Sunday, April 11, 2004
Thursday, April 08, 2004
REPOST & COMMENT
9 APRIL 03
The U.S. is a clever, benign nation - but brash and naive in certain respects. The reason why the Stars and Stripes ended up covering Saddam's statue in Firdos Square on 9 April 2003 - before it was removed and replaced with a less decorously tucked in Iraqi flag - is that the U.S. does not seem to have officers in charge of its soldiers at critical times. Do they spend enough time educating these soldiers, as the British Army does, into what they are doing?
The flag, surviving 9/11, was the biggest public relations disaster the Americans could possibly have thought up: though the spin was ratcheted up several notches on both sides of the Atlantic a few days later to try to persuade us that it was winning the war that mattered, not little mistakes involving the pride of Iraqis (= who ought to be grateful and shut up). And this public relations disaster, all because the U.S. appears to keep its soldiers in blissful ignorance of the reasons why they fight and, by all accounts, where they are fighting. Some "grunts" interviewed on TV seemed to be unsure which country there were fighting in. Arabs everywhere will be making cynical jokes about The Flag and 9/11 for years to come. And all because many U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq appear to have no idea of the for what and the for why.
I stick by the principle of what I said then. I supported the liberation of the Iraqis knowing the stated reasons for the invasion were bogus. I had lived in Baghdad in the '50s as a pre-teen and wanted to imagine the wonderful Iraq I knew back again. Not yet.
I was a bit harsh on the officer corps of the US Army, but still remain mystified as to why no one made more of this flag fiasco. I still think it is a symbol of how lacking in understanding the US is of Iraq and the Iraqis. I still think many of those soldiers thought they were dealing with 9/11 by entering Baghdad. I think many of them probably still do.
I still think Iraq would be further forward, a year on, if the US had not made so many mistakes in the first year of occupation. Being an old cynic, the chaos theory might be as good an explanation as any. Invasion Lite failed and Occupation Lite will fail too.
HARAJ
repost from 9 April 03
"Look at me, Haraj"
"Madam....?"
"I want to see your eyes."
"Ohhhh..." [turns away in embarrassment]
I stand by his side looking at him as he turns away and then I look quizzically at Mum. She later tells me that his eyes are like Meltis' Fruits (This is a make of soft fruit jellies available in the UK at the time)
Haraj lived in a big house diagonally across from us. We two played in the street. One day when I was alone, playing in the driveway, another boy appeared offering me a large drawstring bag of marbles for 50 fils. I begged Mum for the money. She is soft hearted so she agreed. Cock of the walk, I took up the challenge of a game of marbles.
The game they played involved scooping out a shallow hole the size of a large fist in the sand of the should-have-been pavement, against a garden wall, standing 4-5 feet away on the roadside curb and throwing marbles into the hole. There were several effective techniques: straight into the hole, bouncing of the wall or off the ground. If you threw two - and they went in - your opponent had to pay you two; if one or both didn't go in, they were both his. The choice of how many you threw was up to you: one wimpish; two, safe; three risky; four suicidal (or brave, depending on how one looks at it).
I recall, soon after I bought the marbles, Haraj, an Iraqi boy and me playing in the boiling sun until I lost every single marble in that bag - fifty at least. When I went in for supper I dare not tell Mum I had lost them all. It slipped out a few days later.
Haraj once invited me to his house when everyone was out. They were Armenians and this street in the Armenian quarter. They were middle class business people. The thing I remember most vividly was a row of hand-made shoes that belonged to his grandfather. I had never seen rows of shiny shoes like that before. Haraj explained that he wore one pair a day. That way they lasted for years.
I feel as if there was an old violin, or was told about one. The feeling I have of being in the house, cool marble floors, old furniture, ornate pictures, special smells, is there in my head but I cannot describe what I think I saw apart from the row of shoes.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
The chaos theory in action
Mark LeVine, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Co-editor, with Pilar Perez and Viggo Mortensen, of Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation (Perceval Press, 2003) and author of the forthcoming tentatively titled, Why They Don't Hate Us: Islam and the World in the Age of Globalization (Oneworld Publications, 2004).
"It is perhaps hard for Americans to understand their occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend, and in this context chaos is king."
Thursday, April 01, 2004
UK Muslims dazed and Britains confused
I wrote it straight down. On the premier British news and comment programme on Radio 4, "Today", interviewer John Humphreys asked the usual sort of "where do your loyalties lie" sort of questions of a pillar of the British Muslim community, who dodged and weaved so annoyingly that Humphreys sounded if he was going to blow a fuse.
The answer that made any sense, which I wrote down was short:
"Co-operating with the authority (i.e. authorities) against other Muslims is apostasy."
reference > al-muhaajiroun
Well, he said it.
And for those of us who want a rational debate on the thorny issues in the Middle East, we do not want British Muslims to attempt to conflate Islamo-fascist terrorism of the Al Q variety with other issues like Palestine, in order to avoid debating the difficult problem for many British Muslims: the seeming necessity to feel kinship with other Muslims no matter what they say or do, simply because they happen to be Muslim. I believe that hero-worshipping people who do bad things just because of a shortage of Muslim role models and heroes, is a way to make sure that Islam really does go down the tubes in the future.
Some British Muslims are arguing strongly now that the State by clamping down on a few terrorist suspects (9 arrests and half a ton of explosive in South London) is turning every Muslim into a suspect, and that Muslim youth has enough problems with lack of work and being excluded from mainstream society, without being targeted because of their religion. A lot could be done to passify these feelings by equalising religions in Britain, under the law.
Muslims should recognise and admit they are very lucky to live in Britain, or to have been born in Britain. Any young Muslim going to, say, Pakistan, his home country, to visit relatives, would soon appreciate the vastly greater opportunities they have here. They would surely recognise the law in this country protects them far better than in their country of origin. Can you imagine the Pakistani government allowing back young Christian boys from a "Guantanamo Bay" and for their Home Office Minister to say they were no danger to the State? They would kick them straight out without any questions asked!
It is not difficult to see how hard done by Muslim youth might turn inwards to their religion, rather outwards towards the wider community. But if you turn in on yourself such that you become a people within a people, then the big question is, Where do your loyalties lie? To the Faith you adhere to or to your adopted or birth country? The problem with Islam is people look upon it as a "State" because it is so comprehensive. But it does have a weakness. All "legalistic" religions have the same weakness. If you chip away at the regulations, you are chipping away at the faith itself. By the same token one would have thought Judaism, another legalistic faith, might also be sensitive to criticism.
Currently they are being asked to be treated if their religious faith was an ethnicity Opendemocracy > "Muslims and European multiculturalism" . Muslims in Britain are from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and from that perspective rather than the more influential religious one, must see that they are minorities in a large population. They have to empathise with the wider population and try to see how they might feel in similar circumstances if threatened by some form of international terrorism, say from Christian fundamentalists, in their "home" countries.
The fact that the message has recently gone out to the mosques to prevent Muslim youth being indoctrinated by extremist groups such as Al-Muhaajiroun, indicates how seriously the Muslim elders take the possibility of the majority population turning on ethnic groups who happen to be Muslim.
Up to now Muslim leaders in Britain have tended to concentrate on saying (1) Islam is peaceful (2) injustices done to Muslims by the West are the cause of problems in the world, particularly the Middle East.
The nub of the apostasy argument as argued by Al Muhajiroun is (quote) :
"... the Messenger Muhammad (saw) said: Stand with your Muslim brother whether he is an oppressor or oppressed? and when asked ?How can we stand with him if he is an oppressor?? the Messenger Muhammad replied ?Stand with him to prevent/stop him from his oppression? [i.e. through advice etc?] Note that the Messenger did not say ?Hand them over to the non-Muslim oppressors, who will condemn them under their own man made law so that they can be locked up?"
So what advice have the Good Muslims of Britain or anywhere else to pass to Osama Bin Laden and Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri with a view to "Standing with" them to "stop their oppression" ?
Have we too meekly allowed the suggested superiority of Islam down our western throats? Certain Muslims go on TV and radio to churn out half digested and understood interpretations and re-interpretations of the Koran, Hadith and other commentaries. We have been unable to respond intellectually for fear our criticisms be construed as racist and or anti-Muslim. After all, there is constant debate about what the Koran means in the Muslim world. It is is certainly not static. There is no reason why non-Muslims cannot debate Islam with Muslims. Muslims find no difficulty in criticising the inferiority of Christianity. When Muslims tell Christians they believe Jesus was merely a prophet, Christians do not point accusing fingers and make threats (we can't issue fatwas). Because Muslims do not believe in the Trinity, Christians do not threaten them with dire retribution for insulting their Christian God.
In Christianity, too, it is "the sin not the sinner", but there are sins and there are sins. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorists have committed sins of too great a magnitude to be considered in the same way as everyday sinning folk (lying, stealing, cheating, an occasional murder or three) in the "sins not the sinners" category. To say anything else is insanity. It makes a mockery of the moral and ethical basis of all religions. It debases them and turns them into cultish in-groups.
A starting point for a more measured approach to the facts and arguments might be the essay by Tarq Madood in Opendemocracy titled, "Muslims and European multiculturalism".
No longer in denial ?
It is sometime true that an old newspaper cutting can come in handy. One I filed the other day from a dusty box certainly comes into that category. "Britain in in denial about angry Muslims within", written on 4 November 2001 in the The Sunday Times) by Melanie Phillips, a well known right-of-centre Columnist, it argued first that we must wake up to the fact that there was a war on, and then that both British Muslims and the host community:
"...have got to change our attitudes dramatically - and fast. It's not enough for moderate Muslims to say their interpretation of Islam is the majority view. They've got to show this is true by putting their house in order. If they really are in the majority, then let's them deal robustly with the minority who have hijacked their religion."
The recent decision to both discourage rogue Immams from inculcating anti-western proganda in susceptible young Muslims, and help the security services to identify suspicious people operating in and around Mosques, is a first step but goes a long way from the outright condemnation of Islamo-terrorism and a call to all young Muslims to keep away from fringe elements.
As Phillips goes on to say:
"For they have to make a choice. Islam is a proselytising religion that does not distinguish between the spiritual and the temporal. So allegiance to Islam takes precedence over loyaty to a non-Muslim state. What makes this so explosive is the huge number of Muslims in the rest of the world and the power gained for Islam from terror-promoting states such as Syria and Iran.
Now moderate British Muslims must choose. If, as they claim, they accept that British citizenship means primary allegiance to Britain, they must state unequivocally that the first duty of British Muslims is not to the global Islamic nation. They must throw out those immams who, by preaching that the war against the Taliban (and Al Q, ed.) is like Hitler's invasion of Europe, are inciting their young men to treachery. If their religion has been misrepresented by a minority, the moderates can no longer just wring their hands about it. They must prove that the reasonable majority is in control.
As for the host community, it must start taking seriously the widespread hatred of Britain amongst the Muslim young.....at the same time, liberal Britain has got get real and ditch the multiculturalism that is now a menace to life and liberty."
The various arguments about multiculturalism are explained by Tariq Madood in Opendemocracy.
swapping Husseins
Great Guardian piece by replacement Baghdad Blogger Ghaith Abdul Ahad
The modern Voltaires amongst you will be tearing your hair out and laughing like drains in equal measure. Though, to be honest, beyond the tragic-comic images of over-heated young students on the campus, I fear that this tripe will get worse before it gets better. Unless an Iraqi government lays down the law (as it were) pretty quick, then self appointed "clerics" will be dictating how people may or may not act in the arbitrary way described in this trail marriage example. Though, this right to trial marriage may already have existed. I seem to recall examples of it in Iran.
It reminds me of an explanation of the Virgin Birth. According to a renegade Australian academic, Barbara Thiering, Jesus's parents Mary and Joseph, as members of the Essene sect, were entitled to have a similar type of trial marriage, whose purpose was to ensure the fertility of the bride, before marriage proper was entered into. The author, in her book "Jesus the Man", says:
If it happened that during the betrothal period and before the wedding, the passions became too strong, and a child was conceived, then it could be said by a play on words that "a Virgin had conceived". The woman was still a virgin legally, but not physically.
To an atheist with a fondness for the concept of God and a persistent interest in all things religious and theological, the whole book is wonderful with its concept of persher. Everyone says she has no basis for her assertions and that the persher technique is wrong, in that should only apply to contempory documents, and cannot be used retrospectively.
The Essenes were very prescriptive, even insisting that a man ought ideally to marry at the age of thirty six and try to pop a sprog in September (i.e. three years before he was forty (if the child was girl the husband had to stay away for three years, then return to renew his marriage. If the child was a boy, he has to come back after six years!) This might explain why Jesus was wandering around all the time with no sign of a wife. No wonder He wanted to create a universal, inclusive religion.
So beware Iraqis.... you might end up as rule bound as the Essenes. Remember laws by man for man.....
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Hillary and Tenzing
I was going to start this personal memory with a recollection that was stimulated by recently accessing a site to do with the economic/commercial concerns of Iraq. Before I do so, I think I ought to congratulate Faiza on starting her Arabic course. I hope you will keep putting up vocab and useful everyday phrases. I would love to learn tp speak Arabic again.
I remember my father, this would have been in our second year in Iraq, earnestly employing a home tutor to teach him Arabic. My elder brother, in the meantime, was having accordion lessons (we happened to have one) from an East European gentleman. Neither stayed the course. Father was expected to master written as well as spoken Arabic (a bit like trying to memorise Pitman's shorthand!), eventually giving up in frustration! Elder brother, like all teenagers, couldn't be bothered to persevere, though he certainly had a musical bent, later learning the cello.
I was the one - at five or six years old - who learnt Arabic in the streets. I could converse in quite fluent, if basic, Arabic and was often asked to act as interpreter. Now, I confess I struggle to remember much, except some nouns (matches, plane, car, counting 1- 20,etc) and what to call an Iraqi if you want him to slit your throat. This ought not to be so (forgetting languages not wishing to die), because, when you are young, two languages are intermingled in the brain, hence bi-lingual; whereas, if you learn a second language when adult, the first language is surrounded, doughnut-like, in the brain by the second. So the brain-scan studies show us.
Trade Fair 1954
Father's company, IAL, was exhibiting, or had representatives, at the Baghdad Trade Fair organised by the Federation of British Industries. I went with father. There were masses of people. At one point, after trailing round a bit bored, I wandered off on my own. It was starting to get dark. As I walked down one of the paths between the exhibition tents, I saw ahead of me a large film screen, so naturally, was drawn to it. They were showing a film of the successful conquest of Everest by the team lead by Edmund Hillary. This was a big event in 1953. Rather incongruous this, in retrospect : a little six year old English boy in Iraq, watching a film demonstrating the vestiges of empire mentality!
New Babylon : A Portrait of Iraq Desmond Stewart & John Haycock, Collins 1956
"Crowds gathered round the working television sets, the earth-moving machines, the swirling washing-machines, Cartier's discreet little kiosk displaying £25,000 worth of jewellery. But the pavilion that was most crowded was the one organised by the Industries of Iraq. Even to one who had been in the country a long time, it was a surprise to see how much is made by Iraqi industries; much of the workmanship rough, but covering an immense range: cigarettes, soap, cloth, iron drain covers and irrigation pumps made from scrap. For pure quality, Iraqi skilled labour was still best shown by exquisite writings from the Qur'an done on wood by a Baghdad carpenter."
Father went off several times to the north of Iraq at around this time, prospecting for suitable sites for radar stations, which IAL was involved in setting up. He was a stickler for "doing the right thing". I distinctly remember him bemoaning the fact that the Iraqi Air Force was being sold the less good of two then available radar systems. He would never have made a businessman! A man of principle.
A piece in an NYT obituary/biography of Alistair Cooke caught my eye:
"His political outlook was probably best reflected by Stevenson.
In "Six Men," he compared him to "that estimable order of Americans -- Henry Clay, Robert E. Lee, Norman Thomas, Learned Hand, perhaps Wendell Willkie -- who left a lasting impression by the energy of their idealism, but who were never quite strong enough or ruthless enough, in the pit of the political jungle, to turn goodness and mercy into law or policy." He wrote, "Adlai Stevenson remains the liveliest reminder of our time that there are admirable reasons for failing to be president."
"...to turn goodness and mercy into law or policy". Funny, those with the brains, ability and "goodness and mercy", who would best serve their country as politicians, never seem to.
It is easy to see why the second-rate and unprincipled always seems to get to the top of the political greasy pole: they are the type who live by the "principle of shifting principles". They can spend all day, in parliament and television studio, swearing on their mother's grave that the policy they are introducing is "best for the country", while knowing perfectly well it is not, retiring at last to a sound, untroubled sleep.
Saturday, March 27, 2004
www.reason.com
An article by Nir Rosen which I was directed to by long extracts in Juan Cole's latests posts.
Is this Shia technocrat Chalabi?
Guardian 27 March 2004, Jonathan Steele in baghdad
Friday, March 26, 2004
Ahmad Chalabi
This 26 March 2004 New York Times piece on Chalbi's current position is an interesting insight into the shifting tides of Iraqi politics post 9/3(2003).
I didn't know his organisation was being paid a retainer by the Dept. of Defence to keep a tab on things. I wouldn't have thought this was a very good way of ingratiating himself with the Iraqi people. The big question is whether he is corrupt. And if his basic modus is entrepreneurial, whether he is the right person to be Prime Minister, even in the short-term. I wonder who is up for President?
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Rashid Street
Looking for street maps of Baghdad I came up with this atmospheric 2003 piece from Al Ahram.
A way forward
I have posted up the text of the interim constitution and with it an article by Juan and Shahin Cole on Women in the constitution.
Last night on the BBC2 TV programme, "Newsnight", Salam Pax did a piece (the second so far) on the Shia celebrations in Karbala. I am not sure but I think he was saying he was Shia, though he seemed constitutionally unsuited to blood-letting in general. Taken on the surface, the ritual bloodletting is a bit alarming to an outsider. But there is something majestic about the rituals - bloody or not - and the beliefs that underlie them. I see no difference between the blood of Christ - as illustrated in Mel Gibson's latest film - and that on the backs, chests and heads of the Shia adherents in Karbala. Then I am not a blood symbolism type of person.
What I am is a rationalist, and I have already argued that, in the short- to medium-term, Shia political parties might take power. However, I also think this will not work well for Iraq as a whole in the long-term. As the secular political parties build themselves up, they would be well advised to plug the women's rights angle. This in the one issue where they will be demonstrating, clearly, a way their prospecti (if that is the plural of prospectus) are different from the Shia parties, who will, one assumes, continue to envisage a lesser role for Iraqi women "in politics and in life" because of their interpretation of the Koran, Hadith and other commentaries.
If the secular parties wish to become politically effective they will have to find "clear water" between their policies and those of the Islamic Parties, without causing or increasing social tensions by the very fact of having modernising programmes. To choose women's rights would seem, at first sight, not the way to go for the secular parties while not offending Islamic sensibilities.
The Islamic parties, with their traditional views on women, will initially persuade their supporters to stick with them, vote-wise, but if the secular parties plug away at the women's role argument, despite the inevitable counter argument that this was "anti-Muslim", Iraqis as a whole will see the secular parties are the right road to take. So, although all Iraqi political parties will have pretty much the same economic proposals (because they have to in a modern world), the Islam Parties will be unable to shift their position on women, in the light of political necessity, when they see they are losing public support, because this will undermine the Islamic basis of their politics.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
ABU HADI'S FIRST POST
Hi everybody,
Tuesday 22 March 1200H
Abu Hadi's first letter is now up on baghdadjournal
* You can get to this from the main page link below, or the side link (top left).
** Any problems accessing it from the links, try typing in the whole website address
www.baghdadjournal.blogspot.com
into your web browser, then remember to save the website in your favourites for the next visit.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Abu Hadi
Messages will be coming through from your friend at baghdadjournal.blogspot.com
The link is at the top right, for your convenience.
what do islamists mean when they talk about democracy?
Lee Smith, who apparently lives in Brooklyn and Cairo (Is this man a Gulliver?), asks this question in Slate, under the title, One Immam, One vote.
There are several important links and references to book titles.
Friday, March 19, 2004
Abu Hadi
Messages will be coming through from your friend at baghdadjournal.blogspot.com
The link is at the top right, for your convenience.
