Dreamways

The headline reads: “Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is ‘a Nightmare’ “ (David S. Cloud, The New York Times, October 13, 2007). The newspaper article goes on to report: “In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war ‘incompetent’ and said the result was ‘a nightmare with no end in sight.’ “ It is noteworthy that a military person of high rank invokes the world of dreams.

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In an article titled "The Price of War, Front and Center: James Gandolfini Sits Down with Scarred Survivors of Iraq“ (Bill Carter, The New York Times, 06 Sep 07), two versions of nightmare meet.

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"U.S. Is Top Arms Seller to Developing World“ reads the headline of an article by Thom Shanker in The New York Times (01 Oct 07). This would seem to be a dream come true for an economically competitive country like the U.S. We’re Number One, we’re Number One!
"The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study to be released Monday. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers."  read more »

The review starts out: "He had a dream, so they had a 'Dream Concert'; a three-hour-plus variety show Tuesday night at Radio City Music Hall. The beneficiary was the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation in Washington, which is working to raise $100 million to 'build the dream.' There was a brief 'virtual tour' of the planned memorial, but there was surprisingly little talk about the actual design and construction.

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"The Nightmare Is Here“ declares the title of Bob Herbert’s essay in The New York Times (15 Sep 07) regarding the situation in Iraq. Herbert proceeds to describe the hideous waking nightmare that has unfolded in this Middle Eastern country, the unfortunate object of U.S. liberation.  read more »

A front-page New York Times news article (19 Mar 07) begins with a sleep dream that came in the midst of a waking-life nightmare. „Sharp Increase in Vanishings Haunts Iraqis. He comes to her in dreams, dressed in the blue police uniform he wore the day he disappeared. ‚I’m alive,‘ he tells Intisar Rashid, his wife and the mother of their five children. ‚I’m alive. And so she keeps searching. Ever since the Thursday two months ago when her husband failed to come home, Ms. Rashid has tried to find the man she loves."

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"Swiss Troops ‘invade‘ neighbors,“ the Denver Post article from 03 Mar 07 proclaims. "What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.“ Soldiers aren’t supposed to get lost, are they?

"The 170 infantry soldiers from the neutral country wandered more than a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.“ Oops!

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Bombers Blow Up 2 Children After Using Them as Decoys. Insurgents detonated a bomb in a car with two children in it after using the children as decoys to get through a military checkpoint in Baghdad, an American general said Tuesday.

… Maj. General. Michael Barbaro .. said American soldiers had stopped the car at the checkpoint but had allowed it to pass after seeing the two children in the back seat.

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In his enormously compelling and tremendously disconcerting novel, The Life and Times of Captain N. (1993. New York: Alfred A. Knopf), author Douglas Glover tells a brutally-paced, hair-raising tale of lives and cultures in conflict during the American Revolutionary War. The war zone where the story takes place is the forest lands of 1700’s New York state along the Canadian border. This forest is a borderland, a violently contested space where not just armies, but also attitudes and relationships come into blood-curdling and heart-wrenching conflict.

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Set in the Kurdish part of Iraq just before Saddam Hussein’s kingdom was “liberated” by U.S. troops, this movie, an Iraqi/Irani co-production, is a story of children living in the hell of war and the maelstrom of refugee dislocation. On a less concrete level, it is the story of individual dreams confronted with a collective nightmare.

The setting is a mountainous, arid part of Northern Iraq. It has been transformed into a man-made, surreally hostile warscape. It is a bleak and hostile geography in which Kurdish refugee children hustle about in order to survive.

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