I went downtown last week to put up posters and ask for signatures. It was April 3, opening day for Major League Baseball, and one of Yogi Berra’s most famous quotes came to mind: “This is deja vu all over again.”
How many times have I done this in the last 20-plus years — asked people to take a stand against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, against the other endless, undeclared wars the US is waging and against any increase in the military budget?
My co-conspirators advise me against the posters and clipboard sheets for signatures. No one is looking up, they’re looking down at their phones. People won’t notice a poster or stop texting to talk to someone with a clipboard. Maybe they were right, but I went out anyway, taking a familiar route from available space to available space to pin or tape a poster.
Postering is the easy part; getting signatures is more difficult. People look at me expectantly when I ask them to sign. Or they hesitate after reading the text, waiting for an explanation. Where should I begin? What can I possibly say that hasn’t been said a million times over millennia about the horror of war, the senseless waste of human life and human resources? I cannot muster the energy for an explanation. I put up lots of posters, but collected only one signature.
I don’t have the energy to articulate an argument against war. I am depressed by daily headlines from Syria that seem a repeat of yesterday’s news, of last year’s news, of news from 20 years ago in Iraq. It is deja vu all over again: chemical weapons, bombing and maiming of civilians, tens of thousands of people displaced and in need of food, clothing and shelter, hospitals destroyed.
I felt numb hearing that as many as — and perhaps more than — 200 civilians had been killed by U.S. air strikes in the city of Mosul on March 17. This, the highest number of casualties reported in a single incident in Iraq in years. Many were women and children who were told, according to later reports, to remain indoors, sheltering in houses, rather that risk their lives fleeing the city.
It was deja vu all over again, reminding me of the bombing of the Amiriyah shelter in February 1991. At the time, Amiriyah was considered to be the “single largest incident of collateral damage that has ever occurred in modern warfare.” Maybe this is still the case. More than 400 civilians, all of them women and children, were killed when the U.S. dropped two 2,000-pound, bunker-busting “smart bombs” on Public Shelter Number 25 in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad. It was the holiday of Eid Al-Fitr; families had gathered to eat and celebrate in safety. After dinner, the men and boys over the age of 15 left; the women, girls and young boys stayed as protection against the intensive bombing in Baghdad that night.
It seems the first bomb that fell created a hole in the 10-foot-thick reinforced concrete and steel roof, leaving the structure intact, but enabling the second bomb to fall into the windowless building where it exploded, sealing the exit doors and burning those inside alive.
Journalist Robert Fisk wrote, “On some parts of the walls, flesh adhered. … Other concrete surfaces were found to be imprinted with the shapes of the human beings who were liquefied in a millisecond at the moment the American missiles exploded. Hiroshima-like, they would leave their memory as a shadow on the walls.”
“We made too many wrong mistakes,” Yogi would say. I visited the Amiriyah shelter, now a shrine to the victims, on my first trip to Baghdad in the winter of 2000-2001. This was two years after I helped start The Northampton Committee To Lift the Sanctions on Iraq. I was still optimistic about building a movement that would change opinion and eventually government policy in Iraq.
I went to Baghdad with 300 drawings and paintings done by children in the Pioneer Valley — goodwill wishes to Iraqi children. I left one of the drawings with our guide, Um Heyder, who said she would add it to their exhibit of art and photographs.
I cannot say how many disasters, in Iraq alone, the U.S. has perpetrated between the Amiriyah bombing of 1991 and the bombing that killed more than 200 civilians last month. There is poor Fallujah, a city so toxic that women are afraid to get pregnant and give birth, a city destroyed over and over again to “save” it.
There is the continuous onslaught of deadly car bombings in Baghdad, listed year after year, including last year, as the most dangerous city in the world. These horrifying disasters grab attention and grab our hearts for a day or two. Then it is on to the next disaster.
Amiriyah is long-forgotten, and the battle of Mosul will be forgotten as well, blips on the screen for most of us in the U.S., those not in the military and living out of harm’s way. These events however, are not and will not be forgotten in Iraq.
What can we possibly do to end this nightmare, this seemingly endless cycle of violence and war that is destroying so many lives and the very planet we are trying to live on? As a first step to waging peace, we can stop bombing. The government can declare an immediate cessation to current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.
The second step is to stop wasting valuable human, intellectual, industrial and financial resources to produce weapons of mass destruction. Talk, negotiate across the challenging but manageable divides of language, culture and politics. Waging peace after so many decades of war will be difficult, but it has to be done.
“The future isn’t what it used to be,” Yogi said. I agree. It is a lot more scary now.
Claudia Lefko, of Northampton, coordinates “Baghdad Resolve: An International Collaboration to Improve Cancer Care in Iraq,” with Dr. Mazin Al-Jadiry at Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital in Medical City Baghdad.