From The Guardian, via nettime, Naomi Klein on the war and how this is essentially a US led privatisation of Iraqi assets to US ownership, through official and proper channels via distribution of rebuilding contracts and services. She argues the case for the Iraqi people in the face of the multi-nationals attempting to make a buck on the back of "free iraq".
Iraq war: April 2003 Archives
I caught up with Stuart Hughes' blog, he is the BBC producer who lost a foot in northern Iraq, he has now had his cast removed and is recovering in the UK. His blog is good funny reading, but also sad and shocking. The number of mines in the world is really quite frightening, 110 million in the ground and the same number stockpiled, it costs at least 100 times the amount to remove the mine as it does to deploy it. Then you have otherwise intelligent people working on self protecting mine fields, like they don't cause enough damage already. Dozens of people, many children will die or be injured from the mines already in Iraq, they kill more children as they are smaller.
The Mines Advisory Group are actively clearing mines in northern Iraq, they hope to raise enough money to clear the rest of Iraq and other places.
The loss of our cultural history during the looting of Baghdad is appalling, this is were we first wrote, had markets, invented numeracy, time astronomy and many other important discoveries.
I've been in a delimma thinking about the people being killed compared to the books and artefacts burnt or destroyed. One being the destruction of people, the other the destruction of the history of civilization. I've come to the conclusion that, in time, the immediate pain of the thousands of dead will pass and the lasting memory may become the loss of our collective history.
At the weekend I read Robert Fisk in the Independent who wrote powerfully on the loss of our cultural history. On Monday a representative from the British Museum was talking on the Today programme about the need to preserve what remains and pointing out the cleaning up is the worst thing that can happen. The teams of conservators will try to put the broken artifacts back together. Pictures of the damage from the BBC, Baghdad National Library burns and pictures of the looting of the museum.
Jeremy Hedley writes on antipixel about the lack of care that the US have taken over this issue, he links in a variety of sources showing that the US army had been briefed numerous times about this. Good writing, worth reading, the comments below debate the american involvement or lack of it.
To see some of the kinds of things that were lost, have a look at the BBCi History Mesopotamia gallery. Quite a reasonable amount of artefacts from this period are in the British Museum, they have an online Mesopotamia exhibit.
Powell has offered to repair damage, but it is tragic that it happened in the first place. A dozen American tanks would have protected the libraries and the museums, but they rather show off to the world's press outside the Palestine Hotel in a fashion rather after Nero.
I'm still marching against the war, why? This war has throw Iraq into utter chaos and those that caused it are not taking their responsibilities seriously. The looting, killing and destruction of the people and fabric of one of the oldest countries in the world is a tragedy. Something I hear again and again is "did they even think what would happen afterwards", clearly they didn't think very much and now expect the UN to tidy up after them.
If you marched in February you believed that war was wrong, it is still wrong, "our boys" are safe now, so look at the sad state that is now Iraq, look at Afghanistan, where even Kabul is not safe one year later.
This war was wrong, we cannot let this happen again.
Good article in The Guardian by Julian Barnes on what next now the war is over. He analyses the pro and anti war viewpoints and discusses the reasons to keep protesting. He asks good questions of both sides and has some interesting quotes.
There is another march tomorrow, I was undecided earlier in the week, but reading this article and being inspired by reading Mark Steel's Reasons to Be Cheerful have convinced me that now is not the time to stop. I do not want Bush and Blair to think that doing this again to Syria, Iran or North Korea is wise or acceptable.
Stuart Hughes is a BBC producer who was injured by a landmine in Iraq, he is blogging his recovery from losing his foot. It is moving and powerful writing, giving his experiences there prior to the landmine and then his reactions to being injured and subsequently operated on.
He is planning to campaign against landmines, which is a natural and appropriate response, one I support wholeheartedly.
