Over Here: Iraq the Place vs. Iraq the Abstraction - World Affairs Journal

[pinto]

An insightful, first hand look at the big picture of Iraq. Well worth a read. - pinto

Over Here: Iraq the Place vs. Iraq the Abstraction
George Packer



One day in the summer of 2004, while I sat in the western Baghdad studio of Radio Dijla, Iraq’s first all-talk station, listening to a deputy interior minister being interviewed, a man named Haithem called in. His story sounded garbled and frantic: late at night bandits had forced him off an unlit highway overpass, destroying his car, crushing his chest against the steering wheel, and shattering his leg. After twelve hours, American soldiers found him under the highway and called the Iraqi police, who stole his money and gun before loading him into an ambulance. The next day I went looking for Haithem in a modest neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. He lay sweating in a dark room, a radio and phone by the bed, sunlight burning around the window curtain. There was a towel wrapped around Haithem’s waist, and his bandaged knee was held in traction by metal pins and a primitive sack of bricks, sand, and lead weights that hung from a wire over the bed frame. It looked as if torture, not healing, was going on in Haithem’s room.

As it happened, the same leg had been fractured by Saddam’s secret police in 1992. This latest injury seemed to have broken Haithem’s will; he said that he’d attempted suicide by sticking his finger into the power strip on the floor. “I have no manhood right now, I can’t feel my manhood. I’m asking you through the spirit of brotherhood to help me find compensation. I’m desperate—I have three children, how can I raise them, what can I do for them? I took money from my brother for cigarettes—it’s killing me to say this. I don’t want to go to charities as a beggar. I want to be a human being, and I want a human being in front of me who can give me my rights. I want any person to come and help me just like the Americans did—just for anyone to come here and help me as a human being.”

As for the American soldiers, he was still marveling at their kindness. This was his second encounter with Americans; the first occurred a month earlier and did not go well. On that night, he had been careening down a side street at high speed when a Humvee emerged from the darkness. Unsurprisingly, Haithem ended up on the ground with soldiers screaming at him. But the Americans who heard his cries from under the highway were different; they offered him water and spent an hour dressing his wound. “This latest accident changed everything for me. I understood not everyone is the same. The soldier who treated me—the last thing he said as they put me in the ambulance was, ‘Don’t cry, you won’t die,’ and he wiped my tears. I never got the name of the soldier, and I’m sorry about that.”

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I linger on these memories because they capture something elusive and hard to describe that was nonetheless a signature of the war. The American invasion of Iraq was, above all else, a revolution in the lives of Iraqis. Their institutions, their everyday routines, their futures, their sense of order were all turned upside down. This revolution, which is still ongoing and will play out for years to come, was the opening of a prison. When they staggered out into the light, most Iraqis didn’t know where they were, what they wanted, even who they were, and the Americans who had so quickly and casually broken down the gate were standing around as if they had never even considered what to do next. The Americans were nominally in charge—the Iraqis expected them to be, and after the first few weeks of paralysis, the Americans flung themselves into a flurry of activities befitting an occupying power—but it was all illusion. No one was in charge. By the summer of 2003, when I first went to Iraq, it was clear that a void had opened up and the best-armed and most ruthless groups had moved in. Although it went through many phases and assumed a variety of forms, the process of mutual disenchantment between Iraqis and Americans began early. It was this process that interested me most about Iraq, because it went to the human heart of the matter: the experience of suffering, hope, illusion, need, violence, and disappointment that transformed both sides and made the war so painful for each.


http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/Winter-2008/full-iraq.html