We're Doomed. Now What?

by Roy Scranton

  Now, ten years later, there was more electricity. The power still failed several times a day, but the outages usually only lasted a few minutes. There were new shops. There was more money around. There were police in Baghdad now, everywhere, and an army. Things were better—except for the daily threat of car bombs. Except for ISIS. Except for the civil war that had erupted again in Anbar and Diyala. Except for the widespread poverty outside the capital, the broken schools, the increasing illiteracy, and the increasing influence of religious extremists. Except for the increasingly authoritarian rule of Nouri al-Maliki, who jailed and assassinated opposition leaders, attacked dissidents, and gave a long leash to proxy militias like Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

  Yes, there was an election. But as Hanaa Edwar told me, “Democracy is not only elections, not just voting. Democracy is about building civil institutions, transparency, accountability, the separation of powers, the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t have any of that. We don’t have the rule of law. Instead, everything is in ruins. Baghdad is in ruins. My hometown, Basra, is in ruins. They don’t have clean drinking water. I was shocked. Shocked . . . And now, again, we see Daesh or al Qaeda in Anbar and the north, and they’re moving toward Baghdad. They’re in the suburbs, in Abu Ghraib. So what kind of state is this, that was built and is still supported by America? What were the intentions? What is behind it? To divide this country into three states, like Biden said in 2007? . . . You lost five thousand soldiers to bloodshed in Iraq, and spent so much money, and to what purpose? To create a sectarian state?”

  Despite her grim analysis of the political situation, Hanaa Edwar would not stop fighting. Even though international NGOs and the Western media lost interest in Iraq after 2011, especially after the Arab spring, Edwar still worked to connect with organizations and activists outside Iraq. Even though Maliki had tried to dissolve Al-Amal and had used police, government regulations, and proxies to threaten and attack journalists, arrest protestors, and undermine activists, Edwar continued to speak out publicly against what she saw as a new dictatorship. Even though conservative and extremist religious forces were turning Iraq into an Islamic republic, she continued to work for women’s rights, secular government, and freedom of speech.

  Hanaa Edwar was a physical embodiment of the spirit of Mutanabbi Street. So, in another way, was Ali Adad, the friend of Meethaq Waleed’s who I’d been convinced was going to blow me up at the Mansour Mall. In the end, we never made it to the Mansour Mall, because it had been closed in advance of the election. And Ali hadn’t tried to kill me. We’d had coffee on the top floor of a nearby Maximall, and as far as I could tell, Ali wasn’t a member of ISIS, but an intelligent, highly motivated, proud young man who had worked his way up from humble origins into the Foreign Service Institute, where he now studied with Meethaq.

  One of the first things Ali had told me after introducing himself and showing me some pictures from his seven and a half years working as an interpreter with the US Army was that he was a man of literature and a poet. Later, he showed me some of his work, darkly passionate poems in English, influenced by the British Graveyard Poets, such as Edward Young and Thomas Gray, touched by notes of Blake, Whitman, and Donne. His writing showed a masterful command of rhythm and idiom, and a sophisticated sense of rhyme, playing with internal assonance and slant rhyme in complex ways. He told me that what he really wanted was to be a university professor, but that he had entered Foreign Service school in the hopes of securing a career that would let him take care of his family while doing something valuable for his country. Although he saw a difficult road ahead for Iraq, estimating that it would take decades for the country to recover from the bloodshed and trauma of the American invasion and the sectarian civil war it had unleashed, he was committed to making things better.

  Ali had come to the US in 2012 on a Special Immigrant Visa, bringing his wife with him, but after three months, he and his wife decided to return to Iraq. He had been working on an assembly line at Hewlett Packard, earning minimum wage, and when his wife got pregnant, they both questioned whether or not they wanted to raise their child in the US.

