By M.C. Armstrong and Noor Ghazi

Protestors in Iraq have a great deal in common with the new wave of protestors in the United States. David McAtee, the owner of a barbecue restaurant and an unarmed demonstrator in Louisville, Kentucky, was shot dead by police shortly after midnight on May 31^st while marching in response to American police brutality. Safaa Al-Saray, an Iraqi blogger, was also unarmed when police struck him in the head with a tear gas canister in October of 2019. Al-Saray died from his injury, and this is tragic, to be sure. But why should Americans care about Al-Saray? Why should they embrace a protest movement thousands of miles away from US borders?

Many Americans would like to forget about Iraq, but, unfortunately Iraq does not have the luxury to have amnesia. Whereas America has not been occupied by a foreign nation since the War of 1812, Iraq, in spite of having nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, remains under American supervision, and Iraq is now, once again, on the verge of chaos, which certainly raises questions about the quality of this supervision. One of the richest countries in the world in terms of cultural heritage and natural resources, Iraq is suffering today from a dangerously high rate of unemployment, a lack of quality education, and a dearth of public services such as electricity and clean water. But there is hope. On October 19, 2019, just before the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, a powerful wave of protests disrupted Baghdad and the target of this “October Revolution” was the corrupt political system that emerged from the ashes of the 2003 US invasion.

The first round of revolt spread quickly across the country after originating in Al Tahreer Square. The marchers launched a peaceful crusade of free speech in the streets of Basra, Karbala, Maysan, and Babylon, the multi-generational gatherings chanting for change in a government many now believe to be controlled by the mullahs in Iran. Just as the Americans had Iraqis locked in their grip during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the power dynamic has now shifted to Iraq’s neighbor to the East. In both cases, the influence became unwelcome and has, once again, created the potential for civil war. The Iraqi government faced her peaceful protesters with live ammunition and tear gas. The government ignored multiple international calls, warnings and condemnations. Just as McAtee was not the only American casualty of police brutality, Al-Saray was not the only casualty in Iraq. More than 500 martyrs were shot down in the streets. Just as African-Americans wonder where the forces of freedom have gone when their young people are murdered or choked to death on the streets of the United States, Iraqis also wonder what it will take to activate the forces of freedom.

According to the Independent High Commission for Human Rights of Iraq, nearly 15,000 Iraqis have been injured since October of 2019 when the Iraqi government took desperate measures to regain control of Al Tahreer Square, ground zero for demonstrations. Like in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011, these despotic attempts at suppression included police brutality, curfews and internet blackouts to limit communication between protestors. Such media suppression enabled the government cover-up of violent criminal actions and left millions of Iraqis isolated from the rest of the world.

As the pandemic wakes up so many across the planet to the realization that “we’re all connected,” the situation on the ground in Iraq reveals the other side of that platitude and that very real connection. Yes, a virus in China quickly becomes America’s worst nightmare in this globalized world where the line between tourism and terrorism grows blurrier every year. And yes, it is wonderful to witness international cooperation on the effort to pioneer a vaccine for Covid-19. But before public health became America’s favorite media frame in 2020, its predecessor was war and terror. Most Iraqis have no interest in a third decade of the Global War on Terror, but whether its occupiers like it or not, Iraq does have an interest in freedom and democracy, and if Iraq’s people can win a democratic future, the public health consequences will almost certainly be positive. After years of bombing, burn pits, police brutality, and depleted uranium one has to wonder: could the public health of Iraq possibly get worse?

Under occupation, the answer is yes, but that is precisely the point. The occupation must end. Just before Covid-19 leveled Western economies and turned so many countries inward, young people in Iraq were marching like their Egyptian friends of 2011 and like so many Americans in the 1960s and again right now. Thousands of demonstrators started requesting United Nations intervention to stop the atrocities against peaceful civilians who were simply asking for human rights and a better life. Iraqis frequently raised the UN flag in Al Tahreer Square to grab the world’s attention and make the message clear: If the UN wished for peace, democracy, and freedom in the Iraq of 2003, where there was no war, why did they send war and then, two decades later ignore the homegrown calls for peace? When will the basic dignity and humanity of the Iraqi people trump America’s hunger for one more fix for its fossil fuel economy?

