UM-Dearborn Gets Empowered Over Iraq

In case you hadn’t heard, it was “Iraq Awareness Week” in Dearborn last week. (“Students protest on war anniversary”). Yeah, I didn’t know about it, either. Anyway, the Students United for Peace and Justice (SUPJ) are at it again, holding a protest last Tuesday at UM-Dearborn “to highlight the death and destruction of the Iraq war.”

“Five years ago, the United States of America began its war on Iraq without the permission of the United Nations in search for weapons of mass destruction,” said SUPJ President Rashid Baydoun. “Since then, the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and American soldiers have been lost. $500 billion later, the war is still an on-going issue which the current administration plans to put no stop to.”

It’s obvious Rashid has a bet going on campus as to how many misstatements he can cram into two lines. When a guy at a war protest even gets the cost of the war wrong by drastically underestimating it, I have to think he’s really not showing up for these things very well prepared.

Speaking of Rashid’s concern for “innocent…American soldiers,” he was the one who refused a polite request from Iraq War veteran and UM-D student J. David McHann, to remove offensive posters hung on campus by the SUPJ depicting American soldiers threatening Iraqi women and children with their weapons, and captioned: “Oppression.” How can Rashid’s be concerned for the innocent soldiers when he doesn't think there are any?

Considering that the stated goal of the effort is to “educate” the UM-D campus about the war, (as well as, of course, to “empower the campus about this war,” but that goes without saying), you’d think the organizers would trouble themselves to gather a fact or two.

Even guys who are paid to be prepared show up with notes scrawled in crayola. According to The Arab American News, last Wednesday’s lecture by Dr. Hashim Al-Tawil “The liquidation of Iraq: Five years later,” focused on “the impact of the war on the country, the destruction of the social and political structure.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d think that once you tipped your hand by speaking of Iraq as a place that had been “liquidated” five years earlier, there wouldn’t be much of an impact left to make? Or maybe it’s a really slow liquidation, like those 3-days-only sales Art Van has been throwing since 1966.

For all it matters, Al-Tawil is an Art History professor at Henry Ford Community College, and his criteria for a good society seems to be limited to whether or not the modern art scene is fluorishing. Apparently a scant few social institutions escaped Saddam's totalitarian bootheel, includng the modern art scene. As Al-Tawil tells it,

“Fine art in pre-occupation Iraq was thrilling since the sixties and seventies,” says Dr. Hashim Al-Tawil, Professor of Art History at Henry Ford College in Michigan and former Iraqi active artist and faculty member of the college of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad.

Dr. Al-Tawil said that Baghdad was the center of art activities on a national and international scale for over three decades, from the period of 1960-1990. Arab art Biennials, international exhibits and conferences, and national annual exhibits were commonplace in Iraq all year long.

“It [fine art] was hindered temporarily by the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988), but was not affected substantially,” Dr. Al-Tawil told Fine Art Registry (FAR). “That cultural activity was severely wounded by the US bombing of 1990-91 followed by 13 years of brutal sanctions and isolation ended by the US-British invasion of 2003 which has paralyzed every cultural activity in the country.” ("Iraq’s Forgotten MODERN Art").

Things were great under Saddam, It was those fucking Americans and Brits who ruined everything.

Art activities weren't the only things Baghdad was the center of under Saddam, but Al-Tawil didn't seem to notice the mass killings, the secret police and torture, or the rape rooms, what with all the important artwork on display. Which proves one thing--Muslim, Christian, atheist, or Jew, art assholes speak the same language all across the globe.

I’m too tired to organize yet one more itemized list of how, even with all the violence and setbacks, (and even after the looting of the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art, formerly known as the Saddam Center for the Arts), the social and especially the political life in Iraq has been on a steadily upward curve. Before March 2003 Iraq’s social and political life under Saddam were in a poison-induced, death-like sleep: not that mention of that is ever made up at these events.

At one point, according to The Arab American News, “’From sea to shining sea, we want Iraqis to be free,’ rang through the air.”

I agree completely. So why, I ask, should we abandon the Iraqis to their enemies?