Where “pulling out” doesn’t just relate to porn.
During Sunday’s live webcast, I addressed a reader question asking what I think of the Iraq war; I pointed out that Americans don’t understand enough about Iraqi culture to even try to govern it. After reading the news this morning…I can’t help but conclude that we don’t even understand enough about Iraqi culture to comprehend the slightest effect that we have on their society. Unfortunately, I think most of us don’t really care, either. Many Americans are of the opinion that Iraq will be fine once it’s become a homogenized little mini-America, just another annexed territory with a bit of a transAtlantic leap between.
Hopefully for the Iraqi people…that will never happen.
Gays Living in Shadows of New Iraq - NYTimes.com
BAGHDAD — In a city and country where outsiders are viewed with deep suspicion and attracting attention can imperil one’s life, Mohammed could never blend in, even if he wanted to.
Mohammed, 37, has been openly gay for much of his adult life. For him, this has meant growing his hair long and taking estrogen. In the past, he said, that held little danger. As is true throughout the Middle East, men have always been publicly affectionate here.
But, at least until recently, Mohammed and many of his gay friends went one step further, slipping into lovers’ houses late at night. And, until the American invasion, they said, Iraqi society had quietly accepted them.
But being openly gay is not an option in the new Iraq, where the rise of religious extremism has left Mohammed and his gay friends feeling especially vilified.
In January, a United Nations report described the increased persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing of Iraqi lesbians and gay men. In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”
He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe. They yearn to leave Iraq, but do not have the money or visas. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their last names not be used.
They described an underground existence, eked out behind drawn curtains in a dingy safe house in southwestern Baghdad. Five people share the apartment — four gay men and one woman, who says she is bisexual. They have moved six times in the last three years, just ahead, they say, of neighborhood raids by Shiite and Sunni death squads. Even seemingly benign neighborhood gossip can scare them enough to move.
“We seem suspicious because we look like a cell of terrorists,” said Mohammed, nervously fingering the lapel of his shirt. “But we can’t tell people what we really are. A cell, yes, but of gays.”
His hand drifted to his newly shorn hair. He had lopped it off days earlier. There had been reports of extremists stopping long-haired men, shearing their hair and forcing them to eat it.
It is impossible to say how many gay men and women face persecution in Iraq. According to an Iraqi gay rights group, run by a former disc jockey in Baghdad named Ali Hili who now lives in London, 400 people have been killed in Iraq since 2003 for being gay.
Set against the many thousands of civilians and soldiers killed in the war, the number is small. But for Mr. Hili, and Mohammed and his friends, it is a painful barometer of just how far Iraq has shifted from its secular past. [Read more for a description of gay life in Iraq before the occupation.]
Truth told I, like anyone, often don’t fully appreciate the impact of something until it touches on something deeply personal to me. This, more than anything, more even than the body counts and the horrific news reports of bombings and siege, has made me realize the profound and lasting effect that the American invasion has had on Iraqi culture. It’s sobering, it’s painful, and it’s probably entirely selfish that it took that for me to view the occupation through such personal eyes and really take a moment to feel something for the Iraqi people beyond logical assessments of why Americans shouldn’t be occupying Iraq. I can’t help that. That’s human. Willful blindness, self-absorbed preoccupation.
That’s the way many of us are, to some extent. Iraq is “over there”; it’s a political issue, not a matter of real people with real lives that have been forever altered by something beyond their control. We feel strongly about the politics, about the people who agree and disagree with us, but we don’t extend our compassion and our understanding of the Iraqis as people unless we’ve been there or unless we find something that strikes a chord in us and makes it so very deeply personal.
Mohammed’s story and the stories of other gays in Iraq have made this personal for me. I’ve felt for a long time that America should pull out of Iraq, but that feeling has only intensified as this forces me to look beyond not just the issues of how the American occupation has changed gay life there, but how it’s changed other aspects as well. Their entire society has changed; we’ve destroyed parts of their culture that can never be retrieved, affected political balances, increased religious, social, and political intolerance, and in some cases created the very atmosphere of fear and terror that we claim to be fighting a protracted and useless war against. Life is naturally made up of disastrous changes, and one either adapts and survives, or fails - but the changes we’ve wrought in Iraq aren’t natural. They aren’t beneficial. And the Iraqi people won’t recover from them for a very, very long time.
It’s like engaging in battle over fertile fields. Your battle, won or lost, may be all that matters to you at the time…but in the process the fruits of those fields are destroyed, trampled carelessly underfoot while you’re too busy looking on to your opponent. Eventually the battle will end; the land will clear, and the bodies will be removed, enshrouded, and buried. But the great trenches of war will remain; the land ravaged and stomped by a thousand feet, razed by fire, poisoned by the substances of war. It’s only when the fight has moved on that the land may start to recover, and the people of that land can move in to nurture it slowly back to health - even though its shape and character have changed entirely, and it may never be what it once was, may never grow as it once did.
