Singer Muthana al-Jaffar, 37, from Baghdad, said: 'The government is not giving us any protection. I witnessed two of my friends being killed for singing western songs at weddings.'This is where the process (or lack) of planning for the war and its aftermath plays out. The effort that went into the lies and misrepresentations to get us all into a war meant that a society would be created of its shadow: a sort of wilfully neglected Taliban state. Would it not have been better to have supported democratic and feminist factions rather than invading and disrupting water supplies and electricity to all?
This is why you need instruments such as the UN - even given its flaws in places such as Rwanda and Kosovo - to give military actions a mandate. When the reasons for going in are not mendacious, the sort of societies that grow out of the aftermath aren't a matter of factions imposing themselves with guns but hold some hope for conflicting interests being mediated. The coalition of the willing, by avoiding any kind of mediation by institution beforehand, was never going to be able to create such institutions in Iraq afterwards. This is why I disagree with what Nick Cohen said and continues to say. Of course democratic alliances needed to be built between the west and with those in Iraq, and it's for that reason the war as it proceeded required stopping; it could not be modified by the left joining up to it with qualified support; its very processes were fantastical and corrupt; nothing good could come of a war (not) planned in this way and very very little has, unless you think that killing people for non-figurative painting is a genuinely just cause.
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Everything you said merely confirms what many commentators have said about the policies of the West and in particular the USA, that the West believes it is the "source of the solutions to the world's key problems". So said Kishore Mahbubani from the National University of Singapore, in a recent edition of "Foreign Affairs". He believes that the United Nations is respected by most nations which will abide and believe in the authority of the UN. The American, British and Australian total disregard of the UN in the lead up to the Iraq war was tellingly dismissive of world opinion and the UN itself.
I can see the Christopher Hitchins of the world seizing on your statement, "Would it not have been better to have supported democratic and feminist factions rather than invading and disrupting water supplies and electricity to all?"
The theory of undermining from within a corrupt, venal and oppressive state is attractive but the West never had the foresight or the patience to plan to subvert the regime except by supporting the fools behind the Iraqi National Congress and opted for sanctions which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis prior to the invasion.
What is happening to artists in Iraq? We now know that wedding singers are executed by fanatics for singing Western songs, but what is happening to all the others who have not fled the chaos, have bunkered down as the militias reap the grim harvest of their hatred.
I would have loved to know the songs of those dead singers so in a futile but defiant way I could sing them too.
Your Father
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