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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
26, 2003
A Battlefield from Hell
Desert
Storms
By BRUCE JACKSON
Winds
in the Iraqi desert sandstorm have been blowing fifty miles an hour,
bending date palms so their branches scrape the ground, reducing visibility
to a few meters, rendering many weapons inoperable until the sand can
be unpacked from barrels, chambers and sighting mechanisms. "It
was biblical," a U.S. army colonel from Texas told a reporter.
Were it not for digital cameras we'd have hardly any images at all because
sand like this destroys film cameras. Rain fell yesterday, but it was
mud falling from the sky, making everything worse rather than better.
The temperature in the desert approached 100 degrees. If there is a
battlefield from hell that is it.
And
an ancient one. The invasion force in the Coalition of the Killing is
driving its tanks across the motherland of Western culture. This is
the Tigris-Euphrates Valley you learned about in high school: the Cradle
of Civilization.
It
is the location of Sumer, home of the hero Gilgamesh who in the 23rd
century before Christ (or so) went to the cedar forest with his companion
Enkidu and killed the giant Humbaba, and who then, after the miserable
death of Enkidu, traveled to the island of Ut-Napishtim,the Faraway,
who told him the story of the Great Flood and convinced him of the irreversibility
of death. Gilgamesh came home, gave up his dream of immortality and
conquest, and instead built a great wall around his city and told the
story of what he'd learned.
It
is also the site of ancient Babylon, seat of the empire of the 18th
century ruler Hammurabi, whose great code foreshadowed the code of Moses
the Lawgiver half a millennium later. Hammurabi's Code is nowadays trivialized
to "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." It is, in modern
parlance, a code of swift and severe and uncompromising revenge. It
is, in fact, none of those things. The Code of Hammurabi is a code that
limits violence rather than licences it. What the rest of the prose
around eye for eye and tooth for tooth says is, That's it, that's as
far as you go, revenge for an eye or tooth shall not be slaughter. It's
a code about perspective, not blood.
There
is another text that was central to Hammurabi's world, less known but
no less important. It is usually referred to as the "Enuma elish,"
which is simply the first two words: "When on high."
The
Enuma Elish, it seems, was recited every year at the Babylonian New
Year's festival. It is one of the world's great creation myths. It is
also a story of how the gods gave power to mankind. The purpose of the
recitation, if the archaeologists are to be believed, was to remind
mankind of its place in the order of the universe.
The central battle in Enuma Elish is between the great mother Tiamat
and the young god Marduk. Tiamat's children have assigned Marduk the
task of carrying out the war against Tiamat. He accepts the assignment
but demands in exchange the power to remake the world when it is over.
Tiamat's children, gods all, drunk, agree.
Tiamat
and Marduk meet on a field of battle, each with huge and fearsome armies
and weapons. But the armies never engage because one of Marduk's weapons
is Imhullu, the wind, and he causes it to rage into the face of Tiamat.
She is immobilized, her body swells, Marduk kills her with a spear thrust
to the belly and rips her open and, in one of the most bizarre parodies
of parturition in mythology, creates the universe as we know it from
her destroyed body. Afterwards, the gods celebrate his victory and they
assign him fifty names, in effect giving him the power previously held
fifty separate cities and kingdoms and coalitions. Marduk becomes supreme
ruler, master of the universe.
Humans
are created to serve the gods and Marduk appoints one to be master of
all, the ruler of the Babylonian empire. But every year in the New Year's
festival that emperor would be stripped naked and slapped in the face
by the priests until he wept, to remind him that the power he had was
not his but was only his to administer, and that Marduk, who controlled
Imhullu, the wind, was and would remain sole master of the universe.
Marduk gave power to the priests, the priests gave power to the ruler,
and only Marduk was eternal.
More
or less. The remnants of Marduk and the emperors who submitted to humiliation
in order for the priests to certify them as administrators of his earthly
power are now pieces of stone tourists can look at in the museums of
Iraq, Berlin, Paris, London and Rome. Time and the driven sand turned
their palaces and empires to dust.
Sandstorms,
windstorms—these are nothing new to the deserts of Iraq, and neither
are death and destruction and raging empire and the rage for power.
Empires come and go, conquerors come and are in turn themselves conquered,
they bring death and they in turn die or are killed. The myth lives
longer than they and the sand lives longer than either.
Bruce Jackson
is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American
Culture at University of Buffalo. He edits Buffalo
Report.
His email address
is bjackson@buffalo.edu
Today's Features
March 26, 2003
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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