The UNSCOM Commemorative Toilet

I stuffed my old U.N. Declaration of Human Rights poster behind some books 

when I didn't know where to put it upon moving in over 15 years ago.  

Came for the craft, stayed for the memories. Or rather, the memories flushed me down a vortex of emotions that have been all too familiar over these last three years of genocide: rage, frustration, desperate anguish, impotence. Between admiration and flashback, I stayed for all 10,000-plus words of Eliot Weinberger's classic essay, "What I Heard About Iraq." And then read it again, taking notes. 

The craft is breathtaking. The essay is a montage of "I heard" statements made by the lofty--politicians, generals--and the lowly--U.S. service members, Iraqi doctors, peddlers--which tells the story of the Iraq War up to January of 2005 when the piece was first published in the London Review of Books. His clever use of juxtaposition underscores the mendacity of Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, the black humor of incompetence, but mostly the tactile horror of it all. There are two paragraphs that do not contain an "I heard" statement. One is a list of abuses from the U.S. Army 15-6 Report of Abuses of Prisoners in Iraq (the Taguba Report) currently echoing in Sde Teiman and Ofer Prisons: "Detainee 7 was ordered to bark like a dog while MPs spat and urinated on him; he was sodomized by a police stick while two female MPs watched." The second was "the military summary for an ordinary day, 22 July 2004, a day that produced no headlines." It is an extended paragraph of murdered dentists, headless bodies, at least 38 separate bombings and more than 15 gunmen attacking U.S. soldiers, contractors, and Iraqi police. By structuring the essay in such a way, Weinberger lets the actors and the acted upon in this war speak for themselves. It is the ultimate "show, don't tell" piece of writing. 

It all came back, of course. Stuck in a bedroom in someone else's precarious exurban rental in 2002, insisting to one sister despite what everyone is saying, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (except being so marginalized in that moment made me wonder if I could be wrong and the president and media with access to far more intelligence resources knew something I could not). The brief return to graduate school as the war started and supposedly ended on May 1, 2003. Feeling chills and my stomach clenching a year later upon hearing my Gram say with a worried sigh that the Army sergeant husband of another sister was "in that mess in Eye-raq." Becoming homebound with too much time to read and weep over report after report detailing the very horrors Weinberger lists, trying to process it here and there. And weeping more when the amazing Army sergeant brother-in-law I never got to meet was killed in one of those many gun battles that day in Iraq. 

But where all those memories landed me upon reading Weinberger was what happened to Iraq between the wars. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 660 placing a complete embargo on Iraq and occupied Kuwait. Essentially, a medieval siege. If Iraq couldn't buy or sell anything, the thinking went, it would withdraw from Kuwait without the need for war. Iraq did not withdraw. Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm ensued and Iraq was bulldozed out of Kuwait (in one instance, Iraqis were literally bulldozed). But the embargo remained. 

After the war, the UN Security Council created The UN Special Commission, UNSCOM, to make sure Iraq destroyed its weapons programs--nuclear, chemical, biological, and ballistic. The embargo would ever remain until UNSCOM was satisfied that all its weapons were gone. Everybody came out looking like an asshole--or worse--as it related to UNSCOM. Saddam Hussein spent the next decade engaged in ham-fisted attempts to preserve and hide what weapons he could. The Americans on UNSCOM approached the job like a game of "cowboys and Indians in the desert," especially one, Scott Ritter, the chief inspector for nearly half their missions "[T]here's only going to be one alpha dog in country, and that's me. When the Iraqis...bark, I jump on them and I kick them to the ground because I'm in charge and you work for me." 

What did this embargo mean? All the things that happen when an economy is completely devastated. The price of wheat went from 220-270 dirams per ton in 1989 to 95,000-105,000 dirams per ton in May 1995. Fewer people, of course, had jobs and money to buy this wheat, especially if their jobs were connected to the country's main industry, oil. Malnutrition skyrocketed--especially in small children--in a country that before 1990 had a problem with obesity. Malaria returned (Iraq couldn't import insecticides). As did cholera and typhoid (Iraq couldn't import chlorine or supplies to fix bombed water infrastructure). By 1996, the Center for Economic and Social Rights (once known as the Harvard Study Team) sent a group of physicians, public health researchers, lawyers, economists, and journalists to Iraq on a fact-finding mission. Their report suggested that over 500,000 children had died as a result of the sanctions. 

Was it worth the lives of half a million children to let Scott Ritter play cowboys and Indians in the desert? One of the journalists on that fact-finding mission was 60-Minutes journalist Leslie Stahl. She asked then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. 

45-second clip of Madeleine Albright saying that the deaths of 500,000 children was "worth it"

"But the moral question is even a larger one," she said. "Don't we owe to the American people and to the American military...that this man not be a threat?" The American people and the American military were "owed" the death of half a million children. Not merely one child locked away and tortured in the land of Omelas. Half a million of them. 

"The children are always ours," said James Baldwin, "every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality." 

I did not yet have Baldwin's language, but I felt this as a twenty-something college and graduate student. So I did the things I had been told to do when I felt the government needed to change its behavior: I wrote my members of congress and protested. Except nobody cared in that decade of apathy, the 1990s. We maybe had 25 people--50 would be too generous a figure--show up at protests. Half were aging hippies, their graying pony-tails hanging limply down the backs of their tie-dye shirts. 

The indifference of my fellow citizens to the suffering we, along with Saddam Hussein, were forcing on the people of Iraq left me in a constant state of vague despair--especially after former Under Secretary-General and Humanitarian Coordinator Denis Halliday stated in 1999 that the sanctions had killed 1-1.5 million Iraqis. For Osama bin Laden, it left him enraged. The sanctions against Iraq and the suffering they caused were among the reasons he listed for al-Qaida's attacks on 9/11. Along with, of course, the material, political, and emotional support the U.S. has given Israel in its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. 

It hasn't stopped the genocide, but at least people have given a fuck about Gaza thanks to social media. Not only have millions all over the world protested, not only did students set up encampments on hundreds of college campuses, not only did disabled people start an online fundraiser to buy eSims for people in Gaza after Israel destroyed their cell towers, not only did comedians start podcasts making fun of bad Israeli propaganda while raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to feed folks in Gaza, not only were members of Congress being so bombarded by phone calls in the early months of the genocide that they stopped answering their phones. People have set themselves on fire. People have gone to prison. Members of Palestine Action in the UK broke into a Royal Air Force base in June 2025 and damaged two military planes in keeping with years of vandalism and sabotage targeting Elbit Systems, the Israeli weapons manufacturer. Four of them were charged with terrorism and sentenced to 5-8 years in prison. When the U.K. government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization (meaning even the mere mention of support for it was illegal), hundreds upon hundreds of people, many of them elderly or disabled, showed up with handmade signs and/or wearing t-shirts saying "I support Palestine Action" knowing they could be arrested. 

And yet, what does it matter how many 94-year old Jewish grannies and blind men in wheelchairs get arrested if it can't stop a genocide? 

Trite, emotionally indulgent pop songs certainly won't. Still, we cannot stop imagining a future better than this present. And with social media, we are beginning to imagine a community beyond the nation-state, perhaps along the lines of the planetarity proposed by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman. But their suggestion that our need for tribalism can be simply channeled through football is laughable. Before genociding the Melians, the Athenians famously stated that "the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must." Might makes right has been among our most primal impulses as humans, to dominate is our most dominant historical theme. 

There has also been counterpoint. There are the Hebrew scriptures, particularly the prophets, with their frequent threats of God's punishment for exploiting the poor and striking with "wicked fists." There is Jesus with his "blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God...I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" before Constantine absorbed his counterpoint like the Borg into the traditional Greco-Roman Athenian model, its cacophonous dominant chord clanging in the person of our current Secretary of War. It's easy to feel that resistance is futile. 

However, the counterpoint remains. Particularly since the end of World War II. Might makes right led to Auschwitz and Leningrad and Okinawa and finally, Hiroshima. The effects of nuclear weapons would transcend the tribal rivals who might use them. So we set up the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions and Bretton Woods to discipline our tribal instincts. We gave that counterpoint clarity in documents such as the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. 

Some friends in graduate school gave me a poster of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights to hang above my desk in the graduate assistants' office. Around the same time, the friend who would soon become my godfather was also in grad school, living in one of those once grand old houses that had been chopped up into strange apartments. His had a room and a shoe-box kitchen with a shower but the toilet--exclusive to him--was in an old closet down the hall. With impotent anguish turned gallows humor, we dreamed of turning his toilet into a performance art shrine honoring the horror of the Iraqi sanctions regime. We would call it The UNSCOM Commemorative Toilet. My poster of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights would take center stage flanked on each side by Saddam Hussein and Madeline Albright. Alas, we were both too sick--me with ME/CFS, him with Multiple Sclerosis--to actually make our vision a material reality. But thanks to Canva and ChatGPT, it now lives virtually. What it lacks in being tactile, it makes up for in being both appropriately shittier (Talal's toilet was cleaner and much more serviceable) and funnier. U.N. resolution 687 establishing UNSCOM litters the floor. U.N. resolution 986 establishing the Oil-for-Food program is the toilet paper. My old U.N. Declaration of Human Rights poster is fittingly off to the side. 

Happy (belated) Birthday, Habbibi! It finally lives!

Nobody still has a fuck to give Iraq. Since the U.S. occupation, there has been a reassessment of how many excess deaths occurred as a result of the U.N. sanctions in the 1990s. Almost everybody seems to feel it was nowhere near 1-1.5 million. Just how many died, however, is disputed. I have now wasted a few hours slogging through that muddle with no real clarity for my efforts. But there's little doubt that the excess deaths as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were in the hundreds of thousands, with millions displaced. And that we turned this country with an oil industry, a medical system, and an education system that were the jewels of the Arab World, into a hellscape (it's now an audiobook!). 

Over twenty years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq's electrical grid remains so decrepit that almost nobody in Iraq has electricity 24/7--this in a country where summer temperatures can reach 126F/52C degrees. Despite having the world's 12th largest natural gas reserves, Iraq must import liquified natural gas (LNG) from Iran because it still does not have the infrastructure to produce its own. Yes, that same Iran we're currently at war with. Not only does this mean that now Iran can't export as much (or, at times, any) LNG to Iraq, but we're even bombing Iraq yet again because paramilitary groups aligned with Iran (Iraq is, of course, aligned with Iran without Saddam Hussein there to enforce secular, Sunni dominance) are lobbing drones at Saudi Arabia, blowing up a chunk of the Kingdom's East-West pipeline. Maybe the war in Iraq is finally over for the U.S. after the last of our remaining troops left last week. Then again, we left in 2011 only to return three years later when ISIS began taking over western Iraq (a group formed as part of the insurgency against the U.S. occupation). For Iraqis the war remains. It colors their every day as they navigate life in a country where every bit of physical, political, and social infrastructure limps along only because of ingenious ordinary Iraqis MacGyvering together what Saddam Hussein, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Paul Bremer, Ayad Allawi, Nouri al-Maliki, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and so many others have nearly--but not quite--flushed down the toilet over the decades.

But, hey, as Eliot Weinberger heard Donald Rumsfeld say, "freedom is untidy."