Posts by Russell Brown
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This is still a city that publishes ALL the court news and we still read it (if only to see who we know who might be in it) ... a good public shaming probably still goes a long way here ... granny might find out .... it also means we read all the students-were-drunk-and-disorderly-and-stole-a-policeman's-hat or equivalent stories writ in those columns
I'll never forget being in Dunedin several years ago when there was some serious financial news at a national level - Reserve Bank governor statement or something. Every other paper in the country led with it. The ODT led with a story about a youth who might have stolen a car except it looked like he probably didn't. I found it quite bizarre.
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I think the last sentence of the article sums up the confused state of many in the western world at the moment.
"Green MEP Jean Lambert, a staunch campaigner against the hijab ban, pulled out of the conference to avoid sharing a platform with the cleric after being told that he described homosexuality as a disease that needed a cure - possibly death."
Here, I agree with you. Opposing the hijab ban is one thing - I don't think a government has the right to tell me what I can or can't wear on my goddamn head - but even thinking about sharing a stage with such a person is lunatic.
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Florida rape victim denied emergency contraception by Christian nurse on religious grounds. Feel free to generalise wildly on Christian attitudes to rape.
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The left's mantra of multiculturalism, "we are all equal but different", leads directly to nonsense like the recent case in Germany linked to below where a woman was refused a divorce she was entitled to under German law, because her husban had beaten her and threatened to kill her. The divorse was refused because they were both Moroccan Muslims, and the Koran allows men to beat their wives.
Sigh .. what you don't say is that the actions of the (female) judge generated nationwide controversy and she was almost immediately removed from the case, which now proceeds under a judge who's not a raving loony. From The Guardian's story:
Commentators, politicians and Muslim leaders criticised the judge's decision, saying that choosing sharia above civil law was a threat to jurisprudence. Wolfgang Bosbach, of the Christian Democratic Union, said: "One thing must be clear: in Germany only German law applies."
Irmingard Schewe-Gerigk, women's affairs spokeswoman for the Greens, agreed, saying: "This decision is in conflict with the basic law."
I think this rather shows the opposite of what you were claiming.
PS: Just looked up a bit more on this case: the judge made a protection order (ordering the husband to move out of the house and not come within 55m) but then bizarrely cited the Koran to decline the quickie divorce.
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Here is an opinion poll of some 5,000 Iraqis conducted during Feb 2007 that shows only 26% preferred life under Saddam, and that includes only 51% of Sunnis. That number is obviosuly a bit low as a lot of Sunnis have fled, but it is still amazing that after all the problems in Iraq since April 2003, that only a a quarter would want Saddam back.
So Russell, maybe your view that life in Iraq was better under Saddam is not such a "FACT", after all?
I was referring specifically to the position of women, whose loss of constitutional rights is matter of record, and gays, who are having trouble staying alive these days.
But the other recent poll of Iraqis, is the BBC/ABC/USA Today one, which had 50% of Iraqis yearning for Saddam, and only 38% saying life was better now than before 2003.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6464277.stm
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2954716&page=1I'm not sure any of these polls can answer the question though: you're asking people to weigh quality of life against newfound and important freedoms.
But both paint a desperate and deteriorating picture. Eighty per cent of people report attacks nearby. More than half of people have lost a close friend or relative to the violence. Not only have basic quality of life indicators slumped since 2004 and 2005, so has optimism that things will improve.
Also interesting to note is that only 27% of Iraqis think that Iraq is in a civil war. Perhaps NBC, NYT, CNN etc should have asked Iraqis whether Iraq is in the middle of a civil war before they endlessly repeat it as fact.
And a further 22% thought Iraq was "close" to civil war. I'm not sure whether what you call it makes much difference.
One interesting point from both polls is continued support for a unified Iraq, especially if you don't count the Kurds. That seems encouraging.
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This commentary from The New Republic addresses the they'd-have-been-at-their-throats-anyway argument:
But, if Iraqi nationalism was weaker on the day we invaded than it had been two decades before, it was still quite strong. As Kenneth Pollack has noted, when the National Democratic Institute asked Iraqi focus groups in the summer of 2003 which identity suited them best, a large majority eschewed Shia, Sunni, or Kurd in favor of Iraqi. "Iraq is not the Balkans," insisted Phebe Marr, author of The Modern History of Iraq, in April 2003. "There really isn't traditional enmity or hostility between Sunni and Shiite communities."
