On the Road to Baghdad

JOHN ROSS

SOUTHERN TURKEY (Feb. 14^th) – For the Muslim world it is the great pilgrimage of the Hadj and the feast of El Eidh with its accompanying slaughter of lambs to feed the stomach as well as the soul.  Even as the faithful circle the great black cube of the Kaaba in distant Mecca, the Human Shield Caravan advances upon Baghdad in two debilitated British buses on a very different sort of Hadj, one that if George Bush and his coven of killers in Washington have their way, will lead to the unprecedented slaughter of Iraqi civilians in the terrible days up ahead down the road. 

          With the instigator of the Human Shield Action, Ken Nichols O’Keefe, a bumptuous Persian Gulf War marine vet, bounced unceremoniously from Turkey almost to the relief of those still on the buses, for having sought to enter the country on a World Citizens passport, the mood inside the two London double-deckers, themselves symbols of the long-crumbled British empire, seems both somber and exasperated – exasperated by the endless breakdowns and delays that have set the Shields a week behind schedule, somber because the whirlwind of war seems increasingly inevitable.  The young Anglos and Scandinavians and the occasional American that crew the busses leaf through books that spell out the details of the coming conflagration, fiddle with their cellphones ceaselessly calling back and forth between the buses, or else reflexively aim their ubiquitous video cams upon the interactions of the passengers in what has the feel of a U.S.=style ‘reality show’, sort of like ‘Big Brother Goes to Baghdad’.  Indeed, O’Keefe’s substitute leader, A tall, spikey-haired  young man named Gordon, was a star of the Australian ‘Big Brother’ venture. 

          For many of their number, this action is their first political statement and while hopeful that they can still stop Bush’s  impending carnage, they display an enthusiasm that only the young in their illusionary cocoon of invincibility have the naivete to display. 

          The older Shields – Godfrey, a poetry-declaiming 68 year-old Britisher, this reporter, a veteran of the Zapatista campaigns (Emiliano Zapata’s portrait hangs on the walls of one of the buses; Sue, a veteran of the English diplomatic corps; and Edward, a 50-ish former U.S. Geological Survey seismologist (‘I feel as if I’m going to another earthquake’), contemplate a more reasonable balance of their own mortality.  It is a curious dynamic of optimism and dread, young and old, whose conclusion largely depends upon the whims of both George Walker Bush who, as governor of the state of Texas, executed 32 human beings, man, woman, and children, their mentally retarded., and the insane, and Saddam Hussein, not a font of kindness’s milk, who has brutally dismembered his own civilian population during his cruel decades as dictator of the benighted republic he continues to rule with an iron fist. 

          Saddam’s state portrait was a prominent feature of an impromptu ceremony at the Iraqi government’s Ankara embassy as the ambassador, a diplomat mustachioed much like his boss, handed out visas and white spray carnations to the Human Shields on the night of February 10^th.  The propaganda ritual, which featured underlings circulating with trays of dates and other sweets, was widely filmed by Turkish media including CNN and the images transmitted back home to the U.S., a harbinger of manipulation to come.  Indeed, Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based media kingpin, reports that Bush has insinuated the Human Shields have been kidnapped by Hussein, a possible pretext for U.S. intervention. Such devious trickery will be in abundant supply for the Shields as they move closer to Baghdad in the coming days should their buses mercifully survive the Syrian-Iraqi desert intact.  The caravan is scheduled to reach Baghdad on or about February 15^th, the date set for world-wide demonstrations against the Bush war, where they will install themselves near humanitarian sites, such as hospitals, day-care centers, and poorer neighborhoods.  The Shields will join hundreds and thousands of other citizens of the world’s nations in the Iraqi capital in one of the most significant expressions of international solidarity since the Spanish civil war.

          U.S. citizens on this journey to a seemingly inevitable ‘war’ (more accurately a massacre given the disequality of the two sides) are reportedly liable for fines of up to $1  million USD a day and 12 years in prison. 

This piece was written on the bumpy road to Iskandera near the Syrian border which may or not explain the spotty typing. As always, No Blood for Oil.