The Iraqi man I met in Istanbul in 2012 said to me, “Your country had so much to do with what Iraq was like in the eighties and nineties. We know so much about you. And you don’t know anything about my country at all.” There had not been even a hint of accusation in his voice, though I couldn’t know his true feelings. He sounded as if this particular difference between Iraqis and Americans was but one in a constellation of millions. To me, it was like a burst of wind, that old revolutionary shock, and then the customary slamming of mental doors; the force of what he said brought to life, once again, my resilient and cowardly American reflexes: Why would Americans know anything about life in Iraq? I thought. I still had no control over those reflexes. What I meant was: why would it be necessary, why would they bother, you are just one country of many. This was it, this was the gulf, this was the distance between us. This imbalance of power between people and nations was violent even in the absence of violence.
What did he mean, my country had everything to do with what Iraq was like then? There I had the usual problems. One, I did not know the history. Two, I did not know to imagine how that history affected people on an individual level. Our foreign policy, our wars, almost never affected Americans. What did he mean? He meant the bombs of 1991, which nearly destroyed Baghdad and killed thousands of people, and he meant the support for Saddam in the 1980s, which prolonged the Iran-Iraq War. And he meant the sanctions, which destroyed the livelihoods of men and families, plunged people into poverty, and caused as many as five hundred thousand children to die. (About which Madeleine Albright—today a feminist icon—once said, “We think the price is worth it.”) The sanctions were still in effect when we invaded Iraq in 2003, but I remember hearing little about them. The Iraqi man said he despised America for the sanctions above all else.
If as an American I merely ignored, was not incensed or heartbroken by American actions like sanctions, then it must have been because I somehow believed that those Iraqis were deserving of sanctions. What this does in the end is create a distance between myself and those foreigners I thought deserving of sanctions. It is one that cannot be bridged. The difference between us and them is that our country has created this universe in which sanctions are acceptable punishment for everyone except our country. It means that no other country can force my father to lose his job, or force my family to go hungry, or to break up my family, or to forever distort my future, but my country can do that to almost any other foreigner, including the man sitting across from you at a café.
One of the assumptions that allowed for sanctions was that life under the madman Saddam Hussein was terrible anyway, which was true, it was terrible. But what Americans likely didn’t know was that the Iraqi government had for a long time provided its people with adequate health care, schools, and social programs. “Baghdad University in the 1980s had more female professors than Princeton did in 2009,” according to the British-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali. Literacy was almost ninety percent, people had gone to university for free. Sanctions only hastened Iraq’s decline. Before the invasion, some optimistic Iraqis might have hoped that the United States, in promising them freedom and prosperity, would herald a return to the golden age of the 1970s, when Baghdad was, according to the journalist Anthony Shadid, a libertine paradise of vibrant cultural production and dazzling street life. While the Americans were promising a fantasy version of American life—all freedom and democracy—Iraqis likely envisioned a better version of Iraqi life, one rooted in history and reality. Americans never grasped that Iraqis might have their own idea of what a good life would entail. In the first days of the American occupation—and what would turn out to be the next decade—Iraqis were bewildered that the United States could not even provide them with electricity, Shadid writes. In 1991, after the first Gulf War, Saddam got the lights back up within months.
But such was our sense, rooted in modernization theory, that all other nations were decades behind us and thus needed our interference, all of these fantasies we held on to even as America’s own infrastructure—its airports, its roads, its hospitals, its schools—deteriorated. In his introduction to Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society, David Riesman writes, “The Arabs were once a great civilization. The illiterate in his depression, and the modernizer in his impatience, live amid the ruins of greatness. How open and how empathic will Americans be, how magnanimous, if our turn comes to live amid the ruins of our modernity?” Instead, like the featherweight symbols Americans had turned themselves into, they believed their mere presence in Iraq would incarnate some illusory democracy. It was because we did not see Iraqis as humans that we did not know that “democracy,” a word by then sucked of most of its meaning by the American century, might have mattered less to most parents than the ability to feed, house, educate, and protect their children.
“Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists,” President George W. Bush said before the invasion, echoing Truman. For sixty years, all over the world, people struggled with the binary universe Americans created—wouldn’t someone want to resist it merely because of the hypocrisy? You can be free as long as you want our freedom. Such dichotomies, such totalitarian views, created many little monsters in its image. It is shocking to read Shadid’s Night Draws Near now and notice that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the ideological founder of ISIS, emerges during the first years of the occupation. The book was published in 2005, eight years before ISIS became known to the world.
In 2017, the articles still appear with anguished regularity in the papers: “Who is ISIS and what do they want?” When ISIS first declared itself, so many American policy makers said its existence wouldn’t have been possible without the collapse of Syria into civil war. But ISIS was born from the Iraqi occupation; it came from the Americans. It may have grown from the darkness, because the Americans couldn’t make the electricity work. It may have grown from the world we created in Iraq: the night raids by scary hulks draped in weaponry, kicking open doors and humiliating men and dishonoring women, the bombs from the air, the tanks in the street. Our mercenary thugs, the Blackwater men sitting off the backs of trucks with machine guns and wraparound glasses and leathery skin, grimacing at everything that moved, lawless individuals attached to no army, were no less terrifying to an Iraqi child than is ISIS to us, with its black flags and hoods and macabre videos. It was hardly noticed, as ISIS ran across the map of the Middle East, gobbling up pieces of land like an amazingly fast zombie free-for-all, that this militant army now occupying lands was born during an occupation, that they were thousands of occupied men who likely knew of no better way to gain power than to imitate the occupier, to defeat him at his own game.
6.
LITTLE AMERICAS: AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, AND TURKEY
When we revert to the final solution of kill or be killed, all warring parties in the name of clan tribe nation religion violate the first law of civilization—that human life is precious. In this general collapse, one of the first victims is language. Words are deployed as weapons to identify, stigmatize, eliminate, the enemy.
—JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN