Australians All

Aftermath

Eva Sallis

These personal testimonies of Iraqis are among the most powerful and memorable of all defences for the war on Iraq. They are real, not hypothetical.

As Iraqi Americans reach out to their relatives in Baghdad and Basra, in Kirkuk and Irbil, some are hearing words they never thought possible: Iraqis are speaking ill of Saddam Hussein. They’re criticizing him out loud, on the telephone, seemingly undeterred by fear of the Iraqi intelligence service and its tactics of torture for those disloyal to the Baath Party regime. ‘I was shocked,’ said Zainab Al-Suwaij, executive director of the American Islamic Congress. ‘It’s very dangerous. All the phones are tapped. But they are so excited.’

Los Angeles Times, 24 March 2003

Ajami Saadoun Khlis, whose son and brother were executed under the Saddam regime, sobbed like a child on the shoulder of the Guardian’s Egyptian translator. He mopped the tears but they kept coming. ‘You just arrived,’ he said. ‘You’re late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave.’

Guardian, 22 March 2003

We shall never forget what the coalition has done for our people. A free Iraq shall be a living monument to our people’s friendship with its liberators.

Hojat al-Islam Abdel Majid al-Khoi, Wall Street Journal, 4 July 2003

People, if you only knew what this man did to Iraq. He killed our youth. He killed millions.

An elderly man in Baghdad beating Saddam’s portrait with his shoe. Los Angeles Times, 4 October 2003

These personal testimonies of Iraqis are among the most powerful and memorable of all defences for the war on Iraq. They are real, not hypothetical. They remind us of the human gains, not the cost. They make us feel that we were there with a purpose. We helped to remove Saddam Hussein. We can choke up at what it means to have helped free these people from such horror. We can feel good. For many Australians, there is a kind of intimacy with these voices, a direct involvement, for we were part of their liberation.

Nonetheless, an unresolved question hangs over our goodness. We have a vested interest in engaging with these Iraqis’ voices and not with those who are critical of us. The discomfort I have with the emotional and intellectual argument Iraqis’ relief presents to us is that we make each voice representative of all, including the dead. We habitually, uncritically, substitute the life of one Iraqi for another. We so easily hold these voices up as emblems, rather than hearing them as personal experiences, personal opinions. We so easily make these words speak for the dead and assuage our guilt, and we say: see, it was all for this. Such relief was achieved by our killings! In short, we sacrificed some Iraqis so that many might be saved. That is an age-old and very comforting argument.

But these individual voices, no matter how numerous, cannot speak for the dead. They cannot replace the voices of those people we never met or heard. The voices of relief cannot suggest that those who died did so as willing sacrifices. They cannot answer all questions on our right to kill. They cannot remove our responsibility for the killing, even if they reassure us that it was not without positive outcome for those who survived.

When they started taking us off the bus … my mother told me ‘repeat the Shahada, because we are about to die.’ I heard the shouting of the children. We grabbed each other’s hands – me, my mother, my cousin, and my uncle. They pulled us, we were all together. They threw us into the dug-out grave … there were so many bodies underneath me. I layed down on top of them. They started to shoot on us … One of them pulled at my clothes and said, ‘this one isn’t dead, shoot him.’ They shot again, but still I was not shot. So they gave the order to the bulldozer driver to bury the grave. It was sundown now. I crawled to the edge of the grave and got to a place where the bamboo was on my face and I was able to breathe through it.

Nasir Khadi Hazim al Husseini, survivor, aged 12 in 1991.

Every day that uncovers more mass graves is a demonstration that there’s a huge humanitarian and moral dividend out of what took place, and that it was right in terms of Australia’s participation.

John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia.

