Embedded Horizons
The following essay appears in Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire, edited by Aaron Hughes, Ronak K. Kapadia, Therese Quinn, Meranda Roberts, and Amber Zora, and was originally published in Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars, 1991–2011, edited by Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib, MoMA PS1, 2019*I was an early advisor to the Theater of Operations exhibtion, contributor to the catalogue as per my essay below, and panelist at the MoMA PS1 opening. Unfortunately, concerns brought by artists and contributors including myself, on issues such as direct Iraq War profiteering by the head of the museum, were met with attempts to mislead and silence by curatorial and institional staff. By the end of the exhibition, a protest by artist Ali Yass utilizing his own work and participation in the show was organized, and met by NYPD; a show of the museum’s attempt at enforcing their narrative, mirroring the attempts at narrative control that was a throughline in America during the actual Gulf Wars. More on this perspective and the protest may be read here, and here. I am grateful that the essay has another opportunity to be read in the context of the Surviving the Long Wars book and exhibition.
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Americans don’t call it genocide. No one does. Between January and February 1991, US led coalition forces dropped over eighty eight thousand tons of bombs on Iraq. Numbers in the ensuing American bombing campaigns of the ’90s and into this century remain unclear, though upwards of one hundred thousand airstrikes are certain. Spending on the war in Iraq alone is estimated at one trillion dollars. The body count: one million Iraqis have died. The number of refugees and internally displaced are over nine million. The scale of these numbers may be lost on an American public seemingly numb to the wars on terror, nearly in their third decade.
Numbness of a different kind has been reported regarding Iraq’s children, who make up nearly half the population: one in six are categorized as orphans. Numbness in these small bodies is a survival response to cyclical, ubiquitous, lifelong trauma. If you’ve never heard a bomb go off, you cannot begin to imagine what five, ten, or a thousand sound like. Extensive research on brain trauma in US soldiers returning from Iraq reveals that bomb explosions can cause severe neurotrauma and a host of other detrimental conditions, from vision and hearing loss to PTSD. For Iraqis, whose civilian populations are inadequately treated (let alone studied), this barrage simply announces a beginning… of a Gulf War, of an invasion, of a civil war, of Daesh.
Despite the scale and irreversibility of the damage caused not only to the environment, but also to traditions, to past and future cultural production, and to the very notion of personhood itself, war leaves survivors, and Iraq has plenty. Regardless of the lack of meaning ascribed to Iraqi life, it continues, and its DNA offers us insight into the capacity for resilience as it codes our future. Anxieties around climate change, omnipresent surveillance and social media, militarized policing systems, historic refugee populations, and widening income inequality are finally pulsing through mainstream political and cultural discourse, but this discourse will remain incomplete until it takes into account the intricate and intimate ways in which the seemingly distant warzone of Iraq is a testing ground for the establishment of networked systems; systems that—anywhere in the world—can predict, preempt, or neutralize any behavior that might challenge military interests.
Traditional memorials, physically manifested through exhibitions, engraved statues, or immersive gardens, may be the wrong place to look for recognition of Iraq’s sacrifice. Iraqi life has already been immortalized. Its legacy can be found all around us; in our smart-homes, at our airports, and in the games we play. We are haunted by them whether we realize it or not. The purpose of a haunting is to send a message over time, space, and experience. Iraq was, in many ways, a site for the undead. Preparing the site for warfare required an information campaign communicating that any body within the borders delineated for war could be eliminated if necessary for victory. The initial appearance of victory after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was reminiscent of the first Gulf War. But this war followed a different script, and as escalating violence pointed to deeper engagement, images of newly liberated Iraqis gave way to images of Iraqis walking a tightrope of mortality: cowering at the barrel of a gun in a house raid, and strung up as a hooded rag doll at Abu Ghraib. In order to extend the war, the public had to extend its acceptance of Iraqi bodies as available to abuse, to torture, to kill. As ugly as the images of Abu Ghraib were, as ugly as it might have been to see small children screaming in terror while the US Army put bags over the heads of their fathers, it was uglier, still, to be an Iraqi.