In November of 2019, as the October Revolution was reaching its climax, The New York Times and The Intercept shared 700 pages of leaked documents about how Iran and America have used Iraq as a battlefield for a proxy war ever since the American invasion of 2003. Far from his 2016 campaign promises, Donald Trump has maintained the policy positions of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and the mullahs have responded in kind. The Intercept documents revealed conversations from the Iranian embassy in which Iranian officials decried the free-thinking of Haider al-Abadi, an Iraqi candidate for prime minister whom Iran viewed as insufficiently servile to their interests. These leaked files “show how Iran, at nearly every turn, has outmaneuvered the United States” and its formidable network of intelligence agencies. But what is urgent to state before the eyes of the world is this: There are human costs for the ways in which “Iran and the United States have used Iraq as a staging area for their spy games.”  The occupation must end.

These human costs can be heard in the voices of the protestors and seen in the pattern of mass arrests among activists. Intimidation, torture, and in many cases, assassination, has been the tactic at “play.”  Take the story of the activists, Hussein Adel al-Madani and his wife Sara Talib. Al-Madani and Talib were some of the first Iraqis to march against Iranian influence and government corruption. Talib, in particular, was one of the first women bold enough to take to the streets of Basra.

“But they had to stop,” claimed a friend named Abbas. “Gunmen raided their home late in 2018 and asked them to write down the names of other protesters.” Talib and al-Madani, like so many Iraqis before them, fled their country. They traveled to Turkey. But also like so many before them, Talib and al-Madani returned to Iraq. Just before the launch of the “October Revolution,” they came home to Basra. Then, on October 2^nd, assassins entered their home and shot Al-Madani three times. They killed Talib with a single shot to her head. And what was their crime? Why were the protesters sentenced to death? Was it free speech? Idealism? Talib provided medical aid to her own people while her husband helped with organization. They spoke openly, opposing the influence of Iran-backed militias on Iraq.

The occupation must end.

Many other activists were kidnapped by the armed militias such as Ali Jasib, a human rights attorney who helped with the release of many arrested activists. Ali was kidnapped in Maysan province. But as the chaos in America and the Covid-19 pandemic steal the headlines, the international community seems to be forgetting about Iraq and protestors like Ali Jasib.

The Iraqi protests began with simple demands. The Iraqi people want quality education, decent employment, and public services. However, as so often happens, these demands were quickly revised when the first protestor fell dead. The Iraqi people called for the ouster of the government and an end to corruption. They asked for new electoral laws that would protect the country from regime change wars. The persistence of the protestors did force prime minister, Adil Abdul Mahdi, to submit his resignation in November of 2019, but a demonstrator from Al Tahreer Square exclaimed, “Adil Abdul-Mahdi’s resignation will not make the required change. We want a new government that can respect our demands and needs. We want a home.”

The occupation must end.

Just as so many Americans tire of the regime change wars they were forced to pay for under Bush, Obama, and Trump, Iraqis, too, have grown tired of the wars. But Trump continues to ratchet up the tension between Washington and Tehran. First, he withdrew from the United States’ nuclear treaty with Iran, which was a small albeit imperfect first step toward peace in the region. Then, in a provocative move, Trump assassinated Iran’s top security and intelligence commander, Qasim Soleimani, on Iraqi soil. While Trump’s supporters chant about “blood and soil” in America and America expands its Global War on Terror to now include its own homegrown protesters like Antifa, the American president continues the Global War on Terror’s policy of pell-mell assassinations overseas, broadly, and in Iraqi territory, specifically. Like Obama’s drone assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and his fifteen-year old son in Yemen back in 2011, Trump’s killing of Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport in January of 2020, raises serious questions about international law, human rights, and the rationale for America’s continued presence in the Middle East. The attack, far from being framed as a defense of Iraqi civil liberties, was described, instead, as a response to the death of an American contractor on December 27, 2019 at the hands of an Iranian-backed militia. Most Americans, one suspects, do not even know that contractors, intelligence operatives, and special forces are still occupying Iraq. But the occupation continues and the occupation must end.

“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”

Although the Pentagon report may well be accurate, the larger and more uncomfortable geopolitical truth is that Soleimani and his Quds Force never would have had a chance to kill so many Americans if America had not invaded the wrong country after 9/11.

In any event, after the American drone killed Soleimani, Iraqi politicians, religious leaders, and conservative protestors chanted for the immediate withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq, which inspired fear among the more liberal protestors that such an evacuation would only allow for the expansion of Iran inside Iraq. This is the chaos of occupation. The occupation must end.

When Iran announced its retaliation on the US by targeting airbases housing US forces on Iraq’s land, the demonstrators rejected this violence, too. Iraq does not want foreign drone attacks and Iraq does not want foreign missile strikes. Like the US and Iran, what the vast majority of Iraq wants is peace, freedom, and respect for its sovereignty.