The evidence of mass graves is another powerful defence of the war that is gaining momentum now as the likelihood of finding weapons of mass destruction fades. We are offered the grief shown at the opening of a mass grave as proof of the crimes of the regime we have removed. Iraqis’ voices cry out over innumerable piles of bones. They reveal to us some of the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime. We take these killings as reassurance – the graves help establish a proxy mandate in the absence of a clear justification at law. The war was an ending of bloodshed, we are told, a peacekeeping style of intervention that has precedents when the killing in a country has become too shocking for the international community to stand idly by and let it happen.

Can these horrors really make us feel that we killed for a greater good? Undoubtedly they can. The effect they have on politicians and on TV viewers and newspaper readers is evidence enough of this. But I don’t think they should make us feel that the subject is closed or that we should rest easy. The grief at mass graves is not for those we killed. There is no causal relationship between the person killed by Saddam Hussein, and the person killed by us.

We would feel less ease if our media were keen to take us again and again to the funerals of those we did kill. I have been watching Arabic television via satellite throughout the last few months, and there is little comfort or self-congratulation possible at those other gravesides.

I think the killings in the recent war need to be thought through more deeply and considered beyond what makes us comfortable. All this scrabbling for comfort and self-congratulation has at its source a profound and unscrutinised discomfort with what we have done and are doing.

---

In 1991, Robert Gates, deputy national security advisor to that other Bush administration, stated that as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power, the sanctions would be enforced and, he said, “Iraqis will pay the price.” In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, was asked whether half a million dead Iraqi children were a price worth paying for the gains of the embargo. In a statement now famous in the Middle East, she replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” There were still seven years of the embargo to go.

In 2003, as part of the war on terror (President Bush’s “monumental struggle between good and evil”), a US led coalition of just a handful of countries invaded Iraq, ousted Saddam Hussein and will remain there for the foreseeable future as occupying forces. At least 6118 civilians have been killed, alongside uncounted tens of thousands of men and boys who either defended the regime, or defended the country.

In the heated debates before the war on Iraq, collective self-defence from the global threat of Saddam Hussein, collective liberation or rescue of the oppressed Iraqi people, and the irredeemable badness of the bad men at the top, particularly Saddam Hussein, were key features in persuading governments and individuals to support America’s war. At a popular level, in America, “payback” or vengeance for September 11 also played a part. Most, if not all, supporters for the war saw this as going to get Saddam Hussein for the west’s sake and/or for the sake of the Iraqi people. It turned out that the latter was a stronger argument, but it is interesting that in the lead-up to the war almost every justification for killing a human being that has any currency in western cultures was used to argue that we should kill or bring Saddam Hussein to justice, necessarily killing any number of Iraqis to do so. On an emotional level, we went to war against one man.

Worldwide demonstrations against the war offered a spectacular picture of the discomfort millions (including me) felt over this. But the demonstrations did nothing to counter the threat those who supported the war felt, and filled with dismay those Iraqis who saw the war as a possible solution to their nightmare. That Saddam Hussein was so bad, so corrupt, as to deserve our uncompromising aggression was a shared view but invading his country and inevitably killing Iraqis to get to him was a subject of intense disagreement.

It is in the past now. We have been a participant in the killing that ousted Saddam Hussein and his regime and liberated the Iraqi people from him, if not, so far, from us. Whatever it is that has taken place (we are unsure, still) we are responsible for it. There still seems to be much that is unsaid on this war. Supporters talk about successes: minimum civilian casualties, the overthrow of Saddam, the opportunity we have given Iraqis, and the proof that weapons of mass destruction existed sometime in the past, and that it is only a matter of time before they are found. Objectors talk about the new American century and the numbers of civilians really killed, the numbers of ongoing killings, the uncounted military dead, and the mess we have made of Iraq, a country that is not going to be given back to the Iraqis any time soon. A debate still rages in the highest circles, particularly in Britain and America, on whether the war was lawful, or otherwise justified. A panel of eminent lawyers confirmed in May that in their considered view this war was unlawful.

We argue that we have killed fewer people in liberating Iraq than Saddam Hussein did in subjugating it.

This should be scrutinised if only for the fact we find it comforting.

