Art and Politics / Politics and Art

Gulf War

46 Gulf War When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together; when the graves are hurled about; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do. —Qur’an, 82:1 Eighty thousand sorties nonstop express over Baghdad a sound-and-light show takeout boxed into your livingroom (you can only see the nightskytop on TV; the bloody bottom of the picture mars the image). Look at the stars!1 look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! Smart bombs and cruise missiles, F-16 fighter jets, Patriot antimissiles and rocket hardware. Everyone wants them now. (Was this a carnage commercial?) In the bomb shelter children are sleeping in the arms of their mothers. Not hungry, having supp’d full with horrors.2 Are targeted. Deliberately hit. Well, enemies are enemies. May hide anywhere. 1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Starlight Night.” 2. Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.13. The reference here is to an actual occurrence, in which the air force corrected the misconception that the bombing of an air-raid shelter was accidental. 47 Your red-and-white kaffiyeh was edged with lace crocheted by your mother in the family’s pattern. You wore a blue bead to ward off evil. It didn’t work. Iraq is a dry place, mostly, dry as cobblestones, and hot. “Iraq, with its Soviet-style strategy and Soviet-made arms, was the kind of opponent the Army has spent decades preparing to fight.”3 No figures, as yet, on civilian deaths. Maybe a hundred thousand. Plus a hundred thousand soldiers. A thousand of theirs to one of ours. We’re still number one. Try to make sense of it— boys who will kill other boys who will kill children asleep in the arms of their mothers and their mothers asleep with them. Arms and armaments twist into smoke. Even the tanks writhe and scream. Men and women kneel in the prayerful dust of ancient cities, in the new museum of bones and shell fragments. Daily they kneel five times, facing Mecca. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates Mesopotamia once flourished. The Tigris and the Euphrates carried great deposits of silt. The Tigris and the Euphrates 3. New York Times editorial, March 30, 1991. 48 carry dead bodies to be oiled in the Persian Gulf. Cheetah, hyena, wolf, jackal, desert hare, and small mammals, the jerboa. The vulture, the raven, the owl, the hawk. In the west the country is nearly treeless. Places devoid of vegetation except for the bush of Christ’s thorn. “Although many think of it as a lifeless place, the desert is actually a teeming, though fragile, ecosystem. Home to a variety of spiders, snakes and scorpions as well as larger creatures like camels, sheep and gazelles, it is literally held togetherbymicroorganisms,whichformathinsurfacecrust. This crust catches the seeds of sparse shrubs and prevents surface soil from blowing away. Once it is disturbed—by the maneuvers of a million soldiers, say—recovery can take decades. The Libyan desert still shows tank tracks laid down in World War II.”4 The Mesopotamian desert is strewn with the ruins of ancient cities, their royal tombs and hecatombs. In Sumer, five dynasties ruled before the Flood. The first capital was founded at Kish by 4000 BC. Sippar lay on the edge of the glacial shoreline. South of Sippar rose Akkad and its armies of Sargon. 4. Time, March 18, 1991, 37. Information on Iraq is culled from various reference works. 49 Below Cuthah stood the great temples of Kish. Fifteen miles westward lie the ruins of Babylon. When the Euphrates changed course, it deserted its settled embankments. In the south, lakes became marshland. Now ancient cities are mounds, waterless, bare. Kish, Akkad, Babylon, Nippur, Nineveh, Borsippa, Uruk, Ur. Levels of excavation on caravan routes from Baghdad. Baghdad, the Abode of Peace, foremost city of Mesopotamia, preserved the name it has held for 4,000 years. It was once a fertile land of gardens, the home of merchants and scholars, renowned for learning, for silks and tiled buildings, enlightened caliphs, tales of the Arabian Nights. In 1258 Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghiz, sacked the city. The Mongols destroyed irrigation systems and converted Mesopotamia into a desert. “Already a U.N. report concludes that Iraq has been bombed back to the ‘pre-industrial...