Rumours of Glory
Page 50
We visited a pediatric cancer ward where doctors were unable to rely on equipment—including X-ray and radiation treatment machines, among many other crucial services—because electricity was sporadic during the day and shut off completely at 7 P.M. every night. We were told that after the first Gulf War, in 1991, “Saddam had the power back on in a week.”
Doctors were making $150 a month for their thirty-six-hour shifts, and there was a shortage of nurses and medicine. It’s hard to overstate the bitter frustration felt by such highly trained professionals making almost nothing in a starved and devastated country, their own families at home and at risk, while the war itself was obviously so expensive and the attackers were not coming through with promised relief.
Today Iraq remains an impoverished wreck. One can only hope that the $40 billion in cash that the U.S. government flew into Baghdad, on pallets, between 2003 and 2008 made it into some needy hands. No one really knows if it did, because almost all of it simply disappeared. In 2011 CNBC called the cash airlift “the largest airborne transfer of currency in the history of the world.” The shipments of cash, said CNBC, “included more than 281 million individual bills weighing a total of 363 tons. But soon after the money arrived in the chaos of war-torn Baghdad, the paper trail documenting who controlled it all began to go cold.”
Money by the ton. Yet the quantity pales compared with the overall cost of the U.S. Middle East adventure. “The US has already spent close to 2 trillion dollars in direct outlays for expenses related to Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation New Dawn (OND),” according to a March 2013 report for the Harvard Kennedy School by Linda Bilmes, a Harvard professor and coauthor of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. (The book’s coauthor is Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, an outspoken critic of “free market fundamentalists” at the World Bank and the IMF. Bilmes was the 2008 recipient of the American Friends Service Committee’s “Speaking Truth to Power” award.) The twenty-two-page Harvard report concludes, “There will be no peace dividend. . . . [T]he legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be costs that persist for decades. [These] conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history—totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid.”
Meanwhile, at home, much of the United States continued to slide into dire financial straits even as the federal government pumped those trillions of dollars into overseas wars. On July 18, 2013, the city of Detroit, $18 billion in the red, became the largest American municipality ever to declare bankruptcy, one of three dozen U.S. cities to go under in three years. Certainly, Detroit—the “birthplace of the middle class” and a thriving industrial city, despite the riots, when I first visited there in 1967—could have used a pallet of cash. If only the city had been a bank, or perhaps General Motors, which has helped eviscerate Detroit by moving jobs overseas, yet in 2010 received a $50 billion bailout from the U.S. government.
As the bumper sticker says, freedom isn’t free. But the “price” often far exceeds anything financial. Since World War II, millions of people have paid for American “freedom” with their lives. Beginning in 2003 it was Iraqis who paid the price, and two years before that it was Afghanis, though at least the United States had some justification for tearing up Afghanistan in search of the murderers of three thousand Americans. The ghost of William Walker, summoned up, stumbled in the streets of Baghdad, to the sound of the trumpets of fading empire.
Everything’s broken in the birthplace of law
As Generation Two tries on his tragic flaw
America’s might under desert sun
I saw her frightened eyes behind the muzzle of her gun
Uranium dust and the smell of decay
Sewage in the street where the kids run and play
Not enough morphine and not enough gauze
Firefight in darkness like snapping of jaws
This is Baghdad
You couldn’t see the blast—the morning was bright —
But some radiant energy flared up into the light
Like the sky throwing its hands up in horrified dismay
Or the souls of the dead as they sped on their way
Car-bombed and carjacked and kidnapped and shot
How do you like it, this freedom we brought
We packed all the ordnance but the thing we forgot
Was a plan in case it didn’t turn out quite like we thought
This is Baghdad
“THIS IS BAGHDAD,” 2004
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/100.
The “blast” in “This Is Baghdad” was a suicide car bombing at Assassins’ Gate, an entrance to the Green Zone near the palace housing the Coalition Provisional Authority. We had been lucky with respect to violence while we were there. Everyone told us that the week was unusually quiet. I was on my third-floor hotel balcony when the bomb went off. Twenty-four people died and 120 were injured, most of them Iraqis lining up for work in the Green Zone. This was a Sunday—a regular workday in Muslim countries—near the end of our trip, at eight in the morning. We were scheduled to visit the Green Zone that day to hear the Baghdad Symphony practice, but because of the bombing the rehearsal was cancelled. The previous day we had driven by Assassins’ Gate four times. We never did get into the Green Zone.
I was a couple of miles from the blast, so I couldn’t see it. But I certainly heard it, a punch in the eardrums, a massive release of energy radiating like a heat wave into the bright morning sky. What was stunning, aside from the explosion itself, was the reaction of the people in my field of vision: nothing. The street was full of people scurrying to work, and nobody even looked up despite the magnitude of the blast. This lack of curiosity about an obviously massive catastrophe occurring not that far away said more than I wanted to know about what Iraqis had been through.
The intrepid adventurers: Johanna Berrigan, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Bruce Cockburn, and Linda Panetta
The intrepid adventurers meet the papal nuncio Archbishop Fernando Filoni.
