Columns, Opinion

GAGNE-MAYNARD: Coming of Age in Iraq

It’s always funny to hear myself or other members of my generation say such blatantly ironic things as “I’m getting old.” It might be a TV commercial or a song that brings such a phrase out. Or it might be a person’s own self-reflection on all that they’ve experienced (as a person, as an American) within the last two decades that causes them to feel a little old.

For someone born in 1930, this feeling would make some sense. But for someone born in 1993, such as myself, the irony of feeling a little older and wiser than I did a decade ago is obvious. For example, I remember when Iraq was still ruled by Saddam Hussein, when George Bush claimed that the mission (whatever that meant) was “accomplished” and when, 13 years ago today, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in my first week of second grade.

To look back at those events is to look back into my past as an American and place them into the “timeline” of my life. I was seven. I didn’t have to shave. I didn’t know where Iraq was. If the president said we were going to war, we were going to war.

Yet the irony of my looking back on Sept. 11, 2001 and feeling a little old feels absurd when I realize my Grandfather was two years old when the people of the Kingdom of Iraq were even officially given that title. When he was two, the places known as Iraq and the Middle East were full of neat, often straight and arbitrary lines in the sand that seemed to stand for boundaries between peoples and nations. However, those lines meant nothing when you found out that most of them were drawn by 80-year-old British men who liked straight lines and disliked thinking about the people who lived there and who had lived there for 6,000 years and effectively founded civilization itself.

Yet if you look at the Middle East and our relationship to it today, how much has changed? Those lines are still there. Those people are still there. And after 82 years, it doesn’t seem as though either party really understands one another. A complete disregard for life has been present on both sides.

One needs to look no further than what happened 13 years ago, to the merciless response of American forces to “terrorist aggression” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, etc. that has effected murderers and innocent civilians alike, or the beheadings of two U.S. journalists and the murder of at least 500 Iraqi Yazidi minority members at the hands of ISIS, to recognize just how horrible such loss of life is. So it is with a sense of irony and sadness that I heard U.S. President Barack Obama proclaim the plans to deliver a speech on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in which concrete military plans to begin the process of destroying ISIS will be laid out.

This is not to say I feel ISIS should be left untested by American military might and that such a brutal and insidious force should be left alone. ISIS must be stopped. Yet the greatest irony of Obama’s speech on the anniversary of 9/11 is that even though I have lived for 20 years, I feel like I have heard this speech many times before. Because like most Americans above the age of 13, I have. And that it is why I feel old. I hope that ISIS will be disintegrated, but after 13 years of experience as a bystander to chaos and “missions accomplished,” I cannot help but be skeptical. By erasing ISIS, we erase people as they would wish to erase us.

So with a sense of bitter nostalgia, I will watch President Obama give his speech. And I will hope that a foreign policy, an idea and a war which has gotten old as I have gotten old, will consider its age and think a little about what it has accomplished.

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7 Comments

  1. so poignant, Ben. Well done

  2. Ben, as a mum I wish you had lived in a life of no wars or conflicts. I think that 9/11 changed all of us, even us really old. Keep writing. questioning, and reflecting.

  3. Jonrie Etchemendy Davila

    Thoughtful, intelligent piece, Ben. Your parents are rightfully proud. (From one of your dad’s law school friends)

  4. Great thoughts, well written, thanks

  5. I like this piece, Ben. Reflects how “some” of us old folk think. Especially cogent and, to me, poignant…”By erasing ISIS, we erase people as they would wish to erase us.”. What is the point if you, in essence, lose by winning?

  6. Hmmmm. I find you point about seeming as though you have heard the same speech countless times especially poignant. It would appear for all the worlds aging that we still have not come to terms with the true nature of government or politics, I will not speak any further on that as it makes me sound as though i am aiming at conspiracies. I will however say that if we feel this way why do we keep letting history reapeat it’s self in such a manner, and without being cynical about it seek a even more powerful truth out of these events.

  7. The point of defeating evil (ISIS) is to defeat evil.

    It’s air-head logic like yours (ken w) which enables the like of the Hitlers of the world.