Women's Crossroads

Okay, I admit it. I’ve been avoiding posting because every time I think about what I might say, my mind dissolves into something like the famous painting “The Scream”—I just want to hold my head and wail. Every day I think morosely, “Well, things can’t get any worse, we must be hitting bottom,” and then the next day comes and—it's worse.

And the fact that the violence isn’t touching me directly, the fact that I am going about my ordinary comfortable American existence day by day, makes it even harder to bear somehow. The juxtaposition of my sweet, easy life and the maelstrom taking place in much of the world is so jarring that most of the time I just can’t stand to maintain the polarity. I give myself small doses of world news, and pull the covers of my narrow, pleasant existence back over my head with ostrich-like obstinacy.

There are small signs that the American public is awakening. A coalition of social justice activists, educators and a few courageous politicians have just published a full-page ad in The New York Times listing all the crimes of the Bush Administration against the world and calling for a “mass day of resistance” on October 5. The graphic is powerful—the globe going up in flames.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton finally called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, after a Senate hearing at which two of the generals in charge of the American forces in Iraq admitted that the country might be “sliding into civil war” and that the violence was as bad as it’s ever been. “Yes, we hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration’s strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy,” Clinton told Rumsfeld at the hearing. “Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?”

Why indeed? But the real question is, why has it taken Clinton and so many other politicians and pundits so long to read the writing on the wall?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world where there’s no place to hide, an anguish to match my own: Riverbend gives vent to a rage I haven’t yet heard from her, in the three years since she started blogging from Baghdad. She has always seemed like a moderate voice, a voice of reason in the midst of the hysteria of Iraq. But now even she is calling for vigilante justice to be visited on the American occupiers of her land, in response to the rape of a young girl and murder of her and her family—an incident that received some attention in the US press, but only in Riverbend’s blog was the rape victim named and mourned:

“Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

"In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes... Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today.

“I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

”It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

”Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get?”

HOW MUCH WORSE CAN IT GET????? The fact that someone like Riverbend is ready to deliver US soldiers to mob justice in retribution for their crimes of war is truly terrifying, because as I said before, she is a moderate voice in Iraq. If this is the way she is thinking, one can only imagine with horror what's in the minds of the Hezbollah and Hamas militants.

Israel is taking the fall right now, but it's really the US that's to blame for this crisis, and the only person who may not understand this is the average American, the millions of CNN/Fox News devotees who are still suckers for the stars and stripes.

I have never been more ashamed to be an American. And I've had just about enough of hiding under the covers, too. Election season is coming up, and there is a chance to make a difference, if a strong enough message can be sent to the august halls of Congress through the ballot box. If Senator Clinton is finally summoning the backbone to speak out openly against Rumsfeld and his disastrous fumbling of Iraq, maybe the tide is turning and others will follow her lead. Maybe there is still time to put out the flames and reconstruct a global civilization worthy of that designation.

# posted by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez @ Friday, August 04, 2006