Iraq: One Person's Liberation Might Be Another's Nightmare

There's a new book out you should check out: Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage, by Michael Otterman and Richard Hil with Paul Wilson (and with dozens of Iraqi bloggers who are quoted). Although those who remain champions of the 2003 invasion of Iraq may misjudge the book by its cover to be an anti-Bush argument, it is more accurately described as a pro-people, pro-local perspective look back on the Iraq War. Any book showing the Iraq War from the local perspective is, not necessarily by argument but by document, going to read pro-peace.

Up front, I'll admit that I'm friends with the lead author, Michael Otterman. He actually contributed to HELO Magazine's debate about journalism bias in Iraq last fall, before I knew him. We met and talked about Iraq, the Middle East, his previous book, American Torture, and hit it off. Because nothing builds friendship better than talking about harsh interrogation tactics.

What I really respected most about Otterman's approach was that unlike sooooo many other journalists and researchers, he goes directly to the local witnesses. It may not always be possible to get into Baghdad during a bombardment and interview people while it's happening, but any shrewd research should reduce the time committed to White House press briefings and Think Tank brown bags in order to increase time committed to reading through the many growing local witness blogs. With the Iraq debate we did last year, Otterman was the only non-Iraqi to bring in very specific local witness descriptions of events. And so this new book is much more.

In one section, heavily quoting artist Nuha al-Radi, Otterman, et al., reveal the local perspective of the U.S.-led bombardment of Baghdad in 1991 which was so obscured from Americans at the time. As it turned out, helping the Kuwaitis to escape Baathist occupation, and to free Western energy resources, meant blowing the Hell out of a lot of Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the Kuwait invasion. Here's Nuha's section of Erasing Iraq: "Mouths Open Swallowing Bombs."

The rest of the book chronicles the local perspectives of the "liberation" from 2002 to 2010. Many of those interviewed weigh the horrible times living under Saddam Hussein and, just when they had figured out how to navigate the Baathist nightmare, then the potentially worse -- depending which part of the country one lived in -- horrors of the post-invasion period.

Perhaps the two most important points that Otterman, Hil, Wilson and many of those Iraqis they interviewed make are these. First, waging even a defensive or humanitarian war, countries and armed forces are choosing ahead of time to kill, injure, and distress civilians caught in the crossfire. It is not an accidental fallout of war but a pre-meditated decision, even made by the most humanitarian of leaders.

Second, if wars are won by rallying the public in the war zone to support and agree with one group's authority, then it is absurd to wage such a war without placing local witness testimony as the top priority for understanding the dynamics of the war and therefore the prevention of war and the building of peace.

Photo credit: U.S. Army