home by ensuring that the FBI and local police monitor particular ethnic, religious, and political groups — most notably, Muslim citizens and legal residents. Under far more lax standards for surveillance ushered in by laws and policies like the 2001 Patriot Act, many Muslims have been targeted without the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI even hired Muslim Americans to act as informants in their own communities, in certain cases encouraging young men to profess their sympathy for Islamist extremist groups and acts of mass violence. In such a world, it shouldn’t be surprising that hate crimes, incidents of racial profiling, and discriminatory comments by public figures spiked in the years after 9/11 and only continue to rise.

Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone. And that’s just what’s happened. Civil-rights groups have documented cases in which, for instance, the FBI used sting operations to infiltrate, surveil, and target left-wing racial-justice activists during the summer of 2020 as America erupted in protest over the police killing of another unarmed black man, George Floyd.

A lawsuit filed this summer by the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, alleges that a young Colorado police detective went undercover with a local racial justice organization and tried to enmesh one of its members in an entirely fabricated gun-running operation. In a related case, the FBI reportedly hired as an informant a convicted felon who encouraged two Black racial justice activists to assassinate the Colorado attorney general.

Now, President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security and related law enforcement agencies are focusing their surveillance more on anti-government and white supremacist groups. If terror is a hypothetical rationale for the police getting more weaponry, then anyone can manufacture it. If, on the other hand, it’s about real plans to commit acts of violence, then the overwhelming perpetrators during the Trump years were our government and the president’s right-wing extremist collaborators. In other words, you could finally say that the “terror” of the war on terror had come home to roost.

War and Nationalism

Though the start of a war may cause people to rally around their leaders, wars against something nebulous like terror or, in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s case, “Ukrainian Nazis,” tend to prove short-lived in their ability to unify. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their country to avoid having to fight their Ukrainian neighbors who often constitute part of their extended families, while their president has called them “flies that we spit out of our mouths.”

As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s — as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.

This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.

If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com