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Swimming Up the Tigris: Real Life Encounters with Iraq

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If you believe, as I do, that the war against Iraq is one of the most important issues facing people in the US and world-wide, then you must read this book.

Independent journalist Barbara Nimri Aziz traveled throughout Iraq, beginning in 1989 in the days after the end of the Iran/Iraq war and up until the most recent disastrous invasion and brutal occupation. Her quest as an anthropologist was to document Iraqi society. She became a reluctant war correspondent.

This book documents the terrible years of grinding deprivation that was Iraq under the deadly US/UN sanctions. Why look at that period? Because everything that is happening today is rooted in the merciless sanctions period where more than 1.5 million people perished unnecessarily.

Every family in Iraq was touched. Everybody there would never be the same. Aziz writes brilliantly and compassionately about the people of Iraq, the ones we never hear from. The ones whose destiny is tied up with ours so completely.

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Michael Rubin obviously did not read Dr. Barbara Nimri Aziz' book, "Swimming Up the Tigris". From the lies, half-truths, and distortions of fact contained in his "review" of that publication, he did not even read its dust-cover. If he had, he would have seen the comment by Scott Ritter, chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998: "A must-read book which puts a human face on an Iraqi people dehumanized by simplistic, misleading, and inaccurate media accounts before, during, and after America's illegitimate invasion and occupation of their homeland." Rubin's kindergarten name-calling in his "commentary" also discloses that he never looked at the author's credentials (some of which are also contained inside the dust-jacket's back cover: "Barbara Nimri Aziz is a Fulbright scholar and veteran anthropologist..."

Unlike Michael Rubin, I have read the book and I have heard Dr. Barbara Nimri Aziz speak. The work is an accurate, succinct portrayal of a betrayed and savaged people, a people who invented the wheel, who invented writing, who invented accountable government, a people with 5,000 years of recorded history behind them, a history reduced to dust and ashes, like the Mesopotamian treasures of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad.

In her book, Dr. Barbara Nimri Aziz moves from the general, the broad sweep of recent, deplorable history, to the specific, illuminating dark corners of that story by recounting individual Iraqi experiences to America's violation of its Constitution and the Law of Nations. The author covers, inter alia, Iraqis in America, the medical system (or what's left of it), sick children, farmers, and pharmacies without drugs. These are stories about people from all walks of life, part of a once-vibrant society. Even if only part of what Rubin had said were true, it would not negate Dr. Barbara Nimri Aziz' experience and the months of careful anthropological documentation set forth in her book.

I heartily recommend this publication to anyone with an open mind (increasingly hard to find in the United States) who wants a highly-readable, comprehensive account of life in Iraq today as well as its costs, both to this country, to Iraq, and to the world. Read this book and you will understand what an Iraqi refugee recently told me: "We were all better off under Saddam Hussein."

Unlike Michael Rubin, who, in his review, doesn't disclose his background with the Bush Administration, his connection to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, his advocacy of constant war in the Middle East, and his ties to Daniel Pipes, pro-Israeli hate-monger, I will provide a bit of my experience: I am a former Foreign Service Officer once assigned to the Middle East, where I traveled widely. I am now an attorney in private practice in the Washington, D.C. area who has published articles on national security issues in a variety of magazines.

As an American expat living in Ecuador who has adopted the Latin rhythm, it takes me a long time to get around to doing anything these days. After three months of carrying around "Swimming Up the Tigris", I finally found the time to read it. It was worth every minute.

In my opinion, it is the single most informative book, article, or report I have ever read about Iraq. It is gripping, depressing, anger-provoking...a roller-coaster ride of emotions which,in the end, left me feeling embarrassed to be an American.

Aziz does away with the mind-numbing and confusing statistics that form the core of nearly every other writer's work on recent Iraqi history. She doesn't count the bodies; she doesn't dissect the Iraqi society by religion or clan as many self-styled Mideast "experts" do. What she does is provide a sweeping portrait of Iraqi society from the late 80's to 2003 through the eyes, ears, and voices of Iraqis who lived through these turbulent times. She lets the Iraqis---farmers, diplomats, mothers, students, military, etc---tell it like it was and is. She presents a devastating portrait of what it is actually like to live in a state of war in an internationally isolated country under relentless attack.