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri
I posted this link a few weeks ago to a long, interesting and informative article in The New Yorker about this Egyptian doctor who is said to be the brains behind Al Qaeda. It is well worth a read for anyone keen to understand much of the history of the Middle East (in particular, but not exclusively, Egypt) from the days of Saddat (and before). And, more importantly, to try to get a handle on the motivation of people prepared to kill indiscriminately in the name of God, who I understood to be merciful.
Sunday, March 07, 2004
new link
Re-oranising my hard-drive, I came across an article by Henry Pachter in Logos. The link to the home page is now up. There is an author/ index page, which lists alphabeticaly, from which you can find many older articles discussing the Middle East and Iraq. Pachter 's piece,Who are the Palestinians?, takes us through the whole history and is useful for anyone coming to it this question for the first time.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
repost > from Saturday, March 29, 2003
Gargoni
1953. Our first house in Baghdad was a single storey Californian style villa, with walled garden, on the eastern edge of the old colonial estate in Alwiyah, where Gertrude Bell may have lived for a while in one of those mud-walled, whitewashed colonial bungalows in large, luxuriously verdant gardens. I think they had thatched roofs.
Memory is as much about what you have forgotten as what you recall; and recall is effected by how well you retained what you saw and heard. My recollections are visual: there are no conversations, or, if there are, they are silent movies and I've no idea what they are saying! Attempts to dredge up what I have stored away usually starts with visualising where I roamed as an adventurous boy. Strange how clear some of the roads are and then, suddenly, there is whiteness: I didn't go further down those streets; no matter how hard I try there is a fog across the road that I can't see beyond; the cartoonist suddenly stopped drawing.
There were floods in the winter of 1953/4 (Spring or Winter?) We were taken by car to an overflowing canal, probably where Saddam City is now, to watch soldiers in brown uniforms and other volunteers, fill brown sacks with brown earth to shore up brown bursting banks under a brown drizzly sky: the first really exciting thing that happened in my life. I can still conjure up how petrified I felt at the rapid swirling water.
Mr. Gargoni owned the villa, which was rented to IAL, the company father worked for. From time to time Mr G. visited us, usually in the early evening. I have a black and white photo of Mr. Gargoni, mother and me (taken by father who was a keen photographer) standing together, in semi-silhouette, on the covered, marble paved front veranda. Mr. G. - balding and exceedingly round and jolly - standing with one leg on a step, leaning slightly forward, looking up at me in a most kindly way while holding my hand. I remember nothing of the event itself: I know the photo by heart in every detail as if I remember being there.
Baghdad summers were too hot to do without air-conditioning. In our later houses we had an electrical one, but at Gargoni's house we had what had probably been used for thousands of years: a wooden frame hung with palm fronds fixed to the top of the window frame, tilted outwards at the bottom, with water from a hose trickling down it. This would have only been on the bedroom window. In the day you had to tolerate the heat.
I started at the kindergarten that year. Europeans and middle-class Iraqis sent there children there. The headmistress was English. She put the fear of God into me, a very timid, quiet boy. We went across half a mile of dusty waste ground every morning to get to it: another large colonial mud bungalow with tree lined garden, and shrubberies.
In what I think was caused by the flooding, several peasant families moved onto the waste ground opposite us, building mud "serifa" huts with palm frond roofs. I do not remember this immigration being questioned in our house: everything happened and seemed natural. We knew they were poor, but we never asked what they were doing there or expressed any fear at their presence.
I remember as clearly and emotionally as if it was now, standing alone in silence and awe (though not shock), on a warm summer night outside the front gate in my cowboy waistcoat with pistol in holster, slung low over hip, looking up at the clearest night sky with the brightest stars I must ever have seen, when suddenly four comets zipped and fizzed across my field of view at slightly different angles, one after the other. For some reason I can't remember ever telling anyone what I had seen. Perhaps it was too good to share.
Friday, February 13, 2004
some more background on Iraq Debate
(1)
"A scholar argues that Bush's doctrine of preemption has deep roots in American history."
Laura Secor, Globe Staff, 2/8/2004, summary of Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis' thinking, plus counter arguments
(2)
Opendemocracy 5 February 2004
Iraqi realities, American dilemmas: a New York debate
"What political choices should the United States now make in Iraq? Christopher Hitchens, Mark Danner, Samantha Power and David Frum debated recently in front of a packed New York audience. James Westcott was there."
Summary of debate with links details
murder and mayhem
I am sure I was not the only person to feel shocked to the core and very, very upset to see the pointless carnage in Baghdad and environs in the last week. One particular thing jerked my heart strings: a UK TV reporter interviewed a recruit - a man in his 40s who said he was an engineer - who in broken English explained that he loved being an engineer, but that he loved Iraq and knew he had to become a Police man. Of course there are few if any jobs, so many are being forced to join up to feed their families. But that does not take away the courage required to do so. Everyone of them knows the risks they are taking.
Many people have pointed out the idiocy of having queues of recruits standing - to all intents and purposes in the street - while waiting to be processed. But there is something else. Everyone knows what is going on and can pass the places, dates, times to the bombers. I would have though an out-of-town, more rural location would be better for the processing to go on.
It does make you wonder whether the conspiracy theory going around a few moths back that the US deliberately invaded Iraq to draw the terrorists into a fight, might not have an element of truth in it. Not necessarily that it was in the plans, but when the military/intelligence people saw how many Jihadists were coming across the borders, it would be easy to imagine them saying: "Let them come." Why didn't they close the borders properly? They will indeed be easier to deal with in Iraq than in Munich or Frankfort or Bradford, but the Iraqis are paying the ultimate sacrifice in the process. Without being parti pris, it is obvious the Americans see Iraqi civilian security as a very low priority. The US soldiers are still in full battle gear! In other words they are not working enough like policemen yet to comprehensively protect the population. It is evident from the TV screens that they do not see it as their primary role. This is a self - defeating notion because it will make the Iraqis more and more determined to see the back of them. Or, at least off the streets and into barracks in the outskirts of the major cities.
The occupation forces have proved particularly inept at humint and are not very good at finding who these terrorists are. I said right at the beginning of my website in March/April last year, we needed to send in a large contingent of western police men (who would be retired men in their late forties from the US and Britain) to actually walk the streets with young Iraqi recruits. Those who have been sent in are instructors. They are getting up to speed with the training from what I can see on the TV. But Bremer is relying on elements of the old security and intelligence services of Iraq to provide them with information on the trouble makers. This strikes me as excessively silly or cynical. These people will have complex relationships and loyalties with members of the former regime (including continued covert funding from the remnants of the Ba'ath... the country is probably still awash with dollars that were there before April 9 2003.) In other words it will be too easy for the worst of the Iraqi intelligence personnel being employed by the Americans to behave like characters in a Le Carre or Len Deighton novel, double and triple dealing for maximum personal benefit, knowing that their services will not be required sooner than later.
It might have been easier to pay a third-party Arab state to do the intelligence donkey work. I can't suggest who, but at least they would be Arabs, though presumably easily identifiable by their non-Iraqi accents. However, to have infiltrated hundreds of non-Iraqi arabs into the streets of Baghdad to listen to what was on the grape vine would have been more effective than relying on heresay, gossip and rumour.
After all, it was "evidence from a single source " coming from a disaffected Iraqi - the 45 minute claim that Bliar so fervently argued was important - that allowed him to take British troops into Iraq. Sometimes I imagine he actually believes he won the war - ridiculous since British forces were only about 5% of the total sent in. Though to all account they did a very good job and didn't kill as many innocent civilian Iraqis as the Americans, a figure reputed to be in the region of 10-15,000.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Bernard Lewis's influence on US Middle East policy
This WSJ article on Bernard Lewis, the British born historian, might be described as a primer on current US Iraq policy. It is is quite balenced, mentioning Edward Said's "Orientalism" as well.
Chris
at worldinquiry.blogspot.com beat me to it on this one, quoting from it at length.
Thursday, February 05, 2004
"Say no more... [tap nose]...nudge-nudge, wink-wink -- Monty Python
Anthony Barnett's article in OpenDemocracy is a favourite of mine.
What can the ordinary guy say that hasn't already been said more fluently by others about my Prime Minister's dubious leadership in foreign policy over Iraq? But here we get more to the nub. I do not need to repeat Barnett's notions in my words. Read it for yourself.
Saturday, January 17, 2004
What took them so long?
Women in Iraq Decry Decision To Curb Rights - Council Backs Islamic Law on Families
Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 16, 2004
comment
Riverbend also talks long and hard on this one. When you hear this retrograde thinking, it becomes clear that the religious groups realise they will have no power in the New Iraq, so are trying to gather some to themselves before it is too late. However, as this article and the young lady say, it is turning the clock back in a way which will benefit no one and create social divisions that have not existed for the best part of half a century.
Though refering here to Iraq, the principle of "Laws by Men for Men" has to apply right across the modern world. The Ayatollahs have to recognise that the wide variation in interpretation of Sharia means it is worthless in a unified state. Trying to impose outmoded, arbitrary legal systems will do nothing to settle the affairs of countries like Iraq which needs stability not conflict.
Trying to impose Sharia can therefore only really be seen as an attempt to bolster Belief, in the face of an increasing scientific and secular mindset. It is sadly still not possible to say democratic principles holds sway across the world as they obviously should. There has to come a point when the UN Charter is radically changed to ensure unelected groups can't take countries over for their own narrow interests and end up wrecking them for no sensible purpose.
People are progressively arguing in the media that democracy as we know it in the West is not going to happen in Iraq. This is because they expect it to happen overnight, in the form we experience. It will not happen overnight. The Iraqis need to thrash this through for themselves, to work out what they want and what they can realistically hope to achieve. If the US can give them a breathing space of 4-5 years in which to do this, all to the good. If the Islamic Parties push through elections too quickly, as Sistani is demanding, they may take power - if the US lets them - in the initial stages. But soon enough secular parties will grow to a point where the Islamic Parties are pushed back to the position they were in before.
This is why the US has to be clear as to how it will respond to an initial take over (by fair election) by backward looking Islamic Parties who everyone - inside and outside Iraq - can see will not be in the overall interests of a progressive, free, modern, economically viable Iraq.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
·
Excellent article on Islamophobia by Theodore Dalrymple - provoked by the debate on UK talk-show host Kilroy-Silk's outburst on "the Arabs" in the Express newspaper last week.
Can you be racist about a Muslim?
Excellent article on Islamophobia by Theodore Dalrymple - provoked by the debate on UK talk-show host Kilroy-Silk's outburst on "the Arabs" in the Express newspaper last week.
heroic Iraqis
New York Times
Colourful piece on two heroic Iraqis
I'll give 'em £10 towards a robot [ rubber tracked things they used in Northern Ireland]
What about y' all?
Can someone organise the funding?
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
CIA
"The National Intelligence Council has begun a project that will help uncover the most important influences that will shape our world to the year 2020. This ambitious, yearlong study will engage a broad range of foreign and domestic experts who will be challenged to think in new and provocative ways about the forces that will drive global developments"
Ha'aratz reports
Syrian President Bashar Assad ready to resume peace negotiations with Israel without any preconditions and if Israel insists, from the starting point, according to U.S. Senator Bill Nelson (Dem.-Florida), who met with Assad on Saturday.
According to the senator, Assad repeated those assertions several times during their meeting, saying that while he believes it would be best - "not a waste of time" - to pick up the negotiations where they were cut off during the Barak administration, if Israel insists, Assad has no objections to starting from scratch.
Monday, January 12, 2004
news update
No sooner is there a fag packet analysis than the news tells us that Israel and Syria are to have talks! This must must be all to the good.
Sunday, January 11, 2004
another link from neo-troll
A Seattle Times piece about Syria
back of cigarette packet analysis
Though not an expert on the Middle East, I have read enough over the years to understand that certain states in the region - unable to do so in any other way - project power through proxy wars and other political, military, terrorist activities. In the same position I would probably use the same methods because there is no other practical way.
For example, the Syrians cannot overtly attack Israel - having had several nasty experiences of trying and failing - despite not being that weak, with a reasonably strong military including usable biological and or chemical weapons. So they sponsor Hezbollah in Lebanon. It's easier and cheaper and doesn't result in their annihilation by Israel which has at least 200 nuclear weapons. (Though if missiles were flung, where would the radiation go? These are presumably for the Armageddon Scenario, rather than anything else.)
The US is obviously concerned about Syria and Iran. Iran is too big to tackle militarily, but if they neutralised Syrian by removing the dictatorship, Hezbollah would certainly be weakened. Although, as the article suggests, the funding goes from Iran via Syria to Hezbollah. It seems logical to tackle Syria next. I would, initially, put pressure on other Arab states to the effect that if they didn't put a stop to Syria's nasty ways they would not get the cooperation of the US. The if this did not work, play hard ball. 6 months max.
Before I run out of space on my cigarette packet, I would humbly suggest paying the Palestinians big bucks to "keep quiet". I do not mean the PA, but rather by funding groups who directly aid the Palestinian population (even Hezbollah, if necessary, who are reputed to do more for the population than the PA). Jobs, schools, higher education (bursaries to the US and other western countires), hospitals, social services.
If the whole of the US or UK was unemployed, we too might become radicalised in our efforts to right the wrongs we perceived to exist in our societies. If Palestinians have work, they can provide for their families without the indignity of having to commute to Israel, to work in the building trade, small industries or as domestic servants. It was recently reported that Palestinian children are going into Israel to beg for their families. I think we can see what the problem is. They are on their knees.
Yasser Arafat - as far it is possible to judge - still wants to "push the Jews into the sea" as he did at the beginning. So, what is the point of propping up the PA with vast EU funds, mostly used - it appears - to keep the 7 (?) security services Mr. A seems to require to keep in power; to keep the nomenclatura in Amani suits and black BMWs, Audis and Mercedes, giving them fat salaries ( for what? How are they serving their people?) in order to be able to educate their children in Europe - and even, perhaps, the US - while the ordinary Palestinians are left, poor, jobless, penniless, to rage against everyone for their terrible plight? Everyone knows the PA is corrupt and totally undemocratic. And probably incapable of reform.
I have already said elsewhere that Israel has to send the settlers back to the States ($150,000 per family from US tax payers should do the trick, together with a scheme to remove dual nationality status) and then find a way of stopping the Wall. This way would be to elect a Labour government that doesn't have to sleep with ultra-right wing religious parties to retain power. This election could be facilitated by a mass refusal of Israeli military personal to serve in the occupied territories.... As soon as the wall is down, all those Palestinians effected by it ought to be compensated for their losses.
Demography has played a great part in this conflict, but it ought to be taken out of the equation for both the Israelis's and Palestinian's sake.
There is no more room on the fag packet.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Thursday, January 08, 2004
theories of forgetting
BABYLON
Father took all the photographs we still possess and he only appears in a one or two. Though he liked taking photographs, he hated appearing in them. With a casual glance these two photographs look identical: only with further examination is it clear that these are "before" and "after" shots. Both show a lady in long flowery skirt and white short-sleeve top, a small boy in striped T shirt, shorts and sandals, and next to them a guide in traditional dress with a western jacket over the top, standing framed against the pediment of a famous statue of a lion, looking out to the horizon, rightwards.
The "before" shot shows the two adults with arms outstretched towards the boy who is sitting in roughly the same position in both pictures. The "after" shot has all three looking towards the right, in the same direction as the lion statue. Having looked carefully at the photos for the first time, I see that I am holding father's camera case and that the lion appears to be standing over another carved figure, hinted at by a leg of which is clearly visible sticking out backwards under it.
My memory of our single visit to the ruins of Babylon, south of Baghdad, is more an emotional evocation than a detailed recall. I have a vague recollection of walking along dusty, excavated passageways, but not much more. It is these two photos and several more the family possesses which form the basis of my mental reconstruction of the events of our visit rather than any remembered detail.
There is a large contrasty monochrome, a wall relief of a long legged, long-tailed animal. The wall would have been about 30 feet tall. On the photograph, the brick lines are feint, but the shadow smudges of the individual bricks that go into making the relief, highlighted by bright sunlight coming down into the passage-way, now open to the sky.... combine to recreate the clear image of the four-legged animal, like a cross between camel and a Llama.
The immediate thought is a diagram was drawn and the individual pieces of the jigsaw made from it. But this was not necessary. It could have been created by using a large wooden grid laid flat on the ground, encompassing the area covered by the animal, with a few people carefully making the individual bricks in the right positions. Left to bake in the sun each brick could then be carefully built into the wall from the grid - which itself acted as the plan - to create the stunning image, which, though of nothing more than sun-dried mud, lasted for thousands of years, till I set my ignorant eyes on it.
There are two other black and white photographs both showing the excavated site, perhaps 30 feet deep, surrounded by earth mounds at ground level. One, the clearer of the pair, shows a wall in the middle distance with the camel-llama clearly highlighted by the sun from the right. A strong shadow cuts at thirty degrees to the horizontal across the middle of the picture. In the middle background, the 10-15 stump of a circular column made of brick which sits a stork on its nest of twigs. In the foreground on a well preserved wall, another relief, this time of what looks like a horse, tantalisingly cut off at its neck by the white surround at the bottom of the photo.
some history
This Babylon, according to my recent learning from the glories of the WWW, is the Chaldean one that lasted till the 5th century before Jesus was born.
Nebuchadnezzar II
timeline
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Sumerian and Akkadian Civilizations: 2800 to 1900 BC
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
c. 2800-2340 BC: Beginnings of Sumerian city-states Primary Urbanization Chronology
c. 2340 BC: Sargon establishes Akkadian Empire.
c. 2125-2027 BC: Third Dynasty of Ur.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Babylonian Civilization and Hittite Civilizations: 1900 to 1100 BC
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
c. 1900 BC: Amorites in Babylon.
1792-1750 BC: Reign of Hammurabi.
+ ca. 1750 BC: The Code of Hammurabi
c. 1500 BC: Hittites and Kassites invade Mesopotamia.
c. 1400-1200 BC: Hittite Empire
c. 1100 BC: Beginning of the Assyrian Empire
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
745-612 BC: Period of Assyrian dominance
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
745: Tiglath-pileser III becomes king of Assyria.
732-722 BC: Assyria conquers Palestine and Syria.
663 BC: Ashurbainipal conquers Egypt.
625-585: Period of Neo-Babylonian (Chaldean) dominance.
625 BC: Beginnings of Chaldean kingdom in Babylon.
612 BC: Assyrian capital of Nineveh is destroyed by the Chaldeans or Neo-Babylonians.
587: Jerusalem is taken by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon.
and finally...
Sam has written several pieces about the glories of Iraq's history, pointing out the yellow brick accretions Nebuchadnezzar III built in the 80s, with his inscription on individual bricks. Hopefully, modern, free Iraqis will come to Babylon to re-visit their history and, while there on the banks of the Euphrates, take home one of these inexorable modern bricks until all that remains is the ancient magnificence.
New Yorker article
Headed THE MAN BEHIND BIN LADEN, How an Egyptian doctor became a master of terror, written by LAWRENCE WRIGHT
Issue 16 September 2002
this long and informative piece details the history of fundamentalism from its source in pre-Nasser Egypt, showing connection between Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Usama bin Laden and Said Qutb's ideas. Good detail on Qutb : biog. & philosophy.
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Saturday, January 03, 2004
Oh, What? A Proxy War?
Glenn Reynolds
hits one into the crowd
Glenn links to European Union Parliament member Ilka Schroeder's address entitled, "The European Union, Israel, and Palestinian Terrorism" at the Center for German Studies of Ben Gurion University on Monday.
and,
Transition Complications > Who the Coalition is facing in Iraq.
By Amir Taheri at Guest Comment, NRO, December 30, 2003,
plus a blog,
thewindsofchange
and finally, a 3 January piece from
The American Thinker
comment
If we are going to trawl through this business again I suppose we might as well read this from Julie Burchill in order to a get a rounded picture.
Please read some of the things I have said about this already in the scroll. There are no archives. Simpler to use FIND to look for keywords such as Palestine, Jews, Israelis, etc.
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
how the U.S. did it in Central America
link courtesy of Neo-Troll
how the British did it in the 1920s
* links to source material from GlobalPolicy Forum - many articles relate directly to current events
** This organisation appears to be a UN set-up so will necessarily be "anti-American". Needs must - if you want to find
facts you have to dodge and weave through the sources......
A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO MY READERS..
