For the past ten years Lockie Gary, a former U.S. ranch manager and livestock reproductive specialist has been living in countries like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Iraq, leading dairy training programs to help people establish local dairies in their war torn surroundings.

Supported by Minnesota-based Land O’Lakes, Inc. and protected by the U.S. Marines, Lockie is currently teaching Iraqi widows in Fallujah how to make their cows more comfortable in a war zone, and how to make a living by yielding higher quality milk, locally, writes Graeme Wood in the September issue of The Atlantic. He writes:

Somehow in a counterinsurgency where communicating with the civilian population has proved difficult, Gary’s cattle sounds and imitations of newborn calves, or calves in the late stages of Clostridial infection make immediate sense to his students. Gary squats a little when he pretends to be a calf with the scours (that’s calf diarrhea, for the uninitiated), and the veiled women of Fallujah nod in appreciation.

Image by eierea, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: The Atlantic

Reporters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and other hostile places around the world face the daily threat of being kidnapped. Knowing how to be kidnapped can increase a person’s chances for survival—or at least that’s the theory behind the Centurion Risk Assessment Services’ Hostile Environment and First Aid Course. Trainers stage a mock abduction using “theatrical pyrotechnics to simulate such things as mortar fire, machine gun crossfire, mines and booby traps, etc. (all kept at a safe distance from the delegates) to simulate a hostile environment.”

The American Prospect’s reporter Tara McKelvey attended the course and picked up some useful tips: “Stay in hotels that do not have underground parking garages (where car bombs can be placed). Bring along a doorstop and jam it under the door in your room. And never argue with checkpoint guards.” Considering that at least 30 journalists were killed last year for doing their jobs, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the two, three, or five day course might be worth the time.

Source:  The American Prospect  (excerpt available online)

Image by  sindesign , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The latest word on the sexual cleansing of Iraq is that militias have been scanning internet chatrooms used by lesbian, gay, and transgendered Iraqis as part of a grotesque and tragic campaign of kidnapping, torture, and murder.

There was an endless parade of celebrities speaking out on behalf of Iraqis in the months leading up to the bombardment and invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nearly seven years later few raise their voices for the welfare of people in Iraq (not to mention the estimated two million who have fled the violence there).

Enter Antony Hegarty, the achingly beautiful voice of Antony and the Johnsons who posted an article about the killings, followed by a desperate declaration, written in all-caps:

ALLAH TREASURES HIS GAY AND TRANSGENDERED CHILDREN, HIS PRECIOUS HOMOSEXUAL CHILDREN.

JESUS ADORES HIS GAY CHILDREN AND RESERVES A SACRED PLACE FOR THEM IN THE FOLDS OF HIS CLOTHES.

IT IS A SIN TO HURT A GAY OR TRANSGENDERED PERSON. YOU HURT ALLAH WHEN YOU HURT ONE OF THESE MEN OR WOMEN, BOYS OR GIRLS.

Make a tshirt. Tell your friends.

love from Antony, crying

If you want to learn more about the situation for gay and transgendered Iraqis, here are a few resources:

Sexual Cleansing in Iraq (Utne Reader, May-June 2009)

The Sexual Cleansing of Iraq Intensifies (Utne.com, May 5, 2009)

Exterminating Lesbian, Gay, and Transgendered Iraqis (Utne.com, August 17, 2009)

Iraqi LGBT, an organization that publicizes hate crimes in Iraq

They Want Us Exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, a report published by Human Rights Watch

Source: Antony and the Johnsons 

The walls of Walid al-Ani’s plastic surgey clinic in Fallujah, Iraq are scarred from years of gun battles and American bombardment. He’s a popular guy these days, according to a piece by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting on the surge in demand for plastic surgery in Iraq’s war-torn Anbar province, known to most Americans as the “Sunni triangle”:

Saad Nasir, a 44-year-old bank employee, recently took his wife to see Ani for skin grafts. In March 2006, she suffered severe burns on her back when the US military dropped flares during clashes with insurgents. One of the flares set their house alight. At a cost of 3,000 dollars, the grafts “are not risky, but they are expensive,” Nasir said.