  “She said, I want to go back, I don’t want to give birth here,” he told me. “And I said, that was just on the tip of my tongue. I would rather have my baby here than there. I don’t want him to feel different. Because it’s different there. It’s hard. I wouldn’t say it’s easy here, but I would say it’s better . . . I asked myself hundreds of times, what am I doing here, what was my purpose, why had God created me to be here, on that spot of the earth? And for the record, I’m very patriotic. I am a patriot. I love this country. I hope when the end comes, I would die and be buried in this country. So I asked myself many times, what is my being, why am I being created and why here . . . I wanted my son to be born here, to feel what I have felt. But I don’t want him to go through all the difficulties that I have gone through, because I have seen many difficulties. Here, I can make a difference.”

  Making a difference and helping people were, according to Ali, two of the main reasons he had started working with the Americans in 2003. Nineteen years old then, Ali had learned his English from movies and music videos. He started talking to American soldiers in his neighborhood on Haifa Street, telling them where to find hidden caches of munitions, then helping them hand out medicine and first aid to people in the area. With his last year of high school interrupted by the invasion, and as the only child of a single mother, Ali didn’t have much to tie him down, and the tall, powerful American soldiers who had so easily conquered Saddam must have filled some need in Ali for a surrogate father, as his own father had disappeared when he was four years old.

  He took a few months to finish high school in 2004, then started working for the army in August. Over the next seven years, he worked with combat units on patrol, Rangers, the Coalition Provisional Authority, military transition teams and police transition teams, and liaison officers. He was as proud of his time in the field as a “combat interpreter” as he was of his work in Baghdad with senior staff and Iraqi Army generals. While with Bravo 2-15 FA in 2004 and 2005, pulling patrols in the suburbs west of Baghdad, he collected sixty pieces of shrapnel from IEDs his patrols had encountered. He saw one of his units completely replaced, when the first sergeant and commanding officer of the unit he’d been assigned to were found selling confiscated weapons on the black market and running whorehouses in collaboration with local Iraqi Army units.

  Ali had been a trusted and valued part of the American occupation. Along the way, he married, divorced, married again, and managed to complete a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature at Mustansiriya University. All while his country was wracked by war.

  Ali told me he admired Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in many ways he seemed an exemplar of Emersonian self-reliance. He’d been a soldier and a scholar, and was now training to be a diplomat, having pulled himself up from the streets. He was independent, high-minded, earnest, proud, and thoughtful. I realized that part of what had disturbed me with Meethaq was just this quality of earnest idealism that the two men shared. On the one hand, I had gotten so used to the cynicism infecting American society, I didn’t know what to make of these young men who showed no trace of it; on the other, I’d expected Iraqis to be uniformly pessimistic and bitter. Meethaq and Ali had been through dark times, but they weren’t embittered; they saw the troubles they had faced as challenges they had overcome. As Meethaq told me, quoting a French proverb, “Difficult times make strong men.”

  I asked Ali what he thought of working with the American army, and he gave me a complex, thoughtful reply. It was clear that the experience, over seven and a half years, was one of the defining aspects of his life. Yet at the same time, he had taken a certain philosophical distance on it and measured out both the good and the bad.

  “Generally, the army is a society. Just like any other organization. It’s an organization that’s governed by rules, that has a lot of discipline, but someti
mes rules can be obstacles. Sometimes rules are broken. Sometimes justice is lost in the rules. That’s the way I see it. My overall assessment of the army is that it has something to offer, other than advantages and privileges on the social level. It has something spiritual to offer. You have the core values, you have the discipline, you have the mind-set that you learn. That will get you somewhere. For me personally, it helped defining my skills . . . I find all kinds of people in there. People from the ghettos. Crackheads. They have some crackheads in the army. They do. They have some people that inhale the aerosol cans, just to get high. I mean, c’mon, that’ll give you cancer. Why would you do that? They have some pretty good examples and some pretty bad examples . . . I was in a long time and took a lot of it . . . Being in the army is hard. When you work for the army, it’s even harder. When you don’t have the privileges and the advantages they have, it’s even harder. There were some times when we suffered a lot. But if you can take it, you will come out with something. It’s not wealth, but it’s an intellectual gain.”

