Report #14 - Who Is Babylon?

by Jerry Levin

Amman, Jordan

April 6, 2003

These days Ben Tre is very much on my mind, because Baghdad is. (My wife Sis and I and other members of CPT's presence in Iraq have just returned from there.) Ben Tre was the city during the Vietnam War, which an exulting U. S. military public information officer declared was destroyed in order to save it. The comparison may not be seamless but the similarities, if you can excuse the intended irony, are close enough for government work. For, in fact, with respect to lunatic geopolitics all of Iraq is on the verge of becoming Ben Tre.

But where testing homicidal technology is concerned, which is what military hardware is really all about, Iraq is also terrifyingly comparable to the defenseless village of Guernica during the time of the Spanish civil war. Fascist bomber pilots, warming up for what turned out to be the Axis' failed attempt to establish a "new world order" (ah there, George Bush Senior!), tested their attack techniques and weaponry on the place; and it was obliterated. Pablo Picasso immortalized that calamitous event in his powerful neo-Goyaesque painting of the same name.

As our Iraq Peace Team delegation made its way out of Baghdad-Ben Tre-Guernica, allied forces were closing in on it. The run down city was hushed, uncertain, and in a kind of state of near suspended animation. The effects of the previous war followed by years of sanctions and blockade, and now the new war with its intermittent but round the clock air raids had brought normal daytime and evening hustle and bustle to a halt.

The people were hunkered down safely-they hoped-behind closed doors and shuttered or taped windows. Most shops not having to do with survival-such as food-were closed. Traffic was moderate. So, although Baghdad was not a ghost town, it had a ghost town appearance.

Meanwhile above the streets and buildings a black smudge-like haze permanently shrouded most of the city: the result of a series of burning trenches of oil circling the area. They had been kept blazing since the war began in a futile gesture to obscure potential targets from the allies' shock and awe air raids.

One of the few times nonviolent humanitarian communicators and the international press still operating in Baghdad could encounter ordinary citizens en masse was at places Foreign Ministry "minders" took them and us in order to see and gather first hand accounts of the toll in lives and lingering pain that the bombings were taking in demonstrably civilian areas. People from the neighborhoods affected would be on hand, as we pulled up in cabs driven by government approved drivers.

The survivors were anxious to tell their stories of pain and fear and express their bewilderment and rage. The bewilderment was over why they were being made to pay such a steep price for the actions of a government over which they had no control, while the rage took two forms. General rage over the fact that they were being hit instead of military or other kinds of targets contributing to official belligerence and resistance; and specific rage over increasing evidence that anti-personnel fragmentation devices were being dropped on them.

The main purpose of those weapons is to maim and wound not necessarily to destroy. From a distance a person struck by those solid metallic sharp edged flying shards looks like someone with a bad case of the measles, but close up those "measles" are bleeding wounds from which removing each jagged pellet is inevitably painful and difficult.

If the purpose of just this one aspect of the allies' air campaign had been to create docility among the populace in Baghdad with respect to the invasion and a spirit of revolt with respect to the Iraqi police state, it appeared to be having a cumulative opposite effect. A perhaps unanticipated byproduct of the rising civilian death toll had been not just a strengthening unity in anger against the allied fomenters of this war being waged against helpless and uninvolved Iraqis but the increasing iconization of Sadaam Hussein in the very center of what was still his nation-a process, which may only have served to further harden the resolve and nerve of this clearly anti-heroic strongman's increasingly beleaguered regime and life.

That is not to say that his regime will not fall. As of this writing, there is certainly the probability of that happening, but there is also the likelihood of the aftermath turning into a gigantic Afghanistan: an increasingly hollow victory for the United States, if ever there was one, not to mention for the millions of Afghanis living uneasily outside the safety of the small enclaves protected by our forces.

So called "liberated" Afghanis are having to cope with living in still violently unstable areas run by war lords. Democracy in much of Afghanistan is still a slogan. In view of this hardly publicized lack of genuine success with respect to regime change, there is much to be said for the notion that when it comes to establishing democracy allied leaders really need to learn to crawl before deciding to walk. Or is our nation going to keep at our historically calamitous practice for too many of the peoples we have professed to be trying to set free until we get it right-no matter how many innocents are caught in the deadly cross fire of our so-called patriotic duty and resolve, as well as our updated attitudes with respect to manifest destiny and the arrogant perquisites of superpowerism?

Just before the last Gulf War, I was on a panel with some theologians who certainly could recite many many more verses from scripture from memory than I can. They were trying to understand the battle taking place in scriptural terms. I still can remember one gentleman, who was clearly on the side of leveraging the end times, saying, "Up to now I had always thought that all those prophecies concerning Babylon had to do with Rome. Now I can see, they really meant Baghdad."

I stopped my self just in time from blurting out sarcastically, "Make up your mind!" That's because what he said also triggered an existentially significant question, which I realized I needed to ponder some instead of shooting off my mouth so glibly.

And the question was and is, "Who is Babylon?" That led me to reread, Habakkuk for a possible answer, especially all of Chapter Two. If you've got a few moments, I recommend taking a look at what he said: even if religious conviction is not your thing. That's because the prophets had ways of describing the human condition that stand the test of time.

Here's just one sample: "You have plundered the people of many nations, but now those who have survived will plunder you