…According to a report released in July by Anbar’s health directorate, an estimated 100 people with war-related injuries undergo reconstructive surgery in the province each month. Between 130,000 and 250,000 US dollars is being spent on the procedures in Anbar monthly, the report said. Most of the patients are women.

  Source: Institute for War and Peace Reporting

The detention, torture, and murder of lesbian, gay, and transgendered people in Iraq is the subject of a Human Rights Watch report released this week. We've reported on the slow response of the human rights community to sexual cleansing in Iraq, and we've reported on the brutal torture techniques captured on video and distributed via cell phone as a warning to members of what some iraqis call the "third sex." The Human Rights Watch Report, They Want Us Exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, contains several terrible survivor stories and implicates the militias, political, cultural, and religious leaders, and the Iraqi government in no uncertain terms.

The horrors detailed in the report are numbing. Here is an excerpt from the testimony of a man we only know as "Nuri":

I was in a taxi in the middle of Karada when special police stopped the car, asked me for my ID, and searched me. They took my phone and my wallet, and handcuffed me. They put a bag over my head, hit me and put me in a car. They took me to the Ministry of Interior.

They put me in a room, a regular room, took the bag off my head, and there I was with five other gay men.

…They separated us and put each in a room … a police officer came and said. "Do you know where you are? You are in the interrogation wing of the Ministry of Interior." He told me, "If you have ten thousand US dollars, we will let you go." 

I said I didn't have that kind of money.

The next day at 10 a.m., they cuffed my hands behind my back. Then they tied a rope around my legs, and they hung me upside down from a hook in the ceiling, from morning till sunset. I passed out. I was stripped down to my underwear while I hung upside down. They cut me down that night, but they gave me no water or food.

Next day, they told me to put my clothes back on and they took me to the investigating officer. He said, "You like that? We're going to do that to you more and more, until you confess." Confess to what? I asked. "To the work you do, to the organization you belong to, and that you are a tanta" [queen].

"They knew the name 'Iraqi LGBT'-and they knew it helped mithliyeen [homosexuals] financially. They knew about the safe houses. All they wanted to know was, 'Who's paying? And why are they helping you?'"

When I was questioned, they said, "You have to confess." And I said, I have nothing to confess. Then they showed me a police report. I read it and it showed everything about me from 2005 until the day I was arrested. ... They knew personal details, through gay informants. And then they took me into another room, and began torturing me again.

One day, they took me up to the top floor, where there was a little window, straight onto the courtyard. They gave me binoculars to look. I could see:  there were the five men from the cell when I was first arrested. They were lying dead. They'd been executed.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Image by Stephanie Glaros. 

It's a bold move for Hollywood to resurrect GI Joe in a time of war—not that the archetypal warrior figure ever really disappeared from the national psyche. Many of our warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan are men. Those men were once boys and those boys, no doubt, spent hours belly down on the floor pitting one tiny GI Joe action figure against another.

When writer Leah Larson's brother came home from nine months in Iraq she wrote about the "unspeakable damage" to her brother and their relationship. And she wrote about GI Joe. We printed her piece two years ago and offer up this excerpt as a sort of footnote to Hollywood's fantastical treatment of the famous toy warrior:

Two days after he came home from a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq, my older brother showed me some pictures. 'I just bombed that building,' he said. In the photo, children in Fallujah are clustered beside their broken school.

During his first two weeks back, my brother, the demolitions expert, plied me with photos of the carnage and mayhem wreaked by his platoon. Fifteen memory cards worth of bizarre and disturbing photos—half-naked soldiers dancing in the desert, a severed goat's head in a noose, Marines dressed in traditional women's clothing found following a house raid.

I wanted to hit him, banish him, to create a giant dent in his soul. But he wouldn't care, wouldn't budge. This is what the Marines have trained him to do—warp, destroy, and believe it is for good.

