this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters
cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.
image and poem below the fold
An Iraqi detainee sits next to children as US and Iraqi soldiers search houses in Tal Afar, northern Iraq, September 14, 2005. Mohammed Younis welcomed a US army patrol outside his house in the formerly rebel-held Iraqi town of Tal Afar, pleading with them to stay. Three days later, they detained him.
(AFP/Ali Khalil)
The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah
(An Old Persian Legend)
by James Fenton
to C. E. H.
It started with a stabbing at a well
Below the minarets of Isfahan.
The widow took her son to see them kill
The officer who’d murdered her old man.
The child looked up and saw the hangman’s work —
The man who’d killed his father swinging high,
The mother said: ‘My child, now be at peace.
The wolf has had the fruits of all his crime.’
From felony to felony to crime
From robbery to robbery to loss
From calumny to calumny to spite
From rivalry to rivalry to zeal
All this was many centuries ago —
The kind of thing that couldn’t happen now —
When Persia was the empire of the Shah
And many were the furrows on his brow.
The peacock the symbol of his throne
And many were the jewels and its eyes
And many were the prisons in the land
And many were the torturers and spies.
From tyranny to tyranny to war
From dynasty to dynasty to hate
From villainy to villainy to death
From policy to policy to grave
The child grew up a clever sort of chap
And he became a mullah, like his dad —
Spent many years in exile and disgrace
Because he told the world the Shah was bad.
‘Believe in God,’ he said, ‘believe in me.
Believe me when I tell you who I am.
Now chop the arm of wickedness away.
Hear what I say, I am the great Imam.’
From heresy to heresy to fire
From clerisy to clerisy to fear
From litany to litany to sword
From fallacy to fallacy to wrong
And so the Shah was forced to flee abroad.
The Imam was the ruler in his place.
He started killing everyone he could
To make up for the years of his disgrace.
And when there were no enemies at home
He sent his men to Babylon to fight.
And when he’d lost an army in that way
He knew what God was telling him was right.
From poverty to poverty to wrath
From agony to agony to doubt
From malady to malady to shame
From misery to misery to fight
He sent the little children out to war.
They went out with his portrait in their hands.
The desert and the marshes filled with blood.
The mothers heard the news in Isfahan.
Now Babylon is buried under dirt.
Persepolis is peeping through the sand.
The child who saw his father’s killer killed
Has slaughtered half the children in the land.
From felony
to robbery
to calumny
to rivalry
to tyranny
to dynasty
to villainy
to policy
to heresy
to clerisy
to litany
to fallacy
to poverty
to agony
to malady
to misery —
The song is yours. Arrange it as you will.
Remember where each word fits in the line
And every combination will be true
And every permutation will be fine:
From policy to felony to fear
From litany to heresy to fire
From villainy to tyranny to war
From tyranny to dynasty to shame
From poverty to malady to grave
From malady to agony to spite
From agony to misery to hate
From misery to policy to fight!
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read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
Leonard Clark’s blog has been taken down
witness every day
Destroying an entire culture and country while creating a land filled with nothing but heartache, death and disease.
Iraq: The land of evacuees, refugees, detainee and the dead and the living who mourn them.
The thing that grabbed me most about this photo was the notion of shame/humiliation. That was the idea that came to me as I looked at the men, with their hands bound in the presence of thier children.
I don’t think that there’s a more powerful human emotion than shame – not anger or hatred or any other – because I think that those negative emotions spring from shame.
That’s why the modes of torture at Abu Ghraib were so strong, and insidiously evil – because they were selected and implemented to evoke shame.
I also think that so much of what we do, as a culture, is done to avoid the appearance of being shamed. That’s why repubs won’t apologize for anything, or admit mistakes – they think it’s shameful to do so.
That’s also why I even used ‘shame’ as the key word to find this poem – which is a whole ‘nuther matter.
We have done much to shame a country, an entire region and culture (religion) of people. And in so doing we have unleashed a monster, which I think is what the poem gets to.
Makes one wonder, doesn’t it? :o(
Yes, Brenda – fellow nurse, it does. I responded to DJ above as part of my response to your question – it makes us wonder.
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The clinic where my wife worked as an internist, has been shut down. All of my daughters are doctors and have escaped the last year.
The streets are unsafe, you are a prisoner in your own house, in your own neighborhood. You leave your home only when it’s absolutely necessary. The last few weeks I have moved most of my precious items out, shipped them to Jordan.
This is my country, my body leaves, but my heart will be forever here, where I was born and lived all my life.