The larger question she poses is a question that all Americans would do well to ask themselves: How would we feel if we had Iraqi or Chinese or Mexican troops patrolling our streets, bombers in our skies ? How would we deal with 10+ years of sanctions which required approval by the UN to import just about anything ? Where would we be without our Asian and European imports ? How would we deal with DU bombs exploding in our cities, our factories, our fields ? Would we accept a foreign country setting up an Abu Ghraib in America in the name of liberty and democracy ? What would our reaction be to our museums being looted, our citizens tortured, our loved ones dying of cancer ?

I know money is tight these days....there is little left over after the empire's needs are taken care of. But skip a couple of Starbucks stops and grab a copy of this book-----it might be the best money you spend this year!

Barbara Aziz's recent book "Swimming Up the Tigris" is an important addition to the scholarly analysis of the Iraq War, its origins, conduct, and uncertain aftermath. Most Americans assume that the days of colonialism are over, leading them to overlook the quite traditional colonial basis for the invasion of Iraq, to secure its natural resources and control its almost limitless commercial potential. After the invasion, Iraqi resources were quickly transferred into the hands of American corporation. Under U.S. military occupation, hundreds of millions of dollars held in the Iraqi Central Bank vanished. Despite its evident wealth, Iraq soon became a financial dependent.
Selling the Iraq war to the American people was no easy feat. The attempt to suggest a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks was quickly discredited, but Aziz describes the broader American attempt to dehumanize the Iraqi people. In compliance with Bush administration policy, the American press not only promoted an anti-Iraq policy, but campaigned against the Iraqi culture itself. Such a campaign would require a rewriting of history, since Iraq is the modern representation of the great Mesopotamian civilization, which produced the earliest forms of writing, agriculture, and even the use of the wheel as the basis for transportation. Needless to say, convincing the world that Iraq was a primitive and benighted culture requiring a Western makeover was a hard sell.
Iraq's well-established agricultural prowess was set back generations by the invasion and occupation. Its priceless national seed banks, containing more than 1,000 varieties of plants, was either destroyed or removed from the country under the U.S. occupation. Aziz notes, "World grain experts describe this store as a genetic time capsule containing Iraqi's agricultural heritage."
Aziz documents the disastrous effects of the U.S. bombardment and earlier blockade, which resulted in the destruction of the water supply and the precipitous decline of national health care, as drugs and medical supplies were denied to some five million people. More immediately, the U.S. military's use of depleted uranium in its bombs and shells caused widespread cancer throughout Iraq.
Barbara Aziz's exhaustive research and in-depth interviews with Iraqi people break through the cliches and illusions common to the mass media. Her warmth and compassion bring us face-to-face with the reality of modern warfare and the inevitable price paid by ordinary people in Iraq and other trouble spots around the world. Great powers may continue to intrude on vulnerable nations like Iraq, but the work of journalists like Barbara Aziz will make it difficult for them to win the hearts and minds of the world community. In the absence of popular support, aggression is unlikely to prevail.