When recruiters came to take him, I howled, groped, twisted, and shivered at the horrible separation from him. At a young age, long before I recognized politics, my spirit understood many things. I knew that if he joined the military, our kinship would be severed, and it has been. It saddens me when I am unable to hug him because he cannot tolerate affection. Our mother recalls that my brother could only be comforted by his GI Joe toys. Lying in the top bunk, while I slept on the bottom, he would watch a sky of little green men dangle from the ropes he tied to the ceiling.

Now, instead of green men, my brother keeps metal, wood, and crystal beaded crosses in his room. Some hang over pictures of friends killed in the war. 

In 2007, 28-year-old Baghdad resident Firas Adil Saadi got a tattoo. The ornate marking on his right shoulder wasn't an aesthetic decision. Saadi explained the tattoo to an Los Angeles Times reporter:

"The idea came to me after seeing these daily incidents during which some corpses are mutilated and distorted, some were even headless, and the fact that the identity cards are either lost or destroyed," said Saadi, a trader who works in Baghdad's Shorja market, which has suffered numerous bombings. "Even the water of the firefighting equipment is destroying them, so I thought about an irremovable identity card, which is the tattoo."

In those days, identity tattoos were something of a trend. Today, according to a report by IRIN, a news agency affiliated with the United Nations, identity tattoos are on the decline but tattoos of the decorative variety, though they are taboo to many in Iraq, are still in demand:

“Few people were interested in getting a tattoo for the look of it during 2005, 2006 and 2007 as their aim was only to put a mark on themselves to help their families identify their bodies if they were found mutilated,” Abdu, a Baghdad tattoo artist, told IRIN on condition that his full name not be mentioned for his safety.

Today, Abdu said few men come to him for that reason while many youngsters are seeking tattoos for purely decorative reasons. He said he charges US$10 to $200 for all kinds of artwork, such as images of dragons, snakes, tigers, hawks and hearts.

However, Abdu continues to keep a low profile for fear of being attacked by extremists who see his work as being prohibited by Islam or too westernised.

“Turnout is high, but our work is still limited to close friends and people we trust,” said Abdu, a 28-year-old Christian who learned his art as a refugee in Lebanon when he fled there in 2004. On his return to Iraq, he decided against opening his own tattoo studio and instead operates out of a friend’s tailoring shop.

Source: IRIN, Los Angeles Times

All over Iraq, American forces are striking camp and withdrawing from cities. Blogging for the Atlantic, Graeme Wood offers a snapshot of the withdrawal, with an eye for the details most news reports leave out:

The only thing uglier than a military base is a military base that is being torn down. Camp Tash is nearly gone, and it is already half landfill and all eyesore. While walking around I tallied the objects buried in the sand: a leather sandal, frayed coaxial cables, many plastic bags, scattered live 5.56mm rounds, plastic bottles galore.

And stacks of old wood are everywhere. The Marines' weapon of choice is the crowbar, with a claw-hammer for a sidearm. They crawl over SWA huts, ripping out plywood and wearing rifle vests if they rise above the berm and into the sights of potential snipers. In the middle of the afternoon, three Iraqis show up, one in a police uniform, with a truck. They scavenge as much wood as they can carry. One of them, Adnan Yusuf, is plump and huffs smoke through the gaps in his teeth. He is smiling, because there's money in that wreckage. “Business is good," he says. "I just spent three months tearing apart bases in Hit and Ramadi.”

Source: The Atlantic 

David Levinthal's haunting photographic recreations of the tragedy and drama of war in Afghanistan and Iraq evoke the words of the novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien: "A true war story makes the stomach believe." Levinthal's soldiers and civilians are toys scuffed and posed for his camera. Still, they are photographs you believe—with your stomach.

For each photograph in I.E.D. there is a short burst of text—excerpts from the exceptional military blog The Sandbox, a collection of narratives and observations from service members deployed in Iraq.

