Observer: How the good land turned bad - 4th anniversary of Iraq invasion

[muriel_volestrangler]

The Observer's Foreign Affairs Editor reflects on 4 years of frequent visits to Iraq, and life for ordinary people there

Throughout Iraq's collapse into violence, al-Ansari has continued with his compositions, including one for oboe, two violins, viola and cello called, without irony, The Good Land. It is about Iraq. 'This is still a good land,' he insists. He pauses for a moment of further consideration. 'Maybe the land is good,' he adds, 'but sometimes the people are not good ...'
...
The good land breeds a fatalist humour to confront the horror of daily life. I have heard Iraqis tell jokes about suicide bombers; about George Bush and al-Qaeda's dead leader Musab al-Zarqawi, and firebrand preacher Moqtada al-Sadr. Once, not long after the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers was revealed, I came across a group of teenage boys playing roughly in a river, a game that involved trying to pull down the other boys' shorts. 'Abu Ghraib,' they told me they called it, after the prison. Wael, who collects these jokes, explains it is 'the Iraqi way to defy the miseries that they are going through'.
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We are constantly looking for new metaphors - new ways - to describe Iraq. While we in the West argue about semantics - like whether there is a civil war or not - Iraq's violent disintegration has moved relentlessly to a new phase. The question now is whether Iraq, in large measure and large areas of its territory, has become a 'failed state' . And while there are arguments about what 'failed state' means, there is agreement at least on most of its attributes.

A failed state is one that can no longer provide security and social requirements for its citizens; that has descended into factionalism and warlordism; that cannot guarantee the integrity of its own borders, and lacks the ability to sustain itself. All of which perfectly describes large areas of today's Iraq.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2036446,00.html