In reply to one of my irrate American readers 

I deliberately put at the top of my website I would not try to re-invent the wheel, in that if I found an article that expressed my feelings and ideas better than I could express them, I would post it as a side link rather than make a less good attempt to say the same thing. Though many of the side links I have put up are merely part of the story and are not necessarily things I agree with.

Very few of us are on the front line. There are no rules to say you must be a combatant to be entitled to comment on Iraq. I was a boy in Iraq and I feel particularly for the Iraqis.

It is hardly necessary to criticise Iraq and the Iraqis all the time. They didn't do the invading. Though I have said many times I was happy to see it done.

Though the reasons for invading Iraq are many, and dubious, the act itself has become a moral one because the act has saved the Iraqis from a murdering, psychopathic tyrant. But the act of invasion is not the end of the story.

No country is perfect or has a monopoly of virtue. The first twelve months of occupation have seen both great progress and a catalogue of simply avoided errors which have made the situation worse. If western policemen had been sent in to walk the streets of Baghdad starting April 9 2003, the anarchy that the Coalition Provisional Authoirity was so roundly condemned for would have been contained. A very big question hangs over the total disbanding of the Iraqi Army, which left tens of thousands of penniless, jobless, well-armed and trained soldiers lounging around on their back-verandas sipping tea and thinking up ways to occupy their time. While, it is reputed, elements of the hated Mukharabat - and members of other repressive organs - who did all the tyrannising - are being re-employed !

A government is not a people. What a government does or fails to do (e.g. protect the Iraqi museums and keep civil order) ought not to reflect on the people (American) it serves.

George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld (and in my casy Tony B-liar) are only men. Men are fallible.


  ¶ Sunday, April 11, 2004