Al-Mutanabbi
Street Starts Here Exhibition
Al-Mutanabbi
Street Starts Here Exhibition is a project that began as a call from Beau
Beausoleil in 2007 for writers which quickly moved on to incorporate artists,
artist books and now includes printmakers all who are responding to bear
witness to a tragic loss of a center of literacy and humanity in Iraq. One
of purposes of this project is to let those in the Iraqi Arts Community know
that we will not let them endure the destruction of Iraqi culture in silence,
that we have a collective voice and we will use it. This was a street of
booksellers, printers, and readers. A street where people still felt "safe"
among all the words and books. How can we not see the commonality between al-
Mutanabbi Street and any street in the world that holds a bookshop or cultural
institution? This is the starting point: where language, thought, and reality
reside; where memory, ideas, and even dreams wait patiently in their black ink.
A
diverse coalition of DC-area universities and arts and literary organizations
will present Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016, a book arts and
cultural festival through Sat., Mar. 5 throughout the Washington, D.C., area.
Major exhibitions, programs, and events will commemorate the 2007 bombing of
Baghdad’s historic bookselling street, celebrate the free exchange of ideas and
knowledge, and stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq. Exhibitions of
artwork created in response to the bombing will be featured at multiple venues,
including the George Mason University School of Art Gallery, Atrium, Fenwick
Library and the Workhouse Art Center, Gelman Library and the Corcoran School of
Art and Design at The George Washington University, the Brentwood Arts
Exchange, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, McLean Project for the
Arts, Northern Virginia Community College, Olly Olly Gallery, and the
Smithsonian American Art/Portrait Gallery Library. The exhibitions that
are featured at the School of Art Gallery, the Fenwick Library, the Mason
Atrium Gallery, and the Workhouse Art Center (plus partners) include three
components: Letterpress Printed Broadsides; Artist Books; and Absence and
Presence (a call to printmakers). Additionally, each gallery provides new
interpretive documentary materials, hands-on workshops, and panels
and conversations that will be built around the exhibitions. For a complete
list of sites and dates and times go to http://www.amsshdc2016.org/contact-us.html.
This is
a list of some of the sites. You can see the exhibit, for example, at the
Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, 1632 U St., WDC, through Wed., Mar.
30. It is entitled “Night and the Desert Know Me,” and the curators are
Shanti Norris and Spencer Dormitzer. The exhibit at the Brentwood Arts
Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood, MD 20722, runs through Sat., Mar.
12 -- “Selections from Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here.” There will be a
reception on Sat., Jan. 23 from 5 to 8 PM, and the curator of the exhibit is
Phil Davis. Also see the exhibit at the Tyler Gallery, Corcoran School of
the Arts and Design, 500 17th St. NW, WDC, through Sun., Mar. 20--“Al-Mutanabbi
Street in Books, Prints & Poetry.” Enjoy a reception on Fri., Mar. 4 from 1
to 2:30 PM. Also you can see this exhibit at the Smithsonian American
Art/Portrait Gallery, 750 9th St. NW, Room 2100, WDC 20001-4505 from Mon., Feb.
1 through Wed., Mar. 30 -- “Come Together: American Artists Respond to
Al-Mutanabbi Street.” The curator is Anne Evenhaugen, and a reception on Mon.,
Feb. 1 from 5 to 7 PM.
ISIS. (photo: Reuters)
You
Won't Like It, but Here's the Answer to ISIS
By Peter Van Buren,
TomDispatch
19 January 16
How
can we stop the Islamic State?
Imagine
yourself shaken awake, rushed off to a strategy meeting with your presidential
candidate of choice, and told: “Come up with a plan for me to do something
about ISIS!” What would you say?
What
Hasn't Worked
You'd
need to start with a persuasive review of what hasn't worked over the past
14-plus years. American actions against terrorism -- the Islamic State being
just the latest flavor -- have flopped on a remarkable scale, yet remain
remarkably attractive to our present crew of candidates. (Bernie Sanders might
be the only exception, though he supports forming yet another coalition to
defeat ISIS.)
