Iraq Revisted
Matthew Herbert is a British pop musician, better known as Dr Rockit, who delights to meld pop with politics and creates music which makes unusual connections between apparently unrelated things, like battle tanks and food. In an interview published last weekend the musician says:
“There’s a war on imagination at the moment led by the US government, a war against imaginative and complex responses to things. There were imaginative and complex responses to the Iraq situation from everyone from church to academics, but they chose to ignore them and go to war. Mind you, in one way you have to admire Bush. He is actually himself a radical and imaginative president. He’s imagined the world as a worse place, and made it so”.
The simplistic world view that Bush and Blair have embraced not just in Iraq itself but in terms of international security, becomes daily more of a nightmare. Last week two UK national dailies front-paged the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The Independent instead of the usual front-page picture carried the following text in large letters: “Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale. The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s”. The paper’s editorial, noting that 1.85 million Iraqis have been issued with passports over the last ten months, highlights the ‘brain drain’ as middle-class Iraqis emigrate. It also opines that the presence of Coalition troops is making no difference, and the question of whether troops leave or stay is no longer relevant to the unfolding civil war.
The same day’s Guardian took a similar view. With reference to the swearing in of a government of national unity in Baghdad, the front page says, “much will be made in London and Washington of the fact that this completes a democratic transition that began in December with the election of its parliament. But the reality encountered during three weeks behind the barricades of Baghdad’s increasingly bloody sectarian conflict has more in common with the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Balkans than the optimistic rhetoric to be heard on the manicured lawns of the embassy compounds and in western capitals”. Inside the paper, a two-page spread documents the horror of Iraq’s ‘hidden war’.
Yet still Bush and Blair want to assure us that things are under control and that progress is being made. But both were discomforted during this week’s summit in Washington where Blair did not pick up his Congressional Medal of Honour awarded to great applause in 2003. The fact is that had he accepted it and further demonstrated himself to be the lackey of US foreign policy, his days as Prime Minister, already numbered, would have been dramatically foreshortened. Both men religiously recited their mantra about ‘democracy’ with Blair adding that he had arrived hotfoot from Iraq where he had seen “a child of democracy struggling to be born”. Both are seemingly oblivious to the way that what they understand by democracy has unleashed a reign of terror and oppression, which matches anything that Saddam managed to achieve in that arena. The Bible’s description of the sequence of events in this kind of tragedy is ‘sow the wind; reap the whirlwind’.
Yet both men, for the first time acknowledged that mistakes had been made. With the ratings of both of them being so low in the polls of their respective nations, deep down they must realise that the game is up, and that all they can do is to salvage what is left of their reputations. George Bush admitted that his “tough talking” and his taunting of Osama bin Laden were mistakes but, clearly trying to apportion more serious blame elsewhere, said he thought the greatest mistake had been that of abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. Tony Blair admitted that they had underestimated the challenges that the invasion would throw up, and in an apparent criticism of US policy said that it had been a mistake to have barred members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party from government after the fall of Baghdad. He thus echoed what a number of pundits have said: that the Ba’ath Party managed to foster the most secular regime in the Middle East and could have played a vital role in preventing the current descent into sectarianism. But both men however, must now be aware that the fundamental mistakes were to invade Iraq in the first place and to try to justify invasion on the grounds of the detection of weapons of mass destruction, rather than being honest about the real objectives, the securing of oil supplies and execution of the policy of regime change.
As I write, news of the death of more British soldiers has been broadcast and the investigation into the massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha by American troops revealed. Lest we forget Afghanistan and the continuing fight against the Taliban, there have been riots on the streets as news broke that an American army convoy had killed a number of civilians. John Simpson, the BBC’s senior political journalist appeared on TV news today to announce that fifty people have died in Iraq today. That includes soldiers, journalists and civilians. According to Simpson the situation is daily getting worse, but the West appears to have lost interest in what is happening.
Only Bush and Blair seem to have a heart for this war. Yesterday’s TV news highlighted an organization established by British soldiers opposed to the war which is hourly receiving e-mail and telephone calls from combatants who no longer believe they are fighting for a just cause. To date over one thousand British soldiers have deserted and 800 of those have not been tracked down. When those on the ground can no longer commit to the battle, it is left to the leadership to perform absurdly the roles they believe history has conferred upon them. Meanwhile hundreds of civilians die because of the hubris of ideologically driven political leadership and we are left to beg the question of whether the current violence, oppression and ethnic cleansing in Iraq is not every bit as oppressive and dehumanising as that perpetrated by the former Ba’athist regime?
