15 years ago began the US invasion of Iraq. What could an Iraq War Memorial be? How to represent a scale of loss and devastation beyond what individual hearts can hold, what could do (im)possible justice, what would be small, real steps of reparations? How do we learn from other countries, peoples, communities about memory as a practice of becoming more human, a practice of resistance against amnesia as a tool of Empire – with our particular United Statian default settings of tuning out war and often fragmented attention spans?
What war memorial do we need to help us understand this inhuman/very human horror? What kind(s) of memorial could help us heal from the dehumanization that militarism requires? Imagining this today.
A place to take a moment of silence for all victims; in this place people would come and be silent for weeks.
A vision of the nighttime sky, a galaxy of candlelights. Voices reading over a million names. Pairs of shoes that stretch to the horizon. The ocean.
How to represent “inanimate” losses, innumerable dissertations, art objects (ancient and contemporary), freshwater sources, homes, sacred sites, one of the best medical systems, life-supporting infrastructure?
The “slow violence” of health epidemics, terminal and incurable medical conditions in heavily bombed areas such as Fallujah, contaminated with heavy metals, depleted uranium, mercury. The ongoing toxic legacy of the US assault is on par with, or worse than, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Epidemiologists working in Iraq speak of a “footprint of metal in the population”. What type of monster leaves such a footprint?
A memorial that would help us understand war realities absent from the headlines, that would help us connect dots of environmental justice, communities that bear toxic legacies in bodies, lungs, kidneys, blood, to recognize and grieve the severity of the ecological crisis in Iraq.
Reparations could look like a morally bankrupt empire financially bankrupting itself to clean up its poisonous wake and pay for intergenerational medical care.
A museum of the future, which displays the full array of weaponry from the depths of imperial hell, the world’s most lethal arsenal, what each weapon is made of, detailed description of what they do to soft human bodies, the scars they leave in the earth. Depleted uranium, white phosphorus, earth penetrators, daisy cutters, cluster bombs…dozens more.
Children and adults of the present are walked through with care, explaining how we are working to make this a museum of the past. Children and adults of the far future are shocked at the sci-fi horror of a nightmare past they cannot believe existed.
“They were killing us not even like we were animals, but like we were insects.” – Emman Khannam, Iraqi human rights activist speaking at the World Tribunal on Iraq in 2005
A hallway lined with screens that show clips of all of the mainstream media framings that supported “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in a virtually unanimous chorus, 99% pro-war views and 1% anti-war (give or take a percent), the case for “embedded journalists”, the sensationalist framing of the “showdown between Bush and Saddam”, the hyped-up war soundtrack. All that. News anchors apologizing years later. It meaning little. All media genres that helped make Iraqi people killable first in the national imagination.
Images from the 10-12 million people in the streets around the world in protest.
A place where US youth can listen to Iraqi youth talk about how they handle mass shootings, bombings, drone strikes, regularly, how they live with PTSD that is not post.
A place where we can go and speak, as ancestors of the future, to projected hologram beings 200 years in the future, about what it was like to live during a time of wars so constant and shifting that it was hard to know how many countries we were bombing and occupying at any one time. Hard to know and hard to care. What it did to our psyches/hearts here in Empire to know this and not know this, to occasionally tune war in and so easily tune it out, to be a part of a military empire that is a giant terror no superhero could stop, so we kept obsessively conjuring them in our films and fantasies.
When is the right time for a war crimes tribunal? Who will be tried for just following orders and just following money? A place where key architects of this war will be forced to watch, Clockwork Orange-style, the destruction of lives, bodies, regions they made possible. Or where they are forced to listen, with Black Mirror-style implants, to 15 years of screams and wailing. This includes economists who argued that various “prices” and “costs” were “worth it”. What human response could there be but madness?
Barbara Lee would oversee the tribunal, guiding reflections and testimonies on the significance of having become the evil that we deplored.
A place to be in shock. In shock and mourning. Sitting with unspeakable violence of the US and unspeakable violence of the IS, side by side, the former creating conditions for the latter’s rise.
Skilled counselors would be present at the memorial around the clock in rotating shifts.
How do we show what we have learned from that time and during this period? About how the Shock Doctrine played out on us, about the power of lies, about resource wars, about what it takes to resist the psychological and economic undertow of the military industrial complex?
A place to listen, learn from and support those who have been working for healing and justice.
Operation Restore Historical Context. Operation Smash Double Standards. Operation Ruthless Compassion. Operation Target State Amnesia. Operation Warmest Hospitality.
People could visit the Iraq War Memorial for weeks, in silence, in grief, in listening, in shame, in witnessing, in unraveling, in rage, in solitude, in community, in solidarity, in permeability, in public critical thinking, in collective courage to turn towards, in dreaming different futures.