What emerged was something so awful that it is difficult even now to write about it. Discussing with the head of our tribe what I should do (as I wanted to stay in Baghdad with our people during their time of trial) I was told that I could most help the Assyrian cause by going out and telling the story to the outside world.
Simply put, those living in Iraq, the common, regular people, were trapped in a living nightmare. From the terror that would come across the faces of my family at an unknown visitor, telephone call, or knock at the door, I began to realize the horror they lived with every day.
I began to see around me those in seemingly every household who had lost their minds. It seemed every family had one or more people who in any other society would be in a mental hospital. And of course there were the ever-present pictures of family members killed in one of Saddam’s many wars.
I wept with family members as I shared their pain and with great difficulty and deep soul- searching began little by little to understand their desire for war to finally rid them of their nightmare.
Evident everywhere was the terrible price paid in simple, down to earth ways — the family member with a son who just screams all the time, the family member whose wife left because she was unable to cope anymore, the family member going to a daily job with nothing to do, a husband lost to alcoholism. The daily, slow death of people for whom all hope is lost.
The pictures of Saddam Hussein, whom people had hailed in the beginning with great hope, were everywhere. Saddam Hussein with his hand outstretched. Saddam Hussein firing his rifle. Saddam Hussein in his Arab headdress. Saddam Hussein in his classic thirty-year-old photo. One or more of these four pictures seemed to be everywhere — on walls, in the middle of the road, in homes, as statues.
Saddam was everywhere. He was all seeing, all knowing, all encompassing.
“Life is hell,” I kept hearing. “We have no hope. But everything will be O.K. once the war is over.”
The bizarre desire for a war that would rid them of the hopelessness was at best hard to understand.
“Look at it this way,” I was told. “No matter how bad it is we will not all die. We have hoped for some other way but nothing has worked. Twelve years ago it went almost all the way but failed. We cannot wait anymore. We want the war and we want it now.”
Coming back to family members and telling them of progress in the talks at the United Nations toward working out some sort of compromise with Iraq, I was welcomed not with joy but anger.
“No, there is no other way! We want the war! It is the only way he will get out of our lives.”
I Was Wrong
Going back to my Japanese roots I began to understand. The stories I had heard from older Japanese of how in a strange way they had welcomed the sight of the bombers in the skies over Japan. Of course nobody wanted to be bombed, but the first sight of the American B29 bombers signaled to them that the war was coming to an end. An end was in sight. There would be terrible destruction, and they might very well die, but finally, in a tragic way, there was finally hope.
Then I began to feel so terrible. Here I had been demonstrating against the war thinking I had been doing it for the very people I was here now with and yet I had not ever bothered to ask them what they wanted.
