Heavy metal protest

If you want to know what people from a country are dissatisfied with, look at the music being produced by bands from that country. Wars, unfair new laws, police brutality, all these issues have been worked into songs by artists as a form of protest. If the song’s message is a common one, that country’s citizens probably feel the same way, which is why the emerging heavy metal scene in Baghdad indicates a problem.

According to a Boston Globe article, Baghdad bands like “Fatalogy” and “Dog-Faced Corpse” perform in spite of death threats, renting out clubs and hiring armed guards. And they’re popular, if not with the Taliban then with the Iraqi youth. Metal is the angriest, most in-your face genre out there, and the fact that so much frustration is still present in Iraq even as we’re pulling out isn’t a good sign.

In my opinion, the subject matter of the bands’ work proves we’re doing something wrong. The bands aren’t just expressing undirected rage, they’re mad at the US. For example, the author of the Globe piece quotes lyrics from a “Fatalogy” song condemning the American-run Abu-Ghraib prison. Other Iraqis have echoed that message. Maybe we haven’t done enough to atone for the shocking human rights violations we committed there.

Besides our conduct at Abu Ghraib, there are other mistakes we need to own up to as well. Mistakes like the abnormally high amount of civilian casualties. In the process of fighting insurgents, we know for a fact that we murdered countless innocent people. Most of the time it was by accident, but sometimes mentally disturbed soldiers would target Iraqis for revenge or even out of sheer boredom.

I know there’s no possible way we can stabilize the region. That’s why President Obama is currently working to end our military involvement. What we can do, however, is formally admit our responsibility for the hardships we caused. It might not help very much, the frustration and the heavy metal certainly won’t go away, but the least we can do is apologize.