Perception Wars

Jemil Metti

Description

This book is Metti’s journey to
Iraq under extraordinary family
circumstances. It describes personal and
academic challenges he encountered
by the need to acclimate to a new
language and culture.
This story is also a depiction of cultural
rejection aggravated by assimilation
issues: He was compelled to live in
places not of his choosing; to master
a tongue alien to his childhood; and
to feel out of place every time he
stepped outside the hospitable and
generous embrace of his extended Iraqi
family into the corporal punishment
landmines of Iraqi education.

Sujets

• Wars
• Cultural
• Iraq
• Biography
• Rejection
• Issue
• Journey
• Autobiography
• Irak
• Issues
• Assimilation
• Perception

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 13 juin 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781462832842
• Langue: English

Extrait

Perception Wars
 
Iraq From The Outside In
 

 
 
 
Jemil Metti
 
Copyright © 2008 by Jemil Metti.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2007909550
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-4363-0746-8

Softcover
978-1-4363-0745-1

eBook
978-1-4628-3284-2
 
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
Rev. date: 02/03/2023
 
 
Xlibris 844-714-8691 www.Xlibris.com
577446
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Welcome Home, Stranger (1956-1957)
Chapter 2 Christmas– Baghdad Style (1957-1970)
Chapter 3 Motherless (1956-1990)
Chapter 4 Feeling Out of Place (1956-1970)
Chapter 5 A Bloody Revolution (July 14, 1958)
Chapter 6 A Coup to Follow (14 Ramadan 1963)
Chapter 7 The Wave of Revenge (1966-1991)
Chapter 8 Mandatory Citizenship (1964-1968)
Chapter 9 In the Name of Friendship (1957-1970)
Chapter 10 Democracy 101 (1960-1963)
Chapter 11 Education is in the Mind of the Beholder (1956-1970)
Chapter 12 Barriers and Missed Opportunities (1949-1970)
Chapter 13 Propaganda, Religion, and Education in Defying Times (1969-1970)
Chapter 14 If Boy Meets Girl (1965-1970)
Chapter 15 Issues Time Refuses to Heal: Why Can’t Iraqis Come Home (1956-1970)?
Chapter 16 Who Has the Last Word on Iraq (2008)?
Chapter 17 Iraq vs. United States & Israel (1948-2008)
Chapter 18 The War on Terrorism (2003-2008)
Chapter 19 Liberators or Occupiers: More than a Symbolic Perception (2003-2008)
Diagram: How Iraq Sees the West-aiding Terrorism
This book is dedicated to Tokiko, my wife; my reason for loving, and everything else worth living for.
Introduction
This book is about my journey to Iraq, commencing at an age considered most ideal for cultural and language encounters though not knowing that my initial observations and reactions to Iraq were influenced by pro-Western impulses.
My family’s destiny was linked to this ancient land through the mirrors of our respective turbulence with a definite disproportionate impact; Iraq’s men and women were setting the stage for a revolt against the monarchy; I was being submerged into a culture where religion and politics were mutual partners though forcefully at arms length. But this was a matter that wouldn’t concern me directly until my late teen years. There were more serious acclimation and cultural shock matters for a six-year-old to be concerned with; much of it would be misunderstood but a source of cultural trepidation no less.
I was one among millions of Iraqis who lived in the region between 1956 and 1970. There was a significant difference that set my family apart from other Iraqis: due to our exposure to Western culture, we – except my father – felt like outsiders, looking in while plowing our way through this complex culture.
As we involuntarily inherited Iraqi citizenship through my father, I gradually began to understand how Iraq was caught in the quicksand of its historic tragedy, unable to escape the ghost of Holako, the Mongolian barbarian discredited for dismantling Baghdad to Stone Age rubble. In 1258, he decimated decades of advanced philosophic, literary, and scientific work by allowing his occupying forces to recklessly discard these most treasured works into the Tigris River. Iraq never recovered. Adding to its misfortune, Iraq’s troubles didn’t end there.
Since the beginning of its time, the wars in Iraq, as I understood them, were about the clash of ideas, casualties of human perceptions that evolved over time, conflicting beliefs that were sometimes guided by the paradox of narrow vision and ethnocentric entrapment.
In the twentieth century, especially in the 1960s, Iraq failed, as a civilization, to embrace the doctrine of civility and avoid the ill treatment it undeservedly unleashed on its diverse people and cultures. This ultimately influenced this cradle of civilization to engage its own divided body into bloodshed. Iraq’s leaders acquired different banners of justification for their bloody encounters. Some of their wars were fought in the name of nationalism, others in the name of religion. Most, however, could be attributed to Iraq’s prolonged dependency on the ideology of political and religious indoctrination.
