I drink Iraqi nationalism

Two Middle Eastern countries bogged down in muddles of mud, one I come from, the other is a brethren nation of Arabs just like me.

Both share the same news of raucous blood smeared on TV screens. So the call of civil demonstration is as vociferous as the pain of the silent, mute, insignificant Arab corpses, and the sounds of rockets, bombs are the cheerleaders to cheer my steps to go and protest the injustice.

I am human I sympathise. But beneath the layers of what makes me an Iraqi my march rewinds and passes through the oblivions, I feel apathetic.

I hear the sound of vengeances of Halabja in 1981- 6000 dead, chemically gassed, no protest of their unimportant death.

They cheered Saddam’s mongol invasion on Kuwait. No one protested to lift the sanctions from the Iraqis; the sanctions resulted in one million Iraqi child, and the price was worth it according to Albright. I heard no protest of our worth! The post 2003 invasion, even though throngs, crowds and thousands of Iraqis welcomed the invaders and others resisted them on Iraqi dead bodies. No unified protest was organized to send a message of anger due to the high number of Iraqi deaths, no protest to unify Shi’as and Sunnis from a regional Arab spirit.

But there is the tick button, the US , the stimulator of the crowds to protest and attend their right to express and attuned their consciousness to justice, and most likely Al Zaydi’s shoe symbol is used.

The mass graves, the dead buried beneath the sand are long forgotten. “Oh you Iraqis never tried to topple Saddam,” I remember my Lebanese friend uttering unlearned history of not knowing our Iraqi history, for him and especially as he was a Hizbalah Shi’a , the 1991 uprising sunk down in the gutter, forgetting our resistance against the Ba’ath from the South to the North , to take our fate with our hands, with much hope, America supplied the helicopters for Saddam to suppress the uprising!

Leave that alone, I think I can forgive, and I sympathize and I do feel my blood is almost taking the form of diffused steam when I see what is happening in Ghaza.

But my march to protest the injustice, will it ever lead to somewhere? Do I come from an Arab entity that is strong and smart enough to take its fate with its own hands?
I am against emotionalism now, I find it meaningless, and just as we march and protest more are dead not just in Palestine but also in Iraq!

Maybe if I ever go tomorrow, I would like to express the message “Stop killing our Children too, Iraqi children”.