Oil-well fires burn near the town of Qayyarah, Iraq, 2016. Photo: Planet Labs.This
essay was originally published in e-flux
journal no.
84 (September 2017) under the title ‘What
We Are Fighting For’
On the campaign trail in 2015, Trump stood triumphantly at the
podium in Fort Dodge, Iowa, describing how he would deal with ISIS in
Iraq:
I would bomb the shit out of ’em! I would just
bomb those suckers. And that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d
blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there’d be
nothing left. And you know what? You get Exxon to come in there and
in two months—you ever see these guys, how good they are, the great
oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker brand new, it’ll be
beautiful. And I’d ring it, and I’d get the oil. [1]
The crowd erupts into applause, shocked and delighted by such an
unapologetic and direct plan of action.
Trump speaks excitedly, as though he is the first person to think
of bombing the shit out of Iraq. He speaks about the beauty of the
burning oil fields remade in Exxon’s image. A year later, Trump’s
words proved prescient. In the summer of 2016, oil fields across
northern Iraq burned, with credit due not to Trump, but ISIS.
Civilians in northern Iraq lived under a thick layer of toxic soot
for eight months until the fires were finally put out in February
2017. Time will tell what damage, generational and in this lifetime,
was caused to humans and the environment alike. Meanwhile, Trump also
proposed a 10 percent increase—fifty-four billion dollars—in the
US military budget, because we are going to win. What you
can’t take by being a nice guy, you take by force. Beautiful women,
oil fields, whatever.
The relationship between Iraq and the United States is intimate,
toxic, and enduring. It is a relationship whose violence is generally
dismissed as inevitable. It is made possible by many other partners,
and kept exciting by still-unfolding entanglements. We grabbed Iraq
by the pussy, and some people are very upset that it did not make
America great again. Despite all the time and money we put in, we
apparently did not get what we wanted. We did not win. Well
she is crazy, that Iraq, full of toxic, bloodthirsty baggage.
We tried to give her a chance at something good, but that’s
what you get for being a nice guy, for trying to do the right thing.
For all our shock at Trump and this administration’s language, it
is not so far from the way violence has been dressed up and excused
since the end of the Cold War. While the rhetoric from the first
public announcement of the 1991 Gulf War to today has been more
sophisticated than Trump’s, the president has, in effect, simply
dissolved the veneer.
The shock at Trump’s words and actions, rather than an admission
that this is a natural outcome of longstanding policy and general
indifference, is a surprising gap. I’m not the first to speak about
this; there are a number of authors who have connected exploitative
foreign policy and the systems of control used to implement these
policies to black and indigenous experiences in the US. We have to
look at these experiences as bound up with one another. Humvees and
war scenes at Ferguson and the Dakota Access Pipeline represent
precisely this internal colonialism. Like Iraq, the Dakotas require a
military presence to ensure policy acceptance and unencumbered
resource extraction. However, mainstream discourse regarding these
similarities generally stops with the idea that “it is a scene out
of Iraq.” But what does that mean? What do we actually understand
about Iraq’s impact and connection to American life, beyond its
resemblance to the worst episodes shown on the news?
It seems that we have now entered an information war, an
unprecedented era of “alternative facts.” But the first Gulf War
was launched through a major information offensive. One day after
Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Wexler Group, headed by Craig Fuller, was
acquired by Hill & Knowlton, the most powerful public relations
lobbying firm in Washington, DC. Fuller had been the chief of staff
to George H. W. Bush when he was vice president under Ronald Reagan.
Now, as president, Bush would soon announce the start of the Persian
Gulf War. But before that happened, Hill & Knowlton was hired by
a newly formed outfit, “Citizens for a Free Kuwait,” for more
than ten million dollars. Nearly all the money came from the
government of Kuwait, which hired the firm to galvanize American
support for the war. The funds were well spent. With support from a
focus group that counted Pepsi Cola as a client, Hill & Knowlton
was able to find the perfect messenger to sway minds: a girl named
Nayirah. [2]
Nayirah was a fifteen-year-old girl from Kuwait. Modest, with
bangs and a long braid down her back, she gave highly emotional
testimony to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10,
1990 regarding atrocities she claimed to have witnessed inside the
infant care unit at a Kuwaiti hospital. Her voice cracking, tears
streaming down her face, she described babies being ripped out of
their incubators by Iraqi soldiers, thrown to the ground, and left to
die:
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is
Nayirah, and I just came out of Kuwait. While I was there I saw the
Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies
out of incubators. They took the incubators and left the children to
die on the cold floor. It was horrifying.
