Time For A Gut-Check - "The Arab Abstraction"

[kpete]

The Arab Abstraction
Erica Bouris | March 19, 2008

Editor: Erik Leaver


Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org


I admit it with some embarrassment; in my daily perusal of the New York Times I sometimes skip over the articles on Iraq. The ones that say 14 people were blown up in this market, or two soldiers were wounded while on neighborhood patrol. I have taught courses in human rights. I have taught courses in war and peace. I have taught courses on politics in the Middle East, assigning the writings of Edward Said, confident that the students must know this, filled with anticipatory pleasure that I will reread his eloquent words again.

And yet, I barely breeze through these articles sometimes, on Tuesdays maybe, after squeezing in a long run in the pre-dawn hours, shuffling my children off to school, and heading to work in my largely administrative university position. Despite my own voting records, and the records of countless people like me, as we try to strip the funding from this ill-conceived war, as we try to see that some semblance of justice is upheld for the contractors who commit human rights violations, as we try to insist upon just a few more visas for destitute Iraqis, many of whom work for us, it is the place of this war in the minutiae of most of our lives that has caused some of our ears to prick in some surprise when we hear five years. Five years.

Foreign Policy In Focus recently put together a summary of statistics; statistics that should not belong to the wealthiest country in the world, to a country that prides itself on one of the most progressive value sets in history. And yet the numbers tumble out; 81,632-1,120,000 Iraqi civilians dead. How could we be so unsure? How could we not know whether 1,038, 368 people celebrated their eighth birthdays or graduated from high school or handed their daughters off in marriage? We are a bit more confident about our estimates of Iraqi refugees, 2.2-2.4 million (it helps that other countries are trying to count them as their cities and slums swell uncomfortably). But here too we don't know whether the intended birthday trinkets were left behind, whether education was abandoned such that gutters could be swept or handouts could be taken in the streets of Damascus and Iran, or whether elderly fathers were left behind, too frail to make the trip outside Iraq.

Images of these victims are rare on the mainstream news and generally when they appear, perhaps as background snippets to a discussion of troop strategy, we cannot quite move beyond this level of Arab as abstraction. We can't quite be moved at the gut towards a glimmer that we insist is the glimmer of a shared humanity. We may call these infractions human rights violations, we may count them and track them and remember to read these numbers most days of the week, but I have only rarely seen the lurching of a human gut towards these suffering people.


more at:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5085

[Solly Mack]

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