It is easy to demonstrate, with the bewildering numbness of statistics, that America and its allies are responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of far more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. No-one could seriously believe the Bush administration’s argument of compassion and concern for the well-being of the remaining living Iraqis. But whether in argument or counter-argument, the numbers we cite can escalate until they repel any proper engagement with what any of it means.

When we talk about minimum civilian casualties, or an acceptable price to pay we are using a language that neutralises the impact of our responsibility and cushions our grief. The numbers argument (how few we killed) has been used to soften uncomfortable fact to the point where it becomes comfortable. To me it seems to gloss with a positive light something we would find very painful to contemplate closely. It also functions as a last, defining word, a word that erases the diversity of human beings to which it refers. And it is extraordinarily flexible in function. There is no number of deaths that cannot be described as a “minimum”, no number of deaths that, if we are sufficiently insulated from their meaning, cannot be described as “a price worth paying”. There is no maximum, no cut-off point, if we are sufficiently desensitised, as Madeleine Albright was, to the seriousness of killing one person.

Any number of deaths was acceptable to Saddam Hussein as a means to information, control, and, in the 1970s, development and progress for Iraq. If we are going to defend our actions with our minimum killed, we do need to have some kind of cut-off point that distinguishes us from a man we consider so morally reprehensible that we invaded his country and killed people in order to remove him from power. The impact of sanctions on the citizens of Iraq was catastrophic and had no cut-off point. In this war, as I will show, we have no cut-off point, just a vague notion that we did all we could to keep civilian deaths to a minimum.

Curiously, if I were to suggest a low cut-off point, say five acceptable killings, they have much greater impact. We identify with the humanity of five people easily. What is apparent and immediate in the killing of five people is their uniqueness, their individuality. Even if they are strangers or enemies, we recognise this. We are more easily repelled by the idea of killing five people as an acceptable sacrifice than we are by 6118. This demonstrates the danger of this numbers argument. It disengages the faculty of identification, precisely the faculty that needs to be activated if we are to contemplate the full meaning of our actions.

It is commonplace to show that Americans care about Americans. As we would expect, their recognition of the seriousness of the loss of life of their compatriots is fully developed. Had any Australian soldiers died, we would have seen exactly the same recognition by Australians. Cameraman Paul Moran’s death in Iraq is mourned with a full awareness of the great loss of his unique life. The number of American soldiers killed, tallied almost daily in the ongoing guerrilla war in Iraq, was becoming unacceptable to the American public at the 23 August 2003 figure of 179. (The administration, conscious of the impact of these numbers, separates those killed in combat from those who died in non-combat situations. The total number of US military deaths at the same date was 273.)

It is clearly possible to count the dead with pain and recognition and grief. We might have misused numbers, but they are still important. For many Australians, numbers are our only link with these deaths, our only point of contact.

What would it mean if we didn’t bother to count?

We didn’t count the Iraqi military dead, a fact that stuns me every time I come up against it. We could have killed 10,000 or 100,000 men and boys (and a few women) and it would mean nothing to us. “Military targets” were not presented to us through the media as dead in the same way as killed civilians were. Our moral well-being was felt to be related to the number of civilian dead, but completely untouched by either the number or nature of military dead. A loose tally was kept by a few organisations for the one, but not for the other.

Why are the military dead treated as though there is no question that this war was just and lawful? Why are there so few voices of outrage at this? Men and boys who were killed while they defended their country or defended the regime we were destroying have been made invisible as though their deaths do not reflect upon us or invoke our understanding of right and wrong. This is an extraordinary sleight of hand. Their deaths do in clearest terms invoke a questioning of right and wrong, even a resolution, once and for all, concerning the lawfulness of this war. We all know that a soldier’s job in war is to kill. This sense of the inevitability of death in warfare can help to obscure how seriously we should question our right to kill in this war, and how seriously we should scrutinise our view of the killing of these men and boys.

