6 posts tagged “iraq”

Movie of the Day was Blood of My Brother, an insiders look into the fight for Sadr City. On the whole, it wa s afairly apolitical movie that just basically went into the mosques, the funerals, the night raids, the families, and the heart of the conflict and then let you as a viewer make up your mind. The American position obviously is that the elected government of Iraq was the legitimate government of Iraq and that Muqrada Al sadr's Mahdi militia was therefore A) unnecessary and B) dangerous. He clearly was both anti-American and anti-Israeli, and anti-coalition government. In the eyes of his followers, he clearly was the leader Allah wanted them to have and if an election was the means, that would be fine but I can't see any good coming from an Iraqi state that adopted a sectarian government controlled so entirely by one sect's "televangelist".

Muqtada Al Sadr is not Al Qaeda but from listening to him preach, it is hard not to see him coming out of the same batch of cookie dough. He believes in the need to forsake this world for the next and the need for Muslims to dissolve their national borders and unite into one unified Islamo-fascist state with black robed clerics listening to Allah for State policy. He would certainly not be good for Israel and in so far as he defines America as a disunifying force in Islam, he would be no friend. This video was enlightening in that regard.

Still, I couldn't help but watch these house raids looking for weapons without thinking about Lexington and Concord. Apparently Iraqi law allowed each family a machine gun but that's all. The only difference between what was going on in Sadr City and Lexington and Concord is that Iraq HAS a democratically elected government and the minutemen are following a deputized Ayatollah. Further, the minutemen, to my knowledge were not hiding their weapon's caches in their homes.

Unmistakably, innocent people are being hurt and kids are  getting the crap scared out of them in these house raids. I just have a hard time visualizing my hiding weapon stashes in my kids' bedroom. The thematic resemblance to the episodes of Battlestar Galactica that the boys and I have been watching is unmistakable though. These are not easy issues.  I don;t mind praying for Iraq's peace and saftey. I hope I can be forgiven for doubting that it would come in the form of a Muqtada al-Sadr government. Just calling it like I see it. don;t anyone shoot me.

Question for Comment: When you see large crowds of people chanting for a leader who they associate with the will of God (be it G.W. Bush or Muqtada al-Sadr, what reaction does it evoke in you?

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody). 

Tonight's movie was Goya's Ghosts. I will just say with a critic at Rotten Tomatoes that it is a movie that should have been "put to the question" before being released. The sets are cool. The art is cool. The inquisition reminds one of the bumper sticker "Mean People Suck", and the moral of the story may well be, unlike Goya's art, too obvious to be artistic: Karma works only once in a while but if you find it working on you, the effect can be quite arresting. You just never know when that wheel of fortune will turn.

I also learned that Goya, when he did portraits, could be "visually undiplomatic" - In short, sometimes he painted powerful people somewhat too much as they are for his own good.

All criticisms aside, one cannot watch this movie without an awareness that it is a movie that is about more than a period and place in time. It is about Nazi Germany and it is about Abu Ghraib. It is as much about Guantanamo as it is about Madrid. It is as much about the Patriot Act as it is about the Inquisition and the French invasion of Spain under the guise of liberte'. The opening scene  shows us the Inquisition determining that "desperate times demand desperate measures" so to speak ... and it is a reminder that anyone who is going to be the sort to take a job torturing people, is going to be the sort of person that is not going to care about the morality of going beyond what is permitted.

For all sorts of reasons, torture and brutality in the cause of some sort of "good" is just a bad idea and artists like Goya (and no doubt this film director) did the right thing when they exposed it in all its ugliness.

"Goya's causes for discouragement were not confined to personal misfortunes [He had lost his wife and his hearing]. In 1808 his beloved country was overrun by the hordes of what was possibly the most ruthless invading army of modern history. He has left notes in letters, and in his works, of the scenes of which he was an eye-witness-murder, and rape, and cruelty to children. "I saw this," he writes on the margin of his sketches. He saw his fellow citizens shot down, unarmed, without trial-by platoons, one crowd after another. He saw the mutilation of the dead. He saw the heroic and desperate resistance of his people, "ferocious and admirable," beyond all telling, where women fought as savagely as men and died resisting. And his soul was filled with despair, and pity, and with horrible, demoniac laughter at the senselessness of war-and of mankind."

A Self-Portrait by Goya

Alfred Vance Churchill
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 13, No. 1. (Mar., 1931), pp. 4-11

Question for Comment: Why is it that some movies simply do not fool you - that that you see actors playing parts - not characters when you watch them?

Tonights movie was Gunner Palace. It is not my place really to critically analyze a movie made in a place and time that I have not been present for. It captures soldiers lives like the soldiers in it capture Iraqi insurgents (I suppose). It seems to tell its tale well, neither hiding nor romanticizing the personalities and work being done by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers in Iraq.

Here is the chart of U.S. casualties as of this month;

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2003	0	0	65	74	37	30	48	35	31	44	82	40
2004	47	20	52	135	80	42	54	66	80	64	137	72
2005	107	58	35	52	80	78	54	85	49	96	84	68
2006	62	55	31	76	69	61	43	65	72	106	70	112
2007	83	81	81	104	126	101	78	84	65	38	37	23
2008	40	29	15	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

http://icasualties.org/oif/

The chart listing the Iraqi casualties in the same time period can be found below. I find myself compassionately confused by this war. I think some people compare the costs of it with an image of a costless alternative. Others do not feel the cost of it and can't see what we have lost ... what we might have done instead. as of this date, 84 soldiers have been killed in Iraq so far this year. According to the Officer down website, 28 police officers have been killed in the U.S. during the same stretch of time, down 185 from last year.  ( http://www.odmp.org/  )  Are either of these casualty lists worth it? Should we remove police officers from duty before they get hurt and American soldiers from Iraq before Iraqi soldiers take over? I will just ask the question. What is it for? Often the soldiers do not know.

