Though this post cannot trace its genesis back to a conversation with a friend at work, I can say that the ongoing war/conflict in Iraq is a topic much in discussion and reflection for me this last week or so. Three things, really..
1. A coworker/friend just found out someone she knows (in the military) is being deployed to Iraq. She found this out the day after watching Michael Moore’s brilliant piece of non-objective filmmaking, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which I highly recommend if you’re the sort who can appreciate the skill Moore shows in crafting a convincing argument, but do NOT recommend if you’re expecting it to be a documentary without bias. Not surprisingly, the family’s wrestling with the news that one of their own will be going to the highly volatile region that is Iraq.
2. This weekend, I finally got around to watching “Gunner Palace,” which I picked up while traveling earlier in July but hadn’t yet watched. It’s the story of a group of Army soldiers who were using one of Uday Hussein’s palaces as an Army headquarters for patrolling the streets of Baghdad. It was probably one of the only opportunities I’ve had to see pictures of Baghdad that weren’t taken from a rooftop or after a bombing attack. What I took away from the film was that, to the extent possible, life goes on in Baghdad — they had footage from a nighttime hotspot with people, cars, lights everywhere. That’s not the mental image I have of Baghdad, but my mental images are clearly lacking. The film was well worth watching, and purchases of the DVD allegedly support military families — you can read more about that here, just scroll to the June 6 item about the movie release and Fisher House.
3. I’ve just begun reading a book I bought quite a while back called “In the Red Zone.” The author, Steven Vincent, was an art critic/journalist in New York City who felt compelled to go to Iraq on his own — no news outlet underwrote his trip — and see for himself what it was really like there. To my knowledge, the book hasn’t gotten a whole lot of press or critical attention; I heard about it because Vincent came to Dallas for an hour with KERA‘s Glenn Mitchell (one of my favorite radio personalities ever) when the book came out. The Dallas connection is simply that it was published by a Dallas company, Spence Publishing.
For those who want to believe that everything emitted on NPR airwaves is necessarily left-wing liberal propoganda, I’d strongly suggest you read this book. I had no expectations when I started the book yesterday (particularly since his Glenn Mitchell appearance was so long ago I can only remember thinking, “Wow. I should read his book.”) Vincent probably sounds like your typical anti-war liberal; he’s a New Yorker and was once employed as an arts critic, for heaven’s sake. But he’s not. In fact, in the 60 or so pages I’ve read thus far, he’s probably made the best arguments for our intervention in Iraq that I’ve ever heard. From someone who’s been there, without military escort or a media congolomerate dictating what he was allowed to see or report, that carries quite a lot of weight with me.
I could have picked from any number of well-phrased passages, but here’s one I picked mostly at random to give you a taste. If your palette is tempted, take a look at this Reason article he wrote last March, which incorporates several threads I’ve already read in the first 60 pages of the book.
The humor shocked me. I couldn’t imagine making jokes at such a horrific event, but within a few moments, I was laughing, too. The whole scenario, from teh real fact of someone blowing themselves up in a car to the imaginary tale of the falling shoe, seemed the blackest kind of absurdity. Such things just didn’t — couldn’t — happen, I kept thinking, trying to suppress my laughter. It was my first inkling that history would not unfold in Iraq in the reasonable manner we’d expected — that peace and democracy would not rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the old regime. For the situation in Iraq was sliding in the one direction capable of defeating American power and idealism. It was becoming unreasonable.
“We have to laugh about our lives now or we’ll go mad,” Qasim said.
I was beginning to understand.