There is a difference between civilian and military deaths. It is not a difference that can, in the context of this war, erase the question of right and wrong, but one that has considerable impact on our thought and feelings. Civilian deaths were accidental, unintended. Military deaths were intentional. To remove Saddam Hussein, we had to fight and wound or kill those who actively opposed us. But just because they actively defended a country we invaded should not lead to such a complete failure to recognise the killing of the defenders. This should not render them invisible, and leave them out of the questions we ask of ourselves.

Saddam Hussein killed several hundred thousand human beings in suppressing a major revolt against him in 1991 and, as far as we know, his administration kept meticulous records of names. We did not even do that and we have no idea how many we killed.

We wiped them off the face of the earth.

These killings were intended. We have a huge vested interest in ignoring them. It was an unjust war and these killings are, in moral terms, murders. If this war was indeed unlawful, then we have been part of the “supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

It is a worse crime to kill two people than it is to kill one. But the meaning of killing human beings inheres in the significance of killing one person. The seriousness of ending a unique individual life is what makes killing three people worse than killing one. We cannot easily look for the meaning of mass killing, whether it is 6118, hundreds of thousands, or millions, without returning to the meaning of taking one life. All recent debate over acceptable numbers of killings as means to ends seems to me to depend upon a wilful refusal to consider the significance of killing.

The talk of minimum civilian casualties and an acceptable price as used to justify this war seems only tenable if we pretend killing one person is really not so terrible. Our failure to be outraged at the lost uncounted dead bears this out. It would be much harder to support such killing if someone you love is automatically to be among the number you consider acceptable, or is to be lost and unacknowledged forever. We might have talked in a murky and imprecise way about rescuing people and about the suffering of Iraqis but we really positioned ourselves emotionally as enemies. These deaths we deemed acceptable, these deaths we choose not to know about, would never mean to us what the deaths of our own would.

Iraqis are far away for most Australians, but this distance increased, I think, our duty and the duty of our leaders to consider the meaning of what we were doing.

---

The culture of using one person as a means to an end reached, under Saddam Hussein, a kind of ultimate expression. I do not need to repeat the catalogue of unbearable acts that were both possible and permissible in the late stages of Saddam’s Iraq. These are well known. But I would like to give a sense of the prevailing culture and what it meant to the bodies and lives of individuals. He stated in a memo to his heads of security in 1992: Article 12E: We call upon the interrogator to exercise patience while interrogating arrested elements, to enable us to identify and define our enemies. Those who died as a result of interrogation methods are a loss … because we lost a link in our investigations which could have led us to their superior and his superiors. In fact, they were more patient than the interrogators even though they were facing death.

From Article 27: Even if we make a mistake in bringing in a citizen and subject him to torture without reaching any conclusion with him in obtaining information, I say to you that we have benefited from him in that he will describe the way he was arrested and the methods to which he was subjected even though innocent, then how would it have been if he had a conspiratorial or treasonous mind. Such conspiracy shall be a horror screen before his eyes, giving him sleepless nights, making him distance himself from even thinking about politics or hostility to the Revolution. He will also flee from anyone around him who may have inclinations of this nature. Top Secret Memo: All Department Heads, Sector Officers, and Headquarters Branches Plan of Action 1992

Saddam Hussein’s regime was horrible and, in any comparison, we look better. Our actions and the extent of our power over the bodies and lives of individuals, citizens or non-citizens, are far from being equally or so extensively horrible. But comparison with something really nightmarishly terrible should not be our sole means of measuring our good.

In May 2003, Khraisan al Abally was released from detention in Baghdad. American soldiers had stormed his home. According to the family, Khraisan’s brother Dureid thought they were looters. He opened fire on them and was shot. Khraisan was arrested. The Americans apparently believed he knew the whereabouts of General Izzat al Douri, one of the high-ranking Baath Party officers. For eight days and nights Khraisan was forced to kneel semi-naked, hands and feet tied, with a blindfold or under strobe lights with incessant loud music playing. He was repeatedly interrogated and in the course of interrogation, he was told that his brother was dead. When released, his knees were bleeding and swollen. A month after his release, he still had welts where his wrists were tied.