In the wake of this most recent chapter in The Global War on Terror, mayhem ensued and the streets were again filled with protest and revolt. The government scrambled to establish order. Iraq chose Muhammed Tawfeeq Alawi to be its next prime minister, but Alawi was rejected and so was his successor, Adnan Al Zurfi due to disputes over ministerial portfolios and budgets. Also, they were utterly rejected by protestors since they didn’t meet the basic demands. Like so many failed states around the world, the United States included, Iraq is waking up just as the independent media, international travel, and respect for civil liberties is beginning a potentially indefinite pandemic hibernation. Covid-19 has not been a friend of free speech. Iraqi protests could not be crushed by drone attacks, missiles, torture, or government-imposed internet blackouts. But a public health crisis is a different story.

“The pandemic has adversely impacted the situation on the ground,” says an Iraqi protestor who has asked to remain anonymous. “Protestors demands haven’t been answered.”

Although many protestors initially resisted the demands of the World Health Organization and stayed in their tents in Al-Tahreer Square, others went home. They retreated into social media where they witnessed, among other things, shared grievances from their fellow American protestors, but also a surge in honor killings and domestic violence in Iraq, a country more terrified of doctors laying hands on their wives and daughters than on corrupt leaders usurping their civil rights.[1] Meanwhile, the Iraqi government used this international public health crisis as an opportunity to consolidate the old order’s power by appointing Mustafa Alkhadimi, the former head of Iraqi Intelligence, as the new prime minister. As protestors overwhelmingly reject Alkhadimi on social media, one wonders at this point if such rejections do little more than provide valuable intel to this spy who now runs Iraq.

Did America’s Global War on Terror successfully deliver democracy to the Middle East? Just as Tahrir Square passed in Egypt, some suspect the October Revolution in Iraq will also pass away. But what those with roots in Baghdad know is that a critical mass is gathering, both in Iraq and abroad. The Iraqi people recognize that the October demonstrations were different and far more powerful than any other in the past. The Iraqi people are getting a taste of freedom. The hunger for freedom and change is going viral just as an actual virus spreads around the world, and although Covid-19 is frightening, it is nothing compared to the horrors of war the Iraqis have witnessed for nearly four decades. This new generation of Iraqis, like other brave young people around the world, is speaking up against corruption and they are not afraid. Like Hussein Adel al-Madani and Sara Talib, they came out in October seeking a better life for the next generation. They want to be left alone by Iran and they want the US to lift its knee from the neck of their country. As one father in Al Tahreer Square said, “I am here today because I am looking for a better future for my daughter. I don’t want her to live through this poverty and broken system as I did.” It has been almost nine months since the start of the October Revolution and as the demonstrators continually repeat: “We will not return home until our demands are met.” The occupation must end.

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M.C. Armstrong embedded with JSOF in Al Anbar Province and reported extensively on the Iraq War through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Mantle, Epiphany, Monkeybicycle, Mayday, YES! Weekly, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. His memoir, The Mysteries of Haditha, will be published by Potomac Books in 2020. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Noor Ghazi is an international peace activist. She was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and after time in Syria, immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 2008. Ghazi is Visiting Research Scholar with a Master’s Degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is currently an academic translator with the Iraqi Alamal Association in Baghdad translating two books by the eminent peace studies scholar John Paul Lederach into Arabic. She has written academic articles in both English and Arabic and recently gave a TEDx Talk titled, “Lost In My Home For 12 Years.”

[1] From Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/22/iraq-urgent-need-domestic-violence-law#

Today, November 24th, 2015, Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois. We all should be charged for the same thing. I won’t argue with anyone who wants to call Jason Van Dyke a bad apple, but the problem is larger than that.

The problem–the problem that led to the death of Laquan Mcdonald–extends to Jason Van Dyke’s police department, whose officers allegedly went into a Burger King and erased the surveillance video. It extends to the Mayor’s office and to the State’s Attorney’s office, who were dilatory in bringing charges. It extends to our legislatures who have shielded our law enforcement officers with cloaks of qualified immunity, impunity, and legal invincibility. It extends to our courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, for eviscerating the Fourth Amendment rights of the citizens.

The problem extends to each and every single one of us who wants to claim citizenship in a democratic republic.

Laquan McDonald is on all of us. 

