The ever-curious Charlie Rose deserves kudos for hosting Saad Eskander, the Iraqi national librarian, the other night. It is the kind of interchange that I as an optimist want to think can change America: an intelligent, sensitive Arab speaks from the heart to an elite American peers. Let’s learn to love the Iraqis, now that we have crumpled their society.
The most moving thing Eskander said was that he had stopped writing a blog in August. The blog was a professional’s view of the terrors of life in Baghdad, including regular reports on the torture, displacement, and murders of library staff. And observations like this: "One of the national newspapers revealed that the Minister of Culture
issued a ministerial memorandum in which he granted his own bodyguards
financial rewards. The ironic thing is that the memorandum was signed
ten days after the Minister went into hiding!!"
Here is the last entry from that blog:
There will be no Diary any more. The real reason is that I feel guilty about writing it. For sometime now, I have felt deep-down that I have been exploiting the tragedies and sacrifices of my staff,
especially those who lost their lives. I discovered that by writing the diary I put a very heavy moral burden on my shoulders; as if I have been emotionally blackmailing the readers. I do strongly believe that I have no right to do so. I seize this opportunity to apologize sincerely to everybody….
I can’t tell you how moving it was to watch this grave, literary Iraqi describe this decision sitting at Rose’s dark table on American television. The word that came to mind was: holocaust. That’s what’s been visited on Iraq. I use the word the way I first heard it, at the end of The Great Gatsby: "…Gatsby’s pneumatic mattress lolled in the water trailing a crimson
wide-track… it was only later that the gardener noticed Wilson’s body
in the grass, and the holocaust was complete." I know, that was 1928. But the word has power, and can be used to describe other horrors than The Holocaust… I pity the Iraqi people and hope that my country will feel specially connected to them.
I watched the program and felt the same way as Phil. I was amazed and numb, at a loss for words, especially as the banality of evil hardly described the goodness of these two good men calmly giving us the horror if we cared to stay tuned. Then, today I came upon another effort, this time by a 15 year old girl,
Lizzie Palmer who put this YouTube program together:
http://www.youtube.com/v/ervaMPt4Ha0&autoplay=1
Phil, that was a great article, i especially like the sentiment that you express in it.
keem them coming, maybe you can attract a larger judaic audience and after some soul searching we will all be able to get along better as americans.
america is a great country which has afforded many men and women refuge from political conditions that were unbearable.
the least we can do is be faithful to her.
that lizzie palmer video is very touching…wouldnt it be awesome if america brought them home and apologized to them for the lies that the government used to put them there in the first place.
Americas politicians could raise their credibility factor by apologizing to americas real heroes for the lies our president used to send them into another illegal war. the military men and women who are willing to defend this great nation are heroes and should be honored by being told the truth and brought home where they belong.
lets leave the middle east to middle easteners and let us work out negotiated deals for their oil and gas and not go in there to steal it under the guise of promoting democracy, only americans believe that sham of a story, in the middle east and the rest of the world noone buys that bunkum.
we need an honourable foreign policy agenda, not the lying scheming one that has turned the middle east and the rest of the world against us.
He's a brave man, but I stopped watching after he started saying that America failed because of its lack of imperial experience and then started praising the British because of their wise behavior when they occupied Iraq. They had imperial experience, which he considered a good thing. Good God. Yeah, British imperialism has such a stellar record bringing peace and prosperity to India, Ireland, Kenya, etc… The aborigines in Australia and Tasmania were blessed by their presence. And they did such a masterful job setting things up for a lasting peace in Palestine.
I think he might be a fair representation of the Iraqis who favored an American invasion. They knew how bad Saddam was, but they had romanticized notions about the West. Saddam was so bad they blinded themselves to the real history of imperialism and hoped for the best. And so it came as a surprise that Bush screwed up. So does the Iraqi exile conclude that maybe his romantic notions of salvation by foreign imperial invasion might have been misguided? No, he just thinks the British would have done it better.
We're not going to learn anything from Iraq. Charlie Rose or his future counterpart will be listening to future exiles from some oppressed country asking us to invade. A few years afterwards he'll wonder what went wrong. We'll be doing another imperial conquest in twenty or thirty years, if we don't invade Iran first.
I used the term "holocaust" to describe the Iraq war as a caller on an NPR radio show, www.onpointradio.com the September 26, 2007 show with Norman Podhoretz. Here's the link:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/09/20070926_a_main.asp
14 minutes in is when I got on.
A second longer and they would have cut you off, Rob. Nicely put. Too bad Podhoretz wouldn't respond.
(Your call comes at 15:40.)