Bombs Over Baghdad

Look beyond the explosions.

by Brian Howard

I remember where I was the day the Iraq war started.

March 2003. Orlando. At some god-awful hotel conference center covering a marketing convention. I was hoping against hope that someone in Washington would come to their senses and call off the impending invasion. Between sessions, I and a bunch of marketing professionals gathered around televisions in the lobby for updates.

And then it was on.

A bunch of us stood there, slack-jawed, as the blue-green night-vision images of the bombardment of Baghdad commenced and the news anchor introduced us all to the concept of shock and awe.

The attack, for those who've forgotten, was initiated because George W. Bush and Tony Blair had drawn a line in the sand. Get out in 48 hours, they told Saddam Hussein, or else. There were, we were told, weapons of mass destruction.

I'd never really bought the case for WMD (I think I've got a knack for knowing when I'm being lied to). But that's not why I found myself distraught, on the verge of angry tears in a conference full of befuddled Republicans, that muggy day in Orlando.

I was a wreck because I felt like I knew the people whose homes were being destroyed, who were being displaced.

To my knowledge I've never met an Iraqi. But in early 2002 I spent a few intense months in Cairo, a city on a river in the desert that I imagine isn't so much unlike Baghdad before the bombs fell. I met Muslims from a number of Middle Eastern countries. I befriended people with beliefs much different from my own but with concerns not so dissimilar.

Yes, I know that Egyptians and Iraqis are different, and that 800-odd miles separate the capital cities. But when those bombs started falling, all I could picture were Hattem and Said and Said Jr. They, in a twisted sort of way, were the face of the war for me. I had known them; I could imagine people with similar customs, similar faces, similar laughs, being ensnared by this grossly misguided bit of foreign policy. It made me physically ill. (I feel strongly for every family here who's lost a child to this war, too.) It makes me believe that mandatory foreign service — requiring all young Americans to go abroad and meet the people our country too often gets martial with — would do wonders for the nation's grasp of its place in the world.

It's why the story Doron Taussig begins to tell on p. 20, the story of Bassam Sebti, hit me the way it did. What does it say about us as a country that just a few days past Memorial Day, many Americans seem to have forgotten that we're still in a war?

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It's important to see this war, when we do bother to see it, to look beyond explosions and try to imagine the hell living through this war for the last five years has been for families, civilians in Iraq. Reading Bassam's story brought a lot of that back for me.

I was in Maine over Memorial Day weekend visiting my girlfriend's grandparents. Her grandfather, a brilliant and occasionally cantankerous fella, referred constantly to George W. as "your president": "Your president did this ... " and "There's still a warrant for your president's arrest here in Maine ... " (not 100-percent on the veracity of the second one). It's infuriating because it's true. We may not have voted for him, but his legacy is ours.

While there we took a drive up by Kennebunkport and cruised past the lavish Bush compound where George Sr., Barbara and the kids spend/spent summers. (My girlfriend's father, driving the car in front of us, reached his hand out the window and, oh, let's say he "saluted.")

It's ridiculously scenic, a gigantic complex jutting out on the rocks, and kind of galling when you think that the men responsible for disrupting so many lives — here and there — over a line in the sand have this filthy-rich, keep-it-in-the-family estate to drop in on whenever the mood strikes them.

Do they even remember where they were when the war started? Do you?

(bhoward@citypaper.net)