Cheered by today's early handover of sovereignty in Iraq, let me celebrate by posting an optimistic article entitled The Iraq We Don't Hear About.
(I'm painfully aware of what happened the last time I celebrated, about lowering casualties. One month later more soldiers were being killed in Iraq than ever before).
The author, Amir Taheri, seems an interesting, well-informed, cosmopolitan kind of guy, Iranian exile, French citizen, and active in anglo media. I wasn't able to find anything obviously bad about him, except that he's buddies with the neo-cons, but to me that's not necessarily a bad thing, sorry.
For an opposing viewpoint, knowledgeable but ever-bitter Juan Cole, as usual, tries to burst my bubble.
Excerpts from Taheri's article:
Iraq today is no bed of roses, I know. I have just come back from a tour of the country. But I don't recognise the place I have just visited as the war zone depicted by the Arab and western media. ...
Saddamite leftovers and their allies ... have no popular following and have failed to develop a coherent national strategy. The Iraqi civil defence corps has gone on the offensive, hunting down terrorists, often with some success. At the same time attacks on the Iraqi police force have dropped 50% in the past month.
There is also good news on the economic front. In the last quarter the dinar, Iraq's currency, has increased by almost 15% against the dollar and the two most traded local currencies, the Kuwaiti dinar and the Iranian rial. ...
Thanks to rising oil prices, Iraq is earning a record Pounds 41m to Pounds 44m a day. This has led to greater economic activity, including private reconstruction schemes. ...
Despite the continuing terrorist violence Iraq has attracted more than 7m foreign visitors, mostly Shi'ites making the pilgrimage to Najaf and Karbala where (despite sporadic fighting) a building boom is under way. ...
This year Iraq has had a bumper harvest with record crops, notably in wheat. It could become agriculturally self-sufficient for the first time in 30 years.
"Iraq has always had everything that is needed to build a successful economy," says Heydar al-Ayyari, an Iraqi politician. "We have water and fertile land. We have oil and a hardworking people. What we lacked was freedom. Now that we have freedom we can surge ahead."
... During the past 10 months elections have been held in 37 municipalities. In each case victory went to the moderate, liberal and secular candidates. The former Ba'athists, appearing under fresh labels, failed to win a single seat. Hardline Islamist groups collected 1% to 3% of the vote.
Iraq is like a jostling school of democracy with people coming together in clubs, associations, non-governmental organisations, tribal councils, professional guilds and trade unions to talk about the future now that Saddam Hussein's one-party state has disintegrated.
...
"We are coming out of the cold," says al-Ayyari. "The world should help us put our house in order." But this is precisely what many in the West, and the Arab world, won't do.
Having opposed the toppling of Saddam, they do not wish to see Iraq build a better future. Arab despots and their satellite television channels fear a democratic Iraq that could give oppressed people of the region dangerous ideas. The anti-American coalition in the West shudders at the thought that someone like Bush might put Iraq on the path of democratisation.
...
Iraq has difficult months ahead, nobody would dispute that. But it has a chance to create a new society. Its well-wishers should keep the faith and prove the doomsters wrong.
Posted by Kai Carver at June 28, 2004 07:16 PMThanks, Kai. This is a needed tonic ... and I believe it 100%. The only thing that makes headlines is violence, but if you think about it the numbers that have been quoted for kidnappings, murders and terror attacks are small when you think that Iraq has some 22 million souls. That said, the mere existence of this kind of instability probably affects Iraqis out of proportion to statistics. There was an interesting nytimes article on Sunday that said teenage girls in Baghdad were afraid to go outside, wear normal teenage girl outfits, etc. An excerpt:
In an air-conditioned bedroom with pink everything on the walls, Yosor Ali al-Qatan, 15, stares longingly at a hip-hugging pair of pink pinstriped pants. The new Iraq, her mother warns her, is far too dangerous for a 15-year-old girl to be seen in such pants.
Across town, at the end of an alley leaking sewage, Sali Ismail, 16, spends her days staring blankly at the television. A spate of kidnappings, combined with her working class Shiite family's ever-deepening poverty, has prompted her to drop out of high school.
In a hair salon where Baghdad's ladies of leisure come to put blond streaks in their hair, Beatrice Sirkis, 14, quietly sweeps the floor. Her father, a retired soldier who has fallen on hard times, had to choose between sending her, or her older brother, to school. Beatrice was chosen to work.
The perils and pressures bearing on the lives of teenage girls here offer a snapshot of the changes bedeviling Iraq. In the past several months, the new access to satellite dishes, Internet cafes and cellphones has given these young women a new window on the outside world. But creeping religious conservatism, lawlessness and economic uncertainty have also been conspiring against them in peculiar ways.
Parents are so rattled by reports of rapes and kidnappings that they keep their girls under closer watch than ever. Girls accustomed to pool outings and piano lessons during the crushingly hot summer vacation months are instead locked up at home. They quarrel with their mothers; they sleep too much; they grow cranky and dejected from mind-numbing boredom.
To get some anecdotal, non-representative views of opinion in Iraq, I use the good list of Iraqi blogs that can be found on the Healing Iraq blog (on the right, one or two pages down). Raed and River are, like Juan Cole (and some French press headlines), very critical, saying in essence: "This changes nothing, the CIA is still very much in control". Other Iraqi bloggers are unbelievably enthusiastic: "Hail, Great El Bush, a leader not only of the U.S. but a true hero of mankind. And Hail Mr. Blair and the other Leaders of the Free World." Etc (in US), etc..
If nothing else, by reading Iraqi blogs you get a bit of a feel for the high level of hyperbole in Iraqi discourse. I'll bet it's easy to get extreme quotes from Iraqis, but they don't necessarily reflect reality in the way we think they would. Actually, hyperbole may be a characteristic of blogs, not of Iraqis...
Posted by: Kai Carver at June 29, 2004 08:19 AMExxon-Mobil just don't care a pack of beans
Posted by: Claude at July 1, 2004 09:12 AMSecular Parties and Premier Ahead in Iraq.
US casualties from hostile fire down to 5 per month.
Posted by: Kai Carver at February 2, 2009 09:02 AM