Seared into the American imagination, this episode was told and
retold by members of Congress in the months leading up to Operation
Desert Storm. At one point, standing in front of a group of US
soldiers, Bush referenced the babies “pulled from incubators, and
scattered like firewood across the floor.”
The story was fabricated. The girl in question turned out to be
the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. Tom Lanton,
co-chair of the Congressional Caucus for Human Rights, knew her real
identity, but said nothing. Citizens for a Free Kuwait also provided
a fifty-thousand-dollar donation to the Caucus. The invasion of
Kuwait did cause terrible violence and looting, though not the kind
described in Nayirah’s testimony. It is also important to note that
crimes by the Iraqi government were inflicted not only on the people
of Kuwait, but also on the Iraqi populace as a whole in the decades
prior to, during, and after Operation Desert Storm. Iraq’s regime
led by Saddam Hussein had in fact long been supported by the US,
despite being a dictatorship characterized by widespread,
well-documented abuses and the violent suppression of independent,
left-leaning movements.
Iraqi antiaircraft fire lights up the skies over Baghdad as US warplanes bomb the Iraqi capital in the early hours of January 18, 1991. The US campaign drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait in a little over a month. Photo: Dominique Mollard/AP.It was against
this backdrop that any lingering concerns over Desert Storm were soon
overwhelmed by the first televised war—which did not disappoint.
Journalists were in awe and given front-row seats in hotel rooms that
provided a once-in-a-lifetime view of a Baghdad sky famously
described as “lit up by fireworks.” The green lights of
antiaircraft missiles sparkled with trails that zigzagged across a
foreign landscape, as the post–Cold War military-industrial complex
mounted a global display of its undiminished potency. Before the
promise of big data was the promise of smart wars. The bombs over
Baghdad made for a most impressive unveiling of the technologies soon
to guide aspects of our lives as intimately as they guided missiles
to their targets. The American public was introduced to real-time,
living-room war games. [3]
This was what winning looked like.
That year—1991—the Super Bowl took place in Florida, at the
height of military operations. Security was tight and the atmosphere
was tense, though there were no credible threats. Even so, the New
York Times noted that Tampa’s public safety administrator’s
office “has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to prohibit
flights close to the stadium except for regularly scheduled takeoffs
and landings by commercial airlines,” adding that, “inevitably,
the movie Black Sunday has been recalled here. In it, a
Palestinian terrorist takes over a Goodyear blimp at the Super Bowl,
planning to strafe the crowd.” [4]
Despite reporting no basis for concern—and despite the fact that
at that very moment the US was deploying violence affecting Iraqi
civilians—the New York Times inserted a scenario from a
fictional Hollywood film to serve as a specter of Arab terrorism in
the US.
This game was, as ESPN put it, the start of the branding
relationship between the NFL and the US Army. Small American flags
were put on every seat in the stadium for attendees to wave. Whitney
Houston was brought in to sing the national anthem; subsequently
released as a single, Houston’s rendition make the song a Top 20
hit for the first time.
The performance by Houston was huge, replayed again and again. [5]
My junior high school in California played it at an assembly the
following week, and teachers instructed us to send letters and notes
to US troops. It was the time of yellow ribbons, when to criticize
the war was to betray the troops, the innocent men and women—the
only innocent men and women, it was to be understood—of this
conflict. This was also the first year that the Super Bowl enlisted
contemporary pop stars for the halftime show. The year before, the
halftime show had featured an Elvis impersonator. Most outlets
broadcast a news update. The 1991 Super Bowl was the first iteration
of halftime as popular spectacle.