Why
are the failed options still so attractive? In part, because bombing and drones
are believed by the
majority of Americans to be surgical procedures that kill lots of bad guys, not
too many innocents, and no Americans at all. As Washington regularly imagines
it, once air power is in play, someone else's boots will
eventually hit the ground (after the U.S. military provides the necessary
training and weapons). A handful of Special
Forces troops, boots-sorta-on-the-ground, will
also help turn the tide. By carrot or stick,
Washington will collect and hold
together some now-you-see-it, now-you-don't “coalition” of “allies” to aid and
abet the task at hand. And success will be ours, even though versions of this
formula have fallen flat time and again in the Greater Middle East.
Since
the June 2014 start of Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State,
the U.S. and its coalition partners have flown 9,041 sorties, 5,959 in
Iraq and 3,082 in Syria. More are launched every day. The U.S. claims it has
killed between 10,000 and 25,000 Islamic State
fighters, quite a spread, but still, if accurate (which is doubtful), at best
only a couple of bad guys per bombing run. Not particularly efficient on the
face of it, but -- as Obama administration officials often emphasize -- this is
a “long war.” The CIA estimates that the
Islamic State had perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 fighters under arms in 2014. So
somewhere between a third of them and all of them should now be gone.
Evidently not, since recent estimates of
Islamic State militants remain in that 20,000 to 30,000 range as 2016 begins.
How
about the capture of cities then? Well, the U.S. and its partners have already
gone a few rounds when it comes to taking cities. After all, U.S. troops
claimed Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s al-Anbar Province, in 2003, only to see
the American-trained Iraqi army lose it to ISIS in May
2015, and U.S-trained Iraqi special operations troops backed by U.S. air
power retake it (in almost completely destroyed condition)
as 2015 ended. As one pundit put it, the
destruction and the cost of rebuilding make Ramadi “a victory in the worst
possible sense.” Yet the battle cry in Washington and Baghdad remains “On to
Mosul!”
Similar
“successes” have regularly been invoked when it came to ridding the world of
evil tyrants, whether Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, only to
see years of blowback follow. Same for terrorist masterminds, including Osama
bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as
minor-minds (Jihadi John in Syria),
only to see others pop up and terror
outfits spread. The sum of all this activity, 14-plus years of it, has been
ever more failed states and ungoverned spaces.
If
your candidate needs a what-hasn’t-worked summary statement, it’s simple:
everything.
How
Dangerous Is Islamic Terrorism for Americans?
To any
argument you make to your preferred presidential candidate about what did not
“work,” you need to add a sober assessment of the real impact of terrorism on
the United States in order to ask the question: Why exactly are we engaged in
this war on this scale?
Hard
as it is to persuade a constantly re-terrorized American
public of the actual situation we face, there have been only 38 Americans
killed in the U.S. by Islamic terrorists, lone wolves, or whacked-out
individuals professing allegiance to Islamic extremism, or ISIS, or al-Qaeda,
since 9/11. Argue about the number if you want. In fact, double or triple it
and it still adds up to a tragic but undeniable drop in the bucket. To gain
some perspective, pick your favorite comparison: number of Americans killed
since 9/11 by guns (more than 400,000) or by drunk
drivers in 2012 alone (more than 10,000).
And
spare us the tired trope about how security measures at our airports and
elsewhere have saved us from who knows how many attacks. A recent test by the
Department of Homeland's own Inspector General's Office showed that 95% of contraband,
including weapons and explosives, got through airport screening without being
detected. Could it be that there just aren’t as many bad guys out there aiming
to take down our country as candidates on the campaign trail would like to
imagine?
Or
take a look at the National Security Agency’s Fourth Amendment-smothering
blanket surveillance. How'd that do against the Boston bombing or the attacks
in San Bernardino? There’s no evidence it has
ever uncovered a real terror plot against this country.
Islamic
terrorism in the United States is less a serious danger than a carefully
curated fear.
Introduce
Your Candidate to the Real World
You
should have your candidate's attention by now. Time to remind him or her that
Washington’s war on terror strategy has already sent at least $1.6 trillion down the
drain, leftthousands of American troops and hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of Muslims dead.