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
overview
Attacks Force Retreat From Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Neo-Troll comments
Neo-Troll posted this link on the events in 1963. Titled:
CIA Lists Provide Basis for Iraqi Bloodbath
By Hanna Batatu
the article is an excerpt from The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
"Hanna Batatu describes the ferocious violence of the Ba`athists when they came to power in their first coup in Iraq in early 1963. Of special interest is his mention of the lists, which he believes U.S. intelligence provided to the coup-makers. Evidently, the CIA helped bring Saddam Hussein’s thuggish party to power and fatally weakened the prospects for Iraqi democracy. Some reliable sources believe that more than ten thousand were killed and more than a hundred thousand arrested in the coup and the bloody weeks that followed, described by historians Peter and Marion Sluglett as “some of the most terrible violence hitherto experienced in the postwar Middle East.”
new year's review
The Observer Sunday December 28, 2003
The year Britain invaded Iraq - and tore itself apart
"War against Saddam divided friends, families, nations, and traditional alliances. And here at The Observer two of our leading writers held opposing positions in their weekly columns. In this sharp exchange of views as the year closes, David Aaronovitch and Mary Riddell tackle head-on the issues that have divided them."
Monday, December 29, 2003
TAWHID
Saudi Arabia's two most powerful princes have taken opposing sides in this debate: Abdullah tilts toward the liberal reformers and seeks a rapprochement with the United States, whereas Nayef sides with the clerics and takes direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares many goals with al Qaeda.
Friday, December 26, 2003
have a Happy Xmas but don't stop thinking.....
This link is to a Washington Post opinion piece,
After Iraq, Shrinking Horizons
Morton Abramowitz
Thursday, July 31, 2003; Page A19
And while you are at it stay with the WP for
Bush the Believer
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A17
for a Yule Tide Morality tale.....
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
santa's cut his beard off
but is still planning to hand out presents
Perhaps they ought to take all that money they gave Pakistan back.....
Sunday, December 21, 2003
full access to baghdadskies
* This site does not fully load in Internet Explorer since it was constructed through Netscape v. 7.1
* If you wish to see the side links use Netscape, Mozilla or other browser
* It is possible to open up several browsers at the same time
the pity, or lack of it
Inside Saddam’s Mouth > Open democracy > Anthony Barnett > 18 - 12 - 2003
when a beard stroke is a smoke signal
The Sunday Times, 21 December 2003
Saddam the family Man
In an extraordinary interview Hala Jaber meets the Unmetionable Name's daughter Rana in Amman
Rana, however, was immediately struck by her father's gesture. He was stroking his beard - which, she says, was a signal to Iraqi tribal leaders. It meant
"I have been betrayed."
Saturday, December 20, 2003
ludo
a conversation in three easy pieces
* My Friend,
What do you think of these three?
Aristotle: Poetics
"Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions - what we do - that we are happy or the reverse."
* Cher Ami,
The tragedy, of course, is that one person's actions may affect the body politics, the entire nation for that matter. Aristotle was fortunate not to live under the tyranny of this Unmentionable Name. The tyrants of ancient Greeks were a different breed. Even the word tyrant did not have the connotations it has acquired nowadays - as in The Unmentionable as a tyrant or Dubya as a tyrant for that matter. Tyrant for the Hellenes simply meant someone who assumed power through irregular means (not hereditary), but he could very well be a good and benevolent ruler. In this sense both The Unmentionable and Dubya are tyrants as they assumed power through irregular means; both, to boot, are not benevolent rulers. Rex, on the other hand, denoted a king who assumed power after the death of his royal father, but he could be a malevolent ruler - a tyrant in our contemporary parlance.
The play Oedipus, it is recalled, is available in translation as either Oedipus Rex or, in other versions, as Oedipus Tyrannos. For Oedipus was both Rex and Tyrannos. But I digress.
The actions of an evil character may result in wars that will engulf the whole nation and subject it to foreign rule. That is misery.
Speaking of tragedy, it was Hegel, I think, who defined tragedy as (I hope I am paraphrasing him correctly) a conflict in which both sides are right. But how does this apply to the tragedy of Iraq when both sides (TU and Dubya) are wrong? Go solve this!
What happened (and what is happening) in Iraq is a tragedy worthy of a Shakespeare, for though its main characters are abject, the drama addresses the human condition.
Hazlitt
....himself a one-time worshipper, mournfully registered the metanoia: “no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after… . Now he has sunk below the horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality.”
* Cher Ami,
This reminds me of the Ubi Sent Latin poems (Where are the great kings, etc.?) and the similar genre in classical Arabic poetry where the poet examines the existential condition and concludes, in a sense agreeing with the psalmist, that all is reaping the wind. No glory is everlasting. To dust we all return. A cautionary tale.
Hazlitt, of course, did not envision someone as Frankestein-ish as this murderous tyrant. There is a twist, however, regarding the "doubtful immortality." For some notorious people have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Witness, in the case of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, a cruel ruler. More people know of al-Hajjaj than of al-Hallaj, an angelic mystic. It goes to show you that notoriety - if it is of this despots variety - pays; it grants you un"doubtful immortality."
"Saddam Ismak Hazz Amrika!" (Saddam your name shook America!" That was some thirty years or so ago. At the time we thought, right or wrong, that this "hausa" (rallying cry) was improvised by The Tyrant's American handlers in a calculated attempt to bestow on him some revolutionary credentials in a culture known for its anti-imperialism. Little did we know that in a couple of decades this monsters name, would, in actuality, be a household name in America. Although now "he has sunk below the horizons," he does enjoy "the serene twilight of ... immortality." Is this fair? No! Is anything fair?
E.M.Forster
* My Friend,
The first sentence of his essay, “What I Believe” is, “I do not believe in Belief.”
It says:
"I believe in aristocracy though - If that is the right word, and a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive to others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness, but the power to endure, and they can take a joke."
* Cher Ami,
This quotation is rather long, so I'll be short. At first glance this belief in "aristocracy" smacks of elitism. But the qualifier that it is an aristocracy not of power but "of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky" redeems it. Is there room in this aristocracy for such "insensitive," "inconsiderate" and "unplucky" characters as TU, Dubya, Blair, Sharon, Berlesconi...(fill in the blank )? Surely they are no great names, for they do not represent "the true human condition...[of] permanent victory ... over cruelty and chaos." On the contrary, if anything, they are the epitome of "cruelty and chaos." Figure that! I said I'll be short.
hijab in the heat
nawar says:
"Because the things I need are so many it got to the point where it started negatively affecting my mood, and that didn't need another thing bothering it, I finally decided to go to the market. Ignoring, although only superficially, the danger and trouble of going out without veil specially to a place like the market. I wore for the first time a very wide and long skirt….really wide. And a shirt which was as wide and loose fitting as the skirt, it also had long, loose sleeves so the effect was like wearing a long jubbah. And I had to put a Hijab on my head although it was so hot my head was almost exploding. But that might have been because I was feeling annoyed with myself for giving in to some[one] else's wishes and maybe also because I believe that by doing as they wish I am helping in propagating their wishes. Anyway this is better than getting harassed by someone and as I have been told this harassment might take the form of a small knife or a razor-sharp tongue."
more on Chirac's headscarves
Jacob at Volokh, Wednesday, December 17, 2003, runs through the arguments on the headscarves.
The real point is whether the small minority of women/girls are wearing the hijab or scarves because of their religious convictions or because of social pressure (vide, Nawar, above) or to make a political point. If it was the last, so what? If a Sioux suddenly started wearing ethnic garb in downtown New York, would anyone care or mind? A small minority of Muslim girls in the UK are probably wearing black scarves pulled tightly round their faces like nuns because they have fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and are politically engaging in debates over Islam, Palestine, Arabism, pan-Arabism, colonialism, Edward Saidism, et al.
In one sense the headscarves are trivial, but in another distinctly untrivial. One ought to be able to say, Let people wear what they like, it is a free country. But this would be to deny what is in front of your eyes: that there are a small minority of Muslims in western countries who can't stand anything about the culture they live in. In the end it is tied up with the notion that we in the west do not link too strongly our faiths and our politics and we don't like it when exotic outsiders do.
When the war in Afghanistan was over and the western media went in, this was frequently discussed. Many Afghani women threw off the burkass, returning to traditional dress or western clothes, scarfless or not. What did this mean? That they had renounced their faith? That they simply refused to cover up, despite male preference for them to do so? No, they had felt oppressed as women by their men.
It can be argued that it is possible that significant numbers of young Muslim French and British school girls and students are only wearing the scarves because they fear male Muslim disapproval, not because they believe it forms an integral part of their religion. Without being racist or condemning or insulting or patronising the male Muslim population of France, Britain or Afghanistan, it is obvious that we are dealing with uneducated former peasants who stick like glue to their traditions, unable to adapt to the societies they have come to live in.
This is certainly true in the UK, where Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants, who have lived here for years, often have made no attempt to learn English, continue to wear traditional peasant clothes that they might have worn as subsistence farmers, and remain isolated in pockets in industrial towns, acting for all the world as if the indigenous people didn't exist. In fact both "pass by on the other side", having little or non social contacts with each other at all.
How can they learn to understand each others traditions if they never have anything to do with each other?
forensics
The Scientist reports the means by which DNA samples might have been obtained to check against the samples seen taken on TV
sleuthology
How the US Army builds a picture of the key culprits
Friday, December 19, 2003
Alaa posts
"Although I dislike the subject, I have to put in this before leaving.
You give the subject of Religion too much importance. Sectarianism is not about religion, it is about temporal privileges.
Iraq in particular has never been a theocracy, and will never be one. The matter simply is not as important to us as you think."
comment
(1)Those who do not believe in God fear the use of religion as an excuse to arbitrarily control people "in God's name". They see that "In God's name" is arbitrary.
(2) Atheists tend to see religious schism as "proof" that Man is incapable of understanding what God wants
(3) Religions have evolved from ancestor worship reaching universalism in monotheism
(4) Humans tend to "universalise the particular": a innate process which makes an individual conclude what he comes to believe or understand ought to be what everyone else ought to believe or understand > The Human Will
(5) Islamic elements in "revolutionary" Iraq - and other places in the world - appear to desire the introduction of some religious control where it did not exist before
* except, e.g., vide > Iraq Monarchist Constitution which gave Sharia a role, though ultimately subsumed to the King's arbitration
(6) Question whether certain Muslims are really intent on some role for Sharia is a vital question in the debate on Iraq's future and eventually how things move in the area as a whole
(7) Encourage devote, sincere Muslims - and people of other religions - to articulate the notion that, in the modern world, religion is "for personal use" a contract between a man or woman and their God which can or ought, in a limited way, help social cohesion, but not be the basis for a politics; while accepting, in the real world, life and politics are inevitably conjoined.
reader comments
To say atheists see religious schism as proof that Man is incapable of understanding what God wants is to believe atheists accept there really exists a god. What makes an atheist an atheist is that, for whatever reason, he or she does not accept the proposition that there exists a supernatural authority. So, comment no.2 is wrong. We do not base our ideas on any supernatural metaphysics.
Schisms are only proof of ambiguity in religious doctrine. Sometimes interpretations of scriptures differ enough for religious people to feel the need to form new denominations, else why would they bother?
NIETZCHE
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873
Thus the beast lives unhistorically, for it gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. Thus a beast can be nothing other than honest. By contrast, the human being resists the large and ever increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over. It makes his way difficult, like an invisible and dark burden which he can for appearances' sake even deny, and which he is only too happy to deny in his interactions with his peers, in order to awaken their envy. Thus, it moves him, as if he remembered a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something more closely familiar, the child, which does not yet have a past to deny and plays in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and the future. Nonetheless this game must be upset for the child. He will be summoned all too soon out of his forgetfulness. For he learns to understand the expression "It was," that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically is--a never completed past tense. If death finally brings the longed for forgetting, it nevertheless thereby destroys present existence and thus impresses its seal on the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted living in the past [Gewesensein], something which exists for the purpose of self-denial, self-destruction, and self-contradiction.
Thursday, December 18, 2003
question
Amy Lamboley asks for an,
",,, explanation of how functionally excluding deeply religious children from public education could possibly help heal the growing religious divides in French society? I would like to think that there is some motivation for this legislation beyond a desire to keep French society looking stereotypically French, but I am having a great deal of trouble figuring out what that motivation might be...."
a partial answer
The assumption here is that these children are "deeply" religious. It could just as well be that they have been deeply indoctrinated into the basic tenets of their faith, while at the same time seeming to refuse to integrate, in some form or other, into their adopted countries.
France has 5 million Muslims, roughly 12% of Frances population, mostly from North Africa. It also has a burgeoning Right, which is taking a high percentage of the popular vote. Therefore, Le Bulldozer, believing he can regain some of the votes he has lost to Le pen, decides a ban on religious head-gear is a small price to pay in the freedom stakes. He knows Jews won't make a fuss over the skull caps, and the Christians will accept not wearing crucifixes at school; so, in effect, he has the Muslims by the head-scarf, in a manner of speaking. If they refuse, he can say they are disloyal to France, which incidentally, is a multicultural society in a way that the US is not, and probably never will be. People are not prejudice against colour in France as a general rule. The right-wing backlash does seem to be against North Africans, more than blacks, who are mostly African. This may have something to do with "L'Etranger" syndrome - the loss of their colony, Algeria. Many of the pied noir had to come back to France after Algeria got independence.
This was the nation who welcomed Louise Armstrong, who worshipped Sydney Bechet and Josephine Baker, at a time when the kKK were still extra-judicially stringing up "niggers" in the southern states, with no come back whatsoever.
The scarves are said to be worn "aggressively", not to proselytise for their faith, but to be "in your face", symbolically, as if to say their faith is superior to the faiths of the host nation they live in. This cannot be considered to be exceptional behaviour on the part of certain Muslims: despite their pussy-footing around, all religious think their faiths are superior. It's done in the UK, frequently, by Muslim young women - or British Muslim converts who adopt the head-gear - of a certain type and education level. When they come on TV discussion programmes, they rant at everything non-Muslim, and are full of anti-American and anti-western propaganda, only half of which they really understand, having learnt the agit-prop by heart. Usually, they try to put the words, "Palestine" or "Palestinian" in to as many sentences as is possible to do without descending into incoherence.
These young UK born Muslims, the majority are women, live - it seems - in a restrictive, authoritarian, closed system of thought, yet they are at the same time living, paradoxically, in totally free societies. They get the benefits of as much freedom as anyone could possibly want, in Paris, London or New York, but at the very same time insist on living in a closed one within this "freedom". This is what gets up the noses of the host peoples, who wonder if the adopted countries are so bad, why the Muslim guests don't go to a proper Muslim country like Iran, Saudi Arabia or Malaysia where they will not be out of place. Of course the type we mention are usually fundamentalist Muslims, not the more prosaic kind who go about their everyday lives, being good citizens of the countries they were born in or adopt. The former have a point to make, an axe to grind, a political agenda; the latter , as just Muslims because it is a faith they want to adhere to for the normal reasons people are religious.
No man or women from the West, living in Saudi Arabia, for example, can do anything remotely comparable. You can't practice your faith, "on the street" in Riyad, say, selling a Bible. Imagine the reaction of the religious police (we don't bother with these here in the West) to a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses canvassing their magazines and belief door-to-door in downtown Mecca! They would be in prison before they could say "Jeees..." , threatened with 30 lashes, prison or deportation. Westerners know this and therefore feel less sympathetic to "in-you-face" political Islam.
In my opinion religions by their nature are intolerant. You would have to put up a pretty strong case against that proposition. History would certainly be against you. Modern religions are rarely completely open-minded, except perhaps Buddhists who do not worship a God.
The problem is less about dislike of Muslim women wearing scarves as their refusal to see that many Muslim countries are adopting a double standard. Probably, if it were not for this, certain types in western countries like France would look less harshly on people of other ethnic groups or religions who they think deliberately make no effort to assimilate into their adopted countries and flaunt their religious credentials. In the modern western world, apart from in the US where there is a deep vein of religiosity and fundamentalist belief, people do not wear their religions on their sleeves.
meme
NYT > "Coming Soon to Arab TV's : U.S."
By Jim Rutenberg
December 17, 2003
I have always said that a media onslaught was the way to win hearts and minds - certainly more effective than the British Council Summer Tour. Though we must not totally denigrate the efforts of more sedate ways of pushing our culture and values. It is just that an unbiased professional TV & radio project such as this is virtually the only way to counter the venenmous bile that spews out of Arab radio and a handful of TV stations.
The other place where much harm is done is the worst type of Mosque - there a good ones - where the "sermon" inevitably is a diatribe against some western value or another. I say, caste out the mote from thine own eye: your societies have little to be very proud of, of late. You would do better to criticise your governments and leaders, first, before putting the metaphorical boot into ours.
Iraqis struggling & coming to terms
Fine New Yorker colour piece on every day life for ordinary Iraqis
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Zebari kicks ass at UN
NYT
reported 16 December Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari castigated the UN for:
"... having failed to help rescue his country from Saddam Hussein, and he chided member states for bickering over his beleaguered country's future."
an Egyptian view confirms Zebari's claims
Al Ahram,11 - 17 December 2003, Issue No. 668, Opinion runs an interesting article by Abdul-Amir Al-Rikabi
An alternative course
"As the US occupation flounders, the need for an Iraqi constitutive conference abroad grows..."
which shows exactly what was predicted by many people - the Russian & French would try to butt in to a conversation they were not asked to join to try to get their money back, disregarding the Iraqi people's problems for the sake of their debt, which they could write-off. Although I believe the US are talking with France separately about the debt, which, funnily enough was incured by Iraq in acquiring the OSIRAK nuclear installation, which the Israeli destroyed in a spectacular bombing raid some years ago. Ruusia is, of course, willy-worrying about the oil contracts it signed just before the war started. Earlier posts in the scroll mention the companies involved.
My earlier posts argued very strongly for keeping the Russians right out on the basis that Primakov and associates were big buddies of the Ba'ath leadership through the 70s and 80s when the Iraqis had military advisers and equipment - subsequently blown up by successive US led attacks on Iraq.
and finally
This piece from debka.com suggests TUN was already being held captive (by someone expecting to get the $25 million) before the US "found" him. Can we believe it? That's the trouble with the web - you have to use your judgement. My instinct is that it is partially true - but why would he be sitting in a hole with $750,000 and weapons if held against his will?). The evidence given by the writer of this artlcle seems wrong. There were no bricks on the TV pictures, just a block of polystyrene covered by a carpet. He has been on the run since April (TUN, not the journalist), constantly on the move: not much time for regular morning shaves and a hearty breakfast if he moved every three hours!
Pictures in the UK media show very clear details of the contents of the rooms in the quarters, with a battery strip light, a tray of eggs (no eggs) and a variety of tins and other convenience foods - could spend hours checking those two photos. Though it may have been the way the owner of the room lived, not TUN himself, who, for all we know, may have just arrived the minute before the US cavalry did and just jumped in the hole. I just hate it when people fill in the gaps with their fervid imaginations in the absence of concret evidence, rather than saying, We dinna ken laaaaddie! [broad Scots accent]
The Unmentionable Name's future, short or long?
Healing Iraq posts up some new adverts including this bust your sides one
Reasons for secularism # 1
We want to hear the sweet sound of music....
At a Glance
Says this :
....they were insisting on the execution penalty.
BUT, I say Saddam should not be executed, he should imprisoned for the rest of his life and watch how Iraq, the country that he had destroyed, will progress and become the prosperous and model country , so I think the execution will relieve him, but when he is humiliated in the prison, he will die and die everyday.
Saddam have a psychopathic personality, he will never regret about anything he had done, but when he will be imprisoned alone, he will start to think in everything, and the psychological torture will destroy him.
What do you think?
I think.....
He is right. But how could this be achieved in Iraq - they all want him dead. It will be very interesting to watch what happens. Of course, they will get in a tizzy with "Jay" over what to do procedurally. I told you they should have shipped him out - but of course they couldn't. It would seem to much like the US was running the show.
Seriously, the thing needs to handled very careful for the sake of the poor Iraqis. They need to let off much emotional and psychological steam over this. But there has to come a point when reflection will show there is really only one course of action: a Nuremberg style, long drawn out trial in which as well as convicting TUN and sending him away for the rest of his life to reflect on the terrible things he has done, to wait for signs that he begins to recognise the enormity of his wrongs, and for the people to hear that he has. The Iraqi people will have time with such a trial - to include all the major players - to see and hear the terrible details and come, slowly and surely, to sombre conclusions about what they need to do to prevent such a tyrant from ever getting control in Iraq again.