We are a society. We have a culture. We share a nation. We call ourselves the United States of America. We pride ourselves on our democratic ideals. We claim exceptionalism. Equal protection under the laws. A government of the people and by the people. Just as we as a nation cannot absolve ourselves for the slaughter of innocents overseas when we send our troops to war, we can’t abdicate our own responsibility for the death of Laquan McDonald or any of the others unjustly harassed, abused, or murdered in our name.

All it takes to file criminal charges in this country is probable cause, a bar so low in our courts that if it were not so tragic it would be laughable. It took over a year to charge Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder despite the fact that clear video evidence showed far more than probable cause that he committed first-degree murder when he opened fire on a juvenile, a teenager who was moving away from him, a kid who made no threatening gestures toward Jason Van Dyke. He opened fire and he kept firing. Laquan McDonald fell to the ground and Jason Van Dyke kept firing.

It was memorialized in video. Evidence exists. Probable cause exists. As a society, we should be expected to seek justice for whomever was responsible for the death of Laquan McDonald. But we didn’t. We delayed, and justice delayed is justice denied.

It took 400 days to charge Van Dyke in the shooting of Laquan McDonald. 

Jason Van Dyke gunned down Laquan McDonald on October 20th, 2014. A judge, in response to a journalist’s Freedom of Information Act request, ordered the video of the shooting released to the public by November 25th, 2015. 400 days.

400 days have gone by since Laquan McDonald breathed his last while he lay bleeding in the streets from sixteen bullet holes, with all the bullets being fired by one sworn to uphold the law and protect and serve the public.

400 days. The State’s Attorney, she’s an elected official. She’s a politician. The video had been requested by the public for a year. When the courts finally forced the city to release the video of the slaying as unrest continued to grow, she waited until the day the video was released to press charges.

#BlackLivesMatter –Laquan McDonald’s life mattered. 

If Laquan McDonald had been arrested for shooting and killing someone, if the roles were reversed, he would have been put in jail and charged as soon as the courts were open for business. He would have been denied bail. He would have been assigned to an overworked public defender who could not possibly be expected to provide effective assistance of counsel with the immorally low funding and staffing in the public defender’s office. Laquan McDonald would either be coerced into pleading or he would have a mere formality of a trial before he was sent to prison or death row. No one would blink, because that is how our country operates. That is the status quo.

Instead, Jason Van Dyke is a white police officer who has a thin blue line to erase video tapes for him. He is a white police officer who has the strongest unions and political lobbies behind him. He is a white police officer who works in the executive branch of our government, hand in hand with the attorneys responsible for charging decisions and prosecutions. He is a white police officer who has 400 days to prepare a defense, to prepare his family, to practice those magic words, “I feared for my life.”  He is a white police officer who may have never been charged in the first place if a journalist didn’t fight for that video to be released, who may have never been charged had that video not forced the hand of the State’s Attorney in her own self-interested political game.

We are all complicit; we are all responsible for change. 

Plenty of people will spill words indicting Jason Van Dyke, but plenty of right-wing racists will instead blame the victim and say that if Laquan McDonald weren’t a “thug,” if he had just followed the directions of police, if he had just not committed any crimes in the first place, he would still be alive. Their logic will rest on the idea that anything short of unflinching obedience to the State, anything short of complete purity of spirit (and skin) deserves the sentence of death with no trial.

Plenty of people will blame a police culture that encourages officers to shoot first and ask questions later, yet plenty of others will write op-eds about a non-existent war on police.

Plenty of people will march in Laquan McDonald’s memory to honor him and to protest the sad truth that our government—and thus, the majority of our citizenry—cares less for the lives of black people and other people of color than it does for the white majority, yet many will point to the red herring of black on black violence.

Plenty of people will scream out in anguish because they aren’t heard when they say, “Black lives matter,” but—sadly—plenty of people will scream out in anger and denial to drown them out. Plenty of people will miss the point entirely; and to protect their own fragile psyches, to continue living in denial, or to maintain their own status quo, they will cry out, “All lives matter.”

It’s all so familiar, and it’s all so heartbreaking. So many words will be spilled about the blood we continue to spill, and most of them will be pointing the finger at someone else. So few will hold up a mirror and say, “How am I complicit?” The truth is, we are all to blame.

We live in a culture of fear in which we demonize “the other.” We live in a culture of violence in which we use guns in misguided efforts to solve or prevent our problems. We live in a culture in which we are at war with each other—black lives vs. blue lives, liberals vs. conservatives, extremist evangelicals vs. everyone, and the list goes on.

We live in a culture in which we voice outrage over the blood spilled in our streets, in our movie theaters, and in our schools; yet, we do nothing about it. We live in a culture in which we are all given one vote, we are all given voices, and we continue to either not use them or we waste them to maintain the status quo. The status quo is not acceptable.

