Iraq: The Ghosts Between Rivers

“Iraq is the madness of Churchill, who wanted to unite two completely separate oil wells — Kirkuk and Mosul, adding three different entities: the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis.” This is the most brilliant definition, and I would have loved to tell you who it belongs to, but I cannot remember. I keep it with me, along with a few other memorable landmarks that marked my trip to the Orient (by the way, what else can the Kuwait that Saddam furiously attacked in 1990, after a long war with Iran, be called other than an oil well?).

In our preoccupation with the Arab spring, the development of the Iranian-Israeli war, the events in Libya and now the civil war in Syria, we almost forgot about Iraq and its ghosts. What was left behind in December 2011, after the last soldier’s boot rose from old Mesopotamia, “the land between rivers”? Instability, hate, violence, almost a million orphans and the spectrum of an imminent civil war.

On March 20, 2003, local time 5:33 a.m., the first bombs were heard in Baghdad. Tomahawks were pinging over the treasures of Sumer and Babylon. The world’s biggest cities had never been so fierce in expressing themselves than they were before the war began. Starting with the Americans, from February 2003, tens of thousands of people gathered on Capitol Hill — “a vocal minority,” as the authorities called them — shouting, “Let’s bomb Texas, they have oil too!” and carrying placards that said, “Would Jesus bomb them?” According to surveys, “the vocal minority” represented more than 60 percent of citizens.

In March 2003 a war began, triggered by a huge lie that those responsible at the time, today’s memorialists, can’t justify. The chemical weapons that the allies were searching for in Iraq were probably the same ones they previously sold to Saddam, when he tested them on the Iranians. As for nuclear weapons, in 1981 the Israelis had bombed the nuclear station in Osirak; they would have been the first to know whether the Iraqis had developed another one in the meantime. George Tenet, the head of the CIA in 2003, blames others. And he’s got the right people to blame, starting with Dick Cheney, vice president at the time — who shamelessly hoodwinked President Bush — and ending with Douglas Feeith, Richard Perle, the restless Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense under the George W. Bush administration (there was also supposed to be a scapegoat — Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, who the journalists humorously named “the grey eminence” of the administration or even “the artisan of the Iraq War.” President Bush had the decency to commute the sentence of this tragic buffoon). The company Halliburton made $39.5 million from the Iraq War, which is why Cheney is more than relaxed when he says he has no reason to apologize for the political decision he made 10 years ago — ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and Chevron didn’t have it that bad either, come to think of it. Not to mention the numerous security companies, starting with the sinister Blackwater, which gave mercenaries the green light to slaughter the population with no warning.

Still, who is the winner of the Iraq War? If on May 1, 2003 — when President Bush hurried to declare his “mission accomplished” — the hostilities between the allies and the Iraqi insurgents were far from over and the situation couldn’t be more gloomy, nowadays it is clear that the main winner is Iran’s Shiite theocracy. But this is another story, to be told by another fire.

The current prime minister, the Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, whose authority is dangerously crumbling, is not, as many might be tempted to think, “one of the Americans.” Neither is he “one of the Ayatollahs” in Iran (where he spent his years in exile when he was not in Syria). At 63-years-old, al-Maliki is a suspicious introvert who still follows the logic of conspiracy, as he did for almost a quarter of his life. Like many others who survived not only Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship, but also the horrors of the wars, al-Maliki is haunted by all the ghosts of confrontation, rising over the republic like the fog of hell’s heat. The prime minister is having trouble with the independent region of the Kurds, who started selling oil without Baghdad’s signature, and also with the growing number of Sunni manifestations, with the armed groups who walk the country, with the sheer poverty, worsened by the chronic lack of water, in an Iraq that could be filthy rich.

The Kurd Jalal Talabani, now in his 80s, is seriously ill. His death could bring unexpected changes in the current power (his ambitious wife, the first lady, already announced her wish to step in).

Nouri al-Maliki is leading Iraq just like a “capo,” as The Economist notices. His regime is mined with corruption and gross violations of human rights. These correct observations of pure Westerners lose sight of the essential: the political culture of the region, where one bloody dictator is replaced by another.

I could never go back to Iraq. Its ghosts keep coming back even in my nightmares. As al-Sayyab’s poem says: “Streets they say will never be walked on again, just as no one ever returns from the land of death.”