Baghdad: a day in the life
There's a moving account here of what it's like living in Baghdad these days, written by one of our Iraqi producers in the BBC bureau. We don't read much any more about Iraq ... this is definitely worth a moment of your time.
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Robin,
It is not the facts of life in a lawless civil war zone that is shocking, but our collective, and repeated, ability to insulate ourselves from these realities. Dafur, Myanmar, Gaza, Zimbabwe, parts of DR Congo and many other places are just as terrifying today. We forget.
You will personally recall the Vietnam War, (under way when you were a student) - that was another political war where the common people suffered extraordinarily as is mostly the case in war. People are not 'collateral damage'. Everyone matters. Life in Cambodia under Pol Pot was valueless. Being "disappeared" in Argentina (or Chile) also comes to mind and of course Rwanda and all previous Holocausts.
It seems terrifyingly easy for our species to let slip the veneer of civilisation. I am of the opinion that the media who live in a secure western World forget this - but it is still a little reassuring that there remains something that moves you in the description of the commonplaces of the lives and deaths of others.
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We should not lose sight of the fact that these people are doing this to each other. Without the brutally oppressive regime of a psychopathic tyrant and a gang of thugs to terrorize them they reveal their true nature.
Those on the left in politics in the West demand that we all accept the doctrines that drive people to such insanity whether it is Islam or Communism with tolerance being somehow equivalent to our own civilization. They not only rationalize that to do less is unjust but condemn anyone who speaks out let alone takes up arms to protect us from such insanity as barbaric. The greatest threat to the survival of our own civilization is internal. It comes from those who fail to make the critical distinctions between us and them.
There are many in the US and Britain who say we should walk away. Perhaps they are right, perhaps Iraq is a lost cause. Perhaps nothing short of a civil war and emergence of another psychopathic tyrant and a gang of thugs to replace Saddam Hussein and the Baathists will bring a return of civil order to the survivors. Yet there are those who still hold out hope that given time these people will somehow come to their senses. Do we invest more of our own blood and treasure or do we cut and run? If we stay are we just kidding ourselves? Is it true that no matter how many of the savages among them we find and kill, there will be more than enough new ones to take their place?
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"We don't read much any more about Iraq ..."
I do.
In fact I'm reading Ron: Suskind: "The Way of the World" right now.
it doesn't look good for Bush and Blair, not good at all...
Democracy Now: "After Ron Suskind Reveals Bush Admin Ordered Iraq-9/11 Fakery, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers Opens Congressional Probe"
Link:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/14/after_ron_suskind_reveals_bush_admin
It's up to the journalists to start asking the hard questions about the illegal war in Iraq now that there is hard evidence of an aggressive war based on the falsification of intelligence.
Who's going to be first in the dock? Dearlove? Blair?
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