(C) Vazquez

Any honest assessment of the invasion must include discussion of the human costs of war – and what we can do to help. Many Iraqi refugees I spoke with still saw the United States as place of opportunity and promise. We should prove them right. We should support Iraqis in need.

Check it out here.

Gerstle writes:

What I really respected most about Otterman’s approach was that unlike sooooo many other journalists and researchers, he goes directly to the local witnesses. It may not always be possible to get into Baghdad during a bombardment and interview people while it’s happening, but any shrewd research should reduce the time committed to White House press briefings and Think Tank brown bags in order to increase time committed to reading through the many growing local witness blogs. With the Iraq debate we did last year, Otterman was the only non-Iraqi to bring in very specific local witness descriptions of events. And so this new book is much more.

And Hammond recounts:

“U.S. war in Iraq did not start in 2003—it started in 1991,” Otterman explained in an interview with the Washington Report. Asked how Iraq today compares with the past, he pointed out that, prior to the first Gulf war, Iraq was a highly modernized society that “boasted the region’s best healthcare and education system. Literacy rates were high and there was a 100 percent gross enrollment rate on the primary school level. The state’s free and universal healthcare was the envy of its neighbors. Women’s rights flourished—in 1989, for example, more than 10 percent of the seats in Iraq’s national assembly were held by women.

“But the first Gulf war changed everything,” he said. “It shattered the Iraqi state—and it has never recovered.”

From artist Nuha al-Radi reflecting on the Gulf War in 1991 – “Nights and days full of noise, no sleep possible. For forty days and nights, a Biblical figure, we have stood with our mouths open swallowing bombs…” – to blogger Sunshine venting about Mosul in 2009 – “Imagine losing 41 people in one day, family members, relatives, friends, kids, women, old and young…It is unfair…Why? What was their guilt?…” the stories are full of colorful, if painful detail.

You can support HELO by purchasing Erasing Iraq–or an array of other important titles– through their online kiosk.

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3

Thanks again for everyone who came out! Some pics, shot by pal/author/blogger Antony Loewenstein, are available here.

Erasing Iraq (The Human Costs of Carnage) is a poignant story of unheard voices of refugees, surviving Iraqis, and non-Iraqi eyewitnesses who continue to “wonder why many innocent endlessly suffer needlessly.”

The destruction in Iraq goes beyond the arrest and death of Saddam Hussein who was not very much loved by the majority of his own people, but is nestled in what Otterman and Hil suggest as the Iraqi sociocide. [...]

Erasing Iraq (The Human Costs of Carnage) is a good read, ushering enlightening though-far-from-novel truth from voices that have been unheard.

And below are links to three more radio interviews:

Hack, Triple J, ABC Radio National, 25 May 2010 [@13 min, 5 sec]

PM with Mark Colvin, ABC Radio National, 24 May 2010

The Wire with Angus Jowitt, 95bFM, 17 May 2010

For almost two decades the US and its “willing executioners”, especially the United Kingdom, have persecuted war and aggression in Iraq. They turned a county that was once the most secular of Arab countries, in which nation resources were used to increase literacy, industrialization and womenemancipation, that it was a major center of Arab learning – students from all over the Arab world went to study in Baghdad, into a living hell…

This reviewed book is the first that gives the victims of occupation a voice and documents the war crimes, the crimes against humanity and other atrocities, which have been perpetrated upon the Iraqi people by the Western quest for hegemony and domination. In the presence of this disaster the book leave the reader with two justified conclusions: Immediate withdrawal and massive financial compensations. For these war crimes, the perpetrators have to be brought to the International Court of Justice.