Can you even remember when the U.S. went to war with Iraq in 2003, when President George W. Bush announced that, "at this hour, 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"? And that "grave danger" was weapons of mass destruction supposedly in the possession of the government of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein that, of course, didn't exist. In the process of (not) finding those (nonexistent) weapons and (not) winning that war, my country did, however, manage to kill an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians, while suffering 4,500 American military deaths in the process.
Worse yet, as the Costs of War Project reminds us, more than 940,000 people are estimated to have been killed by direct post-9/11 U.S. war violence between 2001 and 2023 in one disastrous conflict after another in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen. And you might think that, from all of that, some lessons might have been learned. But no such luck, since President Donald Trump (in league with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu) has only recently launched a new conflict, this time in Iran, where hundreds of women and children have already been killed, many of them in a Tomahawk missile attack on an Iranian primary school.
One problem in all of this is that Americans seldom hear what life is like on the other side of such nightmarish conflicts. And with that in mind, while the present nightmare in Iran is still ongoing, let TomDispatch regular Helen Benedict, whose new Iraq war novel, The Soldier's House, is about to be published, take you back to that nightmarish war in Iraq and let you listen to Iraqi civilians who lived through it in an up close and personal fashion. Tom
From Baghdad to Albany
Listening to the Other Side
I'm writing this piece well into President Donald Trump's new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least one billion dollars a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the U.S. into a war on a river of lies and greed. I'm thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Weapons that don't exist. Threats to this country that aren't real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.
I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn't know how.
Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.
Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.
Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend's language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.
Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the "other side" was rare. So, Riverbend's blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days -- jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family -- in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.
Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn't believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein's autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.
One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn't disappear with it.
A Bloody Mess
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