But Forget About The Mass Killings...

But Forget About The Mass Killings... The Sunday Strib features an op-ed by by Abbas S. Mehdi, a professor at St. Cloud State.

I once met a Russian who, while broadly admitting that the fall of communism was a Good Thing, held out a few philosophical clinkers. People didn't have the same sense of unity of purpose as they had under the USSR, he said wistfully. Being cast out on the stormy waters of the free market was unsettling to most Russians. Many of them craved order. I felt if I'd asked him if it was worth it, he'd have answered "I'll heff to sink about zat".

I thought about that fellow while reading Mr. Mehdi's piece:

This is what Iraq's liberation looks like to me right now: a woman bleeding to death on a public highway, unable to get help because coalition forces have blocked the road while looking for insurgents. A large room in a hospital where corpses are laid at random on a dirty floor, some of them uncovered, with nothing to identify them, a scene of horror for those trying to find the bodies of their loved ones.

Sounds terrible.

Mehdi elaborates:

The woman is my younger sister.

Aaaah, maaan. And now, I feel like an ass for fisking the guy. Truly, Mr. Mehdi, I am sorry for your loss. So please understand, I understand the grief at the loss of a sister - and that I'm not attacking your grief or loss, but the extrapolations it leads you to draw - and the editorial slant of the Star-Tribune that made them feel that this was news:

She was involved in a car accident on the road between Najaf and Baghdad, traveling home after visiting my parents. When she finally reached the hospital in Baghdad after being stuck on the road for more than six hours, no one could do much for her, and no one was able to get in touch with her family. The hospital was overwhelmed and disorganized, and telephone lines were down.

The Strib must not feel the need to point out that the road is a hotbed of Sunni, pro-Saddamite resistance - hardly a digressive fact, in the context of the story.

Mehdi continues:

It's 26 years since I last saw her, 26 years since I last saw my parents. For all of that time, I have been working for regime change in Iraq, hoping that Saddam Hussein would fall from power and that peace, democracy and stability would come to my country.

And yet...?

Yet I opposed last year's invasion. I feared what the cost might be for the Iraqi people of being subjected to yet another war, weakened as they were by the last Gulf War and the war with Iran, and by protracted economic sanctions. Now that scenario has played itself out and come home to me personally in a way that I never expected, fearful though I was for Iraq and for my family.

So while you "worked for regime change", no doubt knowing that it would never happen of its own volition, now that the regime has changed, you're depressed.

Let's come back to that thought later.

As I talk with the friends and relations who have gathered for my sister's burial, what I hear most plainly is hopelessness. Hopelessness, frustration and resignation.

"She was lucky," one person says bitterly. "It is as if we are all dead already," someone else says. Yet another is grateful that he has no money -- that is why the thieves have left him alone, he says.

Even those I remember as secular liberals murmur inshallah when speaking of my sister's death: "God willing."

Context, please, Dr. Mehdi?

I ask because, while I don't speak Arabic, I do know that Inshallah is a ubiquitous response to events in the languages of most Moslem peoples. In this context, are they saying your sister's tragic death was God's will? Or are they wishing for the same?

It may be a distinction lost on non-moslems, but nevertheless important.

Again - more later.

And people start to tell me stories of other pointless and needless deaths.

More than during the regime?

It's an important distinction. It's been speculated that fewer Iraqi citizens have died since the war than would have had Hussein been allowed to keep killing people at the rate he'd managed for the previous several decades.

That your sister died - and remember, she died because the activities of degenerate guerillas made it impossible to get an ambulance to her, not because we liberated the country - is a tragedy. But for every Iraqi that dies as a byproduct of the liberation, there is at least another, and probably more, that has not been fed into a plastic shredder, or otherwise destroyed by the state...

...whose demise you'd have delayed, probably permanently.

The Iraqi people I speak to are very frightened by the danger and random deaths they see all around them, at home, at work, in the street. They are also worn down by the hardships of their everyday lives.

Right. Life is insecure. Forty years of secure (albeit terrorized) existence changed overnight.

In The main reaction of many Americans to the Iraq war and its aftermath may simply be confusion, but for me, and the people of Iraq, it has meant suffering, destruction and pain. In fact, the latest war has been hugely costly to everyone concerned, to Iraq, to the United States and to the rest of the world, in material and nonmaterial ways. No one is safe there now, not U.N. staff, or Paul Bremer, or Paul Wolfowitz. Even when the president of the United States visited Baghdad, he arrived in a darkened plane, in utmost secrecy, and stayed for only a few hours. My sister would not have died from her injuries if she had not been in a country that is unbearably unstable, to the point of anarchy. In this situation, no one is a winner, and no one feels liberated.

No one?

I shoudn't ask, but since it sounds as if your family is from the predominantly Sunni region of Iraq - might that have something to do with the depression of everyone you seem to have contact with? On a more ecumenical level - you'd have...what? A return to "peaceful" means of overthrowing Hussein? With the apparatus of state oppression swallowing up people no less worthy, or beloved to their families, than was your sister?

Sorry for your loss, Prof. Mehdi. But I know other Iraqis in the Twin Cities who lost relatives and family members, not through the chaos that tragically killed your sister, but through the deliberate actions of the state. Nobody could claim the body, in an ordered morgue or anyplace else - because the person disappeared. Gone, like the dust.

Even with the news of the chaos in Iraq, the joy at the liberation vibrates the walls of their little shops.

Nobody from the Strib has called them yet.

UPDATE: Folsom James Phillips writes:

If you get bored, you may want to do a google search for Professor Abbas S. Mehdi.

He did the job I should have. Googling Dr. Mehdi tells us there are quite a few of them out there. Still, we find quite a few particles, including this one:It's easy to blame everything on a colorful baddie. Saddam Hussein is, undeniably, a tyrant, and 20 years of his military dictatorship has brought a once-prosperous country to its knees. But, tragically for the people of Iraq, current U.S. policy has exacerbated their suffering under Saddam Hussein to new and appalling levels; has made them more, not less dependent on his rule; and has diminished rather than increased the likelihood of his removal and a peaceful transition to democracy, stability and prosperity."

Phillips adds:

He goes on the demand an immediate end to sanctions. How about calling for an end to Saddam's palace building, Professor? How about a call for Saddam to allow the oil for food program to actually buy food and medicine and not golden toilet bowls for his palaces.

To his credit, he does say we should (this is back in 1999, remember) support Iraqi opposition groups. Interesting that what he called for back in 1999 is essentially what is happening now, except that the US military was the catalyst for regime change. Does he imagine that a US supported civil war to overthrow Saddam would have been less costly to the Iraqis? That seems to be the case, and it is an absurd position to take. We've already seen what Saddam did to rebels when he gassed thousands of his own people. Without the might of the US military, even a successful rebellion (and that is wishful thinking at best) would have resulting in an incredible loss of life.

More about Mehdi, from an SCSU website, which seems to avoid most of the politics and concentrates on Prof. Mehdi's stature in his field.

Posted by Mitch at January 11, 2004 10:03 AM