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The Dismantling of War My office is walking distance from my apartment so on days when I don't feel safe to venture any
further, I cocoon myself on campus. During the last Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's soldiers took over all of the apartments here
and made this place their Kuwaiti headquarters, of course after thoroughly looting everything in site. You can still see
bullet holes in many of the buildings, haunting reminders of the once-powerful Iraqi regime. Also down the street from me is a
ship graveyard. Lying stuck, sideways, in the middle of smelly mud flats, are tattered ships abandoned during Gulf War I.
They are unintentional reminders of the wreckage of war. I went back to America the day before the commencement of Gulf War II. I was safely sequestered in the
United States for the next 2 weeks while those still in Kuwait endured terrifying multiple air raid sirens each day, near-miss
missile threats, and chemical weapon scares. The most visible sign here of the wreckage from Operation Iraqi Freedom is the Souq
Sharq which was blasted by a missile launched from a boat in the Kuwait Bay. This is the market place where I normally go shopping
every week. The first thing I did when I returned here from the U.S. was to visit the damage. Seeing the wreckage on CNN news was
one thing, but actually going to that familiar site and realizing I could have been standing in that very spot during the attack,
was another. I was shocked by the damage--not because it was so extensive, but because I felt personally violated. That missile tore
into MY shopping center. That missile penetrated MY favorite place. That missile blew-up the comfortable seats in MY movie theatre.
I guess war shatters us of our illusions of possessiveness. Nothing in this life is permanent. Everything is always subject to
change, whether that change is well charted or impulsively exploded. As the Blackhawk helicopters fade into the background and the convoy of army trucks become less visible,
the camouflage portrait of war begins to dissolve. Soldiers return home on leave, the throng of news reporters flee to other battling
lands, and peace slowly returns to the scene. The panorama becomes serene, almost as if those blaring sounds and daring threats
had never riled this part of the world. Yes, in Kuwait, at least, things are finally getting back to normal. But the wreckage, good God, the wreckage of war, more must be said about that.
The Iraqi people are still without food, water, electricity, and medicine. Havoc rules their land. Ancient treasures have been
pillaged, perhaps permanently erased from the historical landscape of earliest civilization. Animals in the zoo have starved to
death. And little Ali, the much-publicized Iraqi boy, whose flesh burned away on his chest, whose arms are now nothing more than
3 inch stubs, what will ever help his life get back to normal? Through some kind of strange fate which seems to rule my life while I live in this region of the world,
I stood by Ali's side last week, and looked into his dazed, haunted eyes. As the doctors in the intensive care room yanked the
dead tissue from his torso as caringly as they could, I wanted to scream. Even with anesthesia, Ali moaned and yelled with each
surgical prod. My students and I locked eyes, inquiring of each other “Is this moment really happening?”” Even the girl so afraid
to gaze into my cat eyes, looked imploringly into my baby blues “Why does this little boy have to suffer so?” Being a new mother,
she felt the agony of this child's pain as if it were her own. |
“If the whole world got down on its knees one day and begged the Creator, begged the universe itself, for new life, new solutions to our problems, we just might take a quantum leap in our consciousness and find a creative alternative to battlefields and brigades. And then, maybe, we could celebrate the permanent dismantling of war.” |
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