"It's interesting to watch people trying to be normal in the aftermath of a fundamentally disturbing event," writes Owen Powell in 2006. "A few blocks away, corpses were littering the blackened asphalt of a city square, burning. Ambulance crews would be arriving and trying to find the wounded amongst the debris and the dead. But not us. It was someone else's job, and there really wasn't anything to do here but carry on with the mundane details of the still alive. So, we all walked around and fiddled with our gear or stood and tried to make small talk through clenched jaws."

Stories like this push Levinthal's photographs deeper into your stomach and don't fade easily from your mind. Here are some of the images:

Images courtesy of powerHouse Books.

When we last reported on the sexual cleansing of Iraq, the human rights organization Iraqi LGBT had counted more than 475 murders since 2003. Now the count is more than 600. Now, according to a report from the Al Arabiya television network, gay men are being subjected to a gruesome new form of torture: their anuses are sealed with a powerful glue and diarrhea is induced, leading to death. An Al Arabiya reporter who visited a morgue in Baghdad. Two Human Rights Watch researchers have also confirmed these terrible deaths.Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, tells Gay City that videos of the torture are being distributed on mobile phones.

Mohammed, who co-founded Iraq's first feminist newspaper, has taken the issue as her own. "Many older women in my organization were quite opposed to taking up the question of the persecution of homosexuals and didn't understand why it was important," she says. "But I firmly believe that misogyny and homophobia are two sides of the same coin, and that we had a duty to speak out against the persecution of gays in Iraq, which is so little known that I was surprised by the extent of it when I began to look into it."

A Human Rights Watch report on the persecution of gays, lesbians, and transgendered people in Iraq is forthcoming.

Source: Gay City

When a war correspondent reflects on their time spent reporting in Iraq, it’s usually the same story: a few harrowing stories from a few days or weeks spent riding with a unit in Baghdad or somewhere nearby. When the history of Iraq is evoked at all, it is a history that begins in 2003. Jane Arraf is an exception. In the years leading up to the 2003 invasion she was the only Western reporter stationed in Iraq. She worked for CNN and lived in a hotel on the Tigris. Eventually, she moved into a house. She knows Baghdad like no other Western journalist, which is why her reflection piece in the Christian Science Monitor is a must read.

In My Iraq: a reporter’s 20-year retrospective, Arraf has the good sense to bury the harrowing war correspondent stories—and she has her share—in favor of the stories and voices of the Iraqis she came to know over the years. And quoting a particularly courageous Iraqi journalist who happens to be a woman and a mother, Arraf shares a truth that should be printed on the back of every war reporter's Iraq book: "It takes more courage to be a mother in Iraq than a war correspondent."

Source: Christian Science Monitor

It was six years ago this month that the first American missiles—of this war at least—fell from the sky over Baghdad. You know the rest. For all the questions we've asked of the people who led us into this blood-blunder of a war, we've not often stopped to ask ourselves why we were so damn easily led. I stumbled across war correspondent Robert Fisk's most recent book, The Age of the Warrior, in the Utne library this week. The first words of his 498-page collection of articles and essays are, in typical Fisk fashion, words of damnation and profound questioning well suited for this solemn anniversary:

"Iraq, I suspect, will come to define the world we live in, even for those of us who have never been within a thousand miles of its borders. The war's colossal loss in human life—primarily Iraqi, of course—and the lies that formed a bodyguard for our invasion troops in 2003 should inform our understanding of conflict for years to come. Weapons of mass destruction. Links to al-Qaeda and the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. We were fooled. Yet I sometimes believe that we wanted to be fooled—that we wish to be led to the slaughter by our masters, to race for the cliff-edge with the desperate enthusiasm of the suicide bomber, our instincts awakened by something that should have been buried at Hastings or Waterloo or Anietam or Berlin or even Da Nang. Do we need war? Do we need it the way we need air and love and children and safety? I wonder."

As the U.S. tries to draw down its military presence in Iraq, as many as 10,000 Ugandans, hired by private security firms, have stepped up to take their place, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Many of these Ugandans are paid just $600 per month, as opposed to the $15,000 per month paid to some American guards, making the country a lucrative venue for private recruiters.

