As a child in Baghdad, I opened my eyes to a world holding its whip and subjugating us Iraqis to collective punishment through sanctions and repeated wars.
Death in Iraq was a spectacle on TV screens in the US. War coverage paid scarce attention to civilian casualties. As one Iraqi woman put it after the Gulf War, “Did they [Americans] ask where these tons and tons of explosives thrown fell? On whom? What happened there?”
Now that I am in Washington DC, I walk around the capital of the ‘Empire’ and feel as if I am an inferior being who has barely survived repeated attempts at the obliteration of his species. As I make my way through the crowds, I think of how oblivious they must be to the bombs that were funded by their taxes and are still going off in my head.
