The View from Iraq

About a month ago a group of anti-war US academics traveled to Iraq to meet with their academic colleagues in Iraqi universities and to meet and speak with local people as well. Several academics from our state traveled with the group, including a professor I'll call Scott Smith, who spoke tonight to a group of about 300 people from our local Coaliton for Peace and Justice, plus other interested citizens.

Scott showed slides of Baghdad and Babylon as a prelude to his talk. The slides showed a city of 5 million people on the banks of the Tigris, with a skyline that looked much like any US city. There were beautiful mosques, as well, plus high rise apartments and the usual municipal buildings. Of course, we saw markets where vendors hawked their wares and men traveled with huge baskets of bread on their heads. We also saw what were described as "slums," but appeared no worse than or not as bad as slum areas in the US. In many of the photos were groups of smiling, eager children who gathered around to have their pictures taken and to make friends with the Americans. There were also photos of groups of students at the university who had eagerly gathered in large numbers to meet the anti-war Americans.

One meaningful picture was from the inside of the bomb shelter which was struck directly by US bombs during the Gulf War, killing the 400 civilians, mostly women and children, who had sheltered inside. The silhouettes of many of those victims had been burned onto the walls and floors of the shelter by the blast; the bombed-out shelter has been preserved as a memorial to those who died. The Iraqi people generally believe the US deliberately targeted the shelter, so many have said they've learned their lesson from that, and when this war comes, they won't go to shelters but will simply stay home and take their chances.

Scott reported that no one spoke of "if" this war comes, but "when" it comes. There was resigned fatalism about the coming war, with some depression and despair evident, yet people seemed to claim to be hanging onto some faint shred of hope. Most said they'd take one day at a time, deal with what came, and hope to survivve. Most parents resignedly said they expected to lose one or more of their children.

The Iraqis pointed out to the visitors that only the US can stop this war, and that the only hope of halting what was surely coming would be for those against the war to mobilize and spread the word in the US that the Iraqi people don't want war. They don't believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction at all, and as many of the Iraqi academics pointed out, the sanctions on even dual-use materials had been so severe that it seemed unlikely that any weapons had been constructed after the inspectors were withdrawn in '98. The effects of the sanctions are felt strongly in the research areas of the university, where tools and materials essential to their research were forbidden by the sanctions. US weapons inspectors had investigated the biochemistry department of the university just before the Americans came, and researchers there were indignant that they might have been suspected of making weapons instead of working in the healing sciences. Particulalrly since their research had been so hampered for 12 years by such draconian sanctions.

The visitors were taken to a hospital, where they saw very ill children who could have been treated or cured quickly by modern medicine, but whose illnesses were either fatal or at least greatly prolonged by the sanctions-imposed absence of such treatments. They also saw children born with gross deformities which were blamed on pre-natal exposure to Depleted Uranium. Some of the academics were completely unaware of US use of DU in the first Gulf War, and weren't sure how much to believe of what they were told about the connection between DU, childhood leukemia, and birth defects. I do hope now that they're back in the US, they'll research the topic. It seems to me the links are well-established.

The media in Iraq toes the government line, as we'd expect, but the people there of course hear what the US and the UN are saying about war, and the very hard line the US, particularly Bush and administration officials, are taking on Iraq. A few Iraqi citizens have computers and have had access to the outside world via the internet, although service is poor and very slow; because of those technical limitations, in reality access is quite limited. About two weeks before Scott's group arrived, the Iraqi governent started blocking e-mail because the US government had begun spamming e-mail recipients with anti-Saddam messages aimed at trying to convince the military to defect and the population to give up without a fight.

Scott said there were mixed answers when they asked people whether they'd fight against the US when troops came. Some said "of course not" while others indicated they might. More often, people said they wouldn't fight personally, but they knew others who would. When asked if they'd like to be "liberated" by the US and allies, the Iraqis' response was that if that meant having their city destroyed and having many, many Iraqis killed or injured in the bombing, they wouldn't consider that "liberation."

If the US or others came in, deposed Hussein, and installed a government from the outside, even made up of Iraqi exiles, they would strongly object. When asked if they thought the US could find Hussein, the response, as I understood it, was a snort of derision, followed by, "Where's Osama bin Laden?" Scott pointed out, as we'd seen from the photos, that Baghdad is a huge, sprawling city with a maze of streets and tall buildings. If the US plans that troops go in and take control of the city by house-to-house fighting, even after significant bombing, the result would clearly lead to a nightmare scenario of heavy fatalities among the troops, not to mention among any civilians left alive by the bombing.

I should mention that when judging the opinions expressed by the Iraqis you should know that the academics were, technically, to be accompanied everywhere by the same "minders" we hear of from the weapons inspectors, but there were many opportunities, too, for them to have candid conversations with individuals or small groups when the minders weren't present or were occupied with another portion of the group.

It's also important to know that the group met no anti-American attitudes, even when walking in small groups down the streets and mingling with the local people, sans "minder." They talked to a wide variety of people and didn't meet a single "Islamic fundamentalist" or anyone who expressed opinions other than admiration for the US and its people. Our foreign policy, as we'd expect, was greeted with less favor. The Iraqis are completely puzzled about why the US speaks as it does about the Iraqis, about Muslims, and about the Middle East in general. Their experience of the Middle East tells them what we've being told is so far from the truth that it can only be seen as the most strident propaganda. When asked why they thought the US wanted to go to war, they answered: 1) to take control of Iraqi oil, 2) imperialism, and 3) a desire to control the whole Middle East. The best guess among Iraqis was that Iran would be the next country the US would attack.

I'm convinced that if the American people saw any "normal" images of Iraq and the Iraqi people in the media, this war would be halted before it began. Surely all but the smallest right wing fringe would turn immediately against the war and rise up against it en masse. Instead, we're greeted with a level of propaganda at least equal or greater than the propganda the Iraqi people are exposed to. One final note on propaganda: most of the US media isn't interested in talking with the academics who have returned from Iraq, and when they do, they produce articles such as that in the recent New Yorker, one of those notoriously "liberal" magazines, which treated their trip like a travelogue, mentioning only favorite foods and drinks, where to eat, where to stay, and assured visitors it WAS possible to obtain alcohol in officially alcohol-free Iraq. Yes, we have more freedom than the people of Iraq, but how MUCH more freedom? Freedom to make an informed decision about whether Iraq poses a threat to the US?