The Iraqi people are both that field, its fruit, and its tenders.
And we’ve trampled on them long enough.
iraq war, iraqi people, gay iraqis
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December 18th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Unfortunately, I think the situation is not clear and simple at all.
Iraq is more religious now than it was then, true. But that is because its religious leaders were suppressed by a brutal dictator. Now if we leave Iraq, it will be to the mercies of the religious extremists.
And we can’t really help that. We do have to leave the Iraqi people to decide their own future. All we can do is make sure that it *doesn’t* fall to the foreign religious extremists with the biggest guns, because the more willing they are to use those guns… well, the more willing they are to use those guns, whether on us or on the Iraqi people.
Of course, the minute we pull out of Iraq, stories like this will dry out. If we do it quickly enough, it’ll be just like Iran, where there ARE no homosexuals. Really.
December 18th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
I’m sure my opinion isn’t helpeful at all, or in any way sympathetic or compassionate, but if a culture wants to destroy itself, I say let it.
Indikaze - Religious extremists pretty much exist wherever there is religious freedom, and wherever there isn’t. And people with big guns will use them on whoever they want.
We shouldn’t make sure of anything with a culture we only remotely understand, it’s for them to decide, not us. If they’re too weak to stand up for themselves, they can either ask for help or die. It’s not our decision to help a people if they don’t want our help.
I don’t think many US citizens realize that we’re the ones that make some of the monsters of the world.
December 18th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Hello Adri, I just downloaded/listened to your LiveBroadcast- late I know. But I thought it was very good [and entertaining!So much humor^^]. You really can think fast on your toes can’t you? I agree about getting out of Iraq though, we’ve long overstayed our visit. PS: Even if you didn’t like your broadcast, I think another live boradcast would be awesome in the future- after a long day of college testing it made my day!=)
December 18th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Indikaze - Religious extremists pretty much exist wherever there is religious freedom, and wherever there isn’t.
Aaaaand? The goal isn’t to wipe out extremists, just eliminate their physical power. After that, they can be as douchebaggy as they want.
I agree that we shouldn’t waste our time helping people who refuse to be helped, when there are so many people who need that help more. I am not convinced that this is such a situation.
Some want us here. Some want us gone. Listening to only the second kind (because they’re the ones SHOOTING at us) and claiming “that’s what they want” is self-deceiving. If we’re going to be cowards about the whole thing, we might as well be *honest* cowards.
I don’t care *what* the Iraqi people should decide their “culture” should be. But it should be decided by THEM, not by the stupid foreigners (on BOTH sides) splashing propaganda and machine-gunning civilians who don’t agree with them.
Incidentally, I also don’t agree with the Iraqi war–mostly because of the incompetence with which it’s been handled–but that’s a separate issue.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
…Hate to double-post, but I didn’t make something clear before.
I *am* for pulling out of Iraq, within the next two years if possible (sooner would be nice, but under the current political climate… hah). But I can’t agree that the war was fundamentally wrong from the start, and am not convinced that an immediate pullout is for the best. Commitment would be nice though.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
The problem, Indikaze, is that your ideals have no more practical application than any others. It’s pretty much just as impossible to remove the physical power of religious extremists as it is to wipe them out. You can legislate against them, but laws don’t exactly stop people like that, even in the face of penalties.
There’s neither self-deception nor cowardice in acknowledging that we no longer have any business in Iraq, and our presence is harming even those that want our help. Choosing which side to listen to is a lose/lose situation, and a prolonged stay isn’t going to improve the situation. No matter when we pull out, things are going to collapse in our wake; our intervention has weakened the country’s internal structure, and we failed in providing a timely and crucial basis to restructure. Better to leave sooner while there’s more left to rebuild and fewer people dead on both sides as a direct result of American occupancy. That will leave things open for more deaths as a result of religious extremism, but that would have happened with or without us. The problem was there before America arrived. The problem will remain afterwards. We tend to think we’re the world’s problem-solvers, but we can’t be in this situation.
There’s no magical fix-it solution for the Iraq war. No matter what you, I, or anyone comes up with as an ideal for what “should” happen, the end result is still an unstable disaster incapable of self-sufficiency. I say we take responsibility for helping to cause that, but also accept that we’ve made an irreparable mistake rather than blundering about like clumsy children, trying to make reparations that do more harm than good.
As far as the fundamental rightness or wrongness of the war…we’ll have to agree to disagree there. That’s too knotty to waste hours debating, and neither of us will ever sway the other.
Also: I’ve been trying to be polite and bite my tongue about this, but on a side note? If you can’t respond to other commenters without being snotty, don’t comment at all. I’m used to shrugging you off and pretty much ignoring you; years of experience and such. Other people aren’t.
