Thousands of U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, our economy is being ruined over this war and those damn Iraqis can’t even be grateful for it. That’s the talk around here — how the Iraq war is hurting America. I’m anti-war too. But I have a much different take on the issue. You can call it a bias, but I lived in the Middle East and grew up with Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians, everyone, and I look at this crisis from a different perspective — the perspective of an Iraqi civilian.
Under our democratic system, the people are ultimately responsible for the decision go to war. We started the war and we have lost the war. Of course, losing implies there was a winner, but hundreds of thousands of dead, tortured, abused and orphaned Iraqis would beg to differ. They didn’t sign up for this; they didn’t ask to be liberated oh so sweetly; and they certainly didn’t expect chemical weapons, torture prisons, constant raids, and brutality on a daily basis as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The name of that mission was a joke in the Middle East; watching the news with our Iraqi friends as the bombs fell indiscriminately over their country, we in Saudi Arabia couldn’t help but wonder what new and great freedom was about to be forcefully unleashed on Iraq.
Iraq was raped. It started way before this war; the country’s history is littered with colonial exploitation and deceit. But let’s look at it from after the Gulf War, when the most severe sanctions were placed on it. For over ten years Iraq was slowly starved, and the country worked its way to the top of humanitarian issues lists. The horrific effects of these sanctions have been described as genocide by many people, such as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark in his essay “Fire and Ice.” The stated purpose of the sanctions was to teach Saddam Hussein a lesson about human rights, but they only ended up hurting the Iraqi people.
After slowly killing many Iraqis and weakening the entire population, the United States decided to criticize Saddam Hussein for not taking care of his people. That’s when it all started. For a while we were fed information on what a bad guy Saddam was, and it’s true that he was. Then, all of a sudden Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Sure, the sanctions meant that less than a fourth of the country even had access to clean water, and most hospitals didn’t even have enough IV bags for their patients, but somehow Saddam was secretly able to afford WMDs. Most countries didn’t buy that idea, and the international community called for a UN weapons inspection team to check it out. Can you imagine what was going through the minds of the Iraqi people at that time? Their kids were dying of starvation; they had no water and no jobs; and they were living under the tyrannical rule of Saddam. Now, as if the genocidal sanctions were not enough, the United States wanted to bomb the hell out of them.
The world waited anxiously for months, waiting to see what the United States would do, but no one was more anxious than the Iraqis. Some of them started to believe that the United States really did want to help out and overthrow Saddam. But as the months passed, we heard about more deaths, more bombs and more raids against “Islamist” insurgents. Soon enough, the “occupation” had become permanent. I didn’t think it could get worse, but then I heard about Abu Ghraib, read articles from soldiers who had returned from Iraq and listened to my Iraqi friends’ stories about their families. A divide-and-conquer strategy turned Shiites and Sunnis against each other, securing another reason for the United States to extend its stay.
Americans finally realized that their government lied to them and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Everyone became clued in to the oil, and who had gotten rich from it. But most people still don’t understand the basic devastation and humanitarian crisis that have been caused by the war in Iraq. Look at this from someone else’s eyes.
Imagine the lives of young Iraqi children. They have loving families which get by, but only barely. Then the source of the sanctions and their pain (the United States) decides to “free” them. It’s about time. They think the United States will remove the bad guy and let them move on.
A couple of months later, their cities have been bombed to the ground. Their brothers have been shot by soldiers and labeled as collateral damage. Some of them had families in Fallujah who were burned to death by napalm (an illegal chemical weapon), and people they know are being tortured, bombed or shot on a daily basis. Some of them have relatives who had it worse and, in a desperate attempt to retaliate, blew themselves up, leaving them as orphans. In such a run-down and dangerous country, many of them are not allowed to leave the house, even for school. Their country is in a worse state than ever before, and now they know it was all for no reason.
The war was a lie. There were no WMDs, the United States didn’t come to get rid of Saddam and it had no intention of leaving. All of the losses and the destruction of the country were for money, and some idiots’ imperialistic conquests.
I know America’s economy is suffering, and funding this war is tough, and soldiers are dying, but there are other reasons to oppose the war. The Iraqi people did not sign up for this, and with all the news coming out about the horrendous lies and imperialistic ambitions of our government, I think we need to stop dismissing the war as a mess and work to end it. We have done an inexcusable and disturbing wrong to these people and we need to take responsibility for it. The time for pointing fingers is past.
Sufia Khalid, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at skhalid@bu.edu.
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