At the halftime show, hundreds of little girls dressed as
cheerleaders swarmed the stage, dancing and singing about rich men,
football stars, and beautiful girls. [6]
Lyrics sung by the mini-cheerleaders, looking no older than eight
or nine, repeated, “You’ve gotta be a football hero to get along
with the beautiful girls. If you are rich or handsome it’ll get you
anything!” A few minutes later, their counterparts, hundreds of
young boys dressed as football players, ran onto the stage. One, with
a blonde bowl of hair, took the microphone and solemnly sang the
Bette Midler hit “Wind Beneath My Wings,” as images of troops in
the Persian Gulf played across the screen. Children of the troops
were paraded onto the field, and a live message from George and
Barbara Bush was broadcast from their living room, blessing America,
the Super Bowl, and our troops.
Then a replica of the Disneyland spectacular It’s a Small World
After All took center field, as Mickey Mouse, dressed to look like
Uncle Sam, burst out with a parade of children in various
international costumes. The children and Disney characters all linked
hands, singing “We Are the World” and “It’s a Small World
After All” as the camera panned across a sea of multinational faces
and flags, mirroring the coalition of countries in the Gulf. A small
world united by war, and our children. This is why we fight. This is
why we win.
And win we did. Norman Schwarzkopf—commander-in-chief of the
coalition forces—was gruff and respected, a tough-love coach who
showed us the way to victory. There were whiteboards with the various
teams laid out (remember, this was a thirty-four-member coalition,
with more than half the war costs covered by Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia), patiently describing how we did it. He also had a great
sense of humor. At one of his press conferences, he had a small
television set brought out to replay various bombings and attacks
from the air. He concluded by introducing us to “The Luckiest Guy
in Iraq.” In the video, we see the movement of a vehicle across a
bridge. Seconds after the vehicle passes, the bridge explodes—to
laughter from the press. [7]
This is meant as a lighthearted moment. The man is alive, and all
he has to show for it is witnessing a bridge bombed just behind him
and a war waging, literally, all around him.
Schwarzkopf later explained why some Iraqis were not so lucky. At
the end of the war, George Bush made several statements, broadcast
inside of Iraq by Voice of America radio, encouraging Iraqis to “rise
up.” Logically enough, Iraqis took this to mean that if they
revolted against the Hussein regime, the US would support them. And
rise up they did. In the north and south of Iraq, major rebellions,
often celebratory, broke out. The optimism was short lived, as the US
had agreed, in the ceasefire agreement, to allow Iraq to resume
flying military planes over the country. Soon, the north and south
were attacked from the sky, driving hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
into the mountains of the north and the deserts of the south.
Schwarzkopf, the celebrated strategic military mastermind of the
war, led us to believe that he had no idea that allowing the regime
to fly armed aircraft over the country would result in a swift
crushing of the rebellions. He claimed that he was left alone with no
guidance as to how to work out the ceasefire agreement. In countless
interviews and commentary, US military and political figures spoke of
the complicated makeup of Iraq and the possibility of a “quagmire”
if further involvement in the country was pursued.
We see here the precursor to the militarizing of sect and
ethnicity. Kurds and Shia become “factions” rather than citizens
with commitments and concerns. “I don’t think that we should ever
say that because of what’s happening to the Kurds now means that
our mission failed,” said General Schwarzkopf in the aftermath of
the ceasefire agreement. He continued:
It’s exactly the same thing that happened to the Kurds
a few years ago at the end of the Iran-Iraq War. It’s exactly the
same thing that’s happened to the Kurds for many years. Yes, we are
disappointed that that has happened. But it does not affect the
accomplishment of our mission one way or another. [8]
All of this resulted in one of the largest and most deadly mass
migrations in history, a precursor of what was to come. At its
height, nearly a thousand people died each day, with thirty-five to
sixty thousand dying in total. More than a million fled, with Iran
taking in many of the refugees. Nearly twenty-five thousand people
remained in Camp Rafha, a desolate camp in the Saudi Arabian desert,
for more than a decade.