TUN was not the first Hard man to rule, there having been a whole string of them from Qasim onwards - though he was obviously the worst - but if the lesson is learned, and of course the souls and spirits of living and dead are set at rest, gently, and with decorum, something will be gained from the process.
If they deal with him perfunctorily, and hang him, it will satisfy the immediate hunger for revenge and ensure he can never return, enabling people to slowly forget and move forward. My preference is for prison, though I don't think that's what the Iraqis, right now, feel they want. However, image wise, prison would be better. Iraq wants to start off setting the tone for what is to come: rule of law, peace, quiet, non-violence, especially not from government.
lessons from Nuremberg
George F. Will gives his view in the Washington Post
Ctesiphon
We used to believeCtesiphon was something to do with Nebuchadnezzar.
Standing under that arch the first thing you'd ask would be, How does it stay up? I did, as a young boy, when I stood right in the middle, straining my neck back, awestruck. A family day out involved a visit to the ruins and, later, to a nearby shrine, which we went inside, though we weren't Muslim: in the centre was a large grilled, ornate cage containing something or someone revered, the details of which I retain no memory of, which could be walked right round.
The ruins themselves, the famous arch remnant of the Great Hall, and an ajoining structure, are depicted in a black and white lino-cut picture my mother still has. Its image is engraved on my mind, forever.
Nobody quite knows how they managed to construct the roof of the Great Hall. It remains, to this day, unsupported by pillars, in the shape of the curve of the pointed end of an egg. It is so high at the centre, at least 70-100 feet, that is impossible to imagine scaffolding being used in its construction. Maybe earth was piled underneath, so that the bricks could be placed in the tight weave that has held to this day.
If ever there was a symbol of - or for - Iraq today, this is it. Somehow not disintegrating, despite the depradations, physical and mental, that Iraq and Iraqis have endured over the last 100 years. Not true of Babylon, my next memory, since it was, until the excavations of over a 100 years ago, completely covered by the sands of time. And more pointedly, in terms of recent events, was quite recently ruined by massive reconstruction with new bricks stamped with the name and praises of The Unmentionable Name, in the style of Nebuchadnezzar. Will they knock these modern abominations down now?
Labels: Ctesiphon
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
why are some Sunni angry about TUN's capture ?
My text for this is:
"By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs, and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. Hegemony in this sense might be defined as an "organising principle" that is diffused by the process of socialisation into every area of daily life. To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is internalised by the population, it becomes part of what is generally called "common sense" so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite comes to appear as the natural order of things."
Add to Gramsci's interpretation, ethnic and tribal loyalties.
Did you know that TUN had a small blue tattoo on his hand - correct me if this is wrong - somewhere in the fleshy bit in the angle between thumb and forefinger. This means some elder marker him as "being" his, in a way much like the rituals of the Mafia. And, this didn't does mean a whole tribe all with this blue dot. Just a handful, a few dozen. All indelibly (!) linked by a one-sided "blood" rite like those of children who cut their hands and press the cuts together (this, before HIV), swearing eternal frienship and loyalty. Except with blue dots, you don't have any choice.
You get your face or back striped with knife cuts, or you penis circumcised without you permission, to make you part of the tribe; to make you, seemingly, ready to act - or expected to be ready to act - on behalf of the group to which you have been forcibly enjoined.
In contrast to these quaint tribal ethics, Iraq as a whole - represented by it's educated middle-class professionals - is modern and enlightened. And so what we are witnessing in the Sunni triangle is a relic not only of a well entrench "hegemony", but also of an ethnico-political and distant tribal past. It doesn't count for much in the Iraq to come. And should not be played upon by the international media.
Why don't western journalists get onto the streets in Iraq and patiently, systematically ask individual Iraqis what they want, believe, aspire to. Any old fool can stand on a roof, next to a satellite dish, and spout secondhand news off the wires. Only once in the Bosnian crisis did I see a TV crew doing that, walking the streets with a camera, letting the images tell the story. It, the camera, walked, shakily, along muddy lanes and in through rickety garden gates, stopped, asked the surprised occupants how they were getting on, and what their fears and hopes were. It happened to be a French crew. But we must not hold it against them: not all French are like Le Bulldozer, whose youthful picture they are now showing, greeting a handsome, young TUN on his visit to France looking for the wherewithal to make nuclear weapons.
Trial > in Iraq or out ?
This is the talking point. Forget what TUN says or doesn't say. Who cares?
I would like, and think it wisest, to do commit to trial outside Iraq because it will then show up all the reasons why the US had to invade Iraq, including the one's to with Rummy and poisons to kill the Iranians circa 1980.
If inside, all this will never get heard. No one will agree on a venue, a legal system, anything. In particular, there will be a long and tedious debate about trying him or not under Sharia law. Yes, it would please many, but it would alsoe send the wrong signal - that Sharia will be acceptable and inevitable, in some form or another, in the New Iraqi Constitution.
On top of that, I recommend, as I thought might happen, but didn't, that they get TUN onto an aircraft carrier, before his presence in Iraq is the excuse for more unruly behaviour of the shouty, shooty, bomby variety, which will be no good for anybody's nerves.
hot off the TV
Israelis have made a gun which fires around corners. It is being trialed immediately. True. I saw it being used on Palestinians with my very eyes!
Perhaps they could use their undoubted ingenuity to quickly design a blind man's white stick that sees round corners, while they are at it. Send Yasser Arafat - and to be strictly impartial, Ariel Sharon - job lots to try out?
16 December 2003
EveTushNet asks her readers to re-read the Reason.com article of January 2003
Should We Invade Iraq?
discussion by John Mueller and Brink Lindsey
Eve has a compilation of We Got Him! Iraqi reaction. She has posted up memorable abstracts from these Iraq Blogs.
I like this from
HealingIraq
"...When he announced 'We got him' everyone in the room cheered out loud. The following video of Saddam in his long hair and beard was a shock to us all. My grandmother burst in tears.
"...I had no reason to, but I felt humiliated. I sank into an overwhelming depression and sadness, and I had a desperate need to get terribly drunk. I should have felt joy but I didn't. And I'm still disappointed with myself.
"I went out again, the streets were empty now, everyone was at home watching the news. Celebratory gunfire continued for hours. In the evening, I went out to find armed teenagers filling our street carrying Saddam's pictures. They were shouting the vilest things about Sistani, Hakim, and even Ali Bin Abi Talib. Some of the mob were dressed in Fedayeen clothes with grenades and explosives in their hands. I got foolish and tried to take photographs. They dragged me in their midst and I thought this was it. Some accused me of being a spy, and others shouted 'Kill the bastard.' My parents and some neighbours were all over me and convinced the kids to leave me alone. After that they blocked the street and started to threaten passing cars, all the while shooting in the air. 4 or 5 IP cars showed up and the crowd dissipated. Shops closed and the streets were empty again."
comment on
Should We Invade Iraq?
We should. We ought. We did (saw, came, did, what could be done.... )
There is a good summary of the facts in there. If anyone wants a reason why TUN was removed from power it would be found in the 1993 assassination attempt - while he visted Kuwait - of GB I, rather than anything else grander and more convoluted. Mention is made of the US attempts at assassination of other leaders: one thing it does not like is when someone tries to bump off it's leader. And so it should not like. The USA is the democracy, primes inter pares, and, if destablised, we all are. Only connect: E M Forster.
Oil is important, but this oil is on the Market, not stolen. Arab vox pop - from brain rotting excuses for reporting from lazy TV journalists which are pumped out across the world, ad infinitum - is hardly a serious criterion for debate. They always say "It's the oil!", as the Old Left always did, still does. And they are right, it is "The Oil!". But only in that the world stops without it. The consumer goods that everyone, including the Middle Easterners, enjoy - TV, dishwashers, cars, music, film - would not be there in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf States, Yemen - produced in the US, Japan, Korea or China (partly in the slave-labour camps,Laogai) as a result of US investment - without the oil (which the US just happens to use a disproportionate amount of).
the wider view
Though the NeoCon Dreamers see Iraq as a way of settling the Middle East to their liking, so many of the unelected Think Tank experts - and their many too influential quasi-academic papers taken as ready-made party policy by some - are in reality no more expert than any thinking, reading person of above average intelligence. If we were to accept everything, say, Richard Perle argues - and only God knows his sub-agendas - we would be in a world war by now.
The Israelis naturally use Jewish Americans to support their cause. Who wouldn't in their place? Though this begs the question whether Israel, per se, was a mistake. It need not, in the future, be anything else but a force for good in the region if
(1) the Arabs genuinely give up their dream of "driving them into the sea" and overtly say they have, and
(2) under the US umbrella (troops stationed in Iraq for the medium to long-term), the Labour Party get back in Israel.
It was Jew who killed the best chance of peace in the person of Itzak Rabin, who was a truly impressive figure. Shimon Peres is the only one near to him in stature.
This is partly about changing attitudes to Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism and knee jerk anti-Americanism amongst Arab intellectuals (e.g. cosily comfortably-off Egyptian journos and academics who stock the fires of hate they should be trying to damp down). But it is about a myriad of other complex issues. Things will not suddenly be made better in Iraq, or the Middle East in general, by the creation of a New Iraq, or a New Saudi or a New Iran. It's in the souls of the people in these places that have to healed; and souls can't be molded like putty and made into different shapes in a few twists of the fingers. It's generational. It will take time.
The Jewish-European/US born settlers (don't they have dual US/Israeli nationality?) - forget the Russian immigration - must be paid (US dollars, of course) to return to New York (nice extended holiday in the exotic east, over. Come for your annual holidays, any time). Israel has a population of - is it - 7 million. Israel surely doesn't need a breeding programme to keep up with Arab breeding anymore, does it? Not now? Well, now the US is in Iraq, certainly not.
The New Berlin Wall - snaking in and out of the 1967 border, destroying everything in its path, including perfectly viable farms - has to come down. It won't come down in a hurry with Sharon in power. It's his bargaining chip.
As for negotiation, it will bewhen people are properly sick of the killing and finally ready to negotiate in good faith. The Geneva Accord ought to be taken up by the media and its consclusions aired widely, throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.
My view is two Red Pen States (see my previous posts) will have to be carved out of the immediate region to satisfy the aspirations of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. It was done before and it can be done again. The conditions are nearly right for this to be possible...benign colonialism, stupid!.
Populations in this region can't live without the aquifers. This is why the Israelis and the Palestinians argue and quarrel over land. No population can survive or expand without water. Both new states will have to be allowed to possess sufficient water from the aquifers and from water diversion schemes. Both states will have to have both Read Sea and Mediterranean ports. For the Red Sea, this is easy. There is Aqaba, famous for being taken from the Turks by the Arab guerrillas under Lawrence, which is already to a large degree an international port since the Israeli-Egyptian Treaty signed by Sadat.
Israel is important in the total Middle Eastern scheme of things, but the belief that the US unjustly, unfairly favours Israel is complex, despite being regularly used to rubbish anything the US says or does re Israel. It involves a deep psychological/ emotional attachment to Israel by Americans; guilt, within the foreign "policy memory" of the US government, because the US didn't take enough Jewish immigrants when it mattered; 10 million Jewish American voters; and an extremely powerful, effective, legitimate Jewish-American lobby.
Monday, December 15, 2003
The Unmentionable Name checked out by his former friends
So close to achieving his evil aim
Source > Telegraph (UK)
author > David Blair
15 December 2003
* profile
* ambitions - achievements
BBC > Iraq Economics
In Iraq, an Ayatollah We Shouldn't Ignore
Source > Washington Post
Author > Robin Wright
Date > Sunday, December 14, 2003
comment > Prof. Coles's Latest Post
Pre-empted his piece in my earlier posts, but he says it better.
We both agree that this is the last chance for the radical Shii to make a mark. It could amount to a Revolution within the Occupation. Practically speaking, if forces occupied key areas in central Baghdad, - excluding the red Zone - the Coalition military would be in a fix. If they removed the insurgents by force, many more US personnel would die in the process. If they gave the insurgents lee-way, attempting to negotiate the problem away, they would be showing the sort of weakness the "revolutionaries" could use against the Coalition to further bolster their position.
There is news of substantial influx of Iranian "tourists" to many of the Shite the religious sites in Iraq.
I have argued that since Iran is on its last legs, and in sight of a "velvet" revolution itself, within, say, 9-12 months, the obvious way for the Mullahs to shore up their position would be to destabilise Iraq. The majority of Iraqi Shii are moderate, but the mood is distinctly anti-American because that is the nature of the beast : they are Muslims and the Americans are not. There is a need to argue (e.g. SEE Theo & Philo) for the necessity to prevent Sharia being incorporated into the Iraqi Constitution. Iraq must be secular and have the separation of powers that all the mature democracies have.
Though Islam - as a personal religion - is no better or worse than any other - indeed in many respects it is "purer", as Muslims claim - it is in reality still, to a degree, a politico-religious system in the same way that Christianity was, say during the Crusades. The Albigensian campaign of 1208, leading to the destruction of the Cathars under he orders of Innocent III. You could not put a cigarette paper between the religion and the politics. Like Russian communism was, Islam is a closed system.
Sayeed Qutb's position - a correct analysis of the moral decline in both West and East - a rigorously argued case for an Islamic Utopia in the face of the fact that the age of utopias has passed. Despite the fundamentalists distaste for the Market, capitalism, though distasteful to many non-Muslims as well, works.
I am reminded of Emery Reves post-Second World War book "The Anatomy of Peace", which, though not highly regarded in academic / intellectual circles at the time, clearly argued that Religion, Capitalism in the form it then took, Nationalism & Socialism had all failed to come up with the goods. Reves would no doubt have admitted, if he was writing today, that he didn't quite get the Failure of Capitalism right. But he was arguing against mercantilism. He wanted a global economy that would not create goods where they were not needed. He argued fervently for the rule of law, that everything had to be subsumed to this principle. Laws by men for men. We have to persuade fundamentalist Muslims that this does not and cannot mean Sharia, because it is God given not human. Throughout the Muslim world there are examples, in Asia and Africa, for example, where there has been a reversion to strict Sharia, despite, in the wider Muslim world, the acceptance of scholarly interpretation in the light of modern demands.
Nobody can force Islam to renounce its tenets, but we must, in the face of hostility from many Muslims steadfastly argue the progressive, liberal cause.
SADDAM IN CUSTODY
Time Online's BRIAN BENNETT details the interrogation
ATTITUDES IN ARAB COUNTRIES
Short summaries country by country and Links to articles
Sunday, December 14, 2003
GO FOR THE LAOGAI
The Iraqi crisis is surely not over, though Iraqis in Iraq can breath a further sigh of relief that they will not be terrorised for criticising the former leader and his regime. Pundits say there will be more bombs and bullets to follow - it will get even worse before it bets a bit better.
In a sense, the story is now over. Logically, the US will stay in Iraq in the medium to long term, despite the hyperventilations of many in the vein of, "You've done the job, now leave it to us." This is not a practical solution.
The new FACTS, IDEAS, VALUES link is quite interesting. It shows another country firmly on the "other side". It ought now be possible to put pressure on these countries in the same way that pressure has been put on Iraq. I am particularly exercised about China because of the slave labour camps, the Laogai,whose efforts are on the shelves of every hardware shop in the US, unlabelled. Not even " Made in China". Hammers, saws, drills, $5. Big profit from the sweat of the brows of political prisons and others, treated as the USSR treated it's dissidents, as mad people for daring to criticise the communist regime.
There are other countries too: Zimbabwe. Mugabe must be removed quickly - his people are being starved, en masse, and no one gives a damn. Burma - the US must force the Miliitary Junta to step down and allow elections in the same way that the UN organised in East Timor.
Indeed, if one dictator is out - all should be out. Time, surely, for no undemocratic country to be a member of the United Nations. I have recommended elsewhere that it should be replaced by a Union of Democratic States.
If this is not the way the world is going to go, what is the point of getting all high and mighty about Iraq? A previous essay shows how the Middle East will go, following Iraq: velvet revolution in Iran, democracy in Syria and Saudi, then later Egypt.
Egypt is proped up with billions of dollars US. But every day people are locked up and tortured. Only the other day there was a report that an Egyptian journalist was locked up because he mocked the grooming of Mubarak's son to take over, later, from his Dictator father. Both Islamists and liberal intellectuals are locked up in Egypt as a matter of course.
I would welcome comments from Arabs inside and outside Iraq and any thinking people on these things. It's important to discuss the wider Middle East future and the removal of the rest of the tyrants and Juntas, worldwide, while the US is in the mood...
IRAQIS
Straight rip from BuzzM: apologies for wrap failure in letter
A most wonderful post... from Iraq
This week, I got the best email I have received since ... well, since there has been email. Some of you will remember that I've been pushing the idea that Iraq needs weblogs to free the voices of the Iraqi people in Iraq and in the world. I said we needed a thousand Salam Paxes.
Well, here is the first.
Zeyad, a 24-year-old dentist in Baghdad who learned impeccable English in Britain, just started a blog called Healing Iraq. I'll quote it in a minute. But first, I want to show you the most gratifying and promising letter he sent me (my emphases):
Dear Jeff,
Thank you for the wonderful experience which has been your weblog. I stumbled across it following a link from
Salam's blog I guess, and it has been a great read, I consumed most of it in 3 days.
A little bit about myself: My name is Zeyad, I'm 24, male, a dentist, I live in Baghdad, Iraq, have also lived in London
for 6 years as a child, English is actually my first language which I learned before Arabic.
The reason I'm writing is that you have convinced me of the importance of introducing weblogs to Iraqis. I'm sure
most people here have never even heard of weblogs. I myself discovered them only a few days before the war. I
mainly followed Salam, G, turningtables and Riverbend's blogs, but I have been also discovering more and more of
them. And I've been pointing them out to people here, and you will be surprised of the number of bright and
intelligent young people in Iraq who are willing to start their own blogs and express their ideas and opinions freely,
especially that they have nothing to fear from doing so any more.
I don't expect America alone to do everything for us while we just sit and criticize. I want to be part of it, I want to
participate, to contribute, to do anything for my country and the world. Some people may consider this as being a
'collaborator with infidel zionist occupying forces'. If trying to build your country and helping others do so makes you
that, then I can proudly say out loud 'Yes, I am a collaborator!'.
Internet is still new to most Iraqis, very few people had it before the war, according to SCIS which was the state
owned ISP the percentage of Iraqis using the Internet was 0.001 percent of the population, and they were intent on
keeping it that way.
But now things are different, Internet cafes are all over Baghdad, there are nine of them in my block alone, and
someone estimated them at 300 in Baghdad now, and there are more opening daily, but sadly only a few who still
have the privilege of functioning telephone lines have Internet accounts at home....
Anyway, forgive me for digressing. Like I said I am willing to start my own blog now, I'm also planning to make one in
Arabic as well, so Iraqi Arabic writers can do the same. And also for the Arab world, as you know tens of millions of
Arabs are still living under totalitarian regimes similar to Saddam's. And I was dissapointed to find very few weblogs
by Arab people dealing with political and social issues in the Arab and Islamic world. I have always been concerned
about our voice not reaching the rest of the world. Sadly a very large majority in the west still see us as people living
in tents, dressed with turbans and robes, riding camels and cursing the 'infidel' west. This is a myth, and the reason
Arab people aren't building bridges with the west is because they are so hopeless about their future under their
oppressing regimes and their Islamic mullahs who both wish to keep it that way, so they can go on plundering our
money and laughing at our chins while warning us of the grave fate that Allah has prepared for us if we don't do it
their way. I'm sick of all of that.
Despite what you see in the Arab world from people bashing the American 'occupation' of Iraq, the truth is that they
all desire the same in their hearts and minds, because deep inside they all know that they have all been occupied for
years by their own regimes. And they are yearning for their freedom. Most of what you see is really Arab regimes
speaking, not the people. They know their time has come and that their days are numbered. THEY are the real
terrorists. I wish you would also focus on these issues in your blog.
I digress again. But what you are reading is a glimpse of what I'm intending to write about in my future blog.... What
do western readers need to know? What should I focus on? You talked me into this so you are obligated in helping
me!
I assure you that many will follow my steps because that is why I'm doing this. Our voice will be heard at last.
no more bets
Baghdadskies Bookies
No More Bets
Goitres 1723 GMT
AN UNATTRIBUTABLE SOURCE CLAIMS:
TUM's safely tucked up in his bunk on USS {x} - slightly sea-sick mind you - a nice cup of cocoa, watching Fox. Those nice Americans have also seen to it that he has some cream to sooth his sore face: never had such a quick shave in years.