With Bishop Gumbleton at the helm, we met with several prominent Christians. These included the patriarch of the Chaldean Christian Church, an institution I had not known existed: in effect, the Pope of Baghdad. He was formal, elderly, robed in red with gold decoration, and quite rigidly conservative. There was the faint sense that he felt spending time with us was beneath him. The papal nuncio, Archbishop Fernando Filoni, was, by contrast, dynamic, warm, and very Italian. His English was excellent.
Archbishop Filoni was worried. Crime was flourishing, he said, and gangs roamed the streets. Hunger was epidemic; chaos reigned. The occupiers could not control what they’d wrought. Filoni, who had defended the rights of Christians under Saddam, was outspoken about the need for American forces to depart. “In Washington, they still don’t understand that they will never be loved, and that the people of Iraq will not tolerate the occupation,” he told Catholic World News in April 2004, adding that the United States should “have the courage to transfer power immediately.” He was the only foreign ambassador who had not fled the country.
Saddam, whose regime enforced a strong secularism, did not feel threatened by the Christian community and afforded it a degree of exemption from his wrath—with the exception of the Kurds (a minority of whom are of the faith; most Kurds are Sunni Muslim), who were murdered in the tens of thousands during the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war. (Remember the chemical weapons Reagan and Rumsfeld sold to Iraq? Saddam used them on the Kurds.) In return, few Christians challenged his rule. Christians generally prospered. They tended to have professional careers: businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers. Tariq Aziz, who served as foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam, was a Christian.
Christians were
still doing as well as anyone when we were in Baghdad—but not long after we left, Iraqi Christianity found itself in the crosshairs. Churches started coming under attack, and church leaders were abducted and killed by Muslim fundamentalists. Filoni himself just missed being killed by a car bomb in 2006. This was without precedent. In 2007 60 Minutes reported, “From the time of Jesus, there have been Christians in what is now Iraq. The Christian community took root there after the Apostle Thomas headed east in the year 35. But now, after nearly 2,000 years, Iraqi Christians are being hunted, murdered and forced to flee—persecuted on a biblical scale in Iraq’s religious civil war. You’d have to be mad to hold a Christian service in Iraq today. . . .” The Reverend Canon Andrew White, an Anglican priest who was dubbed the Vicar of Baghdad, told the CBS news crew, “In the last six months things have got particularly bad for the Christians. Here in this church, all of my leadership were originally taken and killed.” White said that life was much better for Christians under Saddam and that the American invasion had set them back two thousand years.
In the place of a relatively stable secularism, a de facto form of Sharia law has taken hold in Iraq. Under the American occupation the freedoms of religion once enjoyed by most Iraqis have been eaten away, religious intolerance is now the norm, and the “tyranny” that the Bush junta purportedly wanted to vanquish is now actually stronger in parts of the country than it had been.
Our week in Iraq, as packed with meetings and stress as it was, seemed like a month. Then we traipsed back to Baghdad International for the long journey home. The near total lack of airport security was amusing. Luggage was laid out on the pavement twenty yards from the entrance, where it was gone over by bomb dogs. At the door a guy in a black T-shirt with a pistol in a shoulder holster said, “Got any guns?” I shook my head no and he waved me on. That was it, like passing from Oregon to California at the agriculture inspection station. I could have had knives in my boots, or a bag of Colin Powell’s infamous Nigerian yellow cake, the mythic material that got the whole show rolling. This time there was a concession open in the terminal. Linda bought me a present: a black knitted Shiite skullcap and a black and grey cotton scarf.
Back in Amman, exhausted, we all crowded into a single hotel room to rest up. We had hours to wait for the various flights that would take us the rest of the way. Linda and Bishop Gumbleton arm-wrestled after a lunch of falafel, apples, cucumber and carrots, and tea flavoured with sage. Herbie the Volkswagen was on the TV, with Arabic subtitles. Abundance and Disney and madness and evil—an incomprehensible juxtaposition of the brutal and the bizarre.
The skinny young Jordanian at the front desk asked us, “Have you smoked hubblybubbly?” What? “You are in Jordan. You must smoke hubblybubbly!” His shift had just ended. He insisted on taking us all to a café he knew where we would sit and smoke a multi-stemmed water pipe charged with apple-flavoured tobacco. I put on my new Baghdad airport headgear. He looked at me and said, “I don’t think you should go out wearing that Jewish hat.” Never mind that all the Shiite men in our Baghdad hotel had worn the same thing.
As we sat chatting under a shape-shifting cloud of grey smoke, I said, “I’ve never done this, but I learned the word ‘hookah’ for this type of pipe.” He replied, “In Egypt they call it that. In Jordan we call it hubblybubbly!” Whenever he said the word, it sounded as if it were followed by an exclamation mark.
Back home, I pored over my notes from the trip, scraping at memories, trying to figure out how to make a song out of all the information. It took some time because I didn’t know exactly what to put in it. The bleak absurdity, the sorrow, and the stories of Baghdad were so big they defied my ability to address the reality of what was right in front of me, similar to the difficulty of writing post–9/11. Three months later, on April 19, 2004, I finished “This Is Baghdad.”
