Iraqi writers, Sinan Antoon and Feurat Alani look back at how the unprovoked U.S. invasion devastated Iraq.
is headlined “The Iraq War helped destroy what it meant to be an Iraqi.” He’s joining us from Paris, France.
Just before coming into the studio out here, I was watching MSNBC, and one of its reporters was in Baghdad saying how great Baghdad is now because there is tourism, and going to one of Saddam Hussein’s previous palaces, which was turned into an American University in Baghdad, which is a private university, and telling us, “Oh, it’s a coed university,” as if Iraq did not have coed universities for decades. I can go on, of course, but I’ll stop here.
But the idea that 20 years later we still are talking about how Iraq now is a better place, how Iraq is a democracy, when it’s even almost impossible to have a sense of what the Iraqi citizenship is today. Iraqis are described with their sect or origin or ethnicity. Iraqis today are described as Sunnis and Shia, Kurds and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, which is something I would oppose to what Iraq was. And to me, 20 years later, Iraq is part of a collective amnesia.
And at the time, I mean, despite the corruption and the sectarian sentiments of so many Iraqi politicians — they were vying, and they were in conflict, and they were even fighting — but none of them had asked for this type of division, actually, except for the Kurds, but that’s a separate issue.
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