December 18th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Just wanted to say: I only said that there would be religious extremists regardless or anything, suppression or no. I didn’t say anything about wiping them out. They are a natural result of humanity’s fundamental stupidity.
December 18th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
I agree, Adri, that you can never really change people’s minds on the war. Personally, I supported it on the information that we had back in 2002 (as did the vast majority of the congress, DoD staff, White House staff, and the American public). I continue to support the effort to strengthen the elected government of Iraq, but even my saint-like patience is being worn thin.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:59 am
You kidding? Bush and his cronies are probably having a heyday over this kind of thing. They’d execute the gays in America if they could get away with it.
December 19th, 2007 at 4:45 am
[...] Sanders wrote an interesting post today on Where âpulling outâ doesnât just relate to porn.Here’s a quick [...]
December 19th, 2007 at 5:10 am
“(…)and in some cases created the very atmosphere of fear and terror that we claim to be fighting a protracted and useless war against.”
Erm, I don’t think so. Yes, it did create such atmosphere. But no, I don’t think this war was ever meant to protect them from anything in the first place. It’s old mistakes all over again (?). They shouldn’t be there, period.
In my opinion, if they wanted to get their hands on that territory,they could have waited for them to self-destruct.
I don’t like wars. I don’t like direct violent approaches. I prefer subtle calculated violent approaches- if there’s a need for violent approaches. Wars destroy cultures. So does silent consent. =/
- “We’re kicking ass.” –George W. Bush, on the security situation in Iraq, to Australian Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile, Sydney, Australia, Sept. 5, 2007 -
December 19th, 2007 at 5:21 am
Er…Lux, if you aren’t disagreeing that such an atmosphere was created, then what part of that statement are you disagreeing with? That the poorly-named War on Terror that I was referring to exists? Check out U.S. news headlines more often. They won’t shut up about it. I’m not sure if you’re confusing the word “protracted” with “protected” or if you’re referring to something else.
Anonymous: While no doubt Bush and his cronies stand on a high soap box about their beliefs on gays, I can’t really see anyone in elected office in America going so far as to want to execute gays. Yeah, I know, a lot of them are kill-switch happy regarding the death penalty, but they do at least seem to understand the difference between what they consider a sin and a crime, and while the two are sometimes synonymous, they aren’t always.
Hikaru: It’s a noble ideal to support the effort to strengthen Iraq’s government; I just…don’t really know if there’s anything we can do that will actually help. But yeah, you’re right about not being able to change anyone’s mind on the war. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone is convinced their opinion is the only right one. War tends to bring that out in people.
…I’m supposed to be asleep. ~crawls back into bed~
December 19th, 2007 at 5:26 am
Anonymous: I think you meant “field day”, not “heyday”. And I really doubt that for all Bush’s faults, he thinks executing ten percent of the American population would be just fine and dandy. He’s misguided, but I don’t exactly think he’s evil.
December 19th, 2007 at 7:12 am
I didn’t even notice the protract vs. protect. Now that I look at it, it’s funny =P
“(…)and in some cases created the very atmosphere of fear and terror that we claim to be fighting a - adjectives- war against.”
Being useless and protracted don’t change the fact that it is going on - we agree on that. Also, it’s supposed to be a war against fear and terror in order to protect the people from it - and that’s where we disagree.
Oh, and the silent consent thing is not about the press. It’s about the people. There is no war if the people don’t want it. Even if you say the press and lots of people don’t want it, I don’t see them stopping it. Shouting out to the world “we don’t like it” is not the same as not consenting.
Nyah. You’re supposed to be asleep and I wish I were still asleep. =P
Btw, add as many “in my opinion” as you see fit. I usually forget them. =)
December 19th, 2007 at 7:20 am
hmm… it seems weird…
“Being useless and protracted don’t change the fact that it is going on”
lol
You get the point, right? Hehe.
Oh, and sorry about the double post.
December 19th, 2007 at 7:46 am
“Also, it’s supposed to be a war against fear and terror in order to protect the people from it - and that’s where we disagree.”
We can’t disagree on something I never stated one way or another in the first place. You and I are talking about two entirely different things, and I never said anything about the purpose of the American-led “War on Terror” having anything to do with protecting people.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:15 am
Nyah. My bad then. Sorry xP
Although I didn’t really mean it like that… I meant to disagree with things being supposed to be something. Since I don’t even think they were supposed to be what it’s claimed they were supposed to… erm… I guess that’d be it… or not. o.O
yeah, “disagree” was a bad choice…
Sometimes I lose track of what I wanted to say. It’d take me hours to figure out my own thoughts… So, please, forget it. I might have gotten it all wrong anyway.
