“The worst thing about wars is that they reduce the enemy to a single characteristic. The country ceases to be history, language, architecture, theater, gardens, and legends; a heritage of love stories, philosophy and science; shared ancestral dreams and uncountable varieties of human striving along the roads of the universe. Instead, every becomes a mere label, blot, field of battle. This is what war has done to the names Palestine, Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These are no longer multifaceted countries and their names are mentioned in news bulletins not as such but as ‘fields’–fields from which the numbers of the dead and wounded are garnered daily like the output of a canned goods factory. The whole of history is now ‘today’ and today has become a reduction of every ‘yesterday’ that has passed over the face of this earth, a reduction of all history. AS though al-Mutanabbi had never walked the markets of al-Kufa hugging himself with joy at a nation that would be singing his verses for a thousand years. As though the Abbasids had never built their libraries on the banks of the Tigris and Abu Nuwas never maintained his pinnacle of shamelessness and flagrant sexual indulgence through to the pinnacle of day after first exhausting the night with poetry and lovely depravties that spared neither male nor female. As though al-Hallaj had never been crucified defending what he had seen with the eye of the imagination and the eye of the mind. AS though Hammurabi had never written his code on tablets of burnt clay before Coca-Cola and Mcdonald’s had been transformed into a religion for all mankind, while Gilgamesh, who achieved immortality but not finding the plant of immortality on the steppes of his everlasting legend, is treated as though he were not of the land of Iraq. Bush and Rumsfeld reduced all of this to the word ‘enemy.’”
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