from Ron David, author of ARABS & ISRAEL FOR BEGINNERS

The writer William Gass once described a book as "so good you don't judge it, it judges you." SWIMMING UP THE TIGRIS by Barbara Nimri Aziz is that kind of book. Like most other writers on the Middle East I have focused so intently on America's two military invasions of Iraq that I misjudged the near-fatal impact of the economic sanctions on the Iraqi people.
Aziz describes (or to be more accurate, allows the Iraqi people to describe) the various ways in which the sanctions and embargoes devastated Iraq more deeply than the 1990-91 Gulf War. To grasp the enormity of that charge, bear in mind that the U.S. dropped more bombs on Iraq during the first Gulf war than were dropped on three continents during all of World War Two.
In brief, self-contained chapters Aziz shows the incredible resilience of the Iraqi people and their determination not to let their identity as a people be erased by America's casual brutality. In order to survive the sanctions Iraq rebuilt and literally reinnvented its economy, its medical system, even its oil industry --and unfortunately, its attitude toward America.
Aziz resembles the Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison in her refusal to accept the obvious answer to any question. (Has anyone but Aziz argued that the sanctions and embargoes hurt Iraq more than the bombs?) Another thing Aziz has incommon with the magnificent Ms. Morrison is her uncanny ability to find the truth in terms of what is not there. Example: One of the most beautiful and harrowing chapters in the book is Aziz's observation that the defining characteristic of Iraq's playgrounds is the absence of children. (Just silence.)
The poem by Lisa Suhair Majaj that introduces the chapter "Empty Playgrounds" is called "Arguments." It is, in itself, worth the price of the book.
Given the current political atmosphere in the U.S. --the drum-beating for a war or sanctions with/on Iran-- SWIMMING UP THE TIGRIS is required reading if we want to avoid the same mistakes with Iran we made with Iraq.
A beautiful, truthful book.

Aziz, a freelance reporter and host of an Arab-interest radio show in New York, first traveled to Iraq in 1989 before Saddam Hussein's "blunder" in Kuwait. She returned several times during the 1990s to document suffering under "illegal" U.N. sanctions and after the 2003 Iraq war. What has evolved, in Aziz's words, is a book as much about Iraq as about the United States. "Washington's 2003 military assault and occupation," Aziz tells us, "is indisputably part of the United States' wider imperial design." Much political polemic and conspiracy permeate Swimming Up the Tigris, as Aziz ruminates on the "weapons [of mass destruction] hoax and other fabrications."

Aziz organizes her book thematically: Vignettes supporting her arguments follow short political essays about life in Iraq, the medical system, and children. Aziz depicts Iraq as an enlightened society before sanctions and war and as a helpless victim afterwards. Iraq's once impressive medical system collapsed in the 1980s not because of Saddam's decision to launch a suicidal war but because Washington sought a policy of dual containment that left Iraqis isolated. She blames sanctions for Saddam's 12-year moratorium on hospital construction but omits not only that sanctions did not apply to medical goods but also that Saddam sipent billions during the same period building gilded palaces. Sometimes, she simply lies: The coalition did not in 1991 bomb Iraqi food stores. News media and even most antiwar activists abandoned prewar claims that 500,000 children died because of sanctions when, upon liberation, it became clear that this too was false. Throughout her narrative, Saddam is but a bit player. Aziz refuses to acknowledge the impact of his decisions on Iraq's downfall, for to do so might undercut her world-view.

Few Iraqis would recognize Aziz's description of their homeland. "Until the U.S. occupation in 2003," she writes, "little priority was given to religious affiliation." But why then did the Iraqi government provide electricity to Sunni neighborhoods twenty-four hours a day and just hours per day to Shi'i areas? If Kurds were equal citizens, was it simply coincidence that the Iraqi government expelled so many from their homes in order to resettle Sunni Arabs? For Aziz, there was no Halabja chemical weapons attack and no mass graves throughout southern Iraq. Indeed, it is questionable whether she ever bothered to explore Iraqi Kurdistan or the southern marshes.

Aziz has proven herself the Iraq equivalent of David Irving on the Holocaust. That the University Press of Florida, which published this volume, legitimized such venom and dishonesty, though, is a black mark impossible to erase.

Michael Rubin
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2009

As a social anthropologist, Barbara Nimri Aziz does not write a political
diatribe. A keen observer of human societies, she examines, for example, how important education is to Iraqis, what role women play in Iraqi society, what kind of medical system is available to Iraqi citizens, how Iraqis coped with twelve years of devastating sanctions, how they are affected by the American occupation of Iraq.

Included in her role as social anthropologist is not just observation but participation. With a gift for friendship and an ear for story, Aziz empathetically introduces her readers to individual Iraqis whose afterimages have "staying power." For those of us who have not traveled to Iraq, Aziz succeeds in giving her readers the haunting vicarious experience of having seen the tragic destruction of this ancient society as if with their own eyes.