And he said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”
— Genesis 4:10
I was politically radicalised at the tender age of four, when on the wide stone steps of a plaza in Macao I stood beneath a placard of an Iraqi child lying wounded in a hospital bed. What I felt then, and still feel now, was fury.
I can tell you the exact date — 15 February, 2003 — because that day registered, I would later discover, the largest antiwar protests in history. From Rome to Beijing, millions of people marched and condemned American warmongery in the strongest possible terms. As far as the invasion was concerned these protests would accomplish precisely nothing. A million Iraqis would duly be murdered, directly or indirectly, in a protracted, star-spangled holocaust.
Yet that little protest in Macao — a hundred people and their placards — achieved one thing for certain. It embedded the U.S. invasion of Iraq as the central political atrocity of my life, a brute fact that coloured everything I knew about the world. It remains so to this day. We forget at our peril that we are still living in the wreckage of Baghdad, and the blood has not yet dried on countless Iraqi graves. Or American hands.
I was four years old in February 2003. I knew almost nothing about the world, yet — twenty years and two degrees in political science later — my impressions of the invasion we were protesting have barely changed at all. I knew even then that America was sending its army to Iraq, a country in the Middle East, that their president with the funny name Bush was the target of our protest and bore the final responsibility for the invasion.
Intuitively, I knew the war was illegal. At four years old I was entirely ignorant of 9/11 (though I recall burning towers replayed on TV after the fact), so my understanding that Iraq’s invasion had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda was simply my default impression, though of course this ended up being true. Standing on those stone step — a child with a crowd of angry Chinese and Macanese towering over him, signs hoisted over their heads — I recall being handed a placard with English words written on it. I didn’t want it, I told my dad, I wanted that one. The one with the girl.
The war became potent and real to me only when I saw my first Iraqi victim: a young girl with dark hair lying in a hospital bed. My impression at the time was that she was wounded by an American landmine, though whether this was true or simply the explanation my dad deigned to give me, I’ll never know.
I was handed the placard. I’ll always remember that girl. I suspect that as a kid I was stirred against the war mainly by my sympathy at seeing a child wounded at my own age. But my opposition was not sentimental. Implicit in my vision of that girl was a political conviction I was to hold throughout a childhood experienced alongside that faraway war: that its violence was perpetrated mainly against civilians, and that the murder, torture, and abuse of Iraqis was the calculated intention of the American way of war. Again, this childish intuition proved true.
The American invasion of Iraq was to prove a recurring theme of my childhood, glimpsed on TV screens and usually seen through a prism of cult politics.1 In our eschatology, the Middle East was ground zero for the literal Apocalypse: very much an imminent certainty but only vaguely apprehended as a process somehow involving Israel, the United States, and the shadowy figure of the Antichrist. The war on the TV terrified me; watching images of US soldiers running their guns through houses and dusty streets I would slump on the couch and turn away, whining for someone to change the channel. To my parents I was simply scared of war, but no: I could feel the Antichrist at work in Iraq. These were the Endtimes.
In a perverse irony, my impression that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was fraught with apocalyptic significance would have been shared with al-Qaeda and ISIS. Our armageddons were mirrored. Where we put the final battle at Tel Megiddo, a stone’s throw from the occupied West Bank, they anticipated it at a backwater town in northern Syria called Dabiq. But we were both convinced, if only briefly, that the invasion of the Middle East by the world’s most formidable superpower was somehow tilting the fabric of reality towards a final, cosmic reckoning. There was something spiritually sinister about the invasion. To this day it is an impression hard to shake. How else to see those totems the Americans erected to their barbarity at Abu Ghraib: naked and black-hooded men, arms outstretched like Jesus. Shit-smeared Christs, offerings to the American war god.
A coherent imaginary of terror came together over the course of my childhood: a set of images and impressions rooted in the brutality of American warmaking. Anyone watching the news in the mid-2000s would know what the white wall of a family home looks like when it had been riddled with bullets. They’d know that sand soaked with blood was the same colour as pomegranate juice. I never saw these things with my own eyes, but as images they took root in the primal parts of my brainstem.
If these visions lingered, the West itself moved on. Aged twelve or thirteen, I remember thinking that 9/11 would be remembered as the defining event of the twenty-first century. Here was the mainspring for the wars then consuming Iraq and Afghanistan, the mass surveillance, paranoia and moral degradation, the hysterical tone of every politician assuring their citizens: to protect you from the barbarians we must be twice as barbarous. These things could only be justified if terror on a colossal scale lurked just behind everyone’s eyes.
But I was wrong. September 11 did not remain the central touchstone of even American politics. The war it engendered was too expensive, too protracted. It made its perpetrators feel too greasy. It had to be buried. Nothing further could be wrung from the carcass of the Iraqi state. The war had served its purpose: creating a feeding frenzy for arms manufacturers and military contractors, facilitating mass surveillance of American citizens, generating legal precedent for torture, kidnapping, and arbitrary imprisonment. And of course, the war killed many many Iraqis — surely a cathartic, if not strategic, victory for the US establishment.
By the time I became a man the War on Terror was quietly shunted to the side, a deformed child left to succumb to exposure. The US was pivoting to grander things — great power conflict, sizing up China. Where the invasion of Iraq awoke demons, they could be left to the generals — preferably African and Arab generals who could sort out their own messes. Violence had moved beyond the margins of civilised concern.
Beyond the margins, war can be waged at apocalyptic scale. Whole towns massacred in Sudan, mass shootings in Mali, endemic rape and pillage in the eastern Congo. But these wars go the way of Iraq: they disappear down the same grey hole. Nobody marches or brandishes placards for the Sudan. If ongoing slaughter is not worthy of outrage, the memory of a million dead Iraqis is not even worth a reflex. For the West, terror has sunk down to what it always was: violence in faraway places. Poor brown people dying. This does not concern us, because we’ve learned: dying is what these people do.
But it still haunts me. Perhaps it haunts a very specific generation: those weaned on television warfare. Somehow I feel there is a primal scream that has never been let out. The blood of an ancient country still cries out from the ground. What would it take for America to confront its mountains of dead? It would take more than a placard of a wounded child? If there can be no atonement, grant me the catharsis of this one vision of justice: Bush and Cheney standing on gallows in the Hague, every synapse in their brains frying with whirling visions of tormented children and bomb-blasted homes in the single timeless second it takes their septuagenarian bodies to fall the length of the rope. Any other fate would be appalling.
I confess that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is still the single defining event of my lifetime. I have never seen a crime more odious or cruel. On this atrocity I have erected all my politics.
I am still the child standing on those steps.
In a story for another time, my childhood took place in a quasi-Christian millenarian sect in China.