Like virtually everyone else I've been watching the fall of the statue of Saddam in the centre of Baghdad, one of the things I've liked is the Arabic custom of disrespecting people by kicking or hitting with shoes. The video of Iraqis hitting pictures of Saddam with their shoes is delightful, people even stop mid-stride and take one shoe off and smack him in the face and start walking again.
Hopefully this will be the end of it and the possible battle in Tikrit will dissolve and calm will be restored with an Iraqi led government by the summer.
I've just seen the video pictures of the injured people, wreckage and burning vehicles that John Simpson descibes in this radio interview shortly after the attack. A very shocking event and you can clearly hear how shaken he is in the interview, but he has amazing composure to keep going despite being wounded and having collegues killed beside him, transcript of event here.
I can't help thinking that this is what every bomb has been like for those people beside it from the countless thousands dropped. Regardless of whose propaganda you believe and given that many fewer people have died in this war compared to the previous, death is still death and this has happened all over Iraq, many times.
Hopefully this war will end soon and the coalition will do a better job of maintaining peace in Iraq that they have done in Afganistan.
Andrew Orlowski writes in The Register about the ability of google, combined with the copious amount that bloggers write, to essentially rewrite history. The phrase "second superpower" was coined in the New York Times back in February, to describe the antiwar movement. James Moore a month and a half later wrote using the same expression and it has become a loose description of the blogging world and not really about the war at all, more of an idealist view of how the world might change. Andrew Orlowski's is a good article and well worth reading. Maybe if enough people read it, then the real origin of the expression might become more widely known.
Update: I discussed this with Euan and read Kevin Marks, from Thursday 3rd of April. these people have revised my opinion a bit. Orlowski makes some reasonable points, though he treats webloggers as a group. The main essence I took was not the Joi Ito or other a-list weblogger bashing, but the Clay Shirky power law effect. No-one writes good stuff each and everytime, but the power law means that what ever the topic those heavily linked people will float to the top, each time. Then the usually blogging habit of linking to one another fills the top 10 slots in Google.
This example shows the care that we are bloggers must take when we are writing, there have been several instances of slight misrepresentation recently. Ben Hammersley notes an instance of a blogger, the Agonist, passing off pay-for journalism as his own. This was first noted on metafilter. Too feel good about what we do should we take a closer examination of our sources, or is the write it, link it, post it impulse too strong. I don't feel that we need to do the check everything twice approach of real journalism, as mostly we are writing on our own and this blogs are our opinions. However fair attribution and correcting your mistakes is the least that I feel we (I) should do for our (my) audience, checking your sources would help too.
Mark Pilgrim has a list of peace blogging sites and via Ben Hammersley, an article from The Simon by Sarah Zanolini, which essentially says that protesters are a certain sort of person, but that voting *will* make a difference. Interesting read, but voter apathy is quite strong and the next elections are a couple of years off for both Blair and Bush.
The media focus is starting to drift onto what happens next, as well as starting to compare the current war to Vietnam. Apparently Blair is angry with BBC, Andrew Marr's reply is lovely "[the Govt is] angry that they can control where reporters go but what they cannot control is what they see". Other reporters, Henry Norr for the SF Chronicle are getting arrested and then suspended without pay, or sacked by NBC and rehired by the Mirror with Peter Arnett.
So what should the Stop the War Coalition do next, is another march going to make any difference? The next march will be in slightly less than two weeks time, so should have a good attendence, but even if it is 1.5 million, it'll be difficult to top the first march. I'm not saying stop protesting, but it feels like another march will get even less coverage than last time. What else can we do to show our feelings?
Sarah Zanolini notes in her article that every cause has a button or ribbon etc, she feels that they end up as noise after a while. I've still got a "not in my name" badge and I notice other people who have them, but like the last march it feels a bit preaching to the choir. I'll go on the next march, but I'm unsure if it is the best thing to do.
If marching is not the thing to do, then what are the other possibilities
- sit down protest
- lobby of MPs
- posters in windows