Along the way we lost precious freedoms to the ever-expanding national security
state.
So
start advising your candidate that a proper response to the Islamic State has
to be proportional to the real threat. After all, we have fire departments
always on call, but they don't ride around spraying water on homes 24/7 out of
“an abundance of caution.”
We
Have to Do Something
So
here's what you might suggest that your candidate do, because you know that
s/he will demand to “do something.”
Start
by suggesting that, as a society, we take a deep look at ourselves, our
leaders, and our media, and stop fanning everyone's flames. It’s time, among
other things, to stop harassing and
discriminating against our own Muslim population, only to stand by slack-jawed
as a few of them become radicalized, and Washington then blames Twitter. As
president, you need to opt out of all this, and dissuade others from buying
into it.
As for
the Islamic State itself, it can’t survive, never mind fight, without funds. So
candidate, it’s time to man/woman up, and go after the real sources of funding.
As
long as the U.S. insists on flying air attack sorties (and your candidate may
unfortunately need to do so to cover his/her right flank), direct them far more
intensely than at present against one of ISIS's main sources of cash: oil
exports. Blow up trucks moving oil. Blow up wellheads in ISIS-dominated areas.
Finding targets is not hard. The Russians released reconnaissance
photos showing what they claimed were 12,000 trucks loaded with smuggled oil,
backed up near the Turkish border.
But
remind your candidate that this would not be an expansion of the air war or a
shifting from one bombing campaign to a new one. It would be a short-term move,
with a defined end point of shutting down the flow of oil. It would only be one
part of a far larger effort to shut down ISIS’s sources of funds.
Next,
use whatever diplomatic and economic pressure is available to make it clear to whomever in Turkey that it’s time to stop
facilitating the flow of that ISIS oil onto the black market. Then wield that
same diplomatic and economic pressure to force buyers to stop purchasing it.
Some reports suggest
that Israel, cut off from most
Arab sources of oil, has become a major buyer of ISIS’s supplies. If so, step
on some allied toes. C'mon, someone is buying all that black-market black gold.
The
same should go for Turkey’s behavior toward ISIS. That would extend from
its determination to fight Kurdish forces
fighting ISIS to the way it’s allowed jihadis to
enter Syria through its territory to the way it's funneled arms to
various extreme Islamic groups in that country. Engage Turkey's fellow NATO
members. Let them do some of the heavy lifting. They have a dog in this fight,
too.
And
speaking of stepping on allied toes, make it clear to the Saudis and other
Sunni Persian Gulf states that they must stop sending money to ISIS. Yes, we’re
told that this flow of “donations” comes from private citizens, not the Saudi
government or those of its neighbors. Even so, they should be capable of
exerting pressure to close the valve. Forget a “no-fly zone” over
northern Syria -- another fruitless “solution” to the problem of the Islamic
State that various presidential candidates are now plugging -- and
use the international banking system to create a no-flow zone.
You
may not be able to stop every buck from reaching ISIS, but most of it will do
in a situation where every dollar counts.
Your
candidate will obviously then ask you, “What else? There must be more we
can do, mustn’t there?”
To
this, your answer should be blunt: Get out. Land the planes, ground the drones,
and withdraw. Pull out the boots, the trainers, the American combatants and
near combatants (whatever the euphemism of the moment for them may be). Anybody
who has ever listened to a country and western song knows that there’s always a
time to step away from the table and cut your losses. Throwing more money
(lives, global prestige...) into the pot won’t alter the cards you're holding.
All you’re doing is postponing the inevitable at great cost.
In the
end, there is nothing the United States can do about the processes now underway
in the Middle East except stand on the beach trying to push back the waves.
This
is history talking to us.
That
Darn History Thing
Sometimes
things change visibly at a specific moment: December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor,
or the morning of September 11, 2001. Sometimes the change is harder to
pinpoint, like the start of the social upheaval that, in the U.S., came to be
known as “the Sixties.”
In the
Middle East after World War I, representatives of the victorious British and
French drew up national
boundaries without regard for ethnic, sectarian, religious, tribal, resource,
or other realities. Their goal was to divvy up the defeated Ottoman Empire.
