Bringing home the realities of the Iraq war

Max Shmookler Columnist

I had the unique experience of seeing the Eyes Wide Open exhibit, brought to Vassar last week by the American Friends Service Committee, in the company of a Palestinian friend fresh from the West Bank. Watching him engage with the exhibit was as eye opening as the exhibit itself. His response prompted me to ask what we were expected to see with wide open eyes, and what, even in the presence of 2,067 pairs of empty boots, we were still missing.

On display was the absence of human life. We were shown empty combat boots at ease in neat rows, arranged state by state, crowding the benches of our chapel. Some boots were simply black leather and laces; others were adorned with flowers and photo albums, crosses and state flags, hand-written poems, cold brass medals, and letters of condolence. The pictures and poems proudly offered the kitsch of life: a man and his child washed in morning light, a shy smile at high school graduation, a mother with her son in some unidentified suburban kitchen. A landscape of Formica countertops and glowing Christmas tree ornaments with which many of us are familiar—a landscape many of us call home.

But what is lost in this sombre display of absence? What are we encouraged to see and what slips by in the blink of an eye? Did you see the pairs of Nikes innocuously mixed among the representative fraction of the estimated hundred thousand Iraqi dead? When I saw them I crumbled like a sheet of paper between the two giant hands of globalization. "They wear our shoes," was all I could think. Underneath the jallebeyas, in the gutters of Sadr City, in the soggy winter mornings in Basra and the frigid midnight of Mosul, the children do not wear the sandals of Orientalist imagination. Their feet are wrapped in breathable mesh and high grade rubber, designed for basketball courts they've never seen. And when their small bodies are removed from the rubble of this house or that one, someone must gently remove these emblems of an American past time.

This subtle, unexpected intimacy across the dividing lines of culture and language was deeply unsettling. It collapsed the neat distinction between our dead and theirs, between the losses at home and the losses abroad. And while it is equally unsettling to find unity in the exported consumer goods of global capitalism, those flows create lines of identification that challenged the easy othering of the unnamed and uncounted Iraqi victims of this most recent crusade.

And what of the baby shoes and bedroom slippers, the work boots and the high tops worn by those still invisible victims of this war? For while the dead leave behind a legacy of crippled families and abandoned communities, the living must endure the direct consequences of society-wide violence. The direct experiences of war vary from community to community, touching people from remarkably different backgrounds in any number of ways. For instance, the war is unending anxiety and fear for the families of those serving the US army or employed as private “contractors” for U.S. Army and multi-national corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel. For people of Middle Eastern descent and Muslims living in the U.S., the war in Iraq is reflected in the daily suspicion and alienation that they face everywhere, from their fellow passengers on their morning commute and their representatives in Congress who relentlessly strip civil liberties under the Patriot Act and other such bills. For poor communities, including many people living in the City of Poughkeepsie, the war spells cuts in an already impoverished system of social services—stretching from Section Eight housing subsidies to proper funds for public schools—and increased vulnerability to the seductive promises of military recruiters.

In the 1960s, radical anti-war activists worked under the slogan “bring the war home.” But the war is already home, an insidious presence everywhere, haunting the living not only with the spectres of the dead. The question we must ask is how to connect the different realities of war and the different manifestations of exploitation and violence that a warring society promotes. This is so often neglected by the leftover hippies and self-styled militant college students who comprise the most visible anti-war circles, which are not-incidentally the whitest and most middle-class as well.

The American Friends Service Committee is a conscientious and committed peace network. They address issues ranging from the poverty draft and military recruitment to economic justice and gender equity. Their exhibit invites us to ask whose shoes are still missing and what that says about the framing of the Iraq war in the national discourse. We should not be content only speaking about the war as something happening elsewhere, to other people, in another country, far away and much removed from our daily lives. For those Americans who are not insulated by the intersecting privileges of race and class, the war is not an abstract policy blunder, but a pressing diurnal reality. Learning to see the many manifestations of the war at home and the shared humanity of those abroad that we can challenge the war in its full extent.