Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Iraq, Nov 29, 2004
Sinan Antoon (in the white shirt) interviews an Iraqi woman in About Baghdad
"We'll give [the Americans] a chance. If there's no freedom ... they know that the Iraqi people are revolutionary. We won't be silent if we are repressed," says an Iraqi man with a weathered face in the documentary About Baghdad, shot in July 2003. His sentiment is shared by many of the other Iraqis interviewed in the film. But one wonders what he would say today, after seeing the images that have come out of Abu Ghraib and Falluja, and now that it is apparent that the U.S. military has had no viable exit strategy.
Chaos and looting broke out when the Americans bombed Iraq in May 2003, and the country's outlook looks grimmer as the occupation wears on. The film captures through the many Iraqi voices in the film the trauma of this most current war, on top of the pain endured during twelve years of economic sanctions and decades of war and oppression under the rule of Saddam Hussein.
Says a man in a cafe, "The pressure we've endured for 35 years has knocked us off balance. We are only human. We are a mass of nerves. This could only lead to a breakdown. You could say that all Iraqis are schizophrenic."
Other Iraqis in the film regret that the war and the sanctions that preceded it caused them to lose their consciousness, and turn to looting and aggressive behavior towards one another. It is clear in the film that the pride of the Iraqi people, a rich society 7,000 years old, has been wounded - because its cultural riches were plundered by looters, because the U.S. bombing campaigns left its infrastructure devastated, because the humiliation of the U.S. occupation, and because, as some feel the most keenly hurt about, the impotency of its Arab neighbors to do anything to stop it.
About Baghdad was spearheaded by Iraqi-American writer Sinan Antoon, who explains in the film that his intention was to return to his homeland that he left in '91, when his country was "a big prison." He comes to talk to Iraqis to hear what they think of the situation imposed on them, and finds that there is a plurality of opinion regarding the war and its justifications, and it seems that he, as well as the Iraqis his crew films, feel a need to relocate their sense of national identity.
The entrance to the Marty's Monument for those killed during the Iraq-Iran war.
While a handful of the Iraqis featured in the film thought at the time that the U.S. overthrowing Saddam Hussein through military force was a good thing, many more others were bitter towards the way civilians were targeted in the bombing campaigns and how Iraq's schools, libraries, hospitals, and cultural institutions were left unprotected by U.S. forces and looted as a result.
But Iraqi opinion is more nuanced than Americans bad, Iraqi resistance good. One man explains that since the U.S. kept Saddam Hussein in power, they had a responsibility to take him out, just not in the way that they did, which left Iraq's civilian population hurting as well. And while all of the Iraqis in the film are glad to have Saddam gone, many are angry that the U.S. isn't doing a satisfactory job rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure it destroyed, and giving Ahmed Chalabi so much representation of the Iraqi people, when Iraqis, as one man exclaims, "want someone who suffered with us, who went hungry with us, who was thirsty with us, who lived with us, who ate from the same plate with us."
Yanar Muhammed, a human rights activist who publishes a publication that focuses on women's rights and campaigns against honor killings and compulsory veiling of women, explains in the film that her organization approached coalition forces so they could help develop the Iraqi constitution, but were refused participation. While American-style democracy for the Iraqi people is seen in the United States as being a major boon for women, Yanar expresses her frustration that because of U.S. economic sanctions on Iraq, the high rate of educated women in the country was cut in half, and women and children have been hit the hardest by the depression that has resulted.
Schoolgirls at an Iraqi junior highschool. The girl holding the book declares in the film, "Baghdad did not fall. It was occupied."
Artist Amir Tawfiq at al-Firdaws Square. An older poet in the film tears up as he explains how once he waited in line all day with other artists to receive $20 from the coalition authorities, only to be asked to return the next day.
Upon viewing the film, one can't help but wonder if voices like these were featured in the U.S. mainstream media, would there have been a war at all, or at least a war waged without the support of the international community. As journalists in the U.S. admit that they failed to deliver their true responsibility of objective reporting during the pep rally leading up to the war, it seems more and more amazing that the U.S. can go to war on the flimsiest of pretenses, without even representing the people who are on the war's receiving end. How ignorant can a young country such as the U.S. be to attack Iraq and sacrifice its own soldiers, some of whom (like one interviewed in the film), genuinely believe that they are doing for the Iraqis what they could not do for themselves, while ignoring its history of support towards Hussein as he was killing his own people?
While U.S. news reports speak of insurgents and terrorists, graffiti in Baghdad reads, "It is incumbent on Iraq to build democracy." And while books in Baghdad cost more than a teacher's monthly salary, U.S. soldiers put up parking signs over the names of those who died in the monument for the Iraq-Iran war. And while Bush is reelected for a second term, a woman who contracted yellow fever, and therefore unable breast feed her dehydrated son, can't provide her child with adequate medical treatment because Iraq's hospitals don't even have milk. As a cab driver featured in the film puts it, "If not much changes soon, then God help us."
Maureen Clare Murphy, currently living in Ramallah, is Arts, Music, and Culture Editor for Electronic Iraq and its sister site, The Electronic Intifada.
