Two hundred billion dollars and counting for this. Too bad the Opposition Party can't figure out how to make this catastrophe an issue.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=8554On Monday, George Bush was praising the greedy sectarian politicians here - who had totally failed to meet the new Iraqi constitution deadline - for their "heroic" efforts for "democracy". At about the same time, I came across a friend at one of Baghdad’s best-known hotels. He is the deputy manager and I’ve known him for more than three years, but he now looked twice his age. He grasped my arm and looked into my face. "Mr Robert," he said, "do you realise I was kidnapped?" Every day now, I come across Iraqi acquaintances - or friends who have cousins or fathers or sons - who have been kidnapped. Often they are released. Sometimes they are murdered and I go to their families to express those condolences which are especially painful for me - because I am a Westerner, arriving to say how sorry I am to relatives who blame the West for the anarchy that killed their loved ones. This time my friend survived, just.
Another good friend, a university professor, visits me for coffee the next day. The absence of identities in this report tells you all you need to know about the terror which embraces Baghdad. "I was invigilating the last exams of term in the linguistics department and I saw a mature student cheating. I walked up to him and said I believed he was cribbing. He said he wasn’t. I told him I would take his papers away and he leant towards me and made it clear I would be murdered if I prevented him completing his exams. I went to the head of department. I thought he would discipline this man and take away his papers. But he talked to him and then said that he could continue the exam. My own head of department failed me completely." My professor friend loves English literature, but he has new problems.
"Many of the students are now very Islamically oriented. They want their classes taught through the prism of their religion. But what can I do? I can’t teach existentialism any more because it would be seen as anti-Islamic - which means no more Sartre. These same people ask me for the religious message in Eugene O’Neill’s plays. What can I say? I can’t teach any more. Do you understand this? I can’t teach." Since Baghdad’s " liberation" in April 2003, 180 professors and schoolteachers have been assassinated in Iraq, and shortly after my professor’s visit, I receive a call from one of his colleagues.
<edit>
The reporters are sitting in a fuggy room with a small window from which they can see the Tigris river. One of the American staff admits he has not been outside "for months". An Arab reporter does their street reporting; an American travels around Iraq - but only as an "embed" with US troops. No American journalists from this bureau travel the streets of Baghdad. This is not hotel journalism, as I once described it. This is prison journalism.
<edit>
I drive back across Baghdad. There is a massive traffic jam because the Iraqi National Guard - the American-trained Iraqis who are supposed to save Donald Rumsfeld’s career and let the US forces reduce their troop strength here - have mounted a checkpoint. Most of them are so frightened that they are wearing ski-masks over their mouths. Like every Iraqi I meet, I do not trust the Iraqi National Guard. They have been infiltrated by both Sunni and Shia insurgents and now have a nasty propensity to carry out house raids on Sunni areas, to arrest the menfolk and then to steal as much money as they can find in the house. "First they arrest my son and then they take all my jewellery," a woman complained on an Arabic satellite channel that was investigating this venal militia.
more...
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
