By: Nabil Salih*

 

On a sunny day in Chicago, former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush make their way up a set of steps to the Saint Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian church. They appear unfettered, dressed in fine sports jackets, not the striped prison pyjamas befitting of their past actions.

Gently, they place bouquets of sunflowers outside the church, and stand in silence to honor the civilians being erased from existence by Russia’s war machine.

What the audacious, short clip fails to show are the corpses of the forgotten Iraqis torn to shreds by the American war machine. Unlike Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crimes, those of Clinton and Bush came with global impunity.

In a statement last month, Bush condemned the “unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine”, while Clinton’s former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, wrote just weeks before her death that Putin was making a “historic mistake”.

Unlike Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Iraq War was met with no sanctions or diatribes, receiving hardly a fraction of the condemnation we hear today. In 2003, generations of Iraqis came out limping from a decade of sanctions and into the arms of another war, sugarcoated in ostensibly benign intentions by the U.S. and UK. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had their lives ended early and quietly by UN sanctions, and those who survived were irreparably damaged by repeated air raids.

Today, each bomb launched by Russian soldiers lays bare the West’s hypocrisy, piercing its tattered cloak of righteousness and morality.

One might think that the European officials who deliver vicious tirades against the “barbarians” drowning and freezing to death at the gates of Europe are rotten apples. But in fact, western newsrooms reek with the stench of dormant racism.

Even after the forays of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, columnist William Safire and their ilk in the sewers of shame, Times reporter Dave Philipps wrote of the U.S. veterans joining the fight in Ukraine, who had previously been “trying to spread democracy in places that had only a tepid interest in it”.

It seems that the Iraqi babies born with encephalocele, cleft lips and spina bifida are not enough of a reminder that it was not democracy, but depleted uranium and white phosphorous that the U.S. was spreading in places that definitely had no interest in them.

Even some of the livid, anti-Iraq-War Americans who lament this stain on their exceptionalism refer to it as a “mistake” or “blunder”, as Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon reminds us. This implies naivete at the decision-making level - miscalculations that could be understood and, perhaps, forgiven.

In Baghdad, the American war machine unleashed an orgy of death, which unfolded to hysterical ululations from American newsrooms. “Give freedom a chance,” Safire wrote in 2003. An inferno ensued.

The Iraq Body Count database documented 315 daily civilian deaths during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, from 20 March to 9 April 2003. More than 22,000 others were wounded during the invasion phase alone. Now, our dead are countless.

Cluster bomblets landed on my family’s garden. We rarely slept on the roof thereafter, fearing not only stray bullets and shrapnel, but also that invading troops would pick us off like pigeons, as they often did to those inferior beings they had come to “liberate”, but whose sons and daughters they massacred and raped.

We would run upstairs to watch the columns of smoke rising from the day’s bombing sites. Outside, shrapnel and scorched, shredded human flesh was scattered under our feet in the sun. Routine clashes meant that no early birds sang in the mornings, which were soaked in the stench of rotten corpses laid out on the sidewalks.

I walked past these swollen corpses en route to school. I still do in my sleep.

Tonight, I see my mother’s face, horrified as she opens an envelope on our doorstep with a bullet and a death threat inside. Like everything else in the country, the mail system stopped working in 2003, but the messengers of death know how to deliver his letters.

I see my mother the moment she learns of my father’s abduction, and I hear her voice when our western Baghdad neighborhood turns into a battlefield: “I cannot stay here anymore. I will lose my mind.”

Alas, nowadays, my mother sleeps alone in a cemetery in Baghdad. After 30 years spent educating generations of students, she passed away last summer in a state hospital where no one recovers; where nurses are bribed by patients’ caretakers to provide the medication they need on time.

I remember how, when I tried to bring a fire extinguisher into the isolation ward where she slept - shocked they didn’t already have one, after infernos had incinerated dozens of patients in Baghdad and Nasiriyah - hospital administrators reluctantly allowed me inside because “it would make people speak”, meaning that a scandal might ensue.

And I remember how, during a merciless summer afternoon, the power went out and the air conditioning stopped working for hours, only to be restored after I begged a senior health ministry official for help. I wondered how long it would otherwise have taken them to fix it.

The words of my mother as she spoke from behind her CPAP mask still haunt me: “It is hot. I need some air.” With her passing, I was orphaned for a second time. Like many Iraqis, I was first orphaned by the theft of Iraq.

*Nabil Salih is an independent writer, journalist and photographer from Baghdad.

-Courtesy: Middle East Eye