It's toe tag and body bag weather
With showers of locusts and dust
From the mortars to our quarters
Shells are raining down on us.
Sand flies up the hour glass
Oil slides down the well
A moment can feel like a lifetime
In the next we may be in hell
Or is hell this anticipation
And death just the release
A holy book though often mistook
Is our only refuge for peace
It's toe tag and body bag weather
Our ziggurats crumble to dust
Your modern ideals won't pay for our meals
But you say that your war is just.
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I try not to be too political in most of my writing and focus more on things to which most people can relate. However, I recently came across the above untitled poem that I wrote about a year and a half ago. It was intended to be from what I imagined was the perspective of one of the people we had "liberated" in Iraq. And although I want this blog to mostly be creative writing rather than diatribes, it felt like a good time to reassess all of my feelings about the war and their effect on me. So I begin. Tune in if you wish.
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Now that our troops are officially withdrawn from Iraq, I find myself trying to understand what it all means. The truth is: even with a background in foreign policy, I have no idea. The complexity of it--the various government agencies that sometimes share information or not, the various levels of security authorization, the political agendas--have me utterly confounded. Do we as citizens have any hope of getting anywhere near the the truth when it comes to foreign policy? What about journalists?
Back in 2003, in the lead up to the war, campus groups at SUNY Fredonia and the University of Buffalo organized a trip to an anti-war rally in NYC, which I attended as a member of the Fredonia Students for Peace. Everyone had their own moral or ideological reasons for being there. I will share mine with you, but first, some background information.
I had recently learned about the U.S. involvement in Nicaragua during the 80s, the aim of which was to topple the revolutionary Sandinista government--one that had just overthrown a brutal authoritarian government. The "intervention" as many of these excursions came to be called involved: providing arms for the exiled thugs of the autocratic Samoza regime (known as Contras), training Contra leaders in military and law enforcement techniques (including torture) at a US facility called the School of the Americas, and using CIA covert operations to mine Nicaraguan harbors to prevent goods from being imported into the country. The first two methods mentioned above can be considered war crimes and the latter an act of terrorism by any definition. Not included in the heavily redacted documents regarding the intervention was any indication that the Sandinista government posed any imminent national security threat to the US. In fact, it was later revealed that the Soviets didn't want much to do with them at the time as they were already using up a significant amount of resources in Cuba to prop up the Castro government--an endeavor that was bearing little fruit.
As I began learning about similar (earlier) adventures into Guatemala, Chile and Iran. I began to realize that much of foreign policy claimed to be conducted under the auspices of national security was, in fact, done for reasons of ideology (Socialism=evil) or to benefit powerful interest groups that had vested interests in the domestic policies of these sovereign nations. It was these and other examples that made me think critically about the impending invasion of Iraq.
Now it seemed that we were using the threat of terrorism and supposed presence of al-Qaida in Iraq as a raison d'etre for invading. Yet, we knew that Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden shared little in common ideologically and were actually bitter enemies.
There were the assertions that Hussein was in possession of or trying to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction. This was not new. In fact, we always knew that he was trying to develop these weapons, however, there was little, if any, evidence that he was close to posing an imminent threat to the US or even Israel (unofficially our 51st state). We still had options to work with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The seemingly long list of allies in our coalition included Poland and Costa Rica. Countries that would contribute very little, but whose involvement would be used to legitimize the invasion, amounted to little more than moral support in most cases (Costa Rica doesn't even have an army). This benefited the Bush administration by making it seem as if it had a lot of political allies around the world even if those allies were putting very little at risk in terms of their own resources. Those allies received the benefit of gaining political capital with the world's only superpower.
So what was really going on here? None of it seemed to add up, which is the reason I now found myself on the streets of Manhattan in solidarity with the other protesters there as well as in other major cities around the world. I don't know what reasons the others had for being there, and I can't speak for them. Sure, some of them were probably there simply because they believed war is a terrible thing, and of course it is (even if it is sometimes necessary). Mine, I believe, had as much to do with pragmatism as it did ideology.
In the end, we never made it to the rally at the United Nations Building. The NYPD had barricaded the streets around it. Thousands of us were jammed up in streets that would normally have a high amount of vehicle traffic. The police tried to push us all onto the sidewalk, on which, even if we were piled one storey high, we probably wouldn't have been able to fit.
Though they caused more chaos in Manhattan rather than mitigating it, their strategy worked. News coverage of the rally showed an event that looked sparsely populated, and the disruption of traffic where we were held up couldn't have endeared us to the locals. The effect of the rally was severely diminished. Not that it would have mattered much. I believe the march to war, by that time, was inevitable and had already been pre-determined. A month later we invaded.
During my next semester of college, I tried to revive the group known as Fredonia Students for Peace with little success. I was able to get the group re-chartered since it was up for renewal, but only managed to get five members to join--all freshmen who were new to the group.
I suppose there were a number of reasons why we lost our momentum. First, the whole movement seemed deflated after the war actually began. It's strange because we usually protest wars while they are happening, but this time we thought we could prevent one. I think there was a general feeling of defeat.
Secondly, FSP's leaders had either graduated or were too busy with their involvement in other campus groups. Some of the members perhaps started believeing the fallacy that being against the war was in conflict with being supportive of our troops. Yet, I can speak for myself, and I think for most of the people who demonstrated, in having nothing but respect and admiration for those who serve in our armed forces.
Nevertheless, we were depleted and leaderless when I tried to step in. I had no experience in organizing activist groups as well as very poor (undeveloped might be more generous) leadership skills. I didn't stand a chance, but I believed I did. And that, I think, was congruous with the global anti-war movement as a whole. We just didn't stand a chance.
As I said, foreign policy is complex. It's hard for people who are worried about the day-to-day events in their personal lives to understand how such policy affects them. I'll admit, even I can't say with absolute certitude that we were wrong to invade. The story will go on. More details will be furnished. What I can say without doubt though is that we were deceived and misled.
What we learn in Foreign Policy 101 is that there are "official" reasons for the actions that we take--that is to say, those that are given to the press by communications departments--and there are the real reasons for those actions and the policies governing them.
Because of this, it is important that we think critically and hold our government accountable. This is equally important in matters of domestic policy.
In a later post, I may expound on this as it relates to the Occupy (Wall Street) movement and why I think that, this time, there is a real chance for people to make a difference.
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