The BEST article on the situation in Iraq I've read

[IrateCitizen]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030915&s=davis

It's rather long, but please take the time to read the whole thing. The thing is, it left me not with a sense of anger at what Dubya and his gang of thugs have perpetrated, but rather a sense of hopelessness for any way out of this mess.

[Dover]

1. Thanks. I think these two paragraphs sum it up -

...In a sleight of hand faster than the eye can see, combined with an Alphonse-Gaston routine, a US official answers a question about what is going on by telling you to ask the Iraqi governing council, it's their country. Go to the governing council for the answer, and they say the Americans are in charge, ask them. They are both accurate, both insincere. This gives the press the opportunity to cover events staged either by the coalition or the resisters, which allows a pessimist to conclude everything is a mess while the optimist can say it's all going according to plan. The fundamental US public-relations effort is driven not by accurate information but by political doctrine. Eventually, whether we condemn or support the occupation, we look at it through a moral lens, but the lens is ground, and grounded, in America. Iraqis, with their own lens, will never see the same view.

Forget the Bremer operation for a moment: He's doing a good job or a poor job, he has good people with him and they're struggling, or he has self-interested bureaucrats who want to award contracts and then catch on with their clients like Kellogg Brown & Root or Bechtel once the initial phase of the occupation is over. The uglier fact jumping up to be seen and heard is that we are two vitally separate kinds of societies. What the majority of Iraqis I spoke with (of both genders) want to do with women should not happen, in our view, to any human being. Conversely, the society we want to make Iraqis fit into never worked with groups as disparate as Native Americans and Vietnamese, so what makes us think it will work in Iraq?

******

And in another article by Fisk today, there was this quote by Zinni -

Ex-General Anthony Zinni, once the top man in US Central Command with "peacekeeping" experience in Kosovo, Somalia and (in 1991) northern Iraq, smelled a rat and said so in public. "Do we want to transform Iraq or just transition it out from under the unacceptable regime of Saddam Hussein into a reasonably stable nation? Transformation implies significant changes in forms of governance... Certainly there will not be a spontaneous democracy..."


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4144

[IrateCitizen]

2. Thanks for the Fisk article -- I like to read anything he writes

One of the foremost authorities on ME politics, IMHO. Considering he's actually lived in Beirut for much of the past 30 years, he's definitely more astute than Thomas Friedman.

[berry]

3. You're right. This article should be required reading for all

(along with Fisk, and a rapidly growing list). I went to the bio to find out more about Davis, and was ashamed that I had forgotten his name. I only saw his movie once, in a theater in Cambridge, MA just after it was released--and along with the rest of the audience I was awed. It wasn't really a bio--just a blurb. Here it is:

<<Peter Davis is an author and filmmaker who received an Academy Award for his Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds. His most recent book is If You Came This Way: A Journey Through the Lives of the Underclass (John Wiley).>>

Davis is such an incredibly sensitive observer and good listener. He also writes so beautifully that it's a kind of poetry. Eg., this sentence:

"Salih's anger at the United States is only a membrane from the surface."

And he doesn't argue his points, just presents them. This should be passed around. It's something that will get even oblivious people thinking. I'll just post 2 more sentences that are about Saddam, but could equally be about Bush*. Intended? Probably, but it's very delicately done:

<<According to the historian Charles Tripp, Saddam "reinforced certain tendencies in the history of Iraq, building up a powerful apparatus that brooks no opposition and provides scarcely any space for political activity other than on terms set by him."... Charles Tripp concludes that once Saddam is run off into history, "the contest for control of the narrative of the Iraqi state will continue, but in these circumstances there is a strong possibility that existing privileges will be entrenched and Iraqis will have good reason to fear subjection once more.">>

So, many thanks, IrateCitizen! (Also thanks to Dover for the Fisk article.) It is depressing, of course, but just hearing those Iraqi voices--thinking, considering, judging in a measured way--gives me a lot of hope (once the US gets out of the way--and that is essentially OUR problem, also depressing, but not paralyzing). There's a lot to do....

Edited to correct spelling Davis as "David," and to thank Dover by name instead of as "poster" (since I couldn't see it while posting myself).