The blog Baghdad Burning is getting a very wide audience, as it should. Riverbend's writing is harrowingly good. She is a 24 year old woman and tech geek in Baghdad who spent a lot of time abroad as a kid and writes in English extremely well. And what she has to say is incredibly damning about the invasion.
In this post, she talks about a visit to her former employer on the chance that she can get her old job, which she loved, back. But then things turn very sour:
"We paused on the second floor and stopped to talk to one of the former department directors. I asked him when they thought things would be functioning, he wouldn’t look at me. His eyes stayed glued to A.’s face as he told him that females weren’t welcome right now- especially females who ‘couldn’t be protected’. He finally turned to me and told me, in so many words, to go home because ‘they’ refused to be responsible for what might happen to me.
Ok. Fine. Your loss. I turned my back, walked down the stairs and went to find E. and my cousin. Suddenly, the faces didn’t look strange- they were the same faces of before, mostly, but there was a hostility I couldn’t believe. What was I doing here? E. and the cousin were looking grim, I must have been looking broken, because they rushed me out of the first place I had ever worked and to the car. I cried bitterly all the way home- cried for my job, cried for my future and cried for the torn streets, damaged buildings and crumbling people.
I’m one of the lucky ones… I’m not important. I’m not vital. Over a month ago, a prominent electrical engineer (one of the smartest females in the country) named Henna Aziz was assassinated in front of her family- two daughters and her husband. She was threatened by some fundamentalists from Badir’s Army and told to stay at home because she was a woman, she shouldn’t be in charge. She refused- the country needed her expertise to get things functioning- she was brilliant. She would not and could not stay at home. They came to her house one evening: men with machine-guns, broke in and opened fire. She lost her life- she wasn’t the first, she won’t be the last."
Holy shit. This is just so heartbreaking and pointless. If the intelligent, competent people who like the West are being marginalized or murdered by the thugs now jockeying for power, then we are well and truly fucked. And it's one thing to get lied into a war by a bunch of psychotic businessmen; it's another to have that war precipitate the greater repression of a society that we ostensibly liberated.
And somehow you blame this all on us? You're self loathing is a sign of weakness.
Posted by: Gordon the Magnificent | August 26, 2003 at 11:00 AM
No, it's not self-loathing. It's called taking responsibility for your actions. We invaded, killed a bunch of people, and now the fundamentalists are running amok. Just because the consequences of what we have done are unpleasant does not mean we should look away.
Posted by: Mithras | August 26, 2003 at 01:44 PM
Invaded? We liberated. Are you naive enough to belive that you can rebuild a country as fanatical as Iraq overnight? America's greatest fault these days is her lack of patience. Do you really think Iraq was a better place with Saddams regime in charge? Do you really think the people would want him back?
Posted by: Gordon the Magnificent | August 29, 2003 at 05:29 PM