Cairo Post

Top of the minaret, Bab Zuweila, Cairo, Feb. 2007.

"115 bridges were bombed. What did that have to do with Kuwait?"

Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon talked to Charlie Rose on the five year anniversary of the Iraq war and immediately turned the conversation back to Kuwait, sanctions and the 1990s. He pierced through the current rhetorical stasis of Sunni-Shi’a, of benchmarks, and of blaming Iraqis to the "material reality" of America’s first destruction of Iraq in 1991 and the subsequent decade of sanctions that killed maybe a million, kept the country’s infrastructure ruined, expanded the Iraqi diaspora and plainly convinced Iraqis that the Americans were not interested in liberation when they invaded in 2003.

He was searing in his criticisms, as he attacked "amnesia" in this country about the American-made devastation of Iraq before it was invaded. He explained to Rose that the myriad Iraqi uprisings which followed Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait and which were not supported by the United States were mixed and wide-ranging. They did not fit into exclusive frames broken down into religious groups — the favorite sought-after media explanation for any violence in Iraq and the Middle East today. After all, as he explained, there was an uprising in 16 of the 18 provinces of Iraq, from the Shia holy cities to "mixed" Baghdad and even Saddam’s home province of Tikrit.

The seemingly ignored recent history of America’s complicity in destroying Iraq before the jingoes launched shock-and-awe is vital to any view of Iraq in 2008 and, while the point should seem obvious, it seems to escape most coverage on this anniversary. The mainstream focus is instead on a "what-if" timeline that looks at the mistakes of the past five years outside of the context of the 1990s, which indirectly serves to support the rationale of going to war in the first place.

A rough transcription of one of the interview’s best moments:

Antoon: The problem we have also in the discourse is all this talk about mistakes and what-not. The premise of the entire war is not questioned. Even if no mistakes were ever done, citizens need to understand that human beings by and large do not like to be occupied by foreigners, no matter what. And that was the case, so even if no mistakes would have been done, people would have said in a very short period of time, thank you, bye bye.

Rose: Okay, then that raises the question of whether you could have done it in a way that you did not create the idea of occupation. You created the idea of liberation, not occupation. Unless you say that’s not possible at all?

Antoon: It would have been impossible because the practices of the United States army and Pentagon reflect also a certain ideology and a way of looking at the Middle East and a way of looking at the past and its history. So, we don’t have time to go through all of that, but these mistakes are made. They are not side mistakes. They reflect the structure and the approach to the Middle East and to Iraq and to its history and this amnesia that I’m talking about.

Two of Antoon’s remarks have stuck with me all day. The first is his citing of a US general in 1991, that "we bombed them back to the pre-industrial age." It immediately brings to mind Arundhati Roy and her article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," which the New York Times refused to publish after 9/11.

"In America there has been rough talk of ‘bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age,'’" Roy wrote then. "Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way."

Iraq was half-way there after eight years of war with Iran — supported by the US — and farther down the road after Operation Desert Storm. The United States made sure it never recovered with sanctions through the 1990s, only to bomb the devastation all over again beginning in 2003, our five year anniversary. And Americans still wonder why there are insurgents.

The second quote from Antoon was in response to Rose asking what sort of conditions were needed for reconciliation: water, sanitation, the basic amenities of modern, unoccupied life. Antoon nodded but shot back: "It’s a crime after five years that electricity is not back to pre-war levels, because Saddam Hussein, who was a dictator I detested, was able to have electricity back in 45 days."

"So why is the United States not achieving that in five years? It’s not just miscalculation. That was never the priority."

"The Israeli foray left many Palestinian civilians dead."

So understatement. Say perhaps that rockets fired by militants from Gaza had killed five or ten Israelis in the past week. Would the New York Times have reduced that to a "Palestinian foray that left a few Israelis dead." Of course they wouldn’t — there would be obituaries within news articles on the Israeli dead, and longer reports on the anxieties of 100,000 living in Ashkelon. But 120 dead Palestinian — reportedly a third of them children, uninvolved save for the fact that they were born in the prison of Gaza under occupation, blockade and air strikes — are not eulogized, are reduced in the euphemism of "many Palestinian civilians dead," consistently in the context of Israeli air strikes aimed at curbing terrorist rocket fire — a "foray" into a strip of land populated by a million and half desperate and starved people.

Palestinian rockets are never framed as retaliation for an on-going blockade, or as violent resistance to a 40 year occupation. Israeli bombs however are tactical strikes with regrettable consequences, whether in Gaza or Lebanon.

None of this is new, whether the bias of different deaths accounting for different journalistic language or the outrage at such moral deficiencies in the New York Times and wider American press not to count Muslim or Arab lives as equal lives. It only echoes what Judith Butler wrote in 2002, that "a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation."

The New York Times is barely concerned with reporting on experiences of Palestinians that do not include celebrating rocketry or fitting into an unexplainable "cycle of violence" — or, if you like, "The Chronic Crisis of Gaza: Air Strikes and Rocket Attacks." There are in fact discernible political and historical factors that have created this current crisis in Gaza — who funded Hamas during the first Intifada? Who stoked the recent civil war in Gaza? — but it’s easier, and beneficial to the twisted mathematics of one dead Israeli justifying 30 dead Palestinian kids, to skirt those in favor of the rhetoric of cycles, something chronic and unexplainable.

Last week Isabel Kershner in the Times called Katyusha rocket attacks on Israel "unprecedented" and advanced the view that they were "an escalation of the conflict." What did it call the mounting Israeli air strikes and new round of dozes of dead Palestinians, specifically 54 last Saturday? "Israel Takes the Gaza Fight to Next Level."

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since the so-called peace conference in November. But the Times continues to propel a view that only Israeli victims can escalate the conflict and that the Palestinian dead and injured should be the second or third detail in news stories. The peace process is doomed by homemade rocket fire on fields and scattered apartments, not by bodies pulled from buildings flattened by smart bombs. Palestinians dying that way ought to be normalized in how we view this "cycle of violence," as the Times covers it. Heed the Israeli army spokesman quoted last week: after all, Hamas fighters firing rockets at Israeli civilians are war crimes.

Last week’s Israeli air strikes on 10 year-old boys playing soccer were acts of state security. And please, if you can, forget about them quickly.

The Nile and Zamalek, August 2007.