Of course, what Americans saw on the their screens and in their papers was a view of full-spectrum war, not the full spectrum of Iraq, which may as well have been a black site. Understandably, no one outside of battle reporting or warmongering was going in, and most of the Iraqis fleeing were doing so for good. The wars in Iraq were unique for many reasons—one being that they were fought by extensive international coalitions. The most advanced war-making resources the world had to offer coalesced and touched ground in Baghdad. If you were there during those years, you were witness to a display of force that no one in the world had ever seen. What did those who remained see? What might they want to tell us? What do they know that we don’t? The generation of artists born in the wake of the Gulf War and who came of age in the ensuing invasion of Iraq are the closest thing we have to embodied insight.
"The navigation computer opened the bomb doors and dropped the weapons into the dark.” - American B-52 bomber pilot describing his experience in Iraq.
It is no secret that technology is used to fight wars, and that the lessons from wars support the development of new technologies. The world’s prevailing military research arm is the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Housed under the Department of Defense, “It has a singular and enduring mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.” In Annie Jacobsen’s comprehensive book, The Pentagon’s Brain, she reports that DARPA and the US Army spent three hundred million dollars perfecting the Simulator Networking (SIMNET) system, a networked combat simulation system (a system that also birthed the billion-dollar multi-player gaming industry, starting with World of Warcraft). The system was used to simulate a war game exercise undertaken by US Central Command (CENTCOM). An icon of the Persian Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf scripted a narrative for SIMNET focused on Iraq, a play-by-play of what would become the actual Gulf War. SIMNET technology integrated real data from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait. In the last stage of the SIMNET game, Iraq did in fact invade Kuwait, and the war against Iraq was waged using air bases in Saudi Arabia.
SIMNET was designed to serve as a substitute for real combat operations, but the testing required real-life combat. The seamless timing of the system’s completion, game’s scripts, and the start of the actual war is described as “an eerie similarity” by U.S. Central Command. But it could hardly have been a surprise, or even uncanny, as it was known at the time that Saddam Hussein was gathering military at the border of Kuwait. The live war was an astounding show of might. It provided a quick, potent victory lap, extinguishing the lingering scent of war as a nationally divisive failure in Vietnam, and introducing audiences around the world to a new era of technology. Live news coverage, guided killing, and massive public relations efforts worked together as their own “system of systems” to demonize Iraqis, censor difficult war imagery, and frame all criticism of the war as an assault on American soldiers.
The US entered Iraq again in 2003, and by its second year, DARPA launched its most expensive operation to date, the Urban Operations Program, with these words, “No technological challenges are more immediate, or more important for the future, than those posed by urban warfare… What we are seeing today [in Iraq] is the future of warfare.” The future of war is one that reconfigures earth and all of its human and nonhuman components as potential battlefields. American actions commonly referred to as “missteps” (dismantling the Iraqi military, police, and border security, allowing massive caches of weapons to be left up for grabs throughout the country) enabled the power vacuum to be filled by militias of every stripe with a Pandora’s box of weapons with which to experiment. Daesh, an extraordinary multinational de facto government, would eventually emerge, requiring all-out urban destruction to seemingly expel its forces, but not before it had thoroughly, unimaginably terrorized citizens of greater Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest, and now largely decimated, metropolis. Eco-terrorism too, was scaled here, from the punitive draining of Iraq’s southern marshes under Saddam Hussein’s rule to Daesh setting oil wells and agricultural fields ablaze, trapping black, deeply toxic smoke over entire villages and towns for months, and endangering already precarious farmlands once serving as the region’s (and the world’s first), breadbasket.
Iraq is widely seen in public discourse as a failure, but through the lens of urban research needs, it has been a rich, widely successful petri dish. The American military, through active combat, has been able to test and develop each of the identified areas of improvement in urban warfare that continues to inform our future cities. These include: communication “jammers” (which can disrupt anything from cellphones to GPSs to drones), the development of armored exoskeletons, robotic limbs, machine-enhanced decision-making, explosives detection, voice recognition and translation, drones and robotics, and nonlethal methods for controlling group behavior.
