Moral Luck & the Iraq War - Iraq books reviewed

Lets face it not many of us are going to go out to buy this set of books no matter how interesting. But this review is a help to understanding certain aspects of the war and peace.

it coccured to me only a few hours ago that the invasion and occupation of Iraq did not bring the expected peace, but there do exist forms of freedom such as the freedom from having your privates electrocuted, knecked stretched and your whole family wiped out if you say something derogatory about the Maximum Leader as was. Though no amount of claiming this can actually make for real freedom, which is being undermined by the insurgency and outside trouble makers. To say, as someone did, the Iraqis do not respect the American great power because it has not put the electricity back in Baghdad - that is it has proved impotent - is pointless since it soon became obvious the Americans were not geared up for getting utilities up and running again, and are stil not. If the electricity was working full times and the toilets flushed would the Americans be respected?

It is not much consolation to know one can say pretty much what one likes now in Iraq, when the downside is you seem to be able to do pretty much what you like too, which leads to all the abuses of human rights amongst a people who were educated and modern in outlook despite living in a gangster state. The experts of various stripes did warn of the ways release from the grip of a nasty dictatorship would manifest themselves: though shooting barbers and university professors and forcing women students to cover up to get into their university lectures was not part of the analysis we can be sure.

The Iraqis will overcome the desire of certain Shi'tes to turn the clock back. It will just take time. This is all a bit like a rather heated section of Andrzej Wajda's film "Danton" with some wanting to go too far in their revolutionary fervour. There are bound, eventually, to be a few Iraqi leaders in the next few years feeling not unlike like the Robespierre depicted in the film, sweating with fear under his sheets, having comitted himself to killing off the first wave of revolutionaries as with the orginal Bolesheviks of the Russian revolution.



  ¶ Tuesday, October 11, 2005