Hulagu Khan is Knocking at the Door
by wu ming
Fri Sep 14, 2007 at 06:05:21 PM PDT
Someone has scratched on a wall inside the National Library [Baghdad], ”Hu-LA-gu Khan has returned and knocked on our door once again”.
- wu ming's diary :: ::
As the LA Times reports today, the civilain death toll in Iraq may have topped One Million People. This is on top of the estimated 2.3 Million Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees (you can read an account by Iraqi blogger Riverbend, an educated secular sunni Baghdad resident here, as her family finally flees to Syria), and quite likely another million or two displaced as refugees within the country but without the means to leave Iraq. Nearly half of the once-proud Iraqi middle class have fled, and few of those who have stayed have any ability to put their educations and skills to work, since the American occupation prefers to hire foreign contractors rather than Iraqis, and nothing stands for long without getting destroyed at any case.
I get so sick of the talk about Iraqi "responsibility" by American politicians, as if all that stands between their current bombed out lake of fire and prosperity is their unwillingness to pull themselves up by their bootstraps or some such blather.
We bombed, starved, bombed, invaded and occupied their country. We divided them by sect and ethnicity in hopes of getting short term allies. We trained the Shiia death squads posing as police. We dissolved the Iraqi government and military and left nothing in its place. We encouraged the rise of sectarian militias to maintain order. We levelled city after city under the auspices of "counterinsurgency," practicing collective punishment with on any city with citizens that dared to shoot back.
Now we talk about allying with the same sunni tribes in al-Anbar that form the backbone of the sunni insurgency, to try and gain a short term PR bounce and the image of progress. We form alliances with actual Iran-linked Badr brigades while trying to blame Iran for a sunni insurgency. We talk incessantly about "al-Qaeda," as if that handful of hated foreign terrorists is anything close to a major player in a country with at least three major civil/sectarian wars (shiite v. shiite in Basra, sunni v. shiia in the increasingly ethnically-cleansed Baghdad, Kurds v. Arabs and Turcomans in Kirkuk) and multiple insurgencies targetting our troops. Madness and lies, ever pointing the finger at everyone but the country actually occupying Iraq, in vain hopes that noone will notice the other four fingers pointing back.
All of this has been done in our name.
And all the time, the Iraqi people got caught in the crossfire, and we let them die and flee in the millions. I could care less about the politicians and militia thugs, but what does a decent human being say to the beleaguered engineer abandoning his home and extended family for penniless exile in a foreign land, or the poor day laborer getting burnt out of his neighborhood because of his ethnicity? Sorry, but we are not responsible for the consequences of our actions, we meant well, buck up old chum? Is that all this country has to say in its defense?
And then the outrageous nonsense about "we have to stay or things will get worse," as if a million dead and four million driven to be refugees isn't horrible? As if that disaster wasn't the direct consequence, predicted by millions of protesters before the war began, of our bloody policy? As if the eventual consequence of our refusing to ever leave won't make things that much worse down the road as well? As if our work to divide the country along sectarian lines for our own political benefit had no consequences? As if there is some magical option B of everything turning out OK if we just bomb more urban areas, kick more doors in and search families at gunpoint, switch sides in Iraqi civil wars yet another time, if we just shovel more dollars into military contractors and mercenaries' pockets?
How stupid do they think we are, to think that one can make things better by doing the same damn thing for a longer time?
In 1258, the Mongol General Hulagu Khan marched on Baghdad. Unlike previous seiges, the city was sacked even after it surrendered, and the once-shining was torn apart, with a degree of ferocity so intense that, as the grafitto above reflects, his name has been synonymous with barbarity and mindless cruelty ever since. The Tigris and Euphrates were chokes with corpses, Baghdad's legendary libraries were put to the torch, the cultural center of the Abbasid Empire never regained its former glory.
It is a source of great shame for this American that we are beginning to rival Hulagu Khan for historical legacy in Baghdad.
Originally at surf putah. Credit to Marisa for the image of the graffitto
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