Then the United States overthrew Saddam's weak, brutal state and replaced it with virtually no state at all. In poll after poll, Iraqis said they were happy Saddam was gone but terrified at the lack of security. A Zogby survey in August 2003 found that almost 30 percent of Iraqis had friends or family killed in the war or its anarchic aftermath. Basic services like water and electricity remained scarce as the U.S. reconstruction effort foundered because of corruption and lack of security. Unemployment hit 50 percent.
In this dismal, often Hobbesian environment, those Iraqis who could (the more secular middle class) fled. Among those who remained, sectarian entrepreneurs like Moqtada Al Sadr leveraged their preexisting networks to provide services, jobs, safety, and--increasingly--revenge. As sectarian militias offered the protection that the state could not, sect began replacing nation as the primary identity of many Iraqis. That shouldn't surprise us. Identity is not static, and, in war zones, as anyone who followed Sarajevo in the '90s can attest, it can shift very fast. "Once Iraqis are safely ... settled in Amman," notes Iraqi-born scholar Hala Fattah, "bonds of civility [between Sunni and Shia] reemerge."
It may be too late for the United States to provide the security required for those bonds of civility to return to Iraq. But we should, at least, have the decency to acknowledge that it was Americans (not Iraqis) who bore the responsibility under international law to provide security after Americans (not Iraqis) overthrew Saddam. It was we who failed and then handed Iraqi politicians the poisoned chalice of a government that did not sit atop a state. To be sure, Iraq's elected leaders are an uninspiring bunch. But the state fell, the army was disbanded, chaos reigned, the insurgency began, reconstruction faltered, and the die was cast in 2003-- before Iraqis first went to the polls.
This view is frequently borne out by Iraqi bloggers: this degree of sectarian violence, or even sectarian hatred, is unfamiliar to them.
Neil, you asked what else could have been done. Well, if you were bent on forcible regime change, playing a longer game with better knowledge would have helped.
The hubris and incompetence that saw the Pentagon sideline the State Department (to the cheerleading of massed unthinking winger blogs), then fail to protect civil infrastructure or provide even a modest degree of continuity was criminal. Ministries were looted and burned, the army was dismissed. The fools who moved in to take control couldn't even account for the billions of dollars of Iraqi money they were handing out.
And guess what? That was the plan. This was the "creative destruction" the neocon leisurecrats were urging. They really thought they could wipe it all away and start fresh with a client economy.
Even if the Iraqis can dig themselves out of this in the end, history will regard these events as a grotesque indulgence of an ideological strain defined by its insensibility to reality.
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__These people have almost all been killed or fled the country__
True to an extent but there's still a sizable secular opposition to the encroachment of fundamentalism.
That would be nice, but I'm not sure it's true. This is from a History News Network article called 'The Death of Iraq's Middle Class' earlier this year, by a professor who had held great hopes in 2003:
Iraq's middle class is fleeing at such rapid rate that over 40 percent has left since 2003. Add this to torrent a slow trickle of Iraq's educated classes from the 1970s forward and we've reached a point where virtually everyone who could leave has left or fled to Kurdistan. For all intents and purposes, Iraq's middle class is near death and what is left is just a pale shadow of its former self. It has ceased to be a relevant feature of Iraqi society.
In Iraq, the loss of this class means the loss of the basis of civil society and the disappearance of those Iraqis who would be committed to a non-sectarian form of politics.
http://hnn.us/articles/34133.html
This is not what we were promised.
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well is the invasion reposonsible for the religious conservativeness in the Shiite community or not? Do you really think that had Sistani overthrown Saddam that there would not be an increase in the influence of conservative clerics? The main opposition to Saddam was based in the Shiite religious community.
But, to bring things back to the original topic, this makes a mockery of what Cohen et al like to sermonise about. Are you saying the US invaded Iraq to enable sharia law?
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The invasion isn't responsible for the conservative religious elements. They would have gained prominance whatever the manner of Saddam's demise. The Shi'ite religious leadership is powerful and conservative, had they overthrown Saddam on their own we would be seeing the same threat from conservative religion. To blame this on the US is absurd.
If you say so Neil. Is there anything, in your opinion, for which the US should take some responsibility?
And I feel bound to say, I don't recall you predicting all these apparently inevitable events in discussion before the war.
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For me, didn't Bush inherit a huge surplus and well, hasn't it all gone, and then some, on teh war?
The surplus disappeared largely because taxes were cut and spending wasn't, but they'll be paying for this war for a very long time.
I've seen several estimates that the eventual cost wost will exceed a trillion dollars. I think it's reasonable to speculate on what more constructive things could have been done in the region with that much money.
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