“My experience in Iraq is that despite having been shot seven times, it is very great,” Moses Matsiko, who spent nearly four years working for a U.S. firm in Afghanistan and Iraq, told the Christian Science Monitor. Based on his experience in war zones, Matsiko has started his own private security firm, sending nearly 1,200 people to Iraq. He said, “If all goes well, then I hope to be sending people to Afghanistan in the near future.”

(Thanks, CorpWatch.)

Source: Christian Science Monitor 

Have you heard much about Iraq lately? Chances are you haven’t: Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review reports that coverage of the Iraq war typically fills less than 2 percent of the news hole. That statistic alone is deplorable, but even worse, according to Garber, is the scarcity of “nuanced treatments of Iraq that would flesh out our simplistic things were bad but they’re getting better narrative into something more substantial and therefore more valuable.”

Garber describes the current attitude of the press toward the war as largely apathetic, and all too willing to report nuggets of conventional wisdom—like "the surge is working"—with little critical analysis.

Whether the quality of Iraq coverage will improve is an open question. The quantity, however, is certain to keep dwindling. ABC, CBS, and NBC have all pulled their full-time correspondents from Iraq, according to the New York Times. CNN’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, told the Times, “The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it.”

You’ve undoubtedly heard by now that in Iraq, having a shoe chucked at you, as President Bush did on Sunday in Baghdad, is a huge slap in the face. If you’re still wondering why, Brian Palmer at Slate breaks it down: shoes are a choice weapon of disrespect “because they’re so dirty.” Though it’s unclear where the tradition originated, “Arabs—and perhaps Iraqis in particular—throw their shoes to indicate that the target is no better than dirt.”

Palmer goes on to explain the significance of feet in various cultures, noting that George W. isn’t the first member of his family to be sullied by shoes: “After the Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein installed a mosaic of President George H.W. Bush on the floor of the Al-Rasheed Hotel. Hussein delighted in releasing images of foreign dignitaries stepping on Bush's face.”

Disrespect aside, the shoe incident may be “the best thing that’s happened to Bush in a while,” John Dickerson opines also for Slate. The shoe is being interpreted by opponents and supporters of the Iraq war as a sign of the conflict's failure or success, Dickerson writes, and he analyzes what the reignited popular debate could mean for Bush in his twilight days. Dickerson expects, if nothing else, “a spark of patriotism will kick in when some Americans watch the tape.” If that’s the case, perhaps Bush is looking forward to the farewell he’ll receive from protesters who, according to Politico, now plan to pelt the White House with shoes on his last day in office.

Image by Van Damme M., licensed under Creative Commons.

The sectarian violence in Iraq has many people wondering, what is wrong with Islam? A better question may be, what is wrong with secularism? International politics professor Vali Nasr pointed out on NPR’s Speaking of Faith that religion is resurgent in Iraq, Israel, India, and the United States. People throughout the world are turning to religion and challenging the separation between church and state. Nasr asks, “Why is secularism sick?”

Part of the problem may lie in the style of democracy that the U.S. tries to export in places like Iraq. “We have a very good system of government,” said Nasr, “but whenever we go abroad we promote and implement a French one.” In U.S. history, there were strong bridges between religion and commerce in organizations like the YMCA or the Rotary Club. The style of democracy the U.S. has tried to export is more centralized and secularized, according to Nasr, more French than American. Ideally, the government would promote a more federalist system, less centralized, encouraging commerce and religion to work together for stability in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

A group of UCLA geographers reached a surprising conclusion after analyzing the glow of Iraqi cities and neighborhoods at night: Ethnic cleansing may be the primary reason for the decreased violence in Iraq, not the much-touted “troop surge.”

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods,” said study co-author Thomas Gillespie, in a UCLA press release. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.” The researchers found that the amount of night light in mostly Sunni neighborhoods dropped before the surge and hasn’t bounced back.

