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Marco Werman talks with Sinan Antoon, professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at New York University, about the reality of life in today’s Iraq.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi writer who lives in New York.  He’s a professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at New York University.  Professor Antoon, you’re in touch with friends in Iraq on a pretty regular basis. What is your sense of daily life there and whether it has become any better in the past few months.

SINAN ANTOON:  Well, the numbers of those dying are down compared to three years ago, maybe, and that’s what we usually get in mainstream media.  But in terms of daily life, it has not really changed drastically.  It is still not safe at all to be out on the streets and the services that were promised are not being rendered.  For example, electricity is still not back to pre-war levels.  And so the level of insecurity and anxiety is still very high, especially in terms of the political chaos after the elections.  We still do not have a government, so there is wide ranging fear that there might be a return to the civil war of 2005 and 2006.

WERMAN: As far as the services you were talking about that are not there yet, practically speaking electricity, what does that mean when there are constant electricity cuts in your friends’ lives?  How does that interfere with their daily chores?

ANTOON: Well very simply for example, a lot of times the emails are late and my friends tell me that it’s because we didn’t have electricity.  So we here take it for granted that we have access to email and internet all the time.  It’s amazing that seven years after the war, the regime in Iraq has not been able to bring their electricity back to pre-war levels when Saddam Hussein was able to do that in 1991.  But more importantly, in hospitals and more viscerally needed services, the lack of electricity means a delay of all of these services and so on and so forth, which threatens and ends the lives of a lot of Iraqis.  We’ve all forgotten about all of these problems which have been there since the war.

WERMAN: A lot of media in the United States doesn’t seem to like even mention the word electricity. Do you think we, in the United States, have a realistic picture of daily life in today’s Iraq for civilians?

ANTOON: No, unfortunately, we don’t have a realistic view.  And sadly, because of the Obama election, there was at least a certain kind of euphoria and happiness but it is as if the chapter on Iraq is closed.  The discussion is very simplistic as to when we bring the troops home and so on and so forth.  There is no discussion of the effects on the lives of Iraqi civilians we never signed on for all of this.  So we never get the perspective of a middle class Iraqi family.  Who just want to go about their lives normally and go to school and just enjoy a simple, average, normal middle class life.  This is something that is years away for most Iraqis, if not decades.

WERMAN: Sinan, have your friends in Baghdad come up with any reasonable explanation for you why these services, seven years after the war, are still not back?

ANTOON: Well most of the explanations are because there is one of the most corrupt governments in the entire world, according to international statistics, is in Iraq.  We have a Parliament which is full of very corrupt politicians, very sectarian.  There is no accountability whatsoever and there is massive corruption.  So sadly the expectations of most of my friends and what I read in the Iraqi media, they have very low expectation of a government that is very sectarian and very, very corrupt.

WERMAN: But those friends of your must also say, well at least Saddam Hussein isn’t around anymore.

ANTOON: Well, they used to say that but it’s not Saddam.  What has gone with Saddam, what was destroyed was the modern state of Iraq with all of its services and institutions, which was not perfect, and it had a lot of problems, but there was a functioning state, there was police, there was an army.  All of that was destroyed in 2003 and its one thing to take out a dictator, but it’s something else to dissolve a state.  It took 85 years to build the modern nation state of Iraq, but somehow American arrogance thought that one could rebuild an entire state within a few years.  But the experiment failed.  But who will pay the price?  The Iraqis who are living there will pay the price.

WERMAN: Sinan Antoon of New York University, thank you very much for your thoughts.

ANTOON: Thank you.

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