Iraq
People don’t talk about the Iraq war anymore. Have you discussed it with your friends recently? A tough issue to raise, you get a sort of, “Oh, why bring that up?”. Sigh, roll of the eyes etc. It’s an automatic response for most. Don’t think of that, the long war, an invasion and occupation that never ended, of permanent bases that are still expanding. It began when I was in high school, a lifetime ago. I was relaxing on beaches and skateboarding for the first three years. Then I studied journalism for two and a half years to now, played endless shows with my band, recorded demos and an EP, went on tour to Melbourne and Brisbane over and again, saw many Sydney bands as they began, travelled to the US itself for a music festival, lived in a few houses, and generally had a good and strange time of it.
For all of these years, that war has raged on. More than four thousand US soldiers have died, along with a few thousand ‘private contracters’, or ‘mercenaries’. More than this number have since commited suicide. Many were about my age. Their youth taken, lives destroyed, families torn apart; coming home missing limbs or sight, traumatized, unable to reintergrate, another generation of veterans, many initial casualties enlisting after 911 for nationalistic reasons, volunteering to fight for America’s freedom and security, and to bring the perpretators of September 11 to justice.
Now seven years since it began, the war in Iraq [and Afghanistan before that] has caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, and an estimated three to four million internally displaced persons and refugees living in foreign countries. It has destroyed the country. Around 700 tonnes of depleted uranium has been used, which will cause cancer and birth defects for many years. The cultural history of a 7000-year-old civilization has been lost. Endless numbers have been sent to secret prisons and tortured, as so publicly green-lighted by President Bush.
This is the age that we young people have grown up in. We’ve borne witness to the deepest evils of humanity, of vicious blood-thirsty philosophies, media delivering clear yet distorted images of bombs exploding, stealth weaponry and shock and awe, civilian uprising and sectarian violence, suicide bombers of every age and kind, road-side bombs filmed and released on youtube - and this shit gets to you after a while. I live on the other side of the planet to Iraq. Yet I’ve been marked by this war. Once engaged with it, how could it not effect you.
But we don’t talk about it anymore. It’s been going for longer than World War 2. But we don’t much discuss it. I can dig why, we’ve grown up with this shit. There seems little reason to bring it up. You’re cast as something of a social weirdo if you rave on about it too often, and fair enough, I guess the conflicts of the day are never just talk for night clubs or dinner parties. Better left in uni tutorials or lectures. No doubt. But where is the wider dialogue? Every now and then, you may pass or even sign a Socialist Alliance (or some faction’s) petition to end the war in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or both, or some other reasonably just cause. But this ain’t action. 400 000 people marched in Sydney before Iraq was invaded. Why has this not happened every year since? As though the conflict and violence has become more socially acceptable.
I know that people care about Iraq. I’m not suggesting otherwise. My puzzlement is the cognitive gap we’ve developed. The mental cushioning of the letters I R A and Q. As said in a genius 80s sitcom, “Don’t mention the war!”
