Looking back to the beginning of 2004, the view is almost pastoral. Back then many Americans knew Saddam had no WMD although our president said Saddam was hell-bent on manufacturing them. Many Americans knew Saddam had nothing do to with 9/11 but our president said that didn’t mean Saddam hadn’t thought about such an attack against us. Our president had OK’d a preemptive strike against a sovereign nation but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn out to be right in the long run, would it? Besides, our president said, Saddam abused his own people; surely, we, generous Americans, ought to depose Saddam, liberate Iraqis, and treat them to real democracy? After all, our president said, Saddam was our enemy, not the Iraqi people.
Then came sobering images from Abu Ghraib (first reported not by embedded journalists but by a young enlisted man’s lone voice of dissent), and our military’s first assault on uppity Fallujans (with our snipers firing on ambulances), and the campaign for US president (with Swift Boat Veterans denying atrocities occurred in war). With the re-election of G. W., Fallujans are paying for their earlier temerity (and our troops hurriedly burying corpses before The Red Cross arrives to tally). Somehow Saddam has been sidelined (as has Osama) and the Iraqi people have become our enemies.
As a child of Apartheid South Africa (a land of legal racial segregation with a military that regularly invaded sovereign nations to kill those labeled terrorists) I was skeptical as an adult about what I was seeing on American television. So, in January, I traveled to Baghdad as a concerned citizen and a military mom to learn what our media was not reporting, to talk to Iraqis about war and terror, and to visit my soldier son on a base in the Sunni Triangle.
I visited Al Mansour Teaching Hospital for Children’s Medical City. Iraq’s hospitals were once the envy of the Middle East, well equipped, well financed, and attended by highly trained medical staff. Since UN sanctions and Operation Iraqi Freedom hospitals are now poor in resources, understaffed, under funded, and under equipped. But they are rich in patients. Al Mansour’s pediatric ward is rich in young patients dying of Acute Leukemias, Lymphomas, Neuroblastomas, and Non-Hodgkins Lymphomas. And oncologists find high incidences of once-rare malignancies and solid tumors in infants. UN sanctions limited chemotherapy drugs as potentially aiding the manufacture of WMD and families with sick children sold cars, belongings, even homes, to afford the eight-day treatments. Two to three years of such treatments are required and, today, many of the patients I met in Al Mansour’s pediatric ward are dead.
I talked to Anwar Jeward whose husband, 18-year-old son, and 14- and 8-year-old daughters were killed in a “random shooting incident” when jittery GIs mounted atop humvees fired at their car. Ten-year-old Abir survived although her gold earrings were stolen by a female GI who left the child for dead in the street. Anwar and Abir are ineligible for compensation under the Foreign Claims Act as such random shooting incidents are defined “non-combat events.”
I talked to families living in bombed out buildings because unemployment is over 70 percent and they can’t afford inflated rents. I talked to Iraqis afraid of being kidnapped by those who apologize but need the money to prevent their families starving. I learned that desperate fathers agree to shoot RPGs at GIs for payment on the spot.
At checkpoints in The Green Zone (from where Paul Bremer issued edicts that bind Iraq’s economy to US business for decades) two young Army Rangers told me they were bored guarding gates and wanted to “smash in doors and blow things up.”
Staff Sgt. Juan told me both he and his wife were both deployed to Baghdad while their 2- and 3-year-old children lived with his parents (our military calls this arrangement The Family Plan). Staff Sgt. Juan described his unit where an 18-year-old soldier had been killed by an IED, a 19-year-old died after an RPG attack, and another 18-year-old had been sent back to the US severely traumatized by killing. That soldier testified, “real killing isn’t anything like in video games.”
I talked to a psychiatrist who works with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in children. Dr. Hameed admits it’s tough to measure Iraqis’ psychological health as those traumatized by earlier wars (the Iran-Iraq war, Desert Storm, and UN sanctions) are parenting children traumatized by the current war and occupation. “No matter how adults view Saddam Hussein, school children were taught he was a hero to admire. After the invasion they saw him vilified. Now they see foreign troops violently arresting male heads-of-household in their streets and in their homes. No child should see such things.”
Before the UN departed Iraq Dr. Hameed worked for an umbrella group including our military to reduce combat stress in troops. He observed troops moved from one tense situation to another and pointed out that stressed troops may overreact to minor incidents involving civilians. Military leadership responded that they had no alternatives. (Is this the context in which Anwar Jeward’s family was killed in a “non-combat event”?) Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman summed up the military plan: “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”
Back in the US I talked to military moms. Many told me what has become common knowledge among Americans paying attention to Operation Iraqi Freedom: that our troops are undersupplied with equipment, water, and food, that troop benefits have been cut and will be cut further over the next four years, that US military services are privatized, and that our sons and daughters are being wounded and killed in far greater numbers than the Department of Defense admits. Many know from a recent Johns Hopkins University study that over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. (That number took a sharp turn upward after the second assault on Fallujah but numbers won’t be updated anytime soon as our military has blacked out news from the region.) Unlike our president, many military families know that Operation Iraqi Freedom can’t be won be sending more troops to Iraq and killing more civilians. Instead, we’re calling to bring all the troops home.
Our sons and daughters finishing their tours of duty are returning home disillusioned by The War on Terror. Too many are severely physically wounded and psychologically traumatized. For those driven insane by war there is Walter Reed Hospital’s Ward 54 (an area President Bush avoids on his brief dog-and-pony media shows). Some OIF veterans report that military leadership warned them, above all, to protect Iraq’s oil refineries and Ministry of Oil during the invasion (nothing was said about delivering liberty and democracy). A few OIF veterans speak publicly about atrocities against civilians while others say they’ll protect the American public from the truth of war and shoulder the burden alone. Imagine this, our children, whom we as adult citizens did not protect from war, are protecting us from the truth of what we sent them to do in our name. (The Swift Boat Veterans must be proud.)
I remember a conversation with military mom Sandy from Joplin, Missouri. We talked soon after March 2nd’s grisly episode when bombs exploded simultaneously in Baghdad and Karbala while Shiites celebrated a holy day: over two hundred died and hundreds were wounded. Sandy’s son David was in Baghdad that day and he described carnage with victims and hospitals desperate for medical supplies. With a rare blood type, David wanted to donate his blood but his heartfelt gesture, wholeheartedly supported by Sandy, was unacceptable to our military. What is striking about this military family is that amidst the chaos they put aside war and terror and propaganda and acted from their hearts.
As we head into a new year, thinking with our hearts is something we can all cultivate. Sandy and David are good role models. Like them, we can connect t thinking with the wisdom of our hearts. It is heartless "thinking" (what I call expediency thinking) that allowed Madeline Albright, for example, to claim that approximately 500,000 Iraqi children would die during UN sanctions and that that was “acceptable.” And, it was expediency thinking that allowed many Americans to nod in agreement. Had we thought with our hearts we may have imagined and empathized with the pain of 500,000 Iraqi families. That may have galvanized us to act as if Albright was condemning our own children. We’ll never know what may have happened had we acted then. But now, at the end of 2004, we know better. So let’s develop our capacities to think with our hearts and to develop empathy across cultures. After all, as Sandy said, “Life is so precious and war is so dumb!”