Tag Archives: iraq

A peaceful break

thoughtcat,

Catching up on my emails after a short break in the Lake District, I find Thoughtcat’s West Drayton representative has sent a link to a story from ZNet’s fine round-up of Iraq commentaries about US marine Stephen Eagle Funk. He faces a court martial and probable prison sentence after refusing to fight on the basis that the war is “immoral because of the deception involved by our leaders”. Fantastic name, and, like e.e. cummings’ “conscientious object-or” Olaf, Funk is “more brave than me:more blond than you”.

I must admit I took advantage of the peace and quiet in the Lakes to avoid the news as best I could for a few days. Even so, I couldn’t avoid the war completely, either in the form of some terrifyingly loud training flypasts of fighter jets, or in more peaceful ways, as we found when we came upon this Quaker meeting hall while strolling through the pretty village of Ambleside…

Learning from the past (or not)

thoughtcat,

A recent article by Ian Jack in the Guardian stated the case for Iraq being the “cradle of civilisation”, with the British Museum‘s Mesopotamian section – ironically, rarely more popular than now – providing a home to tens of thousands of clay tablets telling the world’s first written epic, Gilgamesh, in cuneiform script, as well as the beautiful stone reliefs from Nineveh, all of it dating back to the Iraq of up to 3,000 years before Christ. I posted a link to this article to The Kraken, the newsgroup for the work of my favourite living novelist Russell Hoban (and, while we’re at it, my erstwhile virtual home-away-from-home), on the basis that the Nineveh bas-reliefs play an essential part in Hoban’s great 1970s novel The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz – not to mention the disturbing resonances the article has of his post-apocalyptic masterpiece Riddley Walker. Fellow Krakenite, artist and curator of the latter site Eli Bishop responded with a shrewd cartoon and commentary by New York political cartoonist Tim Krieder, who, while with a group of artists sketching Mesopotamian artefacts at the Metropolitan Museum, realised that “[what] we were all dutifully sketching in order to honor and celebrate the ancient and glorious heritage of the people our government was about to bomb … were bas-relief steles immortalizing the rulers of the first military empires in human history — bearded, barrel-chested deity-kings with eagles’ wings and cannonball calf muscles straight out of ‘How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way!’, accompanied by lengthy fine-print cuneiform inscriptions that I happen to know, from art history classes, consist entirely of grandiloquent and dubious boasting about their bloody conquests …” Sound familiar, George?

Who wants to be a major fraud?

thoughtcat, ,

So the defendants of the Who Wants A Million Coughs trial have finally been found guilty. When it first opened, the case seemed to me a spurious PR stunt, especially when it was reported that a total of 192 coughs were heard throughout the show in question, of which only a dozen or so were supposed to have guided said military personnel to the correct answers. But as we know, mistakes are always made in wars, and now the case is closed, transcriptions of crucial bits of the show are emerging which help explain the jury’s decision, with the improbably-named “quiz anorak” Tecwen Whittock spluttering once for “yes” and twice for “no” at judicious junctures like some bizarre game-show séance. Sounds like they all deserve each other.

Enough already

thoughtcat

Robin Cook continues to make the case for ending the war. “I have already had my fill of this bloody and unnecessary war,” he says according to a report in the Guardian. I remember feeling that way weeks before it had even started.

Atrocities

thoughtcat

The ever-superb Robert Fisk has written a horrifying account of the aftermath of the bombing of a Baghdad market in broad daylight yesterday, where more than 20 civilians were blown to pieces. Fisk was close by at the time of the “outrage” and maintains the missiles came from a US fighter jet, but according to a story in the Times, the US is refusing to admit they were responsible, claiming the missiles could have been “a surface-to-air missile that missed its target fell back into the marketplace area.” Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks at US Central Command is quoted: “What meets the eye isn’t always true.” Well, the Americans would know all about that, wouldn’t they?

For somewhat lighter relief in these disturbing times, there is an excellent piece by Tim Dowling in today’s Guardian wondering whether the George W. Bush who addressed the US troops in Tampa yesterday was the real Dubya or a fake.

On an even lighter note, another story in the paper reports that Minister for E-commerce Stephen Timms is planning a clampdown on spam. While applauding this, Thoughtcat trusts Timms will not be too draconian, as spam can often be an unintentional source of entertainment, as highlighted on Spamcat.

What can you do?

thoughtcat,

The discussion I started on the Guardian yesterday has notched up 34 posts, thankfully some of which are somewhat more inspiring than the first few. The best one quotes several ideas from Michael Moore’s website. Even so, I have to say I’m disappointed with the feeling that there’s no one thing that any one person can do. It’s not as if this sort of situation lends itself to a Bob Geldof figure who can rise up and capture the public’s imagination: with a famine, all you basically need is enough money to buy the food and ensure it’s distributed in an effective way; with Band Aid and Live Aid, Geldof achieved that and much more. But with a war, you can’t just throw money at the situation.

Desperate measures

thoughtcat,

In a state of desperation I started a discussion on the Guardian’s “International” talkboard entitled “What could an ordinary UK citizen do to stop this war?” Suggestions so far include “nothing”, “top urself”, “mail Saddam a parcel bomb” and “join the Peace Pledge Union”…

Straw men

thoughtcat,

A Charles Kennedy interview in today’s Independent quotes him on his disappointing revision of his party’s stance on the war: “You have to give your moral support to the troops… I still believe diplomacy should have been given more time, but unfortunately that was defeated in Parliament and we have moved on,” he says. I can’t decide whether he’s just a woolly liberal or if it’s simply naive to think any major party could seriously take a more hardline position than that.

The article also mentions William Hague’s “joke” during the parliamentary debate on military action that if the Iraqi army collapsed with the same speed as the Liberal Democrats’ argument, “it will be a very short war”. Apparently Jack Straw called this “one of the greatest parliamentary put-downs of all time”. Nice to see our political representatives at ease and making humorous, intellectual capital of death and destruction.

Lighting the way

thoughtcat,

Further to Blair’s TV address about the war, we’ve now had televisual statements on the issue from Iain Duncan Smith and Charles Kennedy. Each has seen them addressing the camera exactly as Blair did from a pleasant living-room type background lit by a table lamp. The lighting in the Blair address was harsh, to drive home how tough this course of action is for him and the country; the other two went for a softer, more reassuring approach. Kennedy’s lamp looked a bit cheap, perhaps, but I preferred it to Duncan Smith’s posh affair, which matched perfectly the Tory leader’s patronising and unctuous delivery. Only in Britain could you have leaders of political parties fighting a war from the lighting section of Homebase.

Meanwhile, Mark Steel writes on ZNet today: “Peter Hain was one of several ministers who claimed the French made the war inevitable, by voting against the war. Similarly, I’m one of millions that should apologise for putting Margaret Thatcher into power by voting against her, and making the Cheeky Girls Number One by not buying their record. Hain went on to say, on Radio 5 on Tuesday, ‘The French have decided, by their veto, to not talk when the talk making war with their veto.’ John Prescott must have thought, ‘At last – someone who speaks my language.'”