As this tragedy unfolded, a contract was signed between the US
government and the Rendon Group in 1991. The Rendon Group was headed
by John Rendon, a former Democratic National Committee director
turned self-described “information warrior.” He had also been
hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait to manage public perception.
During a speech he delivered at the National Security Agency, he told
a story about this work: “Remember those little flags the Kuwaitis
were waving around as the tanks rolled in? How do you think they got
those? Let alone flags of the coalition nations? That was me.”
This Rendon Group contract, however, was for a much bigger job,
with a much higher, multimillion-dollar price tag: to push for the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein. During the next decade, Iraqi human
rights abuses, so heartbreakingly real, were consistently manipulated
in the service of paid CIA operatives and exiled collaborators. This
information war, along with real legislation to make the overthrow
official US policy (notably, the Iraq Liberation Act, signed by Bill
Clinton in 1998), would eventually lead to the fabricated “weapons
of mass destruction” claim, infamously printed on the front page of
the New York Times above an article by Rendon Group ally
Judith Miller. These false claims were chillingly referenced by key
leaders like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “We don’t want
the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
But as the second Gulf War loomed in early 2003, it was hugely
unpopular, provoking massive protests worldwide. Something more was
needed. “Shock and Awe” was a campaign that used military and
visual force to knock Iraqis, and the memory of the record-breaking
protests, off their feet. No longer in green-and-black night vision,
this war was rolled out in broad daylight. Huge bombs rocked the
buildings across Baghdad’s riverfront, with screens flashing white
from the intensity of the explosions. As the strikes hit, news
tickers went from reporting the size of the antiwar rallies to
providing updates on military advancements.
The antiwar movement had lost. The US Department of Defense
ensured that journalists from major news outlets were embedded with
US forces, breathlessly reporting from tanks and Humvees. Things were
going well—until, of course, they weren’t. Nighttime raids went
horribly awry, images from Abu Ghraib were leaked, militias and gangs
waged an internal war that killed three thousand people a day at its
height in 2006. Journalists were being killed at an unprecedented
rate, along with everyone else. And as many books written about the
conflict would later attest, it was also one of the most corrupt wars
in history, with rampant cronyism and graft. It was all so chilling,
confusing, morbid, and impossible to keep up with; you didn’t want
to look, and so, many did not.
In 1992, 60 Minutes did an interview with a vice
president of Hill & Knowlton, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, who had met with
Nayirah and worked on her Kuwait testimony. [9]
The interviewer was seeking some kind of accountability for
Nayirah’s misleading story. After reading a statement from Hill &
Knowlton denying any culpability for working deceptively towards the
war effort, Fitz-Pegado expressed no regret: “I’m sure there’ll
always be two sides to a story. I believe Nayirah, I have no reason
not to believe her. The veracity of her story was indelibly marked on
my mind, when I saw her and when I talked to her.”
Again, it was clear back in 1992 that privatizing the war effort
would not only be effective but also that, acting through a
corporation like Hill & Knowlton, the government itself would
never be held accountable. This has, over and over again, proven to
be the case. Even the initial shock of Abu Ghraib is a distant
memory. A handful of low-level soldiers were prosecuted, but no one
at the top of the government chain of command was charged. CACI
International, the prison firm that ran a section of the prison where
abusive interrogation took place, has never experienced any blowback.
On the contrary, it retained its contract and its profits. In
addition, eight months after the Abu Ghraib abuses—rape, torture,
and death, which the press referred to as merely a “scandal”—General
Keith Kellogg, who was previously director of operations for the
Coalition Provisional Authority, in charge of assuring compliance
with the billions of dollars in corrupt contracts, took a position as
executive vice president at CACI International. Today, he serves as
chief of staff of the United States National Security Council in the
Trump Administration.
In a special investigation conducted by The Nation in
2007, fifty combat veterans were interviewed. The report noted that
two dozen soldiers interviewed said that callousness
toward Iraqi civilians was particularly evident in the operation of
supply convoys—operations in which they participated. These convoys
are the arteries that sustain the occupation, ferrying items such as
water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel across Iraq.