Later, as their imperial systems collapsed, Washington moved in (though
rejecting outright colonies for empire by proxy). Secular dictatorships were
imposed on the region and supported by the West past their due dates. Any urge
toward popular self-government was undermined or destroyed, as with the coup
against elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or the way
the Obama administration manipulated the Arab
Spring in Egypt, leading to the displacement of a democratically chosen
government by a military coup in 2013.
In
this larger context, the Islamic State is only a symptom, not the disease.
Washington’s problem has been its desire to preserve a collapsing nation-state
system at the heart of the Middle East. The Bush administration’s 2003 invasion
of Iraq certainly sped up the process in a particularly disastrous fashion.
Twelve years later, there can’t be any question that the tide has turned in the
Middle East -- forever.
It’s
time for the U.S. to stand back and let local actors deal with the present
situation. ISIS’s threat to us is actually minimal. Its threat to those in the
region is another matter entirely. Without Washington further roiling the
situation, it’s a movement whose limits will quickly enough become apparent.
The
war with ISIS is, in fact, a struggle of ideas, anti-western and
anti-imperialist, suffused with religious feeling. You can’t bomb an idea or a
religion away. Whatever Washington may want, much of the Middle East is heading
toward non-secular governments, and toward the destruction of the monarchies
and the military thugs still trying to preserve updated versions of the
post-World War I system. In the process, borders, already dissolving, will
sooner or later be redrawn in ways that reflect how people on the ground
actually see themselves.
There
is little use in questioning whether this is the right or wrong thing because
there is little Washington can do to stop it. However, as we should have
learned in these last 14 years, there is much it can do to make things far
worse than they ever needed to be. The grim question today is simply how long
this painful process takes and how high a cost it extracts. To take former
President George W. Bush's phrase and twist it a
bit, you're either with the flow of history or against it.
Fear
Itself
Initially,
Washington’s military withdrawal from the heart of the Middle East will
undoubtedly further upset the current precarious balances of power in the
region. New vacuums will develop and unsavory characters will rush in. But the
U.S. has a long history of either working pragmatically with less than charming
figures (think: the Shah of Iran, Anwar Sadat, or Saddam Hussein before he
became an enemy) or isolating them. Iran, currently the up-and-coming power in
the area absent the United States, will no doubt benefit, but its reentry into the
global system is equally inevitable.
And
the oil will keep flowing; it has to. The countries of the Middle East have
only one mighty export and need to import nearly everything else. You can’t eat
oil, so you must sell it, and a large percentage of that oil is already sold to
the highest bidder on world markets.
It’s
true that, even in the wake of an American withdrawal, the Islamic State might
still try to launch Paris-style attacks or encourage San Bernardino-style
rampages because, from a recruitment and propaganda point of view, it’s
advantageous to have the U.S. and the former colonial powers as your number one
enemies. This was something Osama bin Laden realized early on vis-à-vis
Washington. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in drawing the U.S. deeply
into the quagmire and tricking Washington into doing much of his work for him.
But the dangers of such attacks remain limited and can be lived with. As a
nation, we survived World War II, decades of potential nuclear annihilation,
and scores of threats larger than ISIS. It’s disingenuous to believe terrorism
is a greater threat to our survival.
And
here’s a simple reality to explain to your candidate: we can't defend
everything, not without losing everything in the process. We can try to lock
down airports and federal buildings, but there is no way, nor should there be,
to secure every San Bernardino holiday party, every school, and every bus stop.
We should, in fact, be ashamed to be such a fear-based society here in the home
of the brave. Today, sadly enough, the most salient example of American
exceptionalism is being the world's most scared country. Only in that sense
could it be said that the terrorists are “winning” in America.
At
this point, your candidate will undoubtedly say: “Wait! Won't these ideas be
hard to sell to the American people? Won't our allies object?”
And
the reply to that, at least for a candidate not convinced that more of the same
is the only way to go, might be: “After more than 14 years of the wrong answers
and the disasters that followed, do you have anything better to suggest?”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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