Claimed he asked, very politely, if he can phone his wife in Beirut - said he can email instead, if he likes, and set-up a weblog to keep a diary of events, when he is feeling up to it, perhaps tomorrow after a good nights rest, followed by eggs over easy, waffles and crispy bacon, fried tomato, real coffee and a long cool smoke...from a long Havana.
FEEL LUCKY?
Place your bets!!
Book on Comments!
Odds at 12112 GMT <<2:1>>
*that TUM will be shifted pronto onto an aircraft carrierby night fall*
BBC Radio 4 News 1103 GMT
The Unmentionable Name reported captured in Tikrit - found in a cellar
now read this
Despite the Prof. not having posted this news, 'cos he's probably tucked up in bed with night-cap on, his last two posts are the core of the discussion about what will happen now.
What will Ayatollah Sistani and the Islamic Parties announce in relation to TUM's capture?
What will they now say about their immediate requirements for government?
NOTE the reports on Iranian involvement
If they are to have increased control of what happens next, they will logically encourage their people to act, more decisively, bearing in mind the Iranian regime is now on it's last legs. The IGC is irrelevant, of course.
Is that Beirut 43-67-03 ?
When we were teenagers in the 60s a joke was doing the rounds, which I always found very funny. A man rings up a house. A little girl answers the phone. He asks, "Is mother there?" "Yes, she's upstairs in the bedroom with Uncle Jo. I'll call her. MaaaaaaaaM! Dad's on the phone." There is a great commotion, which he can hear over the phone. He asks the girl to go up and see what is happening. After a while, she returns to tell him the news: Mum is screaming her head off and uncle Jo has opened the window jumped out, and fallen into the empty swimming pool. Looks as if he has killed himself. The man asks, "Swimming pool, swimming pool? Is that Wallasey 465935…….?"
For some unknown reason this joke come to mind on reading in the Sunday Times this morning that S*dd*m #2 wife, Samira - current abode Beirut, former residence Damascus - is regularly telephoned by hubby, presumably from inside Iraq.
The article says they both met, "Whe they met two decades ago…S*dd*m was a peasant boy from Tikrit…" If he was, then he was a very old peasant boy, because he would have been about 40 years of age.
From now on I will forever see the image of S*dd*m, The Unmentionable Name (TUN), ringing through to Beirut in increasing desperation, until one day he, too, gets a wrong number, and out of the blue a body comes flying out of a 10th floor window to the astonishment of passers by..
"Hello, is that Beirut 43-67-03….
It is said that TUN was obsessed by bunkers and especially tunnels, the building of, and that the Germans did the building. Of course its all a bit confusing here, because prior to 1989 it was the East Germans who would have been doing the building. In fact just as the current War of the Great Ousting was beginning there was a report in British media of a German man who said he had been contacted by one or other of the Western security agencies in regard to the design and construction of a specific bunker he had built in Baghdad, which, he proudly told the press, was of a very high spec., describing in detail - architect plan supplied - the various rooms and facilities and, of course, the depth of the bunker and the thickness of its walls- with bomb penetration in mind. If my memory serves me, since I have lost the cutting, our German man, a very nice helpful man, said it was impenetrable.
At the time of reading this piece, I recollected that bunker building had always been the Germans' forté, and that their concrete is still prominent in the German - and, indeed, most of western Europe's - landscape to this day. If we recall, the First World war trenches were always deemed by the Allies to be far superior to theirs. It is to be wondered whether this is one of the reasons why the current German government was reluctant to join the coalition against TUM. Feeling, as one would, that after it was all over, streams of journalists and TV crews would be for ever embarrassing the German State and People, - sensitive still to memories of their recent past - by showing where TUN and his cronies hid - amongst all those tunnels and bunkers, and for some bright spark hack to ask the German representative present, "Didn't you build these?"
All we have to do now is find the Achilles heel of the French: Osirak? Mirage jets? Perhaps the discovery, in one of the Palaces, of fridges full a speciality home-made French sausage made with wild boar blood?
We of course would not be without red faces, either, or at least the Scots wouldn't be: he had a genuine fondness for good Scotch, as is well known. So, we in Britain may perhaps be nervously wondering whether it is going to be disclosed that the deaths of thousands of Iraqis might be down to drunken rages induced by the amber nectar.
No worry! The Bliar government - expert in the black arts of spin - would deny energetically that the whisky was ours. It was obviously a cheaper, inferior quality whiskey - with extremely good "rip-off" labels, indistinguishable from the real ones - made in Osaka.
Hang on a second don't the Japanese have military personnel in Iraq?
COHONES & INCOHERENCE
In all serious matters, information overload, confusions of ideas, results not infrequently in the rising, intransitive desire for "fight or flight" - in this case from the Iraq/Middle East Problem Debate. The substantially temporarily addled mind - no matter which country it resides in - in desperation, not knowing which way to turn, often, usually, frequently resorts to humour to get through till the next patch of coherent thought.
Iraqis are proving to have a talent for satire, sarcasm & sardonic humour on a par with the English (...as opposed to British, US folks) which is saying quite a lot.
Though difficult to show it to be true, it feels, from regular sniffing of the blogosphere, as if the British and the Iraqis are very similar in this respect. True, too, in subtly different ways, of us and the Indians, for example. We just seem to "get" each other. Of course, we know each other well as peoples, having been in close proximity (ahem...), in one form or another, for the best part of 100 years in the case of Iraq.
Such a shame that the British are not in charge in Iraq. A great shame in fact. We just know there would have been more progress and less mistakes, less incomprehension on both sides.
When the jokes can be put aside, and the mind is ratiocinating is once more, there is still the need for good clear information and well reasoned debate on Iraq for it to work on.
This from AltNet is certainly clear.
Saturday, December 13, 2003
La' la' lil irhab. Na'am, na'am lil dimucratiya.
Iraqis for the "Occupation" By Dr. Walid Phares December 11, 2003
"...open participation of labor unions. Unexpectedly, Iraqi workers were the most excited participants in the march against Wahabi and Baathist Terror. "We need factories, we need peace, no fascists, no fanatics," sang the laborites, as though they were in Manchester or Detroit. But there was even a more significant element in the marches. Cadres from the "Hizb al-Dawa al Islamiya" - a rather conservative Islamic "movement" whose members were walking under the same banners of resistance to terrorism. Why? Well, we need to understand the Shi'a drama.
Christopher Hitchens
FrontPageMagazine.com December 11, 2003
Jamie Glazov
Christopher Hitchens Part I
Hitchens discusses Iraq, the War on Terror, the Left and his own intellectual journey.
Christopher Hitchens Part II
Frontpage Interview focuses on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Iraq Council May Not Exist Past July
NY Post 11 December 03
"The U.S.- appointed Governing Council will not be allowed to exist beyond July 1, when a provisional Iraqi government with full sovereign powers takes office, coalition officials said, despite the desires of most council members to keep it going.
....coalition officials said any new body created to oversee the process toward a democratically elected government would not have the same powers of the current Governing Council, seen by some Iraqis as a mere tool in the hands of the occupation authorities despite the relatively large leeway given it by Bremer in running the country.
Iraqis also view many council members as "outsiders," exiles who returned to Iraq in the wake of Saddam Hussein's downfall after spending many years abroad.
Under the Nov. 15 agreement, the council is scheduled to complete by the end of February the draft of a "fundamental law" that will serve as an interim constitution.
The law, according to published guidelines, must protect human rights, freedom of worship and minority rights. It also will recognize Islam as the faith of the majority of Iraq's 25 million people.
The fundamental law is also expected to spell out details such as whether a prime minister or a president will head the country's top executive during the 18 months until a democratically government is elected to office.
Shiite members, meanwhile, wanted the council to stay on because it's the only powerful body that recognizes their newfound strength as representatives of the country's majority and are loathe to see it go.
Thirteen of the council's 25 members are Shiites, five are Sunni Arabs, five are Kurds and there is one each from the country's Christian and ethnic Turkish communities.
The U.S.- led occupation authority has supported the council in public but privately criticized it as slow to make decisions.
Bremer has said council members who wanted to stay in politics beyond July 1 could nominate themselves to regional caucuses that will elect members of a transitional legislature.
Bremer has said council members who wanted to stay in politics beyond July 1 could nominate themselves to regional caucuses that will elect members of a transitional legislature.
Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the council's current president and leader of a powerful Shiite political group, has indicated that he wanted the council to stay on while calling for direct elections to be held for the legislature. However, he appears to have backtracked recently, not mentioning direct voting in public remarks."
Friday, December 12, 2003
PHILO AND THEO
Sounding more like characters in the sumptiousness of Lawrence Durrell's half-imagined Egypt than the core, the essence, the supposed root of the debate between Islam and the West - that between the philosophers of liberalism and the theologians of Islam - according to a recent NYT commentary on the life and works of Sayyid Qutb, hanged by Nasser in 1966. Paul Berman, The Philosopher of Islamic Terror, based on a to be published book, Terror and liberalism. Certainly not the duty, he argues, of America's President to argue the case. Rather, it is left to the thinkers of both camps to fight a war of words, to exhaustion, for the future of liberal democracy.
Maybe.
"When Philo met Theo" there was no crescendo of pleasure, but the muted murmer of distrust. Qutb, as the primary Theologian of the modern debate, is clear. We have moved away from nature. Praise is heaped on the God given fixity of the Quran. Though in a fallacy similar to the pseudo-persharism of modern interpreters - more correctly decoders - of the Qumran texts and the Torah [vide: Jesus the Man, Barbara Thiering, then of U. Sydney, Australia, much criticised from using pershar technique inappropriately] we are then supposed to accept the constant reinterpretation of what is meant to be perfection. To argue that God's word is misunderstood and has to be explained, interminably, is to horribly miss the point.
To really follow nature [SQ : the human race has lost touch with human nature...Man's inspiration, intelligence and nmorality are degenerating..Man...miserable, anxious, skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime > according to Berman) - our nature - to mimic Nature outside Man, even, we must see what the animals and plants constantly do - adapt within what the evolutionary psychologists call the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, EEA. In our case, the EEA is said to be our past environment, millenia ago, not present ones, since we cannot do an evolutionary analysis in terms of Man's current environment : we do not adapt to it. Whereas at the hunter-gather stage, we were adaptive.
Experientially, our dogs and cats tell us they can learn (because we see they remember). They are observed frequently, often significantly, changing their behaviour according to circumstance. This, despite the inculation ofthe belief - from Descartes, through Pavlov to Skinner - that everything with them is instinct, fixed action patterns. The capacity to remember does not necessarily mean the ability to think - as we think - in the abstract, at second, third and fourth remove from the world of objects. But it does mean learning, nonetheless; it does mean the ability to adapt to change, to mirror the environment - that is the physical world and the plants and animals in it - as where the brain of humans is said to use "mirror" cells in the brain to apply empathy, to copy in non-motor fashion the words and especially actions of others and so keep one step ahead of the game, to predict what others are planning.
Despite the fact that we no longer adapt to out environment in a Darwinian sense, because we so effectively control it, an obvious feature of our individual genetic nature is the constant battle to maintain the integity of our individual genomes (regardless of how it expressed "phenotypically") in the face of externally imposed changes from mutation of the chemical, DNA, that makes up our heritary material. We must see ourselves outside our genetics in the same way. But in this case, learn the mechanisms and processes by which we are capable or retaining or regaining our integrity.
At an individual level - ethologically/ecologically - all organisms that can move are able to do so into or out of changing environments. Even the amoeba, or the flat worm, can "chose" between light and dark. In effect, all the way through the animal, and, to a lesser degree the plant kingdoms, individual organisms problem-solve in a choice-tree.
Only when society is examined is everything different. Society is hard to control effectively because of its very complexity and dynamism: its joinings together and its breaking apart, its rejoinings.
Society becomes "unnatural", in Qutbian terms, because of the existence of power relations, which are never equal, though in a state of flux. Social movements, too, are, in a non-Darwinian sense, "adaptive", but, unlike the individual response, seem quickly to become "unnatural": in other words, to readily, at some stage, become detached from reality; often descending in votices of contadiction, myths and deadly metaphors; frequently driven in directions dictated by the strong, rather than through concensus withing groups, which, in any case, have, in history, been too big to form rough-and-ready agreements within. When we were living in discrete natural groups of 100 or so, these means would have still been open to us.
Social movements- religious, political, technological - like the ebbs and flows of tides difficult to control, must ultimately be for the benefit of individuals, who, as individuals, are able to chose. Movements that involve the monumental sacrifice of many for the good of the remainder are hardly for the good of the individual. Individuals, of course, have principles of action in social contexts, applying sets of moral and ethical guides to given situations. We like to think they are our own principles rather than one's we have been given, though our inheritance plays a key role, through determining our characters and personalites.
"80 lashes for the false accuser of chaste women", believed Qutb. What happened to the "false accusers" of the wholy innocent woman in West Africa, whose beautiful face adorned so many papers around the world, whose cause so many took up, who survived the sentance of death by stoning? Nothing? Then is not he - or are not they - merely hiding behind Sharia as an effective way of controlling people by claiming that politics and life are, as Qutb says, one.
Qutb: under Sharia no one was going to be forced to obey mere humans - tell that to the Iranians and Afghanies! They will laugh till they cry, if they have not already died. Any authority, claiming its legitimacy through religion or politics, is only legitimate if it tempers justice with mercy. And justice, as understood by the Islamic fundamentalists, seems to be without mercy to mere humans, in order to glorify God.
Qutb: Sharia ought to end with the abolition of man-made laws. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Progress is towards human law not away from it. Believing in or accepting the legitimacy - or indeed effectiveness or social desirability - of God made laws, laws made by a God who Himself is perfect, is a fundamental idiocy and delusion and serves no individual or social good in the modern age.
Qutb: Sharia will lead to utopia. (SEE LINK > DESIGNING THE IDEAL STATE). Unfortunately God, who is perfect, does not administer His own laws. Fallible, fickle, weak, power hungry men do, who in effect, by adopting God's laws, "know" what is "best" for others (Sharia), because they "know" it is God given, are intent, at seemingly any human cost, to force it on them.
Everyone has his time in the sun, every notion with social application has its adherents for a time, but when the ideas slip out of their time, they are like the movement of the moon in front of the sun during a solar eclipse: the sky darkens, but also, more chillingly, the temperature drops one or two degrees. Anyone who has experienced that drop in temperature will tell you they were impressed by the quickness of the drop, but also that it was a little frightening. They recognised, in a way that words can never express, how import the sun is to their very existence. They could imagine, during this heightened emotion - for a moment or two - what it would be like if the moon didn't continue across the face of the Source of Life, but stayed motionless, leaving us in the cold and dark.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
A RECENT VISITOR
ForNow put me right on a few points of stylistics & constitutionology and looks like a winner.
He recommmends this article which I am now going to read accompanied by a substantial glass of Tempranillo and a welcome roll up. God bless you all. We'll get there. I feel it in my bones. Long live enlightened progressive thought (and action), or any thinking, actually. As for action: do what the Second World War bomber pilot turned charitable worker, L. Cheshire, V.C. once said when asked, What can we do? [freely paraphrased]
"Do the the little things: [attempting]big things always end in tears."
An Iraqi, who should know about these things, has said:
"I am beginning to think that a Hasmite king (whichever pretender does not matter in this ugly game of politics), perhaps even would be the best solution to save Iraq from going headlong into the abyss. After all, England, the oldest democracy in Europe, is a monarchy, and after all, our mother England --well, you know General Maude and the rhetoric of liberoccupation. Anyhow, at least a king with some genuine authority and legitimacy could appoint and "disappoint" someone like you know who to the cabinet.
Finally, let's all at least cling to what a great man once said: 'Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.' "
MY, no bastard son of Julio - not an Iraqi but cogent - recently posted under byline, Slip Sliding Away:
"For all the talk of democracy-promotion and so forth, it would appear that Russia is falling even further away from the liberal-democratic ideal, and that Putinism will only grow stronger and more authoritarian. My occassional correspondents in Russia (folks I met there during the summer of '98) are all reasonably supportive of Vlad the Selective Prosecutor, which has always made me less hostile to him than are most Western commentators, but still.
I don't have any particular insight into this situation, but one of the things it highlights is the importance of banal questions of constitutional design. The Russian constitution is modeled fairly closely on that of the French Fifth Republic, which has always been a bit infamous for its strong-man qualities. There's pretty solid empirical evidence, accompanied by decent theoretical argumentation, that "presidential" political models, whether along US or French lines, are more given to backsliding into dictatorship than are parliamentary models (one slipshod piece of evidence for this assertion is that, if you look around, you'll often see a guy with the title "president" -- i.e., Saddam Hussein -- who's really a dictator, and almost never a Prime Minister who's really a dictator).
This is, I hope, something that folks are keeping in mind in Iraq. The record of history, however, indicates that the fact in question is typically not kept in mind by people trying to implement political transitions. Can't say exactly why that is, but I think it may be related to the fact that the two countries (France and the US) with the strongest cultural/ideological commitments to the universality of political ideas both operate under presidential systems. These systems have their merits, but they don't seem to work well for countries emerging from dictatorship."
COMMENT
Would they accept a Jordanian?
If the "inarticulate and politically naive Ali Bin al-Husain" is not suitable, why not Prince Hassan? This has been mooted before, many times. Would Prince Hassan be acceptable to the majority of Iraqis? Is he tainted by association? Is he corrupt or venial ? Is he a Hashemite ? Yes. Is is he intelligent? Yes. Is he articulate? Yes, extremely. Could he represent Iraq in the world? Yes, very effectively. Would he be assassinated? Probably. Would he accept the job? Probably not.
BACKGROUND
Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files
Iraq: Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1963
"Students of the period will find much material here concerning domestic unrest, problems with the Kurdish minority, the upheavals following Israel’s creation in 1948, and debates regarding the nature of Iraq’s foreign policy toward other Arab states as well as the Great Powers."
Charles D. Smith, Professor of History, San Diego State University
1945–1954
These documents illuminate Iraq’s political situation and political affairs and race relations with the Kurds, the Iraqi press, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Also included are documents dealing with narcotics traffic, social manners and customs, judiciary and laws, military, finance, agriculture, natural resources, industry communications, and foreign relations with the U.S. and other countries.
1955–1959
The Hashemite monarchy was overthrown on July 14, 1958. These documents illuminate the path to the Iraqi revolution and its aftermath as perceived by the U.S. State Department. They trace both the old and new regimes’ relations with the Kurds, the Iraqi press, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and follow the influence of pan-Arabist and communist elements in the population. Also included are documents dealing with narcotics traffic, social manners and customs, the judiciary and laws, the military, finance, agriculture, natural resources, industry, communications, and foreign relations with its neighbors, the United States, and other countries. For an understanding of how Iraq emerged as a military state in the second half of the 20th century, these records are invaluable.
1960-January 1963
The year 1960 dawned over the Arabian Desert like the unforgiving sun. Centuries-old religious and sectarian hatreds burned anew, and more recent class antagonisms fomented. Abd al Karim Qasim stood in the center of it all.
His 1958 "July 14 Revolution" had caused a radical shift in Iraq’s social structure. It had destroyed the power of the landed sheikhs and the absentee landlords; enhanced the position of urban workers, peasants, and the middle class; and revived long-suppressed sectarian, tribal, and ethnic conflicts, particularly those between Kurd and Arab, Sunni and Shiite. By 1960, tensions had come to a head. The U.S. State Department watched with interest as Qasim stood astride shifting sands.
A precarious balance
From the beginning Prime Minister Qasim’s rule was marked by ambiguity, as he was forced to compromise his centrist principles to remain in power. With material in this collection, researchers will uncover the reasons behind Qasim’s often contradictory policies—most stemming from his lack of a solid base of support, especially in the military. Of mixed Sunni-Shiite parentage from southeastern Iraq, Qasim was unlike his mostly Sunni military. His ability to rule depended, therefore, on a skillful balancing of Communist and pan-Arab interests.
For most of his tenure, Qasim sought to counter the growing pan-Arab trend in the military by supporting the Communists who controlled the streets. He authorized the formation of a Communist-controlled militia, the People’s Resistance Force, and he freed all Communist prisoners.