And these strings of tractor-trailers, operated by KBR and other
private contractors, required daily protection by the US military.
As a former sergeant put it,
We’re using these vulnerable, vulnerable convoys, which
probably piss off more Iraqis than it actually helps in our
relationship with them, just so that we can have comfort and
air-conditioning and sodas—great—and PlayStations and camping
chairs and greeting cards and stupid T-shirts that say, Who’s Your
Baghdaddy? [10]
The author's snapshot of the infamous US army occupation slogan.The above image of the shirt does not come from the Nation
article. A few months ago, I was sitting outside a coffee shop on a
beautiful California morning with my mother and one of her best
friends, also Iraqi and in her early sixties. I bring out their
coffee and see this guy, tall, late-forties maybe. He’s standing,
chatting with a friend a few feet away, wearing the shirt. I freeze
for a moment and look at my mom and her friend, and they look at me
quizzically, what does the shirt mean? They both speak
perfect, heavily accented English, and are both scientists, not
dense. At first I was angry at him for the shirt, then I felt
something I’m not sure I can describe. It was this terrible thing.
On the one hand, it’s funny—haha, who’s your daddy? On
the other, it means I own you baby and you like it. You get me
off daddy and I like it. And this is said by an occupier, an
invader. We grabbed your pussy. Tell me you like it. How do
you explain that to two moms? Who’s your daddy? Who’s your
Baghdaddy? This beautiful city, with all of its beautiful people
and its histories, their histories, already ravaged and now reduced
to this T-shirt. How could I tell them that? My mother and her
friend, so proper and good natured, always wanting to remain
optimistic, sitting in the sun, troubled by their confusion. I
couldn’t. I told them it was just something silly, a stupid saying.
I changed the subject.
We might—and I often want to—think that this is history, it’s
old stuff. But this is the dissonance: we still haven’t come to
terms with this shirt, this narrative, this violence. It’s still
okay, sometimes even funny, to parade about in public wearing this
shirt, in our coffee shops, our newspapers, our galleries. (Indeed,
many well-meaning people thought the shirt was funny when I first
showed it to them.)
Why haven’t we reckoned with this? Instead, we have articles
like “What We’re Fighting For,” published on February 10, 2017
in the opinion section of the New York Times. [11]
The piece recounts the honorable way the author and his fellow
soldiers fought in Iraq. Even his references to a colleague at Abu
Ghraib mention only the lightest use of harsh tactics: slapping young
men for information. The author does not approve of these tactics,
but paints a holistic picture of the effort in Iraq as one solely of
honor and courage. I do not doubt that this was the case for some,
but it has proven to be far from the truth for all. At the end of the
article, the author references an Iraqi soldier who was killed, and
notes that had he been saved,
the enemy soldier would have ended up with a unit like
mine, surrounded by doctors and nurses and Navy corpsmen who would
have cared for him in accordance with the rules of law. They would
have treated him well, because they’re American soldiers, because
they swore an oath, because they have principles, because they have
honor. And because without that, there’s nothing worth fighting
for.
It is a bizarre conclusion to an article accompanied by an image
of bound, blindfolded Iraq men kneeling at the feet of American
soldiers in a barren desert.The article is presented as though there
is no shameful history of Iraqis being rounded up, hooded, and
detained by the US military, often only to be let go with no charges
after they and their families endured terrifying, humiliating ordeals
at best, fatal or torturous outcomes at worst. It is presented as
though thousands of Iraqi men have not been held and routinely
killed, by various actors since the invasion, in mass graves littered
throughout the country. Instead, this image is turned into a national
call. Bowed and handcuffed Iraqi men, embodying, illustrating What
We’re Fighting For.
A day earlier, artist Francis Alÿs had written in Artforum
about his experience being embedded with Peshmerga soldiers in Mosul,
Iraq during the battle against ISIS. He posed a number of questions:
What could the ISIS fighters possibly make of the rain?
Strangely it brought us closer, we shared that moment. Did I film the
rain? Is art just a means of survival through the catastrophe of war?
