“Catastrophic”: Iraqi Writers Sinan Antoon & Feurat Alani Reflect on U.S. Invasion 20 Years Later

This is a truly excellent and incredibly important interview. And I look back at Bush telling the American people about Shock and Awe and I feel every bit as nauseated and enraged and horrified as I do when I listen to Trump.

And I’m angry at the American corporate media that continues — when Iraq is discussed at all — to talk about the cost in lives and injuries to American soldiers. My husband and I were simultaneously swearing at the TV when yet again there was NO mention of Iraqi babies being born 20 years later with horrendous deformities due to how our government funded the poisoning of Iraqi citizens and cities. No mention of millions of Iraqi people displaced and dead. No mention of our own war criminals — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc., etc. And I’m ANGRY!!!

It is long, long past time that we here in America become accountable for American terrorism, American war crimes, American poisonous and pervasive propaganda, American aggression and atrocities and greed and patriarchal power lust and hegemony that kills millions and is destroying the planet.

There can be no solution for that which is denied, minimized, distracted from. We have such a long ways to go to live up to the values we profess. Speaking up and telling the truth again and again and again is so profoundly important. ― Molly 

 

At around 5:30 a.m. local time in Baghdad on March 20, 2003, air raid sirens were heard in Baghdad as the U.S. invasion began. Within the hour, President George W. Bush gave a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office announcing the war had begun. The attack came on the false pretext that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, and despite worldwide protest and a lack of authorization from the United Nations Security Council. We spend today’s show with two Iraqis looking back at how the unprovoked U.S. invasion devastated Iraq and helped destabilize much of the Middle East. Feurat Alani is a French Iraqi writer and documentarian who was based in Baghdad from 2003 to 2008. His recent piece for The Washington Post is headlined “The Iraq War helped destroy what it meant to be an Iraqi.” Sinan Antoon was born and raised in Baghdad. He is also a writer, as well as a poet, translator and associate professor at New York University. His latest piece appears in The Guardian, headlined “A million lives later, I cannot forgive what American terrorism did to my country, Iraq.”

 

Please go here for the full interview and complete transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/20/us_invasion_of_iraq_20th_anniversary