I have lived through the perils of the Iran war and the campaign of the Kuwait invasion, and the U.S. Gulf War. Many years of U.N. sanctions caused great suffering, but what I see today in Baghdad is WORST. Civilians feel unsafe and cannot live their lives. Many are targeted from different sides, so I must now leave my country.
I don’t think I will come back. It will take ten years to reach any improvement so the Iraqis can feel safe, secure and have a decent administration in the city and the country.
Millions of Iraqis have left Iraq and have chosen their new home in Jordan, Syria or Egypt.
SPREADING FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY!
An interview and report by CNNi today.
Baghdad Sept. 11, 2005 — It has been four years today. How does it feel four years later?
For the 3,000 victims in America, more than 100,000 have died in Iraq. Tens of thousands of others are being detained for interrogation and torture. Our homes have been raided, our cities are constantly being bombed and Iraq has fallen back decades, and for several years to come we will suffer under the influence of the extremism we didn’t know prior to the war.
Iraqi women and girls stands in line at an Iraqi Red Crescent camp for people displaced by fighting in Tal Afar, Iraq, 420 kilometers (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad. There are now four thousand people living in the camp, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent. AP Photo/Jacob SilberbergAs I write this, Tel Afar, a small place north of Mosul, is being bombed. Dozens of people are going to be buried under their homes in the dead of the night. Their water and electricity have been cut off for days. It doesn’t seem to matter much though because they don’t live in a wonderful skyscraper in a glamorous city. They are, quite simply, farmers and herders not worth a second thought.
The Islamic Army in Iraq, which has previously claimed responsibility for kidnappings and killings of foreigners, made a bounty offer for the assassination of key Iraqi officials. The group called in a website posting for its “holy fighters to strike the infidels with an iron fist.” It offered $100,000 to the killer of al-Jaafari, $50,000 for the interior minister and $30,000 for the defence minister.
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Oui – You’ve left many comments and responses, but I know very little about you before this post.
Can you tell me more about yourself, and why you visit and respond to my diaries? I really want to know.
Thanks, RubDMC
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Death of 100,000+ innocent Iraqis.
Damnit Janet, BrendaStewart, MilitaryTracy and many others who comment regularly, voice a permanent concern over the U.S. invasion and presence in Iraq. The DSM – see Senator Conyers – and the Blair facade in the UK defines the exploitation of FEAR to impose a war of choice on all Americans, through lies and deceit.
Your daily diaries keeps attention to this ill-conceived adventure and the permanent fracture of a society – in Iraq and the devide cause in our nation. Brings forward all bad memories about the sixties, and the same adventure of Vietnam with suffering and deaths of millions. Caused a rift in US society which never healed, see SVBT and Gannon.
To read a bit about myself, see my user info and diaries @BooMan or here and here.
Please keep up these diaries until suffering in Iraq, caused by US invasion, has stopped. Thanks.
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Arabic News Website with some links – another view.
Tony Blair has frequently played a pivotal role in the infighting in the US administration over Iraq, according to the recently retired British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer. Hawks in the Bush administration, mainly the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, pushed for an attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11.
Sir Christopher said in an interview, that the prime minister, arriving in Washington the week after an inconclusive discussion between George Bush and his key advisers at Camp David, swung in behind the US secretary of state Colin Powell, who saw Afghanistan as the prime target.
In the documentary Blair’s War, Sir Christopher, who returned to Britain last month, said that when Mr Blair met Mr Bush in the weeks after September 11, he urged him to deal first with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network and its protector – Afghanistan’s Taliban government – before tackling Iraq.
“Tony Blair’s view was, ‘Whatever you’re going to do about Iraq, you should concentrate on the job at hand’. And the job at hand was get al-Qaida, give the Taliban an ultimatum,” the former British ambassador said.
Sir Christopher added that Mr Bush took Mr Blair aside and promised he would keep Iraq “for another day”.
I personally believe from past years, Tony Blair is his pursuit “to do good”, had from the mid-nineties the goal of democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people. That was his motivation, once he had immense power through a vast majority in parliament, nothing could stop him. Everything else was fixing the means with false intelligence and to establish some legality – the path through the UN, prematurely aborted by not giving UN inspectors ample time. The rest is poor leadership, not evaluating all options, not listening to opposing arguments and views, and in the end he himself decided to walk the path to war with George Bush.
A Sunday’s child, who had all go his way throughout his life and political career, and never was confronted with a challenge, he could not fix to be resolved.
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