Do we live because we narrate? … This particular war? Because it is
local, tribal, and religious conflicts that have had extraordinary
repercussions on more than half the planet. Its medieval barbarism
perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technologies. An
existential war. [12]
This use of “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, of the gap
between the barbaric and the civilized, and the always violent
echoing of sectarian language, exemplifies how the arts mimic the
tropes of information warfare. It also mimics the use of authority: a
well-known French male artist can give us a glimpse into this odd,
terrible world. Medieval barbarism? The City of Sammara, one of the
biggest archeological sites in the world, celebrated for its
spectacular Abbasid-era minarets, became a notorious torture site
when US operatives used the public library to train Iraqi police and
Special Forces, transforming it into a brutal interrogation unit that
eventually engulfed the city in violence. Hardly a medieval
phenomenon.
During the course of the work I have done for some years now with
art students in Baghdad, I have received incredible support from
various members of the arts community. But I would be remiss if I did
not also discuss a very disturbing acceptance of sophisticated,
supposedly good intentions over the work of building new processes to
bring people in. When I tell people what I do, more often than not
they express curiosity: What’s happening there? What medium are
people using? Any interesting events? What’s the scene like? I
answer these questions, themselves violent in their ready willingness
to ignore every facet of what was and is taking place: the wholesale
degradation of infrastructure, and with it, the conditions under
which young artists work.
How much do most know of the arts in the Middle East beyond the
Gulf States, which have poured billions into PR-friendly arts while
maintaining their role as the US’s main economic partner and
builder of military bases (where construction workers are paid a
miserably low wage)? So many of us still want to believe the Muslim
ban is just a Muslim ban, solely about Islamophobia and not about
unending warfare in strategic areas. Do we even look at why these
states are exempt? It is not just because Trump has hotels there.
These hotels pale in comparison to the billion-dollar US military
installations and accelerating military activities.
The names of the seven countries included in the ban first
surfaced years early in comments made by Wesley Clark, a highly
decorated former US military general, former NATO commander, and
one-time US presidential candidate. He publicly stated that just
before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was told of a high-level memo
outlining a strategy to take out seven countries in five years. Those
countries? Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon. He
said this long before Trump was even on the radar. By 2017, Lebanon
had long been replaced by Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country,
currently in the midst of a historically devastating war waged by the
region’s richest country, Saudi Arabia (supported in the conflict
by the US). Why are we still reducing these policies to religious
identities and Islamophobia? It is a distraction tactic, and many on
the left happily eat it up rather than looking at the clear, ongoing
politics involved. Islamophobia is real, yes, but a far more
effective counter would be to disengage it from American political
ambitions rather than amplify its use.
I bring up the situation of artists in Baghdad not because I think
only Iraqi art students deserve a shot, but because it shows how
willing we are to be contained by clean places, language, and events,
and how much we are missing out in doing so. The things that
these young people know about are things we couldn’t even begin to
understand in our lifetime. They have lived through a multinational
takeover, militarized violence by the world’s strongest armies, and
dizzying messaging campaigns, all within a bustling, major
metropolitan city with unrivaled history. It is our loss not to know,
not to understand, not to learn, as much as it is their position to
feel unheard and unseen in the most infamous, embattled city on
earth—a position some of us may find ourselves in soon enough.
[1] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySdhGyqGCZk
[2] As reported by 60 Minutes in 1992.
[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUMAyiI0TPA
[4] Gerald Ezkenazi, “SUPER BOWL XXV; Further Security For Game
Unveiled,” New York Times, January 23, 1991.
[5] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_lCmBvYMRs
[6] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH3Rwy60ym4
[7] See
https://www.c-span.org/video/?16102-1/us-centcom-military-news-briefing
[8] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUMAyiI0TPA
[9] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhGl03QFUi4
[10] Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, “The Other War: Iraq Vets
Bear Witness,” The Nation, July 10, 2007.
[11] Phil Klay, “What We’re Fighting For,” New York
Times, February 10, 2017.
[12] Francis Alÿs, untitled article, Artforum, February
9, 2017.