Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation
- Jun 3, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 14
★★★★☆
After watching 13 Lives, the 2022 biographical survival film based on the Tham Luang cave rescue starring Viggo Mortensen, I found myself scrolling through his Wikipedia page and discovered that he’d started Perceval Press to help other artists by publishing works that might not find a home in more traditional publishing venues. From there, I discovered this book, which is currently available essentially for free.
It’s a curious thing in 2023 to be reading the 12th-anniversary edition of a book that was originally published in 2003. On the one hand, I doubt the average person was thinking about Iraq in 2015. On the other, there was at least some coverage in recent months for the 20th anniversary of the invasion so my timing was somewhat serendipitous. To put it mildly, there were lots of feelings about the invasion then, and, certainly, for Iraqis above all, there are still lots of feelings now. It’s pretty clear the Coalition of the Willing made a mess of things, and that that mess is still being felt in very real ways.
In reading Twilight of Empire, a collection of essays, on-the-ground dispatches, photojournalism, and more, it’s difficult to walk away with the impression that we simply “cocked it up.” That’s the opinion I had at the time: It was poorly planned and disastrously executed. Some of that is certainly true. But some of the failures were so catastrophic that they can’t come across as anything but intentional. As in: Blunders of this magnitude cannot be accidental. Why? Because we couldn’t be this incompetent, could we? Or could we? Or were we? I mean, nobody considered what might happen were we to disband the military and police forces? Or that, after a 35-year reign by a single party there would be no internal mechanisms in place for establishing self-governance—especially after ousting everyone at every level of that government? Or that, Iraqis, in large part, wouldn’t want us there—and what that might mean in terms of the resources needed to stay? No, I think everything was considered. We simply chose the option that created the most—choose your word—chaos, instability, hardship, damage. Time and again we hear from Iraqis in Twilight of Empire asking some version of, “Are the Americans doing this to destroy us?”
Twenty years after the fall of Saddam, maybe things are better for Iraqis, maybe they’re not. That’s not really the point though, is it? We put a people through hell. Many of them are still in hell. Twilight of Empire brings us right down to ground level with voices we needed to hear from the most. If only they had had a bigger stage than a boutique press from Santa Monica, California what effect that might have had on the national discourse. If only.
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