Rethinking the War against Iraq

Abstract

IntroductionA question that had dogged me for years prior to living in Iraq in 2000 came into sharp focus while sitting in shade of a tree in courtyard of Al-Hamra hotel, located in a suburb of Baghdad.1 According to mainstream public discourse in Canada, and in places where I travelled in United States in years following my first two visits to Iraq in 1991, country was no longer experiencing war. Gulf War, according to this discourse, had ended in 1991. Yet in years following 1991 everything I knew about unfolding situation in Iraq suggested neither resolution nor a return to normalcy. While living in Iraq nine years later, I saw and experienced evidence of a country under severe duress. The continuing economic, social and physical devastation of country, air raid sirens and sound of bombs exploding that I heard in north and south of Iraq, all spoke to a violence that smacked of war. I was disturbed by disjuncture between my own observations, experiences and perceptions-gained by years of critically reading reports generated by observers and researchers on ground, as well as by speaking with a constant stream of people returning from region-and mainstream understanding of the Gulf War as a past event. Sitting in Baghdad under tree at Al-Hamra hotel, I asked: Why did we stop calling this a war?Upon returning to Canada in May 2001, I reread Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and Holocaust (1989). In its opening pages he tells story of how he searched sociological literature in vain for anything that would elucidate Holocaust, which had for him a deeply personal significance. He writes:Such sociological studies as have been completed so far show beyond reasonable doubt that Holocaust has more to say about state of sociology than sociology in its present shape is able to add to our knowledge of Holocaust. This alarming fact has not yet been faced (much less responded to) by sociologists. (Bauman 1989: 3)While I do not equate Holocaust with tragedy of war against Iraq, this passage did strike a chord with me. First, in a similar vein I am concerned to understand war against Iraq-not highly manufactured event that people call the Gulf War or later the Iraq War; but rather, war that I came to know over course of a decade and a half of direct involvement with it.Secondly, although I found some anthropological literature useful in my efforts to understand war against Iraq (Bringa 1995; Nordstrom 1997; Nordstrom 2004b; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004) overall, anthropology of war contributed very little to my effort. With a few notable exceptions, one anthropologist observes in a review of anthropology and war, have barely studied modern wars, and when modern war is treated as a subject, it is why behind fighting and aftermath of it-not how or process-that receives most (Simons 1999:74). It is notable that this same reviewer throughout her paper draws attention to numerous wars in decade prior to her article, but war against Iraq in any form is barely mentioned in passing (1999: 83n9, 84). Indeed, war against Iraq is rarely mentioned, let alone analyzed; an oversight which can be seen in numerous collections of essays and review articles published by anthropologists on subject of war and violence between 1990 and 2003 (e.g., Ferguson 2003b; Nordstrom and Robben 1995; Schmidt and Schroder 2001; Stewart and Strathern 2002). A few anthropologists have addressed this startling lacuna, although they have always framed it with other concerns such as racism, globalization, environmental degradation or the war against terror, and never with attention to definitional and theoretical problems raised by war against Iraq as a subject itself (Aziz 1997; Feldman 1994; Gonzalez 2004; Nordstrom 2004a). …