  After a long conversation at the Maximall, we had arranged to meet again after the election, on Mutanabbi Street. Aziz and I found Ali and Meethaq eating lunch at a shawarma place, and I was unexpectedly happy to see them. When they were done eating, we walked around the Ottoman Kishle, looked at Baghdad’s oldest clock, and listened to some poets read, then met up with some friends of theirs. We all took a boat ride on the Tigris. They joked among themselves and took goofy pictures. Ali explained to me the different varieties of traditional Iraqi musical instruments, then the different kinds of traditional Iraqi boats. I reached into the Tigris and felt the water flow over my hand, watched it split and come back together, while the boat puttered in a slow circle. I felt for a moment like I was anywhere. I felt for a moment like a tourist, among friends.

  Remembering my panic and suspicion Saturday night and Sunday, I felt guilty, even ashamed. How could I ever tell them I’d thought they were going to kill me? That I’d assumed—that I’d believed, ardently, for a whole day, that they were both ISIS terrorists? The gratitude I felt toward them for having given me this moment of tranquility in a place I had for ten years associated with terror and violence was complicated, through my suspicion, by a feeling of deceit. I would never be able to discharge the debt I’d incurred by doubting their trust. I’d never be free of the guilt I felt for having assumed these men were terrorists.

  When we said goodbye, I gave Ali some books of poetry I’d brought from the US and told him and Meethaq that I hoped to see them again, although I wasn’t sure if I’d have time. Already, the profound expanse of days that had opened at the beginning of my trip was closing in as my flight home rushed inevitably nearer. Every connection was already diverging. Soon I would leave again, and Baghdad would go on, and what would happen in the years before my next return, if I ever came back at all? I could see nothing good in Baghdad’s future except its people, and they would go on living and suffering as they had before.

  Over the next few days, I talked to many people who had suffered deeply during the occupation, but few of them directly at the hands of American soldiers. Despite our bombing, invasion, torture, and heavy-handed occupation, the American army didn’t commit the worst acts of violence that went on during those years. What the US did was to foster the conditions that allowed horrific things to happen, allow those things to go on unchecked for years, and support the people who committed them. Then we left.

  The policeman I’d talked to who’d shown me his duplicate voter ID cards told me he’d lost twenty-three family members in the sectarian civil war. “Iraq has lost a son a day since the US came,” he said and assured me that things had been better under Saddam. Much better. “With Saddam, if you try to touch his chair, he’ll attack you. Otherwise he’ll leave you alone.” Now all his hopes lay with Maliki, whom he saw as the only leader in Iraq strong enough to beat ISIS and end the sectarian violence.

  A spice-shop proprietor named Sedrad, in Baghdad’s busy Shorja market, told me how his father had been martyred during the civil war, and showed me a picture he’d hung in his stall of his nephew, Ahmed Sadr, killed six weeks ago by a VBIED. “We lost this one, but we’re going to keep the rest,” he said. “It didn’t use to be like this. We didn’t know what sect our neighbor belonged to. We didn’t care. I’m a Shiia, my friend Othman is a Sunni, and when I was sick, he carried me to the hospital on his back. There was no difference. We’re brothers. Now, if you’re not safe, you can’t work on the street. You have to expect a knife in your back—like Ahmed, when they blew up his store.”

  When I met Raad al-Azzur, I knew nothing about him except that he drove a van for St. George’s Church in Mansour. I offered to go to his church to meet him, but it was easier for him to come to me. I received him in the ostentatiously modern lobby of the Coral Boutique Hotel, whose plate-glass windows overlooking Jadriya Street seemed to invite VBIEDs, and asked the Turkish-vested and pantalooned bellboy to bring us some tea from the dining room. Bland Western classical oozed in the background. Raad was a dour, middle-aged man with a limp, in cheap but clean clothes. He was out of place at this hotel catering to high-rolling Iraqis and foreign money, but I tried to make him comfortable. Seated on giant striped sofas, with an American cop show blazing behind us on an enormous HD TV, I began to ask him the basic introductory questions I normally started with—where he was from, his age, what he did, and so on.

  “Did you know my son was killed?” he interrupted.

  I didn’t. Raad began to explain, then reached into his pocket to pull out a small cloth bag. From the bag he withdrew two plastic-coated photographs. Each showed one of his children lying in a pool of blood, shot in the head. The boy, Aziz, was four and a half. The girl, Ranin, fifteen.