The violence decreased in Baghdad, “because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” the study’s lead author John Agnew said in the press release.  “By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.”

(Thanks, Freakonomics.)

Cinema’s response to war has changed since Vietnam, Michael Bronski postulates in Z Magazine. For instance, the war in Iraq has been immediately made into documentaries (No End in Sight and Standard Operating Procedure), independent films (Redacted and Battle for Haditha), and even Hollywood productions (In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss), while it took years for many films to be made about Vietnam. Mainstream movies like Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now weren’t released until the late 1970s, almost a decade after the war ended.

Bronski credits Vietnam with influencing other film genres as well: The slasher film, beginning with Halloween in 1978, was created as an avatar for the senseless killing of American youth during the Vietnam War, and testosterone-swelling action hero films like Rocky (1976), Terminator (1974), and Die Hard (1988) were used to reassert our postwar nation’s masculinity, as if to say, “We could have won in Vietnam!”

Further, Bronski claims that the stoner buddy movie genre, with a new understanding of masculinity, was invented in response to the absurd man-movies emblematic of the “unholy three” (Willis, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone). Films like Dumb and Dumber, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Dude, Where’s My Car? exhibit an apolitical, peace-and-love sense of masculinity that is a direct backlash to action hero archetypes. 

Bronski’s argument is interesting, but I believe he is ignoring some important, much earlier incarnations of this same sensitive masculinity—the two most prevalent examples being Harold Ramis’ Animal House and Stripes. Both of these films, released in 1978 and 1981, respectively, put goofball, slacker men in positions where they are confronted by archetypal masculinity. Further, in both of these films this masculinity is represented by military figures (ROTC Cadet Officer Niedermeyer in Animal House and Sergeant Hulka in Stripes). The characters use disarming and nonthreatening humor to combat aggression, much like modern-day stoner comedies. But, instead of remaining apolitical, the heroes in Ramis’ films are forced to face the warlike masculinity emblematic of Vietnam militarism, proving that nonviolence can be an answer. 

Reading his article made me think of how we view masculinity in our modern time of war. If cinema is any refection, then our current perceptions equate masculinity with naïveté. Films like Jarhead and Stop-Loss present characters anxious to go to war, blinded by masculinity and a sense of duty, then humbled by the true nature of the conflict. Even stoner buddy movies like Harold and Kumar have ignorant über-masculine villains blinded by testosterone. The current trend seems to be that of peace and intelligence, which is itself a critique on war in general.  

It’s impossible to say what, if any, genres will come in response to the current Iraq War, but it seems safe to say that glorified violent masculinity is no longer something to be admired; rather it is a manifestation of ignorance and last resorts.

(Image by Jurek Durczak, licensed under Creative Commons.)

Blackwater, the private-security firm winning a suspiciously high number of contracts in Iraq, has also been at the center of some of the war’s most horrific events. Yet the company continues to reap billions of dollars in government contracts and staff their highest positions with retired officials from the military, CIA, and other government agencies. They are uniquely positioned to reap the maximum benefit from both the public and private sector.

The agency is currently embroiled in a lawsuit brought by the widows of three soldiers killed when a plane operated by sister company Presidential Airways crashed in Afghanistan. Last year Blackwater attempted to have the case dismissed under a provision that soldiers can’t sue their government, at whose behest Blackwater was serving. When that didn’t work, the firm took a strange new tack: Rather than be tried in an American court, it requested that the case be tried under Islamic law, or Sharia, which doesn’t hold companies in its jurisdiction responsible for their actions. If this request is honored, it would effectively dismiss the lawsuit.

Talking Points Memo highlights the obvious irony of an ostentatiously patriotic company with well-known right-wing ties preferring Muslim law to the good old-fashioned U.S. legal system, and AlterNet snarks: “If this becomes well-known, the GOP's corporate base will become fundamentalist Muslims faster than you can say Mecca Oil & Gas.” Meanwhile, DailyKos posts the mock-hysterical headline, “Blackwater Wants to Establish A Sharia Caliphate Here in the U.S.A.”