For the common Iraqis, their perceptions provided structure and simplicity for comprehending beliefs that were as varied and adversarial as the ethnicities that harbored them. The stage for long-term conflicts was unavoidable because supporters of one belief system failed to compromise or find common ground with followers of another. They were void of the creativity needed to promote religious and ethnic cohabitation and to derail the deadly alternatives that were often chosen, which are still being chosen. Iraq’s ageless civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites demonstrates this point.
Iraq’s linguistically prolific leaders, as I witnessed, falsely alleged their embrace of democratic principles though in practice opted to endorse the politics of dictatorial extremism.
Looking back shortly after World War I, when the Iraqi people responded to Woodrow Wilson’s right to self-determination for all nations yearning to be free, Iraq’s British dominant presence (1914-1958) paralyzed the people’s ability to seize the moment and to reach consensus on what was in their best interest. This political characteristic of directionless leadership was also evident during Iraq’s chaotic postcolonial period after the British were long gone.
While Iraq’s hunger for democracy was evident, it could not agree on what shape or form it should take. The fruits of representative democracy had been denied to Iraqis for too long to the point of escaping recognition. Democracy, though uninvited in the minds and actions of Iraq’s rulers, repeatedly knocked on its political doors throughout most of its twentieth-century history, but it was denied unconditional admission.
Democracy’s flirtatious approach to Iraqi politics during the 1960s was mired by the limited vision of despotic rulers; democracy’s debut was hampered by economic demarcations along the social, political, and religious divide.
This is a humble attempt to shed some light on Iraqi perceptions of their perplexed environment during the late 1950s and the 1960s and the way they challenged and conflicted with the world I was trying to shape for myself.
This account of conflicting perceptions which accompanied the compass of my attitude are my own. As such, I bear exclusive responsibility for the contents herein.
Welcome Home, Stranger (1956-1957)
I am a six-year-old among thousands of children born to parents of mixed nationalities – a common phenomenon among overseas-educated Iraqi families of the twentieth century, where at least one family member, usually the mother, is foreign. These frequent patterns of mixed Iraqi marriages usually involve an Iraqi male marrying a female citizen of a foreign country where he is usually pursuing a college graduate degree.
England, Iraq’s former colonial occupier, attracts the largest bulk of scholarly bachelors, some of whom end up in marriages of convenience because it makes them eligible for residency status, the most coveted perk that would otherwise be denied them.
This privilege proves to be invaluable for Iraqi residents during their country’s five decades of internal upheaval, from the 1940s through the 1990s, when political uncertainties face the future of these Iraqi ex-patriots, and the homesickness that ignites their passion to return reverts into second thoughts.
Dad, however, deviates from this norm and follows a different path to his marital destiny. It starts with a European cruise ship that leads him all the way to the heart of Hungarian-born Juliet Balinth where a 1939 love-at-first-sight episode is legitimized through a lavish Baghdad wedding, following a one-year long-distance romance accentuated with the help of French-written love letters to and fro.
This happy marriage ends with Mom’s premature and tragic death in Long Island, New York. I am barely three months old on that gloomy December 3 of 1949. The family is still divided over her untimely death; for mysterious reasons, no one can say for certain whether brain cancer or postnatal depression shock treatments was the culprit that fatally derailed her youth and denied her living rights to her thirty-second birthday. For sure, her passing away widows Dad at forty-three and abandons him to the desperate unpredictable twists of loneliness.
Thanks to Angela Vivianno, a close family friend, I spend a year under her warm and nourishing care; the bond and attachment which envelopes is sufficient to stimulate adoption considerations.
Despite one less parenting headache the adoption would remove, Dad understandably rejects Vivianno’s humanitarian offer; his abrupt emotional and physical separation from Mom are too deep and fresh. He won’t hear of it. End of discussion.
With Dad’s immediate family of three brothers, two sisters, and a French stepmother living in Baghdad, Iraq, it seems poin