I’ll go get coffee… want some? -.-
December 19th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Yes, please, on the coffee. I’m working on today’s article right now and the coffee would be a much-needed boost to get my thoughts in order, because they aren’t working right now.
On the war on terror: the U.S. claims to be fighting a war against terror, terrorists, terrorism, and its tactics. That can’t be argued with; it’s just a point of fact. The claimed motives are for freedom, equality, and the safety of our people and the Iraqi people. Those are the claimed motives put forward by the administration. Do I think those are the actual motives? No, not really, and I don’t really think the administration is all that interested in protecting people the way they say they are. Likely you and I agree on the possible real motivation behind the war on terror, but got tangled up in language.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:19 am
“Oh, and the silent consent thing is not about the press. It’s about the people. There is no war if the people don’t want it. Even if you say the press and lots of people don’t want it, I don’t see them stopping it. Shouting out to the world “we don’t like it” is not the same as not consenting.”
Lux: I’m not sure how much you actually know about the workings of the U.S. government, but we are not a pure democracy - we are a republic. A republic chooses its representatives, who in turn make decisions for the people as a whole. War “on terror” was declared by the president, that’s true; however, it takes Congress to declare war by a majority vote.
Congress has not formally declared war, either in Afghanistan or in Iraq. So, it has nothing to with us “not stopping it”. Both houses of Congress have been trying to come up with a solution to the conflict in Iraq practically since it began in the spring of 2003.
You hold a simplistic and naive view of how the United States actually works. It is a complicated thing to extricate ourselves from what’s going on in the Middle East, and you can’t just “stop it”. How do you propose we “stop it”? Shall we, the blue-state voters, congregate in front of the White House and then storm it, and put a gun to President Bush’s head until we force him to make a few phone calls that would effectively end our occupation of Iraq, or of Afghanistan?
And furthermore, may I politely ask what gives you, a citizen of Brazil, the right to give us your inexpert, uneducated viewpoint on the subject at all?
December 19th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Anji, darlin’, I love you to death, but I’m going to have to tell you what I told Indikaze (whom I love to a significantly lesser degree not involving corpsifying). You had a good point going up until that last line. Too far, babe. Too far. Educate each other, disagree, but keep it civil. This is an adult discussion forum, and I expect people to be able to discuss conflicting views and enjoy themselves without either getting personal or snide. Humor’s one thing (and Indikaze may have thought she was being funny up there, who knows), but there’s a line.
I’m asking everyone to try not to cross it, because frankly, flame wars give me a headache and I’d rather avert them before they start.
Also, because this appears to be an increasing problem with more than one person: before you jump to conclusions and attack someone else’s stance on something, make sure they’re actually saying what you assume they’re saying. There are a few people here who like to put words in my mouth, and put words in the mouths of other commenters, and have done so on more than one occasion; out of politeness I won’t point fingers, because it’s something everyone needs to be aware of anyway. If you disagree with what’s actually being said, that’s fine; present your opinion, open up the floor for debate, etc. But don’t elaborate on what was said by adding your own view of what wasn’t said in order to give you more to argue against - and please remember that this is the internet, text has no vocal inflections, and whatever tone of upset or hysteria you may be reading in anyone’s posts or comments likely isn’t there.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I apologize, Adrien. Won’t happen again.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:32 am
Thanks, darlin’.
Jesus monkey snot, I’m supposed to be finishing today’s post. ~goes back to work~
December 19th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Nyah. I think I’m at fault too. My apologies.
I know I seem naive. But there is a difference between what I think that should be done and what I know that can be done. Although it doesn’t change the fact that I still think something other than what can be done should be done. Actually, I also don’t think that what can be done is being done, so… blah, blah, blah.
It’s all a matter of different opinions and lack of communication. Just so you know, Anji, Brazil is a republic too. =)
December 19th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Sorry, Adri; I wasn’t trying to be funny, but I do hold myself to different standards of debate than a lot of people do. Often I’m intentionally provocative, as well as insensitive. I sincerely apologize if I’ve offended you, Amanda.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
…I’m also not very good at the whole “tact” thing. And I hate this comment system with fiery death-passion.
December 19th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Lux: S’okay.
Indikaze: Yeah, you and that whole deliberately-inflammatory thing is why I rarely bother responding to your comments, especially since you have a habit of twisting what I’ve said. There’s not much point in debating something that’s borderline flamebait.
It’s possible to be both provocative and tactful, though. I do it all the time, with varying degrees of success. Granted, I’m not doing a good job of it in this particular comment, but at least I’m aware of it. Sorta. Kinda. What is awareness, really?
Okay, I’ll stop being silly. I have work to do.
December 25th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
[...] on an active tour of duty in Iraq (and you wonder why, despite my stated apathy towards my family, I’d like to just bring the soldiers home?), and my mother’s taken on the responsibility of looking after her kids while she’s [...]