Erik Prince, Blackwater’s CEO, argues that his company’s request is a reasonable one since the plane—carrying U.S. military personnel and operated by a U.S. corporation—crashed in Afghanistan, which is governed by Sharia. This logic is patently absurd, but Blackwater has proven it can get away with murder in the past, and this is just more evidence that the agency wants it both ways: When it’s to Blackwater’s advantage,  it’s a governmental entity, acting on behalf of the U.S. Armed Forces; as soon as that becomes inconvenient, it plays the private-sector card and attempts, often successfully to circumvent the law. Pretty slippery, and plenty scary.

Baghdad plays host to many currencies: dinars, petrol, guns, and now blood. The new issue of Colors (pdf) reports on the black market that has sprung up to address the city’s blood shortage. In the al-Sadr City neighborhood, the illicit trade is coordinated by Shia leaders.

People rarely go to formal collection centers to donate blood because they are afraid of both the bombs and the dreadful hygienic conditions. If they or their family need blood, they are forced to purchase it on the black market.

In al-Andalus, one blood-runner has identified a steady source.

“In emergencies, I ask the ambulance driver to find junkies and drunks and drive them in to donate their blood,” he admits. He pays the addicts with loose change and, without any health checks, sells blood to wounded people.

The wounded go home with the bad blood, the addicts go home with bruises, and Kadòm, the drivers and lab technicians go home with the blood money.

—Danielle Maestretti

Image by montuno, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Chronicle of Higher Education—the 2007 Utne Independent Press Award winner for political coverage—just filed this scoop today: A massive trove of Baath party documents from the era of Saddam Hussein has found a controversial, temporary home at the Hoover Institution, the Stanford-affiliated conservative think tank and library.

The Chronicle reports that Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile who was a leading proponent of invading Iraq for humanitarian reasons, has been searching for a safe haven for the documents since digitizing them in 2005 with the help of the U.S. government. (The government got a digital copy out of the deal.)

Makiya, who discovered the documents in April 2003, says his Iraq Memory Foundation got the OK from Iraq’s deputy prime minister and the prime minister’s office to make the deal with Hoover, which will house the documents for five years. But Saad Eskander, the internationally respected director general of the Iraq National Library and Archive, says the documents belong in Iraq and that the private foundation’s possession of them is illegal. (The International Council on Archives noted that only “a legislative act of the state” can sanction “the alienation of public archives.”) 

Despite the pitched debate between the two men, they do agree on something: The 100 million pages of Iraqi documents kept by the U.S. Department of Defense—the largest known cache of Baath-era papers—“belong in Iraqi hands,” the Chronicle reports. Both men have asked the Pentagon to turn the documents over to their respective organizations. 

—Hannah Lobel

When it occurred, the toppling and decapitation of Saddam’s golden idol in Firdos Square seemed to many like a good omen, the symbol of an end to a reign of terror and a step toward freedom and safety for Iraqis. But as the war drags toward its fifth year, idyllic imagery escapes us and reality kicks in. There are no moral victories. Every step in the direction of Iraqi “freedom” has its price. The Defense Department calls this collateral damage, a blanket term that covers—and excuses—civilian casualties, destruction of homes, and the annihilation of Iraqi cultural artifacts. The idol was one of these: a very real, if unsavory, part of Iraq’s history that fell as part of an imaginary victory.

But the statue was the least of an innumerable collection of artifacts that have been destroyed or gone missing. The blame game has worn itself out, without anyone taking responsibility for failing to protect many national museums, and solutions for recovering the lost art have stalled. To put this in historical context, Poland and Germany are still bickering over pieces of art transferred between the two countries during the Nazi occupation 70 years ago. So a government-initiated plan of action may be long in coming. The burden of reclaiming Iraq’s history may well fall to private organizations and art historians.