Empowering the poor
Qasim’s economic policies reflected his disadvantaged origins and his Communist ties. Diplomatic reporting in this collection relates Qasim’s support of trade unions, improvement of workers’ conditions, and implementation of land reform aimed at dismantling the old feudal structure of the countryside.
Researchers will also learn of Qasim’s challenge to existing profit-sharing arrangements with the oil companies. On December 11, 1961, he passed Public Law 80 and dispossessed the Iraqi Petroleum Company of 99.5 percent of its concession. This new arrangement significantly increased oil revenues accruing to the government. Qasim also announced the establishment of the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) to exploit new territory.
Desperate measures
Qasim’s careful balancing act soon began to fall apart. His regime had been repeatedly attacked by Nationalist forces, and while Communist reprisal had been swift and deadly, it had alienated many in his domestic power base. Qasim desperately attempted to retain power, playing all sides against the middle and satisfying none.
Qasim first cracked down on the Communists, arresting some of the more unruly rank-and-file members and temporarily suspending the People’s Resistance Force. Then, following an assassination attempt by Baath Nationalist Saddam Hussein, Qasim softened his stance against the Communists and suppressed the activities of the Baath and other Nationalist parties.
Throughout 1960 and 1961, sensing that the Communists had become too strong, Qasim again moved against the party, eliminating members from sensitive government positions, cracking down on trade unions and peasant associations, and shutting down the Communist press.
In 1961, Kurds took up arms against the central government; in September, full-scale fighting broke out between the predominantly Communist Kurdish guerrillas and the Iraqi army. By the spring of 1962, Qasim’s inability to contain this Kurdish insurrection had fatally eroded his base of power. The growing opposition was now in a position to plot his overthrow.
Conflict at home and abroad
Qasim’s domestic problems were compounded by a number of foreign policy crises, the foremost of which was an escalating conflict with the Shah of Iran. Even though Qasim had reined in the Communists, the Shah, neighboring Gulf states, and the United States still feared an imminent Communist takeover of Iraq.
The U.S. State Department monitored the situation closely as the Shah of Iran disputed Qasim’s Communist sympathies and his claims on Iranian Khuzestan, Qasim laid claim to the newly independent state of Kuwait, the Arab League unanimously accepted Kuwait’s membership, and Iraq broke off diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors.
Hemmed in by regional enemies and facing Kurdish insurrection in the North and a growing Nationalist movement at home, Qasim was overthrown in February 1963. With material in this collection, researchers can assess both Qasim’s fall from power and his enduring legacy as a hero to millions of urban poor and impoverished peasants.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
SAYWELL, WRITE WELL
Standing at the door in trepidation, holding my mother's hand, probably rather tightly. After a short interval, an elderly white-haired lady - with a severe hair-do in the style of Agatha Christie's elderly female detective, Mrs. Marple - arrived. This was the legendary, indomitable Mrs. Saywell. September, 1953. I was five in the previous April: it was my first day at the Kindergarten.
Only the children of well-to-do Iraqis and various grades of ex-patriot attended this school in the old quarter of Alwiyah, amongst the one story, mud-walled colonial bungalows. The school was itself a large bungalow standing in several acres of tree-lined garden at the bottom of a long drive.
I can remember no lessons, but looking at the small, square black and white photos my father took with his Rollifex, I see me in a white short-sleeved shirt, tie, and short trousers, sitting at a desk outside in the sunshine, pen in hand, doing my exams, turning to camera. In another picture I am to be seen running, well ahead of my competitors, towards the camera and the winning line, tie flying, in a sprint race on Parent's Day; the white chalk lines of the lanes clearly visible on the dry grass.
Several other well preserved, small photographs - still in my possession - show rows of well-dressed people - the Iraqi elite of young King Faisal II's era - behind a retaining rope, watching the races. I wonder who they are and whether they are still alive. When I publish these photos, you will be able to check to see if you recognise anyone
BEARDS FOR BAGHDADIES
As the Season of Good Will inexorably approaches - a way of helping Iraqi Schools.
SPONSOR A BEARD
* Grow a beard - big, black and bushy (if possible)
* Get your local children to sponsor it
(a) by weight grown
OR
(b) by total length of hairs
RULES
(1) STATE GROWTH PERIOD
(2) NO FERTILISER ALLOWED
(3) NO KEFIYAHS.....
(4) NO ATTEMPT TO PURCHASE RPGs, KALASHNOKOVs, MINES, or HAND GRENADES DURING GROWTH PERIOD...
(5) COMPULSORY PUBLIC DEBEARDING & WEIGHING or MEASURING (CAREFUL MEASUREMENT AND TOTAL LENGTH OF ALL INDIVIDUAL HAIRS)
All sponsor money to Iraqischools
* Online purchase of top quality drawing pencils, crayons & paints & paint brushes
ART THERAPY
It might be possible to sponsor a qualified ART THERAPIST to go out to Iraq to train peripatetic art therapists to visit Iraqi schools. Practical suggestions about how to do this, please comment.
COMMENT
I can't, unfortunately, make a sardonic political point with my beard (which is already growing) because, UNFORTUNATELY, it's red with tints of grey....yes, it's already growing.. but not looking forward to the public de-bearding...
Monday, December 08, 2003
LEHRER INTERVIEWS JUAN COLE with GARY SICK ON SISTANI'S DEMOCRATIC CREDENTIALS
Aardvark questions prof's assertion that Sistani is a democrat. This is the PBS interview Aardvark based his views on.
COLE CLARIFIES HIS POSITION
Abu Aardvark questioned my description of Sistani as a pure democrat. What I meant by that was only that in his fatwas since June, he has consistently said that legitimate government must derive from the will of the people ("al-hukumah ash-shar`iyyah munbathiqah min iradat ash-sha`b" or words to that effect). He specifically says that sovereignty derives from the people. That seems to me as democratic as anything said by Enlightenment thinkers in Europe. Of course, Sistani does demarcate a limit to democracy, which is that the people must not legislate or adopt policy that directly contradicts Islamic law. But then all democracies are limited by constitutional provisions. A majority of Americans now might not vote for all the 10 amendments to the constitution that make up the Bill of Rights. But they are stuck with them anyway. Likewise, Sistani thinks an Iraqi democracy would be stuck with the "constitutional" principles of shari`ah or Islamic law. But he nevertheless insists on one person one vote as the guarantor of governmental legitimacy. That seems to me a commitment to pure democracy.
COMMENT
I have already pointed out the summary of this discussion at Public Opinion and added my comments:
(1) AWGR
The type of democratic structure that forms in Iraq is probably almost completely dependent on its geopolitical context: if it was possible to create democracies around Iraq first, a different set of conditions [addendum. for Iraq's political development] would apply.
(a) federation
(b) "integrated" state (... UK)
(a) means the opportunity for schemers from [addendum: inside or] outside Iraq to destabilise, e.g. the Kurdish Autonomous Region, or conversely Shia Southern Region
(b) means Italian style " instability" > constant changes of government caused by presence of too many small parties
(a) means questions to be asked about what federal structure would be. A US style might not work because of the strong religio-ethnic divides and jelousies that have never been subsumed to a Great Iraqi Ideal, except for a short period under Nuri es Said, although he too was authoritarian. Saddam achieved the same result by progressively totalitarian control.
(a) means rotating presidents to satisfy the strong ethno-religion divisions
(b) means lack of strong leadership > one ethnic group not accepting the authority of the others' head of state
* I favour a "centralised" federal state not a federation
** Suggested elsewhere > roughly 5 year cooling off before elections proper
*** A [long-term] democratification programme of massive proportions > based on bringing through the new voters in schools and universities, rather than relying on voting groups with entrenched positions (a) religio-ethnic (b) of the generations that grew up in the last 3 decades. (Vide > Russian pensioners wanting Stalin or Gorbachev back "because he kept order and paid us proper pensions")
(2) COLE says:
" Devolve education policy to the local governments, along with local commerce and agriculture."
AWGR argues:
(1) Devolution of education - after 25 years of authoritariasm turned totalitariansm - would not inculcate the Iraqi identity or "federal ethos" needed. It could be used by trouble makers - of all sorts - to encourage the very differences that militate against the Greater Iraqi Concept essential to hold Iraq together. The rationale behind regional schools/universities would lead to demands for total freedom of education > Madrasas anyone ? Not a fortified wine! A deadly brew, nonetheless.
(2) Early in my weblog (started to follow pre-war and immediate post-war events through my personal perspective, and in relation to Iraq's recent history, as is reflected in the sort of references & side links) pointed to the lessons to be learnt from 40s & 50s Iraq under Nuri Said. You will see, in some of the articles referenced, a flavour of the educational developments that Nuri started, encouraged, including buraries from the US to study abroad and an accerated progamme of primary & secondary school building, with many British staff starting the schools.
SEE > New Babylon: A Portrait of Iraq, Desmond Stewart & John Haycock,Collins 1956
IRAQI JEWISH DIASPORA
Are they going to let back the 250,0000 - 300,000 Iraqi Jews they kicked out in the late 50s ? They were the backbone of the business and intellectual elite of Iraq. 100,000 went to Israel, directly.
Sunday, December 07, 2003
ARGUFY ?
ARDVAARK v. OLD KING COLE
Ardvaark replies:
[empahasis added]
[..] agree with Cole completely {..}, although [..] Sistani's thought [..] rests on an important distinction between government (hakumah) and sovereignty (siyada). Government can rest with the people, but sovereignty is reserved for god; the trick is to determine what aspects of life are legitimately within the bounds of temporal decision making. What makes moderate Islamist thought compatible with democracy (potentially) is a willingness to define the realm of the political (hakumah) broadly - god [sic,ed.] does not tell us about zoning codes or foreign policy alignment decisions - and to then look for the best political form to make decisions in that broad zone of the political.
REF.
Public Opinion
SELIM 2
One evening, quite late - probably in the summer of '56 - there was a loud altercation outside on the pavement. Nothing could be seen because the garden wall was so high, but the rumour circulating was that it involved a member of Selim's family. In the morning, I went through the door onto the wide pavement, finding, to my horror and fascination, that there was a now dried trail of blood which seemed to start just to the left of the door and lead from right to left towards the garage door.
The details were later filled in: Selim's brother or cousin or a friend had been stabbed in the shoulder in a fight over a woman.
I never remember telling mother or father about the blood: it would have been inconceivable anyway; you all know what eight year old boys are like. They like to have their little secrets on which can be built monumental, pleasurable fantasies, full of half-facts, exaggerations and preposterous notions, the spells of which would be broken by the airing of mundane facts to adults.
READING LOUD AND CLEAR ?
A few more readers tell me that the links (a vital part of this site) are only visible at the bottom of the page in IE. There are two ways to look at this
(1) Get excited and try and fix it
(2) adopt an attitude of ca m'est egal, a Gallic shug, long ashed Gitane poised precariously in lips, bow to the inevitability of being unable to climb the steep hill, to rise over the cusp of technological ignorance only very slowly with unsteady steps.
Being caught between the two in my desire to write and be read, rather than be caught in the ever present trap of the New Technoolgies - that of becoming more involved in means than ends - I am resigned to writing and hoping for the best.
There is a solution, however, which satisfies both my desire for a fully operating site and to get on : ask, kindly, if my readers will load up a second browser, such as Mozilla, Netscape (which is run on Mozilla, apparently), as well as their primary browser (IE v.{x}). Thus, when you have an urge to find out what is happening "Under Baghdadskies", remember - for the moment - this site requires gentle handling, and a different browser. God Bless and keep you all: if there is god and he understands English.
SITEMETERs & EGO TRIPs
Sitemeter use inevitably leads to statistic junkiehood. In an earlier post you will see a description of the feeling of posting into the void: that it felt very much like writing a Post It! note, getting into the car, driving into the country, down a little used, out of the way lane, sticking the small yellow note to a telegraph post, and retreating.
There is are a steady stream of visitors, which is satisfying, despite there being the sneaking feeling that, because many are 0 second visits, they are automatic checks from technical sites, which are simply checking to see if they can sell me something. Indeed, many of them are ISP registation and web development firm.
Those of you who have sitemeters - and are as curious as I am - will realise it is possible to back track to see the sites that visit you. Most of mine do in fact seem to be technical ones, which leaves the suggestion that I am still "writing into the wind". This is not a big problem for me; it had never been a problem before webogs. Almost all my efforts are in dusty files which no one has read, or likely ever will. At least, a weblog is a useful place to leave bits of the bit stream of one's consciousness when blighted with a decrepid PC and an undercapacity hard drive!
"Onwards and upwards", towards the vanquishing of the ego! But, How ? : suely the internet is a breeding ground for ego?
Saturday, December 06, 2003
RECENT POST FROM JUAN COLE
Census Plan bypasses IGC
verbatim:
THE IRAQI CENSUS BUREAU
Made up a plan that would have allowed a census to be completed by September 1, but the plan was immediately rejected by the US and did not reach the Interim Governing Council before their Nov. 15 vote on creating a transitional government through caucus elections. According to AFP, angry council members said they might have voted differently. The plan did not arrive from the Census Bureau because of a bureaucratic SNAFU. Still, the US officials had seen the plan and rejected it and did not bother to bring it up with the IGC. The outcome looks manipulated even if it was not. Of course, the real reason for trying to get a new transitional government by July 1 is to get Iraq out of the news before the fall presidential campaign.
COMMENT
Professor Cole links to an article in the Khaleej Times Online on this organisation,The Iraqi Census Bureau, 4 December 2003. which says:
WASHINGTON - US officials have rejected a plan devised by Iraqi census officials to tally up Iraq’s population in less than a year to clear the way for general elections in September, The New York Times said on Thursday.
The plan, which called for all Iraqi teachers to go to every home on June 30 with a streamlined set of questions, was devised in October but never reached the Iraqi Governing Council for vetting, members of the council told the daily.
Although there is pressure from Ayatollah Sistani to go for a a quick election in about 9 months, it would seem commonsense and reasonable to accept as correct the assessment of the IPA that it would be impractical in the present climate of turmoil and uncertainty, where fear and intimidation are pretty much order of the day. The poor teachers, probably doing the work for the love of their country and little, or no pay, would themseves be under threat or at least intimidation, let alone the population in areas still supportive of the former regime. What sensible person would argue that people in these areas would be voting the way they wanted to?
A solution seems to be there for the taking.
Agree
(1) to allow the IP [or preferably the UN as administrator and the Coalition as guarantee of peace and stability] to "rule" Iraq, unhindered, for a fixed, agreed, period of, say, at least 12 months, and
(2) for a caucus for an Iraqi governent to operate for say, 2 years, from summer 2004, followed by
(3) full national elections a year later or so later.
This would have the benefit of allowing
(1) further time to restore social stability and the organisation of requisite institutions of state: bringing police and a New Iraqri Army and other organisations to full effectiveness by the general election in, say 2006.
(2) allow for the re-education of the Iraqis into the ways of democracy (said without out being patronising: the work of schools and universities, essential here, bringing on a new generation of young voters), while the debate over Muslim attitudes to women voting, etc, would be thrashed out amongst the various parties.
((3) the greatest chance of first-time success: avoiding the chance of a revolution led, say, by disaffected fundamentalist Muslims, or at leat, a pattern of well organised civil unrest, suggested by the reports above that certain clerics, of uncertain provence and loyalty, intent on organising strikes: at this stage, everyone needs to get back to work, or be provided with work to feed their families, which in itself will encourage acceptance of such a long transitional phase.
What will create further discontent is a long period of about 4-5 years, where there is no work, no businesses dare set up in a hostile climate, and the die-hards of the former regime continue to do their best to disrupt any efforts to restore normality to everyday life - let alone the body politic - while the Coaliton flounder trying to keep control with too few troops on the ground.
A flight back abroad of the best people - doctors, dentists, engineers, computer experts, academics, business men - who have recently returned, or the inhibition to return of those planning to, intent on contributing to their countries development, would be a disaster for Iraq. Four million were said to left in the decades up to 2003.
The estemable Prof. also writes
ABU ARVAARK....
questioned my description of Sistani as a pure democrat. What I meant by that was only that in his fatwas since June, he has consistently said that legitimate government must derive from the will of the people ("al-hukumah ash-shar`iyyah munbathiqah min iradat ash-sha`b" or words to that effect). He specifically says that sovereignty derives from the people. That seems to me as democratic as anything said by Enlightenment thinkers in Europe. Of course, Sistani does demarcate a limit to democracy, which is that the people must not legislate or adopt policy that directly contradicts Islamic law. But then all democracies are limited by constitutional provisions. A majority of Americans now might not vote for all the 10 amendments to the constitution that make up the Bill of Rights. But they are stuck with them anyway. Likewise, Sistani thinks an Iraqi democracy would be stuck with the "constitutional" principles of shari`ah or Islamic law. But he nevertheless insists on one person one vote as the guarantor of governmental legitimacy. That seems to me a commitment to pure democracy.
It is simpler: a religious dignitary of Sistani's eminence has - despite his quietist political role in the past and his current expressed desire for a quick election - a hierarchy of values which put Sharia above anything else. So arguments about his democratic credentials will have to be sucked in order to be seen.
Iraq will, in effect, be a testing ground for a modern way of looking in the modern Muslim/Arab world, which it is to be hoped will preclude any religious law taking precedence over man made law. Evidence is clear: where Islamic law takes precedence, despite its many virtues, countries adopting Sharia in full, lock stock and barrel, rarely progress in the western liberal democratic sense. it might be argued Malaysia disproves this point, with it's thriving ecconomy. Egypt, with a long history of Islamic subversion - beautifully depicted in The Alexandra Quartet by Lawrence Durrell - with secular undemocratic governments ruling for decades, have faced significant social tensions due to fundamentist agitation, bubbling to the surface for time to time. Successive governments have had a hard time keeping the lid on.
Iraq is not the sole place to deal with these issues. It is fascinating to see it all going on in Iraq, and to wonder what the outcome will be. A wider debate in the Arab world and beyond, perhaps as part of a Standing Conference on the Middle East, has to develop which specifically asks the peoples of these countires, Do you want to part of the modern world, or for the sake of religious tradition, fall behind in a rapidly changing world? There is no question of Islam, per se, being a "bad" religion, in comparison with others. This is patently, obviously, not true. Other religions have had to shift their principles with the general shift in society itself. In the Islamic world, this is not accepted by the fundamentalists. Much like the Christian fundamentalists with their insanities about evolution and abortion. But despite the word fundamental,fundamentalism, with it's derivation in Latin, fundare " to found", is of course, modern; a turning back to older ideas. As are the notions of the fundamentalist Christians with their belief in every word of the Bible, literally.
T E Lawrence in the inaccurate, flawed, but irresistably spectacular David Lean film, Lawrence of Arabia- in the Nafud desert crossing sequence - when told by Ali, "But it is written!", replies firmly,"Nothing is written!" For me, a believer in human laws made for humans by humans- changeable in the like of circumstances - this sums it up.
Friday, December 05, 2003
GRAND AYATOLLAH SISTANI
Guardian gives extended profile based an article by Amir Tahiri in Asharq Al-Awsat. Hammorabi (Wednesday, December 03) has filled out more of the gaps from an Arabic website.
BBC
gives potted biogs of some of the major players.
SISTANI = SIEYES
Elsewhere argued, tongue in cheek, Sistanti for the role of Sieyes in The French Revolution Game. Please give me your views on this. I re-post a Sieyes quote:
"So long as the philosopher does not go outside the bounds of truth, he must never be accused of going too far. His function is to fix the political end, and he cannot do that until he has arrived there. If he were to stop half way, and raise his standard there, he might merely mislead. On the other hand, the duty of the administrator is to adapt his advance to the nature of the ground. The philosopher does not know where he is, unless he has reached his goal; the administrator, unless he sees where his goal is, does not know where he is going."
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
ZARA KAZEMI
A disgusting, terrifying, informative programme on UK channel 4 TV, Wednesday 2 December, Iran Undercover, on the death of Zara Kazemi, who was beaten to death on 10 July 2003, by people linked to the Iranian Prosecutor General. Zara, a Canadian Iranian, had lived outside Iran for years. She made the mistake of being caught filming student protests, was arrested and beaten. Apparently she took the beatings, and the men who were doing the beating didn't like it: they expected contrition and wailing that they hear when they beat Iranian women. Presumably they kept beating her till they heard what they were expecting. But all they got was defiance and silence. Terminal silence.
