Let us forget Iraq

Iraqi prisoners

The war in Iraq has ended so why do you continue in grieving an invasion that has officially been closed? There is no open case, we have stamped “mission accomplished” over the Iraq war file.

The American troops have left Iraq, is that not what you’ve asked for? Now let us alone. The Iraq war is over, why can’t we simply just forget it?

As cold as the aforementioned statements sound, they are real; now that the Obama Administration has seemingly ended the 8 year, 8 month and 25 day occupation of Iraq there are too many asking for us to bury the rotting corpse that is Iraq. Hide it away, mask its odor – do what we please, just so long as they can omit from their minds the name: Iraq.

I was 13 that March in 2003 when it was announced that the United States et al. were indeed invading Iraq. I remember my mother’s words, haunting me now as I look upon a world map dotted in bloody U.S. interventions and sponsored massacres; “They’ve ruined Iraq. That’s it, they’ve ruined Iraq.”

A year later, in 2004, I excitedly got my hands on a DVD copy of Fahrenheit 9/11, the documentary by filmmaker and political commentator Michael Moore covering the War on Terror. As I was the eldest and most politically astute of the sisters I was allowed to sit alongside my parents and watch. I recall one scene from the film, vaguely now; U.S. soldiers standing above a corpse, mocking a dead man and making perverse sexual remarks as he lay motionless. I walked out of the living room and into my bedroom and cried. I couldn’t stand watching this grotesque humiliation happen before my eyes. I did not want to see. To this very day I have not finished the film.

It angers me, listening to so many mourn the financial losses the United States Gov’t has forced upon the citizens of this empire. The cost of the war. That is seemingly all we hear of. The day the war “ended” I forced myself into watching, briefly, a few mainstream media outlets; the cost to Americans was all that mattered – their troops, their money – them. A selfish media for a selfish people.

But, we must put this into context, the Liberals say. How else will Americans care for Iraq if we do not put this into perspective.

This rationale is one I deplore. I find it disgusting.

That even suffering, even the loss of life of some 1 million people we must make marketable to an American audience, we must make it easier for them to swallow so as not to make them feel too guilty, so as to help them towards another path wherein they can feel something, anything, for Iraq.

They wish for us to forget that it was American troops and their lackeys who raped, tortured and pillaged Iraq; who raped, tortured and devoured its people.

In Abu Ghraib prison, notrorious for heart-wrenching torture and abuse of prisoners taken captive by US soldiers, there were photographs found, and among the photos are images of soldiers raping a female prisoner, a male detainee, and committing “sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and phosphorescent tube.” Not only did US troops sodomize and rape adult detainees but there are accusations of child abuse, rape; women have been left pregnant, after being raped by US soldiers. In the 2010 edition of Newsweek it was written that the photos “include an American soldier having sex with a female Iraqi detainee and American soldiers watching Iraqis have sex with juveniles.”
In 2004, Professor Huda Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University, said an Iraqi girl was raped by a U.S. military serviceman and became pregnant.

The Obama administration refused to release said photos as “the most direct consequence of releasing them would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger,” according to US President Barack Obama.

And they want us to forget, because it is seemingly all over for Americans. Their war is finished. But for Iraqis, the suffering is endless and the consequences of the occupation have only just begun to surface; only now have they begun to mourn.

“The Americans did not leave modern schools or big factories behind them,” said Khazim, whose father was killed when a mortar shell struck his home in Sadr City. “Instead, they left thousands of widows and orphans. The Americans did not leave a free people and country behind them. In fact, they left a ruined country and a divided nation.”

(This is crossposted on Roqayah’s blog The Cynical Arab)