The next day I wrote another song. You could think of it as an unintended companion to the previous day’s work, an offering of light against darkness. I was captivated by the idea that we as a species are engaged in a race between our attraction to thanatos, to self-destruction, and the recognition of our interdependency on each other and the planetary systems that provide the necessities of life, between the narrow, selfish everyday-ness of materialism and the willingness to embrace the Bigness of things. The song came out of a sense that no matter what, as we live and we die, we are always moving toward a sort of mutual absorption of and by spirit; that my soul remains rooted in the Divine; and that life is, or ought to be, ruled by love. Who or what God might be, what the cosmos actually consists of, how love and evil are so regularly conjoined in the human heart—all are questions that hail from a deep and overarching mystery that has forever teased and haunted us.
That mystery, as the universe keeps reminding me, deepens and opens with every breath.
You can’t tell me there is no mystery
Mystery
Mystery
You can’t tell me there is no mystery
It’s everywhere I turn
Moon over junkyard where the snow lies bright
Snow lies bright
Snow lies bright
Moon over junkyard where the snow lies bright
Can set my heart to burn
Stood before the shaman, I saw star-strewn space
Star-strewn space
Star-strewn space
Stood before the shaman, I saw star-strewn space
Behind the eye holes in his face
Infinity always gives me vertigo
Vertigo
Vertigo
Infinity always gives me vertigo
And fills me up with grace
I was built on a Friday and you can’t fix me
You can’t fix me
You can’t fix me
I was built on a Friday and you can’t fix me
Even so I’ve done okay
So grab that last bottle full of gasoline
Gasoline
Gasoline
Grab that last bottle full of gasoline
Light a toast to yesterday
And don’t tell me there is no mystery
Mystery
Mystery
And don’t tell me there is no mystery
It overflows my cup
This feast of beauty can intoxicate
Intoxicate
Intoxicate
This feast of beauty can intoxicate
Just like the finest wine
So all you stumblers who believe love rules
Believe love rules
Believe love rules
Come all you stumblers who believe love rules
Stand up and let it shine
Stand up and let it shine
“MYSTERY,” 2004
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/101.
FINALE
So . . . the book stops here. After this point, Big Circumstance spun my life off in another new direction, and it’s too soon to see where that tale leads. A quick synopsis though:
MJ and I, having originally met during the land-mine campaign, when she worked for VVAF, started dating shortly after the Baghdad trip. We had been heading in that direction for a number of months. We spent time in Kingston, Ontario, and Brooklyn, briefly in Buenos Aires. We visited Jerusalem and Barcelona and Amsterdam. We moved to San Francisco. The dream work deepened. There was another journey to Nepal, which became the subject of a documentary film. “This Is Baghdad,” “Tell the Universe,” and “Mystery” found their way onto a CD, along with other songs. Linda Panetta and I observed an election in Venezuela. Later came another couple of albums and a documentary film about me on tour. There was plenty of touring, and the arrival of more grandchildren. There was also the arrival, by way of seventy-five hours of hard work on the part of MJ, a delightful new daughter. Jenny was excited to have a sibling after all those years.
None of us has the capacity to stand far enough back from the picture to really see how the parts of our lives int
ersect. We’re all tiny figures in the jigsaw flux, tossed about within ourselves and with each other. One benefit of a relationship with God is that he does provide at least a sense of the whole picture. If I go by my deepest, truest, most open feelings, which I trust emanate from the Divine or at least are open to the spirit, I can receive that guidance, even if I don’t know that I’m getting it. That’s God talking. But it’s a fragile connection. It has to operate through the static of our thoughts and our personalities and our brain chemistry. It can easily be diverted or distorted. We have to remain true and open to whatever guidance the spirit offers us, and use it in combination with material forms of information. With this openness comes a freedom I have consciously known a few privileged times in my life.
I’m not the first person to utter these notions. They are part of the mystical end of every religious faith: Sufism, the Kabbalah, Christian mystical tradition, Shinto, Taoism. People express it differently, because we experience it in the context of our own cultures. But knowing that it’s there, that guidance and insight are available for those who look and listen patiently, also means knowing that the mystery will never completely unfold. This is a good thing. It’s the mystery that holds it all together, keeps us together, and connects us with coming generations. My not knowing exactly what I’m talking about is essential to leave room for what flows from the spirit. If a preacher or anyone else tells you he knows exactly what’s going on in the spirit world, walk away.
Our spiritual quests need not be religious. In fact, the two are sometimes antithetical. Doctrine can be a great thing to hide behind when faced with the unanswerable questions of which life is full. Politically, dogma is often a pretext for the imposition of authoritarian measures. Anytime you find yourself confronted by someone who claims the power to dictate the rules and limitations of your spiritual quest, defining for you exactly what the spirit world consists of, requiring you to uphold judgment and punishment, and leading you along a path that pits your community (or country) against another, walk away.