“There’s a war on imagination at the moment led by the US government, a war against imaginative and complex responses to things. There were imaginative and complex responses to the Iraq situation from everyone from church to academics, but they chose to ignore them and go to war. Mind you, in one way you have to admire Bush. He is actually himself a radical and imaginative president. He’s imagined the world as a worse place, and made it so”.
The simplistic world view that Bush and Blair have embraced not just in Iraq itself but in terms of international security, becomes daily more of a nightmare. Last week two UK national dailies front-paged the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The Independent instead of the usual front-page picture carried the following text in large letters: “Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale. The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s”. The paper’s editorial, noting that 1.85 million Iraqis have been issued with passports over the last ten months, highlights the ‘brain drain’ as middle-class Iraqis emigrate. It also opines that the presence of Coalition troops is making no difference, and the question of whether troops leave or stay is no longer relevant to the unfolding civil war.
The same day’s Guardian took a similar view. With reference to the swearing in of a government of national unity in Baghdad, the front page says, “much will be made in London and Washington of the fact that this completes a democratic transition that began in December with the election of its parliament. But the reality encountered during three weeks behind the barricades of Baghdad’s increasingly bloody sectarian conflict has more in common with the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Balkans than the optimistic rhetoric to be heard on the manicured lawns of the embassy compounds and in western capitals”. Inside the paper, a two-page spread documents the horror of Iraq’s ‘hidden war’.
Yet still Bush and Blair want to assure us that things are under control and that progress is being made. But both were discomforted during this week’s summit in Washington where Blair did not pick up his Congressional Medal of Honour awarded to great applause in 2003. The fact is that had he accepted it and further demonstrated himself to be the lackey of US foreign policy, his days as Prime Minister, already numbered, would have been dramatically foreshortened. Both men religiously recited their mantra about ‘democracy’ with Blair adding that he had arrived hotfoot from Iraq where he had seen “a child of democracy struggling to be born”. Both are seemingly oblivious to the way that what they understand by democracy has unleashed a reign of terror and oppression, which matches anything that Saddam managed to achieve in that arena. The Bible’s description of the sequence of events in this kind of tragedy is ‘sow the wind; reap the whirlwind’.
Yet both men, for the first time acknowledged that mistakes had been made. With the ratings of both of them being so low in the polls of their respective nations, deep down they must realise that the game is up, and that all they can do is to salvage what is left of their reputations. George Bush admitted that his “tough talking” and his taunting of Osama bin Laden were mistakes but, clearly trying to apportion more serious blame elsewhere, said he thought the greatest mistake had been that of abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. Tony Blair admitted that they had underestimated the challenges that the invasion would throw up, and in an apparent criticism of US policy said that it had been a mistake to have barred members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party from government after the fall of Baghdad. He thus echoed what a number of pundits have said: that the Ba’ath Party managed to foster the most secular regime in the Middle East and could have played a vital role in preventing the current descent into sectarianism. But both men however, must now be aware that the fundamental mistakes were to invade Iraq in the first place and to try to justify invasion on the grounds of the detection of weapons of mass destruction, rather than being honest about the real objectives, the securing of oil supplies and execution of the policy of regime change.
As I write, news of the death of more British soldiers has been broadcast and the investigation into the massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha by American troops revealed. Lest we forget Afghanistan and the continuing fight against the Taliban, there have been riots on the streets as news broke that an American army convoy had killed a number of civilians. John Simpson, the BBC’s senior political journalist appeared on TV news today to announce that fifty people have died in Iraq today. That includes soldiers, journalists and civilians. According to Simpson the situation is daily getting worse, but the West appears to have lost interest in what is happening.
Only Bush and Blair seem to have a heart for this war. Yesterday’s TV news highlighted an organization established by British soldiers opposed to the war which is hourly receiving e-mail and telephone calls from combatants who no longer believe they are fighting for a just cause. To date over one thousand British soldiers have deserted and 800 of those have not been tracked down. When those on the ground can no longer commit to the battle, it is left to the leadership to perform absurdly the roles they believe history has conferred upon them. Meanwhile hundreds of civilians die because of the hubris of ideologically driven political leadership and we are left to beg the question of whether the current violence, oppression and ethnic cleansing in Iraq is not every bit as oppressive and dehumanising as that perpetrated by the former Ba’athist regime?
posted by MichaelElliott @ 7:15 AM
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