IRAQ | Mouths Open Swallowing Bombs: An Excerpt from the New Book, Erasing Iraq
Friday, August 6, 2010 at 01:29AM 
Baghdad parade ground. HELO.Journey | Michael Otterman & Richard Hil with Paul Wilson, Quoted text by Nuha al-Radi, HELO Magazine, July-August 2010
In their new book, Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage, HELO contributor Michael Otterman, Richard Hil and Paul Wilson give a greater voice to Iraqis to share from their own points of view what being “liberated” from a dictatorship by concerned Western powers felt like. The team and their publisher agreed to run an excerpt of the book here for HELO readers. If you’d like to learn more or buy the book, go to our Kiosk or to the formal page for Erasing Iraq.
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.
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Nuha al-Radi, an Iraqi painter and ceramist, found refuge in her family’s country house north of Baghdad during the 1991 bombing. Daughter of a wealthy Iraqi diplomat, Nuha lived in India as a child and learned English in Delhi and Simla. She worked and exhibited in Beirut, but fled to Iraq during the Lebanese civil war.
Her diary—first published in the literary journal, Granta, and later by Random House—is a unique English-language narrative of the invasion. Nuha’s deeply personal account of the destruction of Baghdad foreshadows the eyewitness accounts of the second Gulf War written by Iraqi bloggers in 2003.
Nuha al-Radi began her diary on January 17, 1991—day one of the US-led assault. She wrote:
“I woke up at 3 a.m. to exploding bombs and Salvador Dali, my dog, frantically chasing around the house, barking furiously. I went out on the balcony. Salvador was already there, staring up at a sky lit by the most extraordinary firework display. The noise was beyond description.
“I ventured outside with Salvador to put out the garage light—we were both very nervous. Almost immediately we lost all electricity, so I need not have bothered. The phone also went dead. We are done for, I think: a modern nation cannot fight without electricity and communications. Thank heavens for our ration of Pakistani matches.
“With the first bomb, Ma and Needles’s windows shattered, those facing the river, and one of poor Bingo’s pups was killed in the garden by flying glass—our first war casualty.”
National Security Directive 54 called for military operations designed to “destroy Iraq’s command, control, and communications capabilities.” While achieving these ends, it continued, “every reasonable effort” should be taken “to reduce collateral damage incident to military attacks, taking special precautions to minimize civilian casualties and damage to non-military economic infrastructure, energy-related facilities, and religious sites.”
Contrary to this guidance, the US Air Force dropped about 1200 tons of explosives on 28 oil targets in Iraq—bringing all refinement to a halt. Iraq’s eleven major power plants and 119 substations were also destroyed, knocking out over 90 percent of electricity production nationwide. A US Air Force planning officer later explained to the Washington Post the reasoning behind infrastructure targeting:
“People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with [United Nations-approved economic] sanctions—help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.”
By all accounts, the plan worked. Nuha’s normal life unraveled following the loss of electricity. On January 20, 1991, she wrote:
“Mundher Baig has made a generator for his house using precious petrol. Ten of us stood gaping in wonder at this machine and the noise it made. Only four days have passed since the start of the war but already any mechanical thing seems totally alien.”
By January 26, 1991, deep disillusionment had set in:
“’Read my lips,’ today is the tenth day of the war and we are still here. Where is your three-to-ten-days-swift-and-clean kill? Mind you, we are ruined. I don’t think I could set foot in the West again. Maybe I’ll go to India: they have a high tolerance level and will not shun Iraqis.”
Shockwaves killed scores of birds that once filled Nuha’s garden. “Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the orchard. Lonely survivors fly about in a distracted fashion,” she wrote. The destruction intensified as the air war dragged on. After 22 days Nuha confided:
“There is a sameness about the days now. I saw the Jumhuriya Bridge today; it’s incredibly sad to see a bombed bridge—a murderous action, for it destroys a link. The sight affects everyone that sees it; many people cry.”
Four days later she added: “Both the Martyrs’ and the Suspension Bridges have been hit. I feel very bitter towards the West.”
On February 13, 1991, two F-117 stealth bombers dropped laser-guided “smart” bombs on a civilian shelter in the Amiriya neighborhood of Baghdad. The first 2000-pound bomb gouged a hole in the concrete shelter, while the second bomb exploded within. More than 200 Iraqi women and children were incinerated in the blasts. The US Air Force later claimed that the bunker was used as a “military command-and-control center,” despite site markings to the contrary. On February 14, Nuha responded:
“A turning point in the war. They hit a shelter, the one in Amiriya. They thought it was going to be full of a party of bigwigs, not women and children. Whole families were wiped out. The Americans insist that these women and children were put there deliberately. I ask you, is that logical? One can imagine the conversation at Command Headquarters going something like this, ‘Well, I think the Americans will hit the Amiriya shelter next, let’s fill it full with women and children.’”
Nuha’s bitterness grew after the Amiriya bombing. In an entry dated February 25 and 26, she complained:
“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. We didn’t have anything to do with the Kuwaiti takeover, yet we are paying the price for it. We are living in an Indian movie, or better still we are like Peter Sellars in The Party, refusing to die, rising up again and again for a last gasp on the bugle…”
For more, see Erasing Iraq.
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