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Memo to Iraq

MEMO TO IRAQ

by Tim Fitzsimons

This month we celebrated the five-year anniversary of George W. Bush’s triumphant landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off of California, where, a mere six weeks into the War in Iraq, he declared in front of a staged rally of sailors that “[i]n the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Mr. Bush was correct; the goals had been realized: we had quickly toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, established control over the country, and few at home in America had been asked to do more than bat an eye.

Since we won that first fight, however, we have lost the war of words and images. In the wake of “Mission Accomplished,” we have seen the horrifying pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, a cell phone video of Saddam Hussein’s botched and barbaric hanging, and front page after front page plastered with images of decapitations and blood running through the streets of Baghdad.

Somehow, despite the fact that this war has gone on for longer than the Civil War and both World Wars, we as a nation have failed to seriously question its continuation. One of the two main candidates for president seeks simply to end American casualties, since he has rightly identified that as the only factor that concerns most of us. We have not been paying close enough attention to the war over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the one that we are losing most terribly. They will always remember.

But we won the War for Iraq. Mission accomplished.

***

Nine months ago, as I was rumbling down the "green tunnel," a tree-lined main throughway in the Kashmir valley, my translator Shabir pointed down a road that flicked by and told me that it led to his village.

I had heard about that village before. He had already explained to me what life was like when the Indian army would conduct a "crackdown," the English word that embodied the brutality of the conflict in that beautiful region of northwest India. In a crackdown, the army would surround a village, corral all of its residents, line up the men old enough to be "insurgents," blindfold them, and then walk down the line with an informer, who would silently finger the accused. Those unlucky enough to be chosen would be whisked away and “disappeared,” never to be seen again.

Recently, the BBC reported that mass graves had been discovered in the valley, suspected to be some of the sites where those disappeared people were finally put to rest.

Kashmir was my introduction to India. Before my flight from New Delhi even touched down on the tarmac at Srinagar airport, I could see hundreds of camouflaged tents behind tall fences surrounding the airport. When I stepped off of the plane, I saw military trucks and barbed wire, and men with machine guns in hand. We were frisked twice before we were permitted to leave the airport, and we were the only ones there. The height of the conflict has long since passed, but so much remains.

As we drove around Srinagar pursuing our story, our car would be pulled over every few hours by the Central Reserve Police Force, and we would both be frisked. Shabir would always get particularly incensed, but never to the police. He would wait until we were speeding away before letting slip some of the rare four letter words he reserved for the “occupiers.”

When Shabir and I would talk about the conflict between Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, he would gaze out of the car window and his mannerisms would change. His emotions would deaden, and he would speak in a sort of robotic way that showed he found the question too difficult to answer fully:

"I think Kashmir should be part of Pakistan," he would say, looking away.
"Why? You already said that you think being part of India makes Kashmir prosperous," I would ask, slowly.
"But you know," (and here he would begin to get especially uncomfortable), "I can't want to go to India. Pakistan is a country for Muslims, and we in Kashmir are Muslim."

But his true feelings shone through his explanation. A day or two before, when he had explained what a crackdown was, I had asked him if it had ever happened in his village when he was a kid. "Yes," he had said simply, "many times." His employer had told me that his village was a hotbed of insurgent activity in the 1990s, so I already knew. Shabir remembered the conflict well. India to him was forever seared into his mind as the force that disappeared all those people from his village, causing so much pain to so many people.

And with that, I learned that the cost of insurgency and counter-insurgency is not one that fades with age. Pay close attention.

This article was published on May 17, 2008 in the Tufts Daily.