My heart absolutely breaks for Laquan McDonald and for his family. And my heart breaks for us all.

     Matthew J. Hefti is the author of A Hard and Heavy Thing (Tyrus / F+W).

I’m writing this on the eve of Veterans Day, an annual observance in America that becomes both less and more important to me with each passing year. It’s important to view days or periods of time as special; I’m not sure when that began, and I assume there was originally a religious or superstitious connotation to “special days,” but now the special days with which one identifies form an important part of one’s identity.

In thinking about Veterans Day, and what it means to me, I have to admit that many days feel like “Veterans Day” in America. Part of that is my friend circle—as someone who is interested in affairs that affect veterans, I’m constantly encountering them on social media, as well as in the news. It helps that identifying as a veteran is seen, now, as a largely apolitical gesture, and one that is fairly unbiased when it comes to race, religion, sex, or gender (individual experiences will vary on this point, but I’m speaking broadly). In general, veterans tend to feel appreciated in US society. And when they don’t, they let people know.

Being a “veteran” is different from being a part of any other special interest group, especially ones involving birth. Nevertheless, being a veteran is similar in that few civilians know or understand what they’re getting into when they join the military. One goes through basic training and advanced training, and the point of it all is to strip you of your identity as a citizen—to make you simultaneously less and more. Once you join the military, you have become something that you never were as a civilian—part of a unified collective—and once you leave, you are stripped of that collective. Even the people who misbehave, the anti-authoritarians (as I was), the renegades, the individualists—even they are not unaffected by the curious taking off of identity, of returning to what one was before the military changed you—this is a large part of what it means to be a veteran—to know loss, to understand what it means to have been part of a special team.

Not every group in America does feel appreciated, or even safe, necessarily, within the identity that has been assigned to them. I’m currently lecturing a course at Yale called “Memoir and the War on Terror, which has been in the news recently because certain minority groups do not feel safe on campus—intellectually, culturally. The source of the problem some students have with Yale clearly has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, and it is eliciting the usual spectrum of responses. The left, broadly, supports what appears to be a valid concern on the part of students who do not want to be confronted by crude caricatures of their cultures. Yet all over the right, there exists much handwringing over liberal fascism and the thought-police, moderately described by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic and less moderately by people writing for Breitbart and other right-wing sites.

Academia is not crumbling; it’s not under attack; our freedom is secure. What’s happening, near Veterans Day (conveniently for my meditation on that which makes me special and unique in terms of social identity beyond my being special and unique by virtue of my chemical and physical composition), on the Yale campus and at the University of Missouri, is that people are engaged in dialogue. There have been threats, intimidation, and strong language, but unlike in many areas on earth, there haven’t been gunfights or brawls. There’s been language.

When my father was graduating from Yale in the Spring of 1970, there were protests on New Haven Green tied to a murder trial of the Black Panthers. Someone called out the Connecticut National Guard. My father remembers smelling tear gas on campus—the Green is beside Old Campus, where most freshmen live at Yale. Tanks and uniformed soldiers were on the streets. Kent State loomed at the forefront of people’s memories, where students had been shot. That was a protest.

Today, some students don’t feel safe and are congregating, are meeting with professors, and—sometimes—are shouting. There are no tanks, no soldiers, no riot police. No tear gas. The Silliman Master, whose wife provoked this firestorm with a (as Friedersdorf points out) fairly rational, defensible, unintentionally incendiary email, stands (in a prominent YouTube video) in the middle of a group of students—despite being yelled at, he remains calm; his life and safety are not in danger.

We’ve come a long way, collectively, since the days of Vietnam. Veterans of Vietnam came home to an almost-non-functional VA, and were alienated by veterans of WWII and Korea, as well as by segments of the US population. Society itself was in turmoil, everywhere. Today, Veterans of the War on Terror are accepted despite their participation in a war that makes even less sense than Vietnam. Veterans come home to parades, a less-broken VA, and an appreciative (or, at least not a hostile) population. Veterans have it good.

And society has it good. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re far better than they were forty, fifty years ago. The events unfolding at Yale and on other college campuses today are products of integration and products of a democratic society wherein people can speak up and speak out. That’s a good thing.

I’m pleased with what is happening on college campuses and proud that being a veteran of the United States of America’s armed forces is part of my identity. Life isn’t perfect—it never was, and it never will be—but so far, we’re doing it better than just about anyone else in the world.