Khraisan al Abally has lodged a complaint against his captors. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have also begun an investigation. The US military response was an official statement that its officers adhere to the rule of law. When questioned further, they stated that sleep deprivation, shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions, noise abuse and from strobe lights are lawful interrogation aides. When questioned about Dureid al Abally, who is missing, they responded that they had no record of a person of that name.

The most disturbing part of this story is if we view it from Khraisan’s point of view. His brother is dead or, at the very least, he believes his brother is dead. The killing of someone he loved is used as part of an interrogation that includes the kind of cruelty and humiliation that any reasonable person would recognise as torture. How is he supposed to tell the difference between how he was treated and how he might have been treated by Saddam Hussein’s interrogators? In the world of this man’s life, this man’s individual experience, is there any real difference between the Americans and Saddam Hussein? If, in the light of this story, we are to maintain there is a difference, we would have to argue that it is a difference in the numbers of people subjected by us to such pain, but given that two Afghans have died under American interrogation from “blunt force injuries”, and given Khraisan al-Abally’s experience, it is hard to maintain an absolute difference in kind. The Americans tortured a man, and killed a family member, or used the incidental killing of a family member, to get information from him. It was not an aberration: it was ‘lawful’. It was, is, standard practice. America has detained several thousand Iraqis in prisons with no accountability and no outside scrutiny. It has not even recorded all the prisoners’ names. We know many more than Khraisan al Abally have been tortured, in lesser or greater degrees, in order to obtain information.

If we sanction at law the torturing of one person, allowing his or her torturers to act lawfully in inflicting humiliation, physical and emotional suffering, if we argue that we kill or torture fewer people than Saddam Hussein did, are we on unassailable territory for defending what we have done? Where is the cut-off point going to be? At what point, at how many tortured, would torture become wrong if we allow it to be lawful at all?

---

A lot of what I have outlined above applies to so many wars that it could be seen to be an age-old and ineffectual discussion against killing, torture and warfare generally. To that I can only say that embarking without due thought on an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a country raises all these questions afresh, and that they need to be discussed in the context of our alliance with America and the judgments we made and make of Iraq. We Australians need to discuss what it means to move towards a world that sees one human life as an acceptable price to pay to get to another, and sees damaging one human body or mind as an acceptable means to obtain information or control, or to send a negative message to others. We need to discuss any shift we make from a notion of universal human rights, not just slide into something else without facing the nature of what we are doing.

Nothing I have said here can change the source of our acquiescence or active support for the war on Iraq. We are afraid. We are sufficiently afraid of 4000 Iraqi refugees to have supported and encouraged our government’s decision to harm them a little to deter other Iraqis from asking for our help. We are sufficiently afraid of terrorism, of Islam, of the taint of Saddam Hussein, that we let ourselves see killing Iraqis as an acceptable price to pay for the perceived lessening of our fear and the increase of our safety. Without this fear, I can’t see that we would have defended our actions in quite the same way – with all the trappings of enmity but no acknowledgment of it. We dehumanised Iraqis, spoke of them as collective victims or collective aggressors, while presenting ourselves as saviours or as agents of retribution. This seems to me to be enmity. Our fear made action an imperative, but we had to manufacture reasons for our fear, and reasons to act.

What if our fear was baseless? What if it came from us, from our lack of connection, understanding or identification with individual Iraqi experience? From our failure to feel our shared humanity? What if it was a phantom? What if we were duped, first of all by ourselves?

What have we let ourselves become?

It is too late to say that this is America, not us. We agreed that America should pursue its objectives in Iraq. We helped them do it. We joined our active will to theirs. We have not pressured our representatives to register any official dismay. We have not yet, at any point, said as a nation: No! That is not what we meant at all.