No evidence so far - though soon will be now the programme has been aired - of sanctions decisions by the countries with strongest trade links with Iran, such as the UK, to put pressure on Iran, in no uncertain terms, for this pointless official murder. Pointedly, instead, we saw a video clip of Jack Straw, smiling obsequiously at the Iranian Foreign minister, who, for some reason appeared to have left his tie at home.
A student leader, Amir Zakovah, was arrested while the film was being made, sentenced to 8 years in prison; beaten frequently. There was a poignant scene wher he told his mother, a few days before he was arrested (they had told him to expect it), that she was to be strong and get on with life. I wonder if she will ever see him alive again.
The programme elicited the information that 1000s of students had been locked up and 100s "disappeared".
A former leader of Ansar Al-Islamia in Iran, now living in Europe, protected by the Americans and Europeans, is spilling the beans on his former bosses. Book burning seemed to be one of the things they went in for. I wonder
where I read about book burning before?
A nice film sequence - shot from moving car - showing rows of luxury villas owned, it was claimed, by the clerical leadership. So it goes.
My view, expressed elsewhere, is that there will be a velvet revolution in Iran quite soon, but only if the Coalition stay in Iraq. If there was any reason for them staying in any numbers beyond 12-18 months this would be it.
And of, course, it is to be hoped the same sort of thing will happen - with the encouragement of Coalition forces in Iraq - in Syria, Jordan, Saudi and Egypt. No prizes for guessing in which order they will be brought into the sphere of civilised values. For some reason, which is only beginning to form in my little gray cells, I think Egypt will be the last to reform. This either shows I know nothing or more than I think I do.
Baghdadskies
recollections of a childhood in Baghdad in the 1950s, useful links and some ideas on current events
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Baghdadskies
recollections of a childhood in Baghdad in the 1950s, useful links and some ideas on current events
ACCESSING BAGHDADSKIES > PROBLEMS WITH SIDE LINKS
* I use Netscape 7.1 for accessing Blogger and of course, for adding the HTML through the Blogger
site.
* Accessing Baghdadskies with Internet Explorer seems to leave out links
* Would be grateful for reports if you use IE (state version)
* If you Netscape/Mozilla (or other) please confirm if links are present
* If you visit the site on a regular basis, please load Netscape 7.1 until resolved
Felicitations
COMCAST.NET
COMCAST have done a piece from Associated Press on who they think the guerrillas are. A nice touch: the description of how the FBI team worked out who had carried out one of the attacks. It goes against my principles to go into the technical side of things. I just like forensics.
There is a link on that page to a piece on the Palestinian/Israeli "Accord" reported on British TV tonight, where they showed footage of various ex-Israeli government ministers and Palestinian worthies thrashing their positions out with maps, accompanied by assorted scratchings of heads and pointings. In one case a Palestinian gentleman literally sweating buckets over a Gruyere cheese-like map of settlements in assorted colours as he gave his exposition. It appears they have been amongst the Engs, weeks or even months, for part of the time, somewhere in the leafy Home Counties. I suppose it was paid for by the EU, as usual. So it goes.
The Israeli government does not like what they have agreed and is ignoring the Accord.
BUSH TALKS TURKEY, GOOSE AND DOESN'T DUCK
Abstract of most salient points from interview while visiting UK in November. Worth the effort to read the whole thing. If he was speaking ex tempore, he comes over as much more knowledgeable and savvy than anyone could have imagined. More impressed after reading that than with anything I have ever heard him say in soundbites on TV. My view had been that he might lose the next election, but I am thinking of changing my mind. If only he could spit all that stuff out on the TV instead of using colloquialisms that really grate. He's a scion of the East Coast Elite, not a bod what turns that long, drilly thing with a big oily chain like on the movies played by Paul Newman, or whoever.
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Sedgefield, England)
November 21, 2003
INTERVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT BY AL-SHARQ AL-AWSAT
The American Embassy
London, England
November 19, 2003
(1) GWB: ...half the Muslims live under democratic societies and they're contributing citizens. And those societies have got different ways of dealing with democracy. And Iraq's democracy will emerge in a uniquely Iraqi fashion.
(2) Q. Are we saying that you are doing the transfer of power earlier than planned because the pressure, because of the loss of life, the French, everybody --
GWB: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. [9 "NO's Bush, ed.] Because what I told you, that the Governing Council -- the circumstances -- the situation in Iraq and the Governing Council's progress led us to believe that this transfer of sovereignty could take place in a realistic and helpful way.
(3) ...the oil is flowing, up to about 2.1 million barrels a day, to the benefit of the Iraqi people....
(4) I believe that the Palestinians deserve a state.
(5) I delineated Israel's responsibilities -- end the settlements, and not prejudice final negotiations on states with
walls, to end the daily humiliation of the Palestinians.
(6) ...on Iran...Syria, and your friends in Saudi Arabia.
GWB: ....
Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Abdullah is an honest man. And he is a friend of mine. I like him and respect him. And he has told me that we are joined at fighting off the terrorist organizations which threatened the Kingdom and they threaten the United States, and he's delivering. He also has told me that he's going to work on reform, and I believe him.
Iran: The choice is theirs. They must adhere to the non-proliferation treaty that they agreed to. And they must be transparent and open and honest with the world about their ambitions. It looks like we're making some progress. The Secretary of State, as you know, yesterday met with ministers from European countries with this message; that we all need to speak with a unified voice that says to the Iranians, get rid of your nuclear weapons ambitions. And hopefully the -- not hopefully -- and work with the IAEA to develop a open and transparent regime with the Iranians.
Syria: Again, it's the leader of Syria's choice to make. The most important thing that he can do -- oh, by the way, on the Iranians, one other point I want to make to you is that they hold al Qaeda operatives. And we would hope that those al Qaeda operatives were sent back to their countries of origin.
Q: From Iran.
GWB: In Iran, yes.
Syria: We have talked to Syria before and we still feel very strongly about the same thing, that they need to shut down the Hezbollah offices in their country, Syria.
Q: -- Jihad --
GWB: Hezbollah. And JI, absolutely. Hamas, if there are such offices there. And they need to do a better job on their border to stop any infiltration going from Syria into Iraq with weapons and terrorists and Jihadists. A peaceful Iraq is in Syria's interest. A free and peaceful Iraq is in the interest of the neighborhood. And we would hope that Syria would be cooperative in the development of a free and peaceful Iraq, and not turn away from any infiltrations that might be taking place-- that are taking place -- from Syria into Iraq.
Monday, December 01, 2003
IRAQIS
Imad Khadduri
Profile by Riverbend
* Baghdad in the 1950s and 60s
* Quotes from Imad Khadduri's book
* available by instalment online "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage"
NEW LINKS 1 DECEMBER O3
Following the theme of, Is Democracy the Right Model for Iraq?
(1) Interview with Bush > he mentions the notion of "a democracy suitable for Iraq"
(2) The Mises Review has a series of articles, including these two "Stand alone" book reviews:
* Blood for Unity : Why We Fight : Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism
* The Trouble with Democracy
Sunday, November 30, 2003
WHY IRAQ?
No not the invasion. Have you ever asked yourself why media and bloggers are concentrating on Iraq rather than, say, troubled states in Africa or Asia? There was a surfeit of Warblogging in the early days, but they seemed to have dissolved into the morning mist - at the hint of less carnage and military hardware - to be replaced by the politicos, of course.
The warblogging seems, on reflection, to have been an extention of computer war gaming, though many warbloggers had some sort of academic provenance. I had a deep feeling of antipathy to the enthusiasm which hardware, software - wetware even - were adumbrated, in that subtle blend of acronyms and pseudo-jargon that our cousins from across the pond are so fond of using; and, of course, the fact that they very overwhelmingly on-a-roll-gungho-whatever- gets- you off-I love- the- smell- of- napalm- in- the- morning sorta guys.
The tendency of one group to objectify another, the in-group drive which - though indelibly etched into the human psyche and modus operandi - is something to be wary of. It important for someone to point this out at frequent intervals, even to a chorus of indifference and/or ignorant cries of, So what? It matters in the overall scheme of things: it was the strong in-group feeling that created the impulse to invade Iraq, on dubious grounds - in effect trying to lie to the public which did not believe the reasons given Despite the falsity of the reasons, there will be good result for the Iraqis and the wider Middle East in the end. The danger in Iraq is that before long some reconstututed military grouping will take over, again, 5 years down the line.
It will take many years before a uncorrupt, competent political class and reformed, reliable military evolves from the ashes of Saddam's madhouse. It must not be forgotten for a moment the trauma the people of Iraq have suffered. TV images of a few people gloating over the deaths of Coalition soldiers is not the point. A few blips on the radar screen in the great scheme of things. The maddening thing is how, if they got onto the streets to really report events and opinion, the foreign - Arab and Western - media could actually help to mend feelings. What they actually do is send the message back to the West - in effect to the U.S. public - that those chanting hatred of the invaders, telling them to go home, are representative of Iraqis as a whole. Go into the homes of a wide range of Iraqis, ask them how they are coping, what their aspirations are. Humanise the whole thing in a way that TV can do. Don't repeatedly send out the message - overt or subliminal; real or contrived - that, Iraqis are savages. They are not. They are angry, confused, depressed, traumatised, penniless,without work, short of medicines, worrying about their children. Try to be empathetic and through that empathy develop a proper sympathy for them and a desire to help them. It is a great moral and ethical training ground for what it is to be truly human. To be properly human is to go beyond the human. Who can say that in Latin?
The Americans had one thing on their minds: protect themselves against terrorism in the homeland. Now they have to run that necessary operation alongside nation-building and the settling of the Middle East Crisis - on the ground, not at a distance. Few sensible people hope they will fail. The world is increibly more connected together than it ever was.
It is useless speculating about the stages through which Iraq will go on the way towards stability and peace. It is easy to fall back on cynicism, both about the U.S. government's motivations and the country and people they claim to have come to save. It has been more and more written about in recent weeks that the U.S. went into Iraq for one reason, but is now having to cope with dealing with the situation from a different set of criteria, because events dictate that it does so. It is good to learn from one's mistakes and move on. Despite the echos of conspiracy theories, America is a free and the most open society in the world, capable of changing its direction in the light of changing events and circumstances.
IS IT FAIR TO BLAME ISLAM ?
The other night someone on the British TV said something which I find very interesting, effectively : joining a Church, being a member of a Church, being recognised as a member by other members, is a bit like having Party Card. A tiddly bit too Koestlerish, perhaps, to bring this up, but think in terms of the potential for fundamentalist Islamisation in Iraq.
In-groupism is fit and healthy in the U.S. as well as in countries like Iraq, despite the U.S. being the main mover in globalisation, which one might think would bring a more universalist approach. However, the experience the Americans are having in Iraq, the cost in money and lives, is teaching them to temper their geopolitics with a little humanity. They know they can't succeed without dealing with the reconstruction of Iraq in humane, personal terms. Not, in a sense, because they wanted or planned to, but because the political process demands it. Yes, there are the great players on the stage, those who are coming up, those who going down; those who people put hope in and who are now disappointed in; those who were not trusted who must show their mettle or disappear from the scene.
With a majority Church-going population in the U.S. and born again Christians in charge at the Whitehouse - with regular prayer meetings reported going on in the White House - what chance for a less grindingly calculating way of doing political business? If those of sincere faith - whatever religion - are really understanding the tenets of their faiths they know it is their actions that count not their piety. The loic of choice dictates a good result for all.
Religious and tribal loyalties have always been the what people fall back on in crisis. They tend to be the default values when things get difficult. Somehow or other efforts have to be made to bring different groups with their different views into a unified whole. Education will play a vital part: if the state education system in Iraq is taken over, in part, by too many Islamic groups, this will only lead to trouble. In a globalised world - which does not just mean money and goods but people and culture - what better than to teach Iraqi children their place in the wider scheme of things. This is what children and student in other countries learn.
It will be impossible to insist there can be no religious schools, but the safeguards to prevent sedition through these schools and the mosques, where hardcore political lines have always been pumped out, to varying degrees, in ways that would certainly shock the parishioners of an Anglican Church in a sleepy village in England! There are certain types of Muslim - not only Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters - who retain a backward looking attitude to the world and their place in it. They have to learn to be forward looking, not harp back to the past too much for the genuine good of all.
The use of the Mosque to propagate unhealthy, aggressive thought in the impressionable is in part due to the corrupt governments that rule most Arab countries, rather than to anything the West has done to them. Few Arabs - religious or secular - would admit this malignant influence too loudly, because Arabism is still a prevalent attitude, as has been widely discussed in the media. The passe Arabism is one of the root causes of their problems. Islam, especially in the Middle East, is too political - it is a politico-religious system despite the political element having been toned down in general over time - and frequently uses its control of vulnerable, persuadable young people with no hope to propagate arguments that do no good but stir up more unnecessary hatred and negativity. Even, or especially, in countries like Egypt this stirring up continues, because they are under authoritarian secular control. Egypt locks up both secular intellectuals and religious agitators. Countries like Egypt need freedom and justice for their people too. The U.S. presnce in Iraq will surely stimulate change.
Iran is of great concern in all of this: the sooner the mullahs are removed from power the better for the Iranians and the region. It is they stir up so much of the trouble in the area, support various proxy wars, such as in Lebanon, and generally instill a hated of the west. Their murderous authoritarianism, which can't possibly be seen by even them as in any way religiously guided, is exemplified in a report that a Canadian journalist, of presumably Iranian origins, was beaten to death recently following her witness of a student demonstration and her subsequent arrest.
The talk of the Iraqis being given their head as quickly as possible has to be seen in relation to the threat of destabilisation in the region in general and the prospects of instability in Iran. It will take a long time to produce a well trained and equipped and trustworthy Iraqi Army & Air Force: do the Americans really trust them yet? Not really. How long will it take to trust them? Quite a few years. They are not happy to see their soldiers and those of other Coalition forces dying, but they want to make sure they don't have to go back in again. It is unlikely they will leave anyway: they are said to spending billions on two intelligence centres, one in Baghdad, the other in Mosul.
Iraq could show the way out of this backward looking and chip-on-the-shoulder way that has been the attitude of the Middle Eastern Arabs for the best part of a century.
When all is said and done, what humans always do, deal with people, not problems, is at the root of it. That is, the first question is always, Who are you?, What is your affiliation? When it should be, What do you think? How can this be solved? How can we help each other to make things better? People feel they must take "sides", take "positions", and defend them even when they don't really believe in them wholeheartedly. People take sides because this is the simplest way of protecting their interests and getting something, anything, done.
Party politics is necessary, and essential in the formation of governments. It is a fantasy to think that independent minded politicians are going to have any real influence on events. But in the modern world, this is all we get. There is no truly moral agenda to politics, as there ought to be. The desecration of the environment attests to that, mainly by the biggest democracy America and the greatest dictatorship, China.
The invasion of Iraq, as a imperative, has to be set against a Korea, Burma or Zimbabwe, all in a way almost as bad as Iraq was under Saddam, and needing to be put back together again, like Humpty Dumpty ought to have been, for the good of their peoples. But the West stands by and does nothing for these peoples. There are those who know what is right, but in a world of influence peddling they don't get a look in.
CAN DARWIN CAN TEACH US ANYTHING?
Googled for an article by Raphael Sargarin - impressed me the time I read it - in order to post a link to it,. Called: Adapt or Die: What Charles Darwin can teach Tom Ridge about homeland security, it appeared in September 03 issue of Foreign Policy. I am gratified to see BILGE - who apparently knows a computer builder named Chip - referred to it under his title, Adapting to Threats, in post on Friday, 26 Sept. 03:
Adapting to Threats Friday, 26 Sept. 03, warfare
Foreign Policy has published a wise article on biological adaptation. This might seem an off-beat subject, but it actually makes a great deal of sense. Raphael Sagarin suggests that an understanding of evolutionary biology would be helpful to American policy-makers as they devise responses to Al Qaeda and other terrorist threats. Unfortunately pious nincompoops like Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft probably don't believe in evolution, so they're unlikely to learn anything from Sagarin or the book he cites, "Evolution and Escalation." Ditto their boss, I'm afraid, though not Rumsfeld and his Pentagon pals, whose Darwinian reforms of the military have clearly transformed warfare. But between ponderous Powell, smarmy Bush, and the "homeland security" team, America's non-military policies will be probably shaped by the usual bureaucratic imperatives until 2008. They may suffice. We won't know for a few more years.
Couldn't have expressed it more succinctly but I will say to Bilge Pump and my 385 readers:
Of course Ashcroft doesn't believe in evolution, you old Sea Lugger. The Born Agains are the worst, don't you find? Although Sagarin's and Vermeij's suggestions are quite pleasingly sound, we are in a ironic position where a fundamentalist U.S. administration, tackling the risks set by another set of fundos, has the tools at hand - to use nature to best advantage - but can't because it's not in the manual they use. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote on more than one occasion.
The source of Sagarin's ideas, or rather the distillation of ideas source was a biologist Geerat Vermeij's 1987, Evolution and Escalation: An ecological History of Life.
postscript
A solitary post to Old Sea legs comments:
Thanks for the plug. I did have a line in there about Bush and Ashcroft not believing in evolution but it got edited out at the last minute. Wait for the longer version coming sometime in a more provocative journal.
cheers,
rafe
Posted by: Raphael Sagarin at 12:41 PM, Wednesday, 1 October 2003
AND FINALLY....
I admit freely to being a different thought plane from most bloggers - most people - on Iraq, but this is my nature. Love it or hate it. All of a piece in my head, I assure you, despite appearing to be a series of serependipitous, unrelated facts and ideas. There is a thesis: Iraq is a country, a place in the fore-front of many minds, where fundamental things are forming, or will form.
The cradle of civilisation: intrinsically interesting; just that many of these people never thought to look at it as a place and a people before, apart from as a source of amusement on Nasty Dictator Syndrome - which is really only an extention of The Godfather Syndrome: fascination with nasty blokes - it's always blokes isn't it - doing nasty things, far away, which are indeed irresistibly fascinating, awful, and wrong in their nastiness, but with which we can both entertain ourselves and exercise our moral muscles. By saying, It's only a story, but what a man that Corlioni! Will. Will to Power. How the mighty fall, etc. Nadir. Nemisis.
The worldwide popularity of Mario Puzzo's books must be telling us something. Perhaps that, deep down, we like, prefer even, strong leaders even to the extent of being prepared to forgo the niceties of a truly "civilisated" society, as GW might say : freedom, justice, democracy. A surprisingly large number of the total world population live in countries where these principles don't operate.
Those living in democracies can't - for the sake of political correctness - be admitting to a natural instinct for authority. I was always impressed by arguments in Richard Sennett's, Authority. He discussed Pullman, he of railway fame, at some length., talking about the bonds of authority. Well, any book with Authority, Power, Totalitarian or Hannah Arendt in the title, I find interesting to be honest.. Crowds and Power, The Totalitarian Temptation (ah, I remember it well, and should really have taken it back to the library). Strange (or maybe not so) since I am against the exercise of too much unfettered power.
Ayatollah Ali Sistani: Sieyes or Mirabeau ?
O.k. it's only a parlour game, but run with it, you students of history. Revolution Act I; the invasion. Act II ( corresponding to 1789-91 ): the debate over the constitution.
Sieyes, who wrote a pamphlet in January 1789, Qu'est-ce le Tiers -Etat? was regarded by Mirabeau as "Mon maitre".
Sieyes:
"So long as the philosopher does not go outside the bounds of truth, he must never be accused of going too far. His function is to fix the political end, and he cannot do that until he has arrived there. If he were to stop half way, and raise his standard there, he might merely mislead. On the other hand, the duty of the administrator is to adapt his advance to the nature of the ground. The philosopher does not know where he is, unless he has reached his goal; the administrator, unless he sees where his goal is, does not know where he is going."
It's over to you. Am I off the mark? If so, who do you suggest for Sistani? Come on chose one and state your reasons. You've only got Sieyes, Mirabeau, Lafayette, Brissot, Louvet, Danton, Fabre-D'Eglantine, Marat, Saint Just, Robespierre and Dumouriez. Don't be put off by any lack of knowledge about these people - look them up. The fun bit is to see if we can get some sort of consensus and whether any of the main characters in the Iraqi "Revolution" (one started by a foreign invasion rather from inside the country) do indeed turn out like these people of over 200 hundred years ago.
Saturday, November 29, 2003
WILL NATIONALISM PLAY ANY PART IN THE NEW IRAQ?