	Period	Total
	Mar-08	442
	Feb-08	674
	Jan-08	554
	Dec-07	548
	Nov-07	560
	Oct-07	679
	Sep-07	848
	Aug-07	1,674
	Jul-07	1,690
	Jun-07	1,345
	May-07	1,980
	Apr-07	1,821
	Mar-07	2,977
	Feb-07	3,014
	Jan-07	1,802
	Dec-06	1,752
	Nov-06	1,864
	Oct-06	1,539
	Sep-06	3,539
	Aug-06	2,966
	Jul-06	1,280
	Jun-06	870
	May-06	1,119
	Apr-06	1,009
	Mar-06	1,092
	Feb-06	846
	Jan-06	779

Tonight's movie was one that I think everyone should see before engaging in rhetorical skirmishes about tactics in the war on terrorism; The Cult of the Suicide Bomber. One of the most frightening things to me as a Western observer of the suicide bomber phenomenon (and to be fair, it is a phenomenon referred to as martyrdom in the society that nurtures it) is how little kids are raised to see these people as heroes. They are like baseball heroes or rock stars or movie stars. IT is THE ticket to immortality AND fame and society, peers, religious leaders, family, parents, educational systems ALL seem to grant the martyr the highest status in communal regard.

One of the most riveting moments in the movie is when an Iranian Mullah being interviewed complains about the inhuman use of suicide bombs against Shiites in Iraq. It doesn't seem to cause him a single blink to say it. He is furious at how the Sunni use of the tactic is bringing ill repute to a tactic his country basically invented and celebrated as martyrdom. All of a sudden, the glory goes out of it when the cause is one of your enemy's I guess.

I cannot help but wonder, how is it that the people who idealize this form of resistance and dissent do not see the ultimate implications. Lets say that Israel removed itself from the West Bank entirely. Some "martyrs" would the set up to attack Israel itself .... presumably until Israel disappeared altogether. That must be seen as a given. Israeli departure from the West Bank would cause thousands of these kids to interpret the event as a sign of Allah's approval on the tactic. Lets say that the tactic resulted in the destruction of the Israeli State (just hypothetically). How long would it be before the tactic would then be applied in a wider context ... Would these same people not also want Spain, the Balkans, and other regions of the world once under the rule of Islam? And then what? How long would it be before divisions in the Islamic community itself caused branches and sects of Islam to label other branches enemies? Would elections become suicide fests where winners were declared on the basis of how many psychopathic suicides they could inspire in the name of their truth?

Here in America,  Martin Luther King gets a holiday and Malcolm X doesn't.  One of the enjoyable side effects of policies like that is that we replace our leaders, hundreds and thousands of them every year without a  single person dying. Its an idea worth celebrating more.

And so I do so here.

One of the golas of the neo-martyrs is symply to create tension between Islamic  communities and the host people  that presently have welcomed them into their systems. It is an attempt to make the line between US and THEM clearer by "forcing" western cultures to begin treating Muslims suspiciously. It is the opposite of Peace making.

And I reject it here.

Question for Comment: If the solution to terrorism is not counter-force but a change in cultural ideals, how does the world proceeed to interfere with cultures that glorify martyrdom as a worthy aspiration? Must we simply contrive ways to martyr yourself without killing others?

“We are all drifting and things are going rotten.” Ralph, Lord of the Flies

Tonight, I got to see the documentary, Iraq in Fragments, a movie that highlights what is going on in Baghdad, in Shiite Southern Iraq, and in the Kurd area of Northern Iraq.

http://www.iraqinfragments.com/

It is impossible to watch the second section on the breakdown of Shiite Iraq without thinking of The Lord of the Flies. It is impossible for me not to draw parallels between Muktada Al Sadr and Jack.

"For us, holding on to religious rules, and following them, and refraining from what's forbidden, and being diligent with our duties, what do we call that? That's what we call freedom." Muqtada Al Sadr

“I will give the conch to the next person to speak.  He can hold it when he is speaking. . . . And he won't be interrupted.  Except by me.  Jack was on his feet.  We will have rules!  He cried excitedly.  "Lots of rules!  Then when anyone breaks em" – Lord of the Flies p.33.

The Mahdi Army is set up primarily to enforce Islamic law ... but it has been a force to be reckoned with since it was formed. And it serves many purposes outside of that for which it was formed. As, I  imagine most forces of power projection in history, including out own.

The movie opens with a view into the life of a learning disabled kid in Baghdad. Lacking the sort of educational support a kid like that would get here in the states, he quits school and goes to work in a garage. Sigh. Watching human potential go to waste always disturbs me. Maybe we should send a few hundred thousand copies of Lord of the Fies to Iraq?

Question for Comment: 

“What makes things break up like they do?”

“I don’t know, Ralph.  I expect, him.”

“Jack?”

“Jack.”

                     Lord of the Flies, p. 140

Does it seem like chaos gets just as much talent in its leadership pool as order? Why is that? Is there some universal law that demands that forces of progress be balanced with forces of entropy?