I covered the Middle East when Saddam was America’s friend. The bloodletting hasn’t stopped
One day, Donald Trump will die and many evangelical Christians will mourn him. I will think Alex is beautiful and Renee Good, both shot and killed by U.S. immigration agents. Trump’s gutting of US aid, shattered immigrant families and 160 little girls The person who went to school in Iran this week and never returned home. And I think those who mourn Trump are very misguided in praying for such a terrible president. But it will happen in their big churches and Bible study groups, and that will be their job.
One day, Benjamin Netanyahu will die and some Jews will say Kaddish for him, and I will think about the dead children of Kibbutz Be’eri, whom he did not protect on October 7, 2023, and the thousands of Gaza children he bombed, and I will think that they were very misguided to waste their prayers on such a leader. But it will happen in their synagogues and their shuls, and that will be their job.
This week, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died and a handful of Australian Shiites mourned his death. I think about the terrorism it supports, the citizens it shoots, tortures, oppresses and impoverishes, and I think they are deeply mistaken. But this was in their hüseyniyes and masjids and this is their job.
If anyone is wondering whether our rights to free speech have been compromised lately, politicians trying to prosecute people for whom they could pray for whatever dead leader offers a depressing answer.
Less than a year after Australians went to the polls and publicly rejected the politics of division, all parties appear to be in a rush to take sides.
The Prime Minister calls for social harmony and then invites a highly controversial head of state, Israel’s Isaac Herzog, to Australia. The NSW premier imposes draconian crackdowns on protests against the visit and then appears ready to excuse police roughing up Muslim men as they pray. Pauline Hanson makes an unspeakably racist statement about Muslims and the Coalition refuses to support a motion to censure her.
And all the major parties sided with the United States in an election war that completely lacked domestic sanction from the U.S. Congress or international sanction from the United Nations.
Our tendency to go into whatever trenches America chose to dig made little sense for Australia, even in the years when the United States was a solid democracy, a reliable ally, and committed to international law. It makes a lot less sense now when none of this is true right now.
How little we have learned. I left Sydney in September 1987 to take up the role of Middle East correspondent. Wall StreetJournal The first major story I covered was the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Here we are again, almost 40 years later. Here we are still. Lots of wars, hundreds of thousands of dead, and I can’t point to a single thing that is better in the region than in 1987. There is no strategic stability. There are no emerging new democracies. There is no progress in human rights.
The USA was supporting Saddam Hussein at that time. The US ambassador looked me in the eye across his desk in Baghdad and said: “Saddam is a man we can work with.” He had invaded Iran and was in the middle of a war that lasted eight years and killed more than half a million people.
During that war, Israel and the United States provided Iraq with targeting information for missiles that destroyed Iranian cities such as Khorramshahr. I walked through the rubble of that ghost town and through residential neighborhoods in Tehran where missiles reduced homes to rubble. In those days, Iran did not have a missile program of its own and had no ability to respond to attacks. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was forced to ask for a ceasefire. Emboldened, Saddam went on to invade Kuwait, leaving this “man we could work with” at the end of a very expensive (lives, treasure) American noose.
Nobody wanted a nuclear-armed Iran. After tough and skillful diplomacy by the Obama administration and its European allies, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action appeared to be working. The only party unhappy with the nuclear deal was Netanyahu, who undermined the deal by interfering in US domestic politics and working for Trump’s re-election.
Trump bragged about it Iran’s nuclear program “destroyed” Following last year’s 12 day war. Faced with declining popularity at home and increasing fuss about what his administration was hiding in the Epstein files, Trump moved the goalposts to justify this new attack. He declared that Iran should give up its missile program. The very missile program instigated by America’s tragically misguided Iraq policy.
Iran is an ancient culture with a vibrant young population, two-thirds of which have been born since the Iranian revolution. Many would have left the country to seek greater freedom and prosperity. Instead, they remained to fight for the heart and soul of their culture. They risk their lives on the streets, but also in creations of art and music, literature and film that transcend humanist beauty. They deserve better than the ayatollahs. And they deserve better than an illegal war waged by a murderous, incompetent president with no plan for what comes next.
“Stand up,” he says. The last time I heard a US president say these words, Iraqi Shiites and Kurds listened. They revolted in southern and northern Iraq, and thousands were massacred while George HW Bush was playing golf.
Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.