"Nationalism has been a long illness since the 19th. Century. Dictators take advantage very effectively. If France cannot recover from the sickness of nationalism, what hope is there for countries where the peoples have no information?"
Mario Vargo Llosa
Rather disappointed at not having any offers for a debate on the topic of, shall we call it, "Nationalism in the age of almost fully matured globalisation". A ripe gorgonzolla of a discussion, if ever there was one, which there probably won't be on this site. Do I tempt you with:
"I posit the USA is rabidly nationalistic but tends to deny the right of other states to habour nationalistic sentiments because it interferes with the global capitalism it is so good at." Hint: The U.S. would argue for patriotic rather than nationalistic....When the money is on the counter what's the difference?
REAL IRAQ
Iraqis challenge 'Arabism', Thomas L. Friedman, Times Union, 17.08.03
Mock me for coming to this a tad late, but there is no date stamp on the facts, ideas and values (FIV) expressed here.
Propose to do regular profiles of 'Real Iraqis'.
Some copy from Real Iraqis about Real Iraqis would be welcome.
* politicians
* intellectuals
* poets, artists, musicans
* top 10 players > weekly chart
* up and coming
* on the way down
NEW LINK
Salam seems to have filled up his tank with good quality Iraqi petrol (or gas if you are from the New World)
RELIGIONS OF THE BOOK
Stimulated, after reading Mess Pots latest post, to relay something interesting I read.
Umberto Ecco, the Italian professor of semiotics and well-known novelist ("Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum", etc), prolific writer for press, recently gave a lecture at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, on the subject of "Vegetal and Mineral memory: The Future of Books. In it he said:
"...both Hebrew and the early Arabic civilisations were based upon a book and this is not independent of the fact that they were both nomadic civilisations. The ancient Egyptians could carve their records on stone obelisks: Moses and Muhammad (PBAH) could not. If you want to cross the Red Sea, or go from the Arabian peninsula to Spain, a scroll is a more practical instrument for recording and transporting the Bible or the Koran than is an obelisk. This is why these two civilisations based upon a book privileged writing over images."
Ecco lecture printed in Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20-26 November 2003 (issue n. 665)
Friday, November 28, 2003
DOES BAGHDADSKIES HAVE SIDE LINKS?
I use Netscape 7.1 for accessing Blogger and of course, for adding the HTML, but I checked out the site using Internet Explorer (5 or 6) tonight - to my horror the side links are not there !
I would be greatful if you access Baghdadskies with Explorer, if you would report what it looks, or, if you use Netscape/Mozilla and Explorer let me know if there are any differences.
Felicitations
APRICOT
From the Mushtamal, I used to walk up the road a few hundred yards to a road junction where - on the right-hand side - from a small temporary wooden stall a man sold various snacks, including what, for me, was something exotic : dried flat sheets of apricot, nine inches square, mabye 1/8 inch thick, which he wrapped neatly in paper. I am not sure whether my memory is paying tricks with me, but it seems he may have placed the sheets on paper and rolled them together into a neat package.... but you know how reconstructive memory can be. Any one as old as I am will remember the packets of clear gelatin - which, too, came in sheets - for making jelly in the days when you added your own fruit flavourings.
The dried apricot - what is it called in Arabic? - was, I suppose, for adding to various recipes such as lamb stews. I would buy a single sheet, tear off pieces and suck and suck to enjoy the fruity acid tang of something quite special as I walked slowly home.
These are memories I hold of my childhood in Baghdad.
SUBJECTIVE/OBJECTIVE
How could I see Iraq and Iraqis, the Middle East - where our family lived for nearly 20 years - and the Arabs in general, in the same way as a Bush or a Cheney, a Wolfowitz, a Feith or a Perl?
FRUIT AND VEG
The thing people outside Iraq could never realise apart, in recent years, from the visual hints from fleeting TV images of market stalls in the old city of Baghdad near Raschid Street, is the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables grown and readily available in the markets in towns and cities around the country.
Like the Nile, the Tigres and Euphrates flood low-lying land each year, the soil's goodness is replenished by deposition of fine silt replete with minerals. The harvests, everything from wheat to water melons, and of course citrus fruits and dates - though Saddam set back date production - must be the thing that has kept the Iraqis healthy through the lean years, despite the depredations of international sanctions.
1953 FLOOD
In the autumn or winter of 1953, having been in Iraq for about 5-6 months and had my fifth birthday in April, living in our modern villa on the edge of Alwiyah, Dad and I went up in the car to the canal, about 2-3 miles to the north, in what was open country but which must now be surrounded by the urban sprawl that is Sadoun (formerly Saddam) City, to witness the Army sand-bagging the canal banks to prevent flooding. Somewhere there among my mother's albums are black and white photographs showing men in scratchy, British style uniforms, amid a swirling mass of brown, in my memory, water.
We also Sandbagged the drive way to our garden to prevent water coming in. All these houses had walls right round, with heavy metal gates, so the water was kept at bay, though it was about 8 inches to a foot deep. Across the way, the what was a large patch of unbuilt on ground, now a vaste lake which I could look at from the front verandah.
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
I hope they will not do me for copywrite, but, well, oh here goes :
22 August, 1920
A Report on Mesopotamia by T.E. Lawrence
Ex.-Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence,
The Sunday Times, 22 August 1920
[Mr. Lawrence, whose organization and direction of the Hedjaz against the Turks was one of the outstanding romances of the war, has written this article at our request in order that the public may be fully informed of our Mesopotamian commitments.]
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.
The sins of commission are those of the British civil authorities in Mesopotamia (especially of three 'colonels') who were given a free hand by London. They are controlled from no Department of State, but from the empty space which divides the Foreign Office from the India Office. They availed themselves of the necessary discretion of war-time to carry over their dangerous independence into times of peace. They contest every suggestion of real self-government sent them from home. A recent proclamation about autonomy circulated with unction from Baghdad was drafted and published out there in a hurry, to forestall a more liberal statement in preparation in London, 'Self-determination papers' favourable to England were extorted in Mesopotamia in 1919 by official pressure, by aeroplane demonstrations, by deportations to India.
The Cabinet cannot disclaim all responsibility. They receive little more news than the public: they should have insisted on more, and better. they have sent draft after draft of reinforcements, without enquiry. When conditions became too bad to endure longer, they decided to send out as High commissioner the original author of the present system, with a conciliatory message to the Arabs that his heart and policy have completely changed.*
Yet our published policy has not changed, and does not need changing. It is that there has been a deplorable contrast between our profession and our practice. We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil. We spent nearly a million men and nearly a thousand million of money to these ends. This year we are spending ninety-two thousand men and fifty millions of money on the same objects.
Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely peopled; but Abd el Hamid would applaud his masters, if he saw us working. We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want. It may be what the Cabinet has promised them. A Minister in the House of Lords said that we must have so many troops because the local people will not enlist. On Friday the Government announce the death of some local levies defending their British officers, and say that the services of these men have not yet been sufficiently recognized because they are too few (adding the characteristic Baghdad touch that they are men of bad character). There are seven thousand of them, just half the old Turkish force of occupation. Properly officered and distributed, they would relieve half our army there. Cromer controlled Egypt's six million people with five thousand British troops; Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia's three million people with ninety thousand troops.
We have not reached the limit of our military commitments. Four weeks ago the staff in Mesopotamia drew up a memorandum asking for four more divisions. I believe it was forwarded to the War Office, which has now sent three brigades from India. If the North-West Frontier cannot be further denuded, where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the wilfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad. General Dyer was relieved of his command in India for a much smaller error, but the responsibility in this case is not on the Army, which has acted only at the request of the civil authorities. The War Office has made every effort to reduce our forces, but the decisions of the Cabinet have been against them.
The Government in Baghdad have been hanging Arabs in that town for political offences, which they call rebellion. The Arabs are not at war with us. Are these illegal executions to provoke the Arabs to reprisals on the three hundred British prisoners they hold? And, if so, is it that their punishment may be more severe, or is it to persuade our other troops to fight to the last?
We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. all experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?
*Sir Percy Cox was to return as High Commissioner in October, 1920 to form a provisional Government.
source site email > Jane Plotke (cd078@gwpda.org)
Thursday, November 27, 2003
< NEW LINKS > CHENEY'S ROLE
Via Issandr El Amrani found Josh Marshall's link to a set of three articles, "What Cheney Really Believes", in New Republic Online. SEE side link CHENEY
< COMMENT > RICH MIX
A blogger yesterday wrote he was going to stop writing about Iraq because there were enough indigenous Iraqi weblogs - currently about 10 or so - to make his remarks superfluous. I don't feel the same way, despite reading a mass of blogs and journalism. Though if someone says it better, I see no point in re-writing what they have said, prefrring to link to the piece that says it.
The trick is to subtly shift one's focus, as Hercule Poirot would no doubt have said. For me, that means going back over old ground, both the period following the 1991 Gulf War and further back - my original intention - to pre-1958 Iraq, because it is well attested that what goes round comes round. We can learn from history. Humans are the same, do the same, think the same way, want the same things, no matter what age they live in, as is evident from any historical writing.
Three pieces mentioned way down there in the scroll, details of which I re-post below, give a flavour of Iraq in the 50s. The links don't seem to work, and unfortunately, so far, I have beem unable to Google them again. The archive doesn't seem to available online beyond the 70s. If anyone can find these and help me restore the links, I would be grateful:
(1) LETTER FROM BAGHDAD Joseph Weschberg 13 September 1952
* good historical overview
* interesting details [including fascinating section on types of dates grown!]
(2) THE LESSON OF IRAQ William R Polk December 1958
* written by an American from an American perspective
* Jordan as "client state" of U.S. [details on money given and by whom]
* good description of the rise of the Iraq educated classes
* Palestinian problem in relation to stability of Iraq and others
(3) THE US AND IRAQ: A HISTORY Richard Becker 19 October 2002
These are the sort of pieces that help anyone trying to make sense of present and future Iraq, in my humble opinion. Comments on this assertion welcome from any of my three readers who might take the time to look them up.
Issandr El Amrani
has made up for his excuses in not posting to encourage us to read Josh marshall. How refreshingly informative he is, too, about The Power That Is.
This is a stimulus to read more and try to think less. However, I can't resist saying something.
I seem to have good instincts on this. Only yesterday I was reheating the notion that the U.S. would tolerate a certain amount of chaos and suffering in Iraq, for the mean time. Now it seems it might even, possibly, be someone's policy! Or agenda, more like. If any of you have been reading me lately, or have come to my words of wisdom - hgh! - and are going through the old posts, you will know I stopped posting soon after the events that preceded the toppling of the statue in Al Firdaw Square through incredulous disgust: I did not like the way the supposed (who knows?) 9/11 flag - it was said to have miraculously survived the Twin Towers disaster - was brought over to Iraq in some soldiers pocket to be draped over Monsieur Le president's face for the whole world to see. At the time I got all cynical and moaned on about the U.S. military personnel's lack of geography lessons. A deficit that might extend right up to the Commander in chief. Though, of course, he's been busily studying the globe in the Oval Office, no doubt: needing to know where Iran and Syria were.
I would love to know whether the flag draping was "policy" or a rather thoughtless, stupid idea some individual thought up. At least, the Iraqi flag could have been draped first, followed by the Stars and Stripes. Well, perhaps I am being too sensitive and precious. Well, no actually, symbols mean a lot. And no nation is more keen on them than the Americans, who worship their national flag in a way that we British find a little embarrassing. However, one man's satisfying symbol is another man's not to be forgotten insult. And in the Arab world they are big on insults and affront.
My theme on objectification will continue later.
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
< DEBATE > REPLY TO FIRAS AL ATRAQCHI
In The Iraqi Governing Council Continues to Baffle Firas, a Canadian-Iraqi journalist, with knowledge of Middle East issues, oil and gas markets and the telecom industry, reports disapprovingly on the appointment of an American Iraqi woman to the position of Iraqi ambassador to the U.S.
Dear Firas,
You are right in what you say, but who else is available to take up leadership positions except tribal leaders and clerics? We read about the unwillingness of members of the Provisional Council to actually get on with the job they have been given. Bremer is reported to be tearing his hair out in frustration trying to find 5 committee members to sit on any one day - many preferring to leaving the country to get on with their business and personal affairs instead. And that they do not go out to meet the people, but zip between their homes and the secure compound. Of course they are not being properly protected and are in fear of their lives. I have described before how it resembles the French Revolution as depicted in the film "Danton", starring Gerard Depardieu as Danton, with a fragile leadership making decisions while quaking in their boots as to whether they will live to see them implemented. Robespierre in the film is seen lying is bed for days, sweating, pulling the white sheet over his head in terror.
It will sort itself out when Iraqis of a sufficient calibre from inside Iraq, untainted by association with the former regime, come forward to take leadership roles. By the nature of things they have to be untainted and this, in effect, means young men and women who, almost certainly, have had no, or little, political experience. Hence 1793. Oor, more correctly, between October 1789 and June 1791, which has been termed Act II of the french Revolution, during which consitutinal issues were debated.
There is no reason for true Ba'athi [ Ba'ath = Renewal, Rebirth] not to play some part in a New Iraq. I have argued previously that the Ba'ath - as distinct from the Ba'ath/Saddam elite - have to play a role. This because they are the core of a secular-minded Iraq. Though it is obvious that the fascist/nationalist side of their philosophy would need to go. The world has moved on since Aflacq - who died in Iraq in 1989 by the way - and Nasser.
Any offers for a debate on "Nationalism and Globalisation?
The U.S. is petrified of the clerics ruling Iraq. We must see it from their point of view - in realpolitik. They would prefer an Iraq that is a bulwark against Iran (despite some policy fellahs that want to pussy foot with them), which would - by being strong, and hopefully democratic - "encourage" a Second Iranian Revolution - a velvet one, of course - with eventual regime change in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In terms of realpolitik this means the U.S. doesn't care how Iraq is governed and how much the Iraqis suffer, in the short and medium term, as long as Islamic Sharia law doesn't take hold. Any new Iraq Constitution that was not weighted strongly towards Sharia will, in any case, be anathema to the clerics. This is the one stumbling block to the rapid writing and adoption of a constitution. No one wants to sign it without Shia elements for fear of getting the chop, literally. The Shites who want power know they will never have a better chance to take what they see as their share of it.
If things do not move on more rapidly, the clerics will take over by default. This does not necessarily mean total disaster, because the Iraqi Shites are moderate and mostly not pro-Iranian. But those with most to lose in a democratic Iraq will fight hardest to obtain power, legitimate or not. Juan Cole covers this in his essays on the Shites in Iraq.
Logically, for now, it would be preferable to have Sharia law than lawlessness. In this life, the only things that are irreversible are birth, genetic mutation, aging, death, nuclear radiation and the age of the universe. Buildings can be built and knocked down; people can believe one thing then the opposite in the light of circumstances. If the choice is between a period of undemocratic stability followed by a civil war and shakey democracy, then a shakey democracy it ought tobe.
If the clerics do take over in the immediate future, civil war would be inevitable because of Iraq's' modern history: the ex-Ba'ath, the minor secular democratic groups, the educated middle classes as an entity regardless of political leanings, will not be happy to be governed by strict Islamic laws having lived without them for so long. Yes Iraq is Muslim, but the Iraqi identity is well defined and religion is only part of that indentity. Even Iraqi jews from the diapora - 100,000 went to Israel! - still dream of and keep their cIraqi culture in their hearts, many still longing to return to their birth country. This must suggest they feel Iraqi first and Jewish second.
Imagine the U.S. forces sitting idly by in its barracks in Baghdad and Mosul as a strict Muslim ethos is forced down the throats of a westernised, well educated Iraqi population. This will only result in the wholesale departure of all the best people, once more. It was said that at least 4 million professional and business people left Iraq in the last 25-30 years. They want to come back to play their part. The educated women certainly won't want to return if they are going to have stay in doors. It is quite hard to run a medical practice or school from your kitchen.
As long as it takes to create a constitution with separation of powers - as per the western model - seems to be the watch word.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Dad (2)
This particular day I regularly recall in cinematic detail. Connotative, catenative memories enjoyed with intense pleasure: pleasure at being able to remember; pleasure at knowing I had had such simple, pleasing experiences.
This was the place where I ran around with my cowboy suit of tassle-fringed waist coat, wide-brimmed hat, holster slung low on hip, percussion-cap pistol in hand, chasing round the garden, ducking down behind low hedges, re-enacting scenes from a a film I had just seen. " The Man from Laramie" at the King Ghazi : I got so upset when James Stewart was shot in the hand, wrapped it with a 'kerchief, and grimaced bravely.
'55 or '56. A late summer afternoon. The Mushtamal - our old fashioned Turkish house that father had proudly found to rent instead of the modern, California-style houses the company offered - had a rectangular garden of about 1/2 an acre, or slightly more. Surrounded by a 10 foot high brick wall, the road frontage had two doors: a single, solid wooden door in the middle, and on the right a double door to the garage under the house, which ran along a third of the southern wall and formed part of it. The windows faced inwards to the garden.
The garden formed two squares: the top one laid out in a regular pattern of paths, dividing it into four smaller squares, with vine arbours running over the paved paths and flower beds in between; at the bottom, a lawn.
Outside the house itself - a large rectangular matchbox standing on the striking end - with its large marble tiled patio, its centre piece, a round pedestal fountain stood at the southern entrance to the cross of paths.
A substantial single story, flat-roofed servants' quarter was integrated into the north-west corner of the garden wall, opposite the house. It's windows looked towards the house.
The quarters had a flat roof, with a one foot low wall round it, which could be reached by a open staircase running up the western wall. From the top the rest of the garden could be seen: the lawn a square of grass surrounded by another path with orange trees running along the wall, four or five date trees in the middle. A local man came once ayear to tickle the flowers with a long stick to pollinate the flowers. A tall, mature white mulberry tree stood against the south wall tucked in the behind the bathroom, which was a separate building attached to the end of the house. Open stairs ran onto the top of the bathroom, and, from there, in a second flight, to the a wooden fronted Turkish-style slatted balcony, running the whole length of the house, from which each bedroom accessed individually. A further flight of stairs ran, like a ladder, to the flat roof.
Dad used the servant quarters as his darkroom. The back room had a sink with cold water tap. He had always been keen on photography, his main camera was a black Rollifex with metallic trim with a flip up lid - a look down through-the-lense-camera long before modern SLRs came on the scene.
I picture this one specific late afternoon and evening when watching him develop a film as if it was a movie. Playing around outside along the concrete paths while he was busy inside, I then joined him inside under the red light to watch the film developing canister being prepared for washing the film. It was dusk as I watched him bring the black canister outside, attach the garden hose and flush out the developing chemicals onto the dry earth, the waste water running off in rivulets. Playing with the wet soil I created mud, with which I made a pond.
Whenever I remember this scene in my life, at this point in my recollection - it always impresses me - I think about Bilhartzia, now called Schistosomiasis. Someone probably mentioned it to me that night, or subsequently. It was said you might catch the water fluke if you swam in the Tigres, but whether it was true or not I don't know. The larvae of this flat worm is carried in fresh water snails. My brother swam across the Tigres one summer, towards the oil refinery: we always had a frissant of fear of this "germ", as it was to us, would do us some unimagined harm.
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Apparently the last credible census in Iraq was held in 1957. So how are they going to vote until everyone is registered? It must surely take at least 12-18 months to organise and carry out a new census. In the mean time a conclave of the great and good has to chose a leadership.
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The world wants to know all about the Iraqis in personal terms. They get a surfit of conjecture, exaggeration, generalisations and narrow reporting.
This is the sort of thing we need to read:
"I've started translating an abridged essay on the "Personality of Iraqis" by Ali Al-Wardi a renowned and respected Iraqi sociologist. He died in the late nineties a lonely death after the previous regime had isolated him, king Hussein of Jordan offered him free medical treatment back then. His books were banned for years because he had dared to criticize the consecutive Iraqi governments and had thoroughly analyzed the ambidextrous nature of the Iraqi society, his treatises were a shock to both Islamists and top gov. officials during his sixty years of writing, and he was repeatedly threatened with murder. There was supposed to be a website by Iraqis introducing his ideas and works after the war but I can't find it anywhere. But his books are translated into many languages so I highly recommend them if you can find them."
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An ebook by Enver Masud, The War on Islam is available here.
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This is the WHO fact sheet on schistosomiasis
