Flag #2: “Rothko to the Rescue”
This strikingly minimalist entry can only be some poor Iraqi village boy’s homage to noted alcoholic and Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, whose striking canvases of simple fields of color wrought more dark, disturbing emotions than a fifty-hour movie marathon of the Bush daughters playing beer pong in the Pentagon War Room with a “Girls Gone Wild” production crew ever could. Awesome.

Flag #3: “That’s MISSUS Burkha to You!”
This one is quite brilliant: a geometric representation of what may soon happen to Iraqi women should fundamentalist Islamic clerics (or John Ashcroft) take hold of the country, with twin blue Islamic crescent moons to represent the eyes of oppressed women throughout the nation. There’s additional meaning boiling under the surface, as the wavy tan stripe could also stand for the increased desertification that will no doubt follow the US occupation, and the twin moons suggest an Islam at war with itself. Right the fuck on.

Flag #4: “Newman’s Own”
What can we say: a war-torn populace loves its Abstract Expressionism! This one’s a tribute to the dark, brooding verticals of Ab-Ex legend Barnett Newman, his 1951 composition “Adam” to be exact. When your entire village is burned down and your nation’s in shambles, what better way to go than the existential absurdity of paintings “anyone can do”?

Flag #5: “Sachar’s Pre-Teen Secret”
A rather odd entry here. Ignoring for a moment the hip allusion to Louis Sachar’s young adult novel Holes (and the Jon Voight vehicle of the same name), this can only be viewed as a stark documentarian’s look at the craters found throughout Iraq’s dusty, bombed-out towns. But let’s get back to that Sachar reference: the story takes place in the fictitious Camp Green Lake, a site which was formerly the largest lake in Texas [!], but is now nothing but a barren wasteland. Hmmm… Texas, huge depleted reservoirs of liquid, a barren wasteland, roaming wolf-packs of violent kids….

Flag #6: “God’s Great Matrix”
At first we were amazed: is this really a badly-rendered calligraphic depiction of the “green rain” of the Matrix Trilogy? Was this designer saying something about the deceptive nature of reality in this War with Iraq? Maybe… but upon closer study the more banal truth became obvious: this was just another cynical continuation of Saddam Hussein’s already-cynical addition of the Islamic phrase “God is Great” to the old Iraqi flag a couple years ago, a move meant to placate unruly religious elements within the nation. Here the phrase is simply repeated many more times over to tell the sad truth: Iraq will soon be drowning in fundamentalism.

Flag #7: “El Collage de Allah”
We thought we had a pretty good idea of why this incomprehensible hedonist nightmare was rejected—what with the autographed Joe Theisman football card, the garish pogo Ball, the Greek Doric column, the photo from the home page of Tittymax.com, the angry Optimus Prime statuette, the mooning purple Leprechaun, the severed head of the deposed Saddam— but after a quick search on Lexis-Nexis, we discovered a far stranger truth: this was actually the WINNING ENTRY. Or it WAS the winning entry, until the artist was informed by the new Iraqi government that he would need to provide a high resolution file, and all he had was this fucking 356 x 207 pixel piece-of-crap layered Photoshop file. It’s a good thing too, because this entry (which also makes use of Alex Grey’s famous Theologue painting), is a bit too close to The Manifest aesthetic for comfort, and our lawyer already has his hands full with the class action suit against the estates of Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, and Judy Chicago.