The militarization of police units across America isn’t simply due to the fact of weapons “coming home” from war, it is part of transforming urban areas into spaces that will always be ready for war. Ferguson, Standing Rock, Baghdad, images from protests in these areas look the same because each visible force engages in the tactics developed from the same war-constructed incubator. There was no Iraqi SWAT team prior to the 2003 invasion. American forces created it. There were no body scanners in American airports—now resembling checkpoints—prior to 2007. In 2018, the first biometric airline terminal was launched in Atlanta, with the majority of airlines and ports expected to follow suit. This technology was also advanced through human Iraqi data by the US military, which collected fingerprints, photographs, and biographical information on an estimated 750,000 Iraqi citizens, intelligence that is housed at the Department of Defense’s Biometrics Fusion Center in West Virginia.
Hovering a thousand feet above the ground, surveillance blimps—machines deployed to serve as the US Army’s unblinking eyes—tethered by fiber optic cables floating above Baghdad, surveyed the terrain below. Like the other displays of urban military control that characterized this war in stark difference to the remote, stealth capacities on display in the first Gulf War, the blimps were also made to be seen. They were not only full of monitoring equipment, but also full of meaning: We are watching you. Everyone knew that the blimps were there, taking pictures. The machines of occupying forces—from extensive camera surveillance and psychological operations to tactical units, snipers, and checkpoints—controlled pedestrian movement, entered homes, reconfigured neighborhoods, and determined whether Iraqis lived or died.
In 1993, a remarkable piece, “War is Virtual Hell,” by science fiction writer and theorist Bruce Sterling appeared in WIRED magazine. In the piece, Sterling details the turns and possibilities set in motion for military dominance through what DARPA refers to as, “the war in Southwest Asia.” Sterling describes the military’s use of virtual reality “as a new way of knowledge: a new and terrible kind of transcendent military power,” and notes that during Desert Storm, Iraqi soldiers surrendered to unmanned flying drones. In her book written thirteen years later, Jacobson claims that “this became the first time in history that a group of enemy soldiers was recorded surrendering to a machine.”
Ali Eyal and Sajjad Abbas, both visual artists under thirty who were born a few short years after this historic surrender, came of age under the camera’s eye. Having already seen the worst violence possible while raised in Baghdad’s notorious public housing project, Sadr City, they weren't afraid to turn the gaze on itself, by both harnessing and incinerating its authority. In Eyal’s recent work, Behind the Sun, he uses painting, one of the earliest forms of military technology, to depict the faces of disparate lives, animal and human, united by death at the hands of “No Name.” Eyal chronicled the imagined life of the work:
“I decided to visit his (No Name’s) house and paint all its walls… I knew that he killed my father or buried him, or maybe he fed his body to wild dogs… I wanted to crush him with the faces within the mural. The faces of the dozens who were killed or went missing during his private parties. I could imagine their eyes following him all around the room...One of the paintings showed missing people and victims whose faces I copied from old pictures, collected from multiple families… I finished painting and called him to see what I had done.”
The painting is a replica of an imagined mural created for No Name in his home, without him realizing that it was painted as the ultimate act of revenge. No Name, initially enamored by the mural, would soon be tortured by the faces looking back at him. In the vigilante fantasy-turned-painting, No Name loses his mind and kills himself, meeting his righteous fate. Eyal exhumes the mass graves of Iraq and enacts the closure remaining out of reach for these victims and their families by destroying the multi-variant, anonymous force. Are the faces victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime? Of Daesh? Of US military forces? Of local militias? No Name exists because, for most Iraqis, there has been no resolution for the missing dead. No accountability, no identification of perpetrators, no processes or procedures to recognize their loss. In this work, Eyal grants justice to his father and others who have lost their lives through a fiction that in turn creates a memorial in the form of the painting itself. He honors these faces as he attempts to afford justice to the cut-short, unaccounted-for lives of No Name’s victims.
In his 2013 public intervention, Abbas brashly addressed the Green Zone with a phrase, I Can See You, written in massive Arabic script atop the largest building he could scale beneath a magnified tracing of his own eye. The building faced a major public freeway as well as the Green Zone, the area covering four square miles of central Baghdad along the banks of the Tigris, and once serving as Saddam Hussein’s control center. It later became the US coalition command, and today the heavily fortified area houses the largest and most expensive US embassy in the world, as well as Iraqi and coalition government offices, company headquarters, and residences. With one of the most corrupt governments on record unwilling to provide basic resources like electricity, water, and security beyond the perimeter of their guarded, air conditioned walls, Abbas’s eye was the crown atop Baghdad’s present-day dystopia. During the worst years of Baghdad’s violence, smoke from bombs could be seen around the city, the Green Zone at its center impervious to pain—quiet, secure, the Tigris lapping at its impenetrable shore. Abbas’s artwork was as much a reckoning as it was trespassing.
