Remembering Saint Patrick's Day 2003

On March 17, 2003, I was studying abroad at the American University in Cairo when I watched President Bush give Saddam Hussein forty-eight hours to leave Iraq.  Afterwards, I read a friend’s AOL IM away message: “Saint Patrick’s Day 2003: What do the Irish and the Iraqis have in common? We’re all getting bombed tonight!”

            Fifteen years ago this week, the United States went to war in Iraq.  While that war is by some accounts over, the devastation continues.  It continues for a minority U.S. families, for it is a minority—disproportionately working class—who fights our wars of choice for us.  Their sons and daughters have been killed or permanently maimed, both physically and psychologically.  And the devastation continues for a majority of Iraqis, who died in the hundreds of thousands and who live with the chaos today even after the war is officially over.  

Fifteen years on: Was the Iraq war a crime, or was it a mistake?  

Some very distasteful people built and sold that war.  Tragically, many better people fell for it.  Our indifference, ignorance, and distance, for the most part, allowed the "masters of war" to carry out their "project for the new American century."   The speech from Colin Powell—“one of the good ones” among that neocon troupe—at the United Nations had sealed the deal.

In Cairo, I was still a thousand miles and one time zone away from Iraq, but I fancied myself in the middle of the war and of the drama. There in the self-proclaimed center of the Arab world, millions of impassioned Arabs incensed over what appeared inevitable.  President Mubarak had given the wink and nod to Bush and left the Suez open to navy warships gulf-ward for a little “shock and awe.”  Protests with signs in Arabic, like I had seen in the news before (usually presented eerily), marched right there in Tahrir Square in front of our campus, and the police cracked down—sometimes on skulls.     

A night or two later, on the eve of the invasion, the legendary Edward Said arrived at AUC to give a blistering speech on U.S. foreign policy, as Operation Iraqi Freedom (or, OIF for short) loomed on the horizon.  After Said spoke, a well-known Iraqi oud player, Naseer Shama, gave an intimate concert.  AUC didn’t book Shama purposely for the eve of his country’s invasion, but the drama couldn’t have been scripted better—or worse.                     

            In such a setting, already in Cairo for two months, I could not help but be against the war.   I hope that if I was in South Bend that semester—among my ROTC classmates, among American TV news outlets—I still would have had that same opinion.  As I emailed, IM’ed, called, and read the news from home during the war lead-up, it seemed that I was living in a different world.  I was, in fact.  

There might be very well be, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and later the Byrds said "a time of war".  People in good conscience, I believe, can disagree about a particular fight in a particular time and place.  "Deciders" can arrive at hard or different "decision points.".  And maybe in the end, after fifteen years, people can admit mistakes, and these admissions could be the marks of any healthy-yet-fallible citizenry.  Although, people are less likely to admit crimes.      

People in good conscience can disagree.  We have the duty after all to follow our consciences.  But, and here is the crux, we have the duty first to form our consciences.  And, we don’t do too much conscience formation in this land.  Neither at the individual nor the collective level.  

One of Just War Theory’s prerequisites is a presumption against war.  Yet, here in the United States and probably most other countries, we have a presumption towards war.  War is our default.  We can’t imagine other options.  Maslow famously quipped, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  Therefore, when an impending conflict looms and thoughtful people try to debate, the war drums beat louder and the self-serving and jingoistic tropes get repeated: “If you can’t stand behind our troops, then you should stand in front of them,” I remember from a bumper sticker in Texas.  Or, as I recall reading in several Notre Dame Observer columns, “Your protest gives help to the ‘enemy.’”  A false yet convenient logic.

A deeply embedded militarism and a whitewashed history, from an early age, had greased the skids for the Iraq war.  It is difficult to form a conscience amidst this type of noise.  And, that easy, demand-nothing-from-you patriotism has greased the skids for the next war.  Conscience formation involves truth seeking, but our major news outlets hardly ever present context in any war, and our history books do not adequately teach our atrocities.  We celebrate King, for example, but we leave out his “Beyond Vietnam” speech when he said we were the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  At the most, if we’re lucky, Vietnam is taught as a mistake.  It’s certainly never taught as a crime, despite criminal activity.  There was no serious national reckoning with both the mistakes and the crimes of that war. (Yesterday, March 16, was the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre.)  Thus, upon defeating Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1991, the elder President Bush made it clear that we actually learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam: “We promised this would not be another Vietnam. And we kept that promise. The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”  

And so, twelve years and one Bush later, when we went to war in Iraq again, we were ripe to answer that war cry.  True, many of us did not build or fight or support that war.  If you’re young enough, you probably didn’t even know about it.  But, none of us is blameless.  Today, we remain only "half awake in a fake empire" and readily greased to answer the next war cry.  The other two members of the “Axis of Evil” remain on the chopping block: Iran and North Korea.

My Saint Patrick’s Day, almost-spring, almost-Easter, fifty-years-after-the-My-Lai-massacre, fifteen-years-after-shock-and-awe wish is that we get in the way of the next war.  That we imagine and build something different.  That we learn, for instance, that we are supporting a war in Yemen but that we have the power to stop it.   That we wake up and "practice resurrection."