Many Truths To Consider
By SEAN HANNON
August 22, 2004
Can there be more than one “truth” to a given situation? Of course there can. For each person living, there can be a separate and equally valid truth told in their honest perspective of events. It’s just that some truths demand a narrower field of view than others in order to stand.
A truth for many Americans is that we have brought freedom and democracy to Iraq. As proof, all they need to do is point to the removal of Saddam and his Baathists, and the installation of the Allawi interim government. And that closes the book on the subject, for that is all the truth they desire to see.
The same truth in the eyes of Iraqis looks quite different. What they see is that one puppet tyrant has been replaced by another. As proof, all they need to do is point to Dr. Allawi’s brutal measures of repression.
At Allawi’s command, the world’s journalists have been threatened at gunpoint to leave the country. He has declared the equivalent of Martial law. Neighborhoods are repeatedly bombed with no regard to civilian casualties. Over a dozen witnesses, including four Amercians, watched in stunned silence as Dr. Allawi personally executed six suspects lined up blindfolded and handcuffed by shooting them in the back of the head one by one. And in an effort to make Abu Graib appear trivial, he presided over the hideous torture and maiming of 150 men and boys who were rounded up in a sweep and held in the enclosed grounds of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. For three days they were starved, denied water, bound and beaten with hoses, and scarred with chemicals.
As to this last allegation, you might be wondering if I am merely repeating hearsay from Al Jazeera propagandists. No, these atrocities were witnessed firsthand by Oregonian National Guardsmen who saw it through their riflescopes atop adjacent buildings. They intervened by marching into the compound, taking photographic evidence of the injured as well as rooms with torture apparatus. They separated the prisoners from the abusive guards and administered first aid. But later that day they received orders from their commanding officers to “stand down”, to ignore the situation and return the prisoners to their captors. In that moment, the truth changed for those Oregonians. For Iraqis, the truth is that Allawi is the new U.S. strongman in Baghdad, using all the old methods from Saddam’s playbook, and freedom and democracy are little more than a cruel hoax.
What we have to realize is that everyone has some truth to bring to the table, even the guys we’re fighting. Some Americans will point to the image of the burning twin towers and say that’s all the truth we need. But that’s not a truth. That’s a symptom. A symptom of a greater disorder in the world that we haven’t even begun to address honestly. “Terrorism” isn’t an enemy you can fight, it’s a symptom. And no amount of heavy artillery is going to cauterize the wound and make the scourge of terrorism go away. Unless we show the courage to push beyond our self-aggrandizing truths, and address other people’s life experiences - their truths - as seriously as we take ours, we will fail. We will fall beneath a weight unseen and unconsidered, and wonder what happened.