One of these crusaders is Nada Shabout. The Iraqi-born art historian and professor at the University of North Texas talks about the importance of preserving Iraq’s culture in a Q & A with the Montreal Mirror. This preservation is especially important, it seems, in light of the ever-growing role played by the West in reshaping the country’s political identity. If what we do today can only be understood tomorrow, as the Bush administration claims, than it is a great blow to history that more care wasn’t taken in preserving Iraq’s art for future generations. 

For more on the fate of art in Iraq, check out the documentary Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq by Deep Dish TV. —Morgan Winters

Under fire in Habbaniyah along the banks of the Euphrates near Fallujah, Navy Chaplain Michael Baker stands as the first line of defense against the mental and spiritual toll of the Iraq War. As part of a series of articles in the Christian Science Monitor, Lee Lawrence illustrates how chaplains navigate the ethical and religious quandaries on the battlefield and in the barracks.

Last June, for instance, a lance corporal on guard duty shot himself with his M-16 rifle. The reaction of higher-ups to the tragedy highlight highlights how obstreperous superiors and military culture can conspire to worsen the mental wounds of war. According to Lawrence, a noncommissioned officer told the lance corporal’s detachment that their comrade was in hell and it was time to wash the suicide from their memory.

At moments like these, Baker’s work becomes indispensable—even counterintuitive. When the secular military recklessly turns religious he must wear adhere strictly to his duty not to proselytize and play the role of rationalist.

—Eric Kelsey 

Riverbend, an Iraqi woman who has been blogging about her life in Baghdad since 2003, recently fled with her family to Syria. Here’s Riverbend writing about leaving her home in Iraq:

It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war. In spite of my assurances to myself of a safe and happy return, I spent several hours before leaving with a huge lump lodged firmly in my throat. My eyes burned and my nose ran in spite of me. I told myself it was an allergy.

Here, Riverbend writes about her adjustment to life in Syria:

It has taken me these last three months to work away certain habits I’d acquired in Iraq after the war. It’s funny how you learn to act a certain way and don’t even know you’re doing strange things- like avoiding people’s eyes in the street or crazily murmuring prayers to yourself when stuck in traffic. It took me at least three weeks to teach myself to walk properly again- with head lifted, not constantly looking behind me.

The suffering of war can feel distant when seen through the dim mirror of the media. Peering through these posts, like an archeologist sifting through dirt, there are signs of a beautiful and delicate life. They make the Iraq War seem less and less a political issue, and more a moral crisis, something that dooms and cleaves real people’s lives. Riverbend’s posts are blogging at its best, demonstrating that form can do more than just report news—it can collapse boundaries, and make the horror of war come alive.

Found via Crooks And Liars.

­—Brendan Mackie

Imagine a time when our government was so focused on post-war reconstruction, so determined to heal the wounds of war, that scientists were tasked with figuring out how to tend the battered bodies and psyches of civilian survivors. Such was the case in World War II, when some 200 conscientious objectors volunteered to go hungry so that the military could understand what it was up against in resurrecting a ravaged and starving Europe.

American RadioWorks just aired a fascinating documentary on this starvation experiment, which began in 1944 at the University of Minnesota. (You can listen to A Duty to Starve here.) Thirty-six men were chosen for the yearlong study, which tracked the psychological and physiological impact of starvation (the young men's caloric intake was cut in half). Henry Scholberg, one of the participants, explains why he felt compelled to sign up: "American boys were dying on the battlefields, suffering imprisonment, getting wounded. And I felt it was unfair for me to be able to sleep in a comfortable bed at night and always have three meals. I felt I should be prepared to sacrifice." The U.S. government's rationale was similarly simple and persuasive: "Your military leaders," one newsreel intoned, "want no starving people behind their battle lines. For a hungry man is a dangerous man."

Today, when most Americans remain a comfortable distance from the sacrifices demanded of soldiers, A Duty to Starve seems to capture not only a different time but a different country. It's also a striking companion piece to another recent documentary, No End In Sight, which chronicles how obstinately blind the Bush administration was when it came to post-invasion planning. —Hannah Lobel