The grind of trauma has been inescapable in Iraq, and also absent from general discourse outside of the country. However this lack of acknowledgement of Iraqi trauma was used, particularly in American discourse, as a narrative tactic to deflect from and diminish the war’s historic carnage. Why wasn’t Iraq getting better? As though what had befallen the nation was no more complicated than a cold. Problems in Iraq were often attributed to Iraqis needing to “get back on their feet.” Even those whose lives center around image making and meaning - arts professionals - seemed to be unaware of the catastrophe that had taken place. With several notable exceptions, when those in the field of contemporary art (American, Middle Eastern, and otherwise) found out that I worked with artists in Baghdad, the question they asked most was if there was “anything good.” When I explained the kind of conditions these artists were working under (severe trauma, bombed art spaces, bewildering isolation, dysfunctional education), my response was regularly met with impatience, as if growing up during unending war was a kind of pity project, or simply, boring. What these people wanted to know was if there was anything that could be bought or shown, acquired before the market got hot, or the artwork passé. What other good could be there, apart from a commodity? Sometimes, I was told that the lack of educational infrastructure might lead to originality. A pearl in that blasted piece of sand.
Though the works of untold artists in Iraq are impressive, their entry into the global art world—which rests on some combination of social connections, sophisticated English, savvy presentation, a (preferably Western) art school education, and mobility—remains elusive. Iraqi citizens cannot easily obtain visas to leave the country, if at all, to go to shows or meet with curators. Iraq’s art schools are mainly populated by those from middle or low-income backgrounds, rather than restricted as an upper-class opportunity, as it is in so many other parts of the world and neighboring countries. Far from having parents with dual citizenship or access to English classes and private education, many young artists are consequently left outside of the global art circuit. There have been little to no visits by curators and art world operators independent of political or military contexts, and, far more importantly, no dollars or effort spent to support their development, education, or ability to independently produce work. This partially explains why diaspora artists are the sole purveyors of anything that is recognized as contemporary Iraqi art. Nearly all have gone to Western art schools and hold Western or dual passports.
This is by no means the fault of the artists. A diaspora is the inevitable outcome of sustained war and mass murder, and rich work has emerged from artists that span the years of dispersal, from the melancholy resistance of Koutaiba al Janabi to the poetic interventions of Rheim Alkadhi. A much more productive conversation is not about the merits of artists working from outside their countries of origin, whatever that means, but about why artists working from inside a country like Iraq are excluded from the world of exhibited art, and how the structures of the art world can be reconfigured to address this.
The works of Eyal and Abbas are acts of defiance against conditions designed to force surrender. They do not have much to lose and a great deal to gain by going up against the technology that marks their bodies for death. But will the art world, informed by and participating with war’s image-making and financial structures, ever take the risk of remaking the rules of engagement? Or will we continue to pretend that the barriers to entry in the art world for artists living in Iraq is simply an oversight (or impossibility), that artists embedded with militaries are not furthering the aims of PSYOPS, that the mega museums and art fairs of the Gulf do not function as state-sponsored strategies laundering strategic state-sponsored violence.
The allure of technological warfare, shock and awe, and unlimited capital have worked in seamless phases relying on the near-evisceration of Iraqi life and associated narratives. But even with all this might, Iraq remains present, at the vanguard. The buzzwords of today—climate change, representation, acceleration - should remind us that there can be no meaningful investigation, let alone emancipation, of our technologies, and consequently our planet and its citizens, without investigating the conditions undergirding Iraq—the current, millennia-old center for global innovation. The lessons of the Gulf Wars are that our future has already been fought for; a blueprint already exists of this world. A Green Zone for the few, a Red Zone for the rest. We look away at our own risk.
- Rijin Sahakian