  It had happened just over ten years ago. Men with guns forced their way into his house one night, threatened him and his wife, then shot their two children. The men didn’t say who they were or why they came, except that they were “supporters of Islam.” Raad didn’t know why he was targeted. It may have been because for a month or so that winter, he’d helped a friend sell liquor. It may have been because he was Christian.

  Over the years, eleven members of his family had been murdered, and he’d heard of more among his congregation. His cousin in Mosul had recently been killed—a stranger knocked on his door, asked him his name, then put a pistol in his mouth and shot him. Many others had been kidnapped or threatened with letters or text messages. There were almost no Christians left in Baghdad, he told me. Most of the ones who hadn’t been killed had fled.

  After his children were murdered, Raad had tried to escape, too, taking his three remaining children and going to Jordan. He applied to the UN for refugee status, but they rejected him. He tried again in Syria and was again rejected. So he came back to Baghdad, to the same house in which his children had been killed, where he lives today.

  He worked for a time in the Ministry of Displaced People and Immigration, under a Christian supervisor, but he was fired after his supervisor was replaced by a Muslim. Then he got a job at the Baghdad Provincial Council, but he was fired there too when they found out he was Christian. He lived now on the little money he earned driving a van for the church and a disability stipend he got from the government: he pulled up his pantleg to show me the artificial limb he’d been given to replace the leg that had been blown off in Iraq’s war with Iran.

  “Life was better under Saddam,” he told me. “Nobody attacked Christians then. When somebody did, Saddam’s police would find the killer and punish them. Now, you can see, ten years and I’m still looking. When they cut the power under Saddam, you knew when and how long. Now, you never know. In the old days, people did their work and handed out rations because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Now, nobody does anything, and the corruption is so bad you don’t get anything . . . Nothing is going to change now. The faces you see in the election are the same faces that
came in on the American tanks.”

  I looked at the pictures on the table. Here, I thought, were images that would connect with readers, images that could make the suffering real. Yet what could these pictures of pictures do that hundreds of pictures over eleven years hadn’t? Images of suffering, sorrow, and grief inspired pity for the world’s downtrodden, but almost never engaged real sympathy. How could they? How could a photograph communicate the empty heaviness a man like Raad carried with him, coming home every day to the same rooms in which his children had been murdered, knowing that there was no one who could help him, looking ahead to a future without hope, a future always shattering in the echo of remembered gunshots? I could show you a picture, or a picture of a picture, but the picture can’t show you the ghosts that haunt people’s lives, the memories of sudden violence, the abysses hiding behind desperate efforts at normality. Maybe you can imagine living in a war for a day, a week, or even a year. Maybe you’re sympathetic and brave and willing to take the trouble. Now imagine that war goes on your whole life.

  I asked him if I could take pictures of the pictures of his dead children. It seemed necessary but inadequate, and when he agreed I felt like a vulture. I had to keep retaking the pictures again and again from different angles, shifting the photos around the table. My reflection kept getting in the way.

  The dream I had of Mutanabbi Street was a dream that life could win out over death, as the poet Naseer had said a few days ago: a faith that the tissue of existence was stronger than the ravages of imperial politics or religious violence. I wanted to believe it was true, and I wanted to believe that even in the darkest days, some flame flickered. Before coming to Baghdad, I had been lucky enough to meet Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi writer whose short-story collection, The Corpse Exhibition, took the perverse cruelty of thirty years of war and tyranny and turned it into art. The collection’s title story is about just what it says, a corpse exhibition by an artist who sculpts death, murdering people and arranging their bodies in grotesquely aestheticized positions. Blasim’s work isn’t the kind of redemptive bullshit you often get when people “turn suffering into art.” His stories are as cruel as the cruelty they portray, and they redeem no one and nothing. Yet somehow, even though his work offered no redemption, the mere fact of its existence, the fact that the human imagination had transformed horror into something beautiful was some kind of testament to the human spirit. Blasim’s work isn’t redemptive but rather tragic, and like the best tragedy, affirms life even at its most awful.