No Steps Forward, One Leap Back

Rant in response to yesterday's post in Baghdad Burning.

This really isn't getting the media coverage it ought. It's, unfortunately, not surprising--either the lack of coverage or what's going on.

For years I've taken an interest, not hugely active admittedly, in human rights and freedom of speech. (I joined Amnesty 20 years ago, tho' my membership's lapsed.) For much of that time, the one "oddity" in the Middle East was Iraq. Undoubtedly a less than perfect regime, but one where in comparison with much of the rest of the Middle East, prior to the First Gulf War, health care was better, education was better (the literacy rates were, if I remember right, as high as those in the west), women had more personal freedoms and legal protection. Hard to decide what the correct "stance" should be: condemnation of the brutal regime or grudging recognition of some of the social progress. Of course, back then Saddam Hussein wasn't the official bogeyman: that was Ayatollah Khomeni or maybe Colonel Gadaffi (depends on the year or the current "offense" committed against the West). Then the West stepped in to liberate Kuwait (that is what the First Gulf War was all about, wasn't it? oh, that, and oil...) and as a result wrecked Iraq before walking away from the results and preventing reconstruction via years of sanctions. But Saddam Hussein wasn't ousted, there was no regime change so presumably the legal structures and social norms did not change. Well, the Western allies have forced the regime change and now the legal system gets an overhaul, not by a democratically elected government but by folk put in place by the occupying forces.

And I'm not surprised. I've never really bought into the fiction that regimes in the west actually want to spread our supposed values--individual freedom, democracy, equality of the sexes, etc (we fail substantially to inflict these things on ourselves)--and have always felt that what was required was not that the others, whether in South America or the Middle East or the Far East or Africa, got these things at all. After all, all those others might want then access to all those opportunities that we have alongside our freedoms--our prosperity, our abundance of food, clean water, modern health care, education--and that might mean we'd have to give some of ours up. What the West wants sn cheap raw materials and markets for our surplus goods. So, evidently left-wing regimes that might not buy into our notion of "free" trade and captialism are out and must be opposed, destabilised and eradicated. But we don't need to "export" freedom, democracy, proper rights for women and children. In fact, we don't want to do that at all. Even in our "mature" democracies, those freedoms we have (and increasingly seem to be losing) cause instabilities that some see as unacceptable. Extending those freedoms to the rest means accepting that we can't guarantee that our collective needs for raw materials and outlets for our goods can be relied on. Stable, repressive right wing regimes, those that will trade with the west but keep their populations in check so there aren't any "nasty surprises" , are just fine. We can still sell them our surplus manufactured goods, still buy their oil, and there won't be any inconvenient elections, or student demonstrations or even moves to promote local goods over foreign imports (India's locally produced coke, for example). So Shari'a law in Iraq: it'll keep the religious zealots happy, and probably busy arguing over details for years to come. It won't necessarily reduce demand for imports. Driving women out of public life, out of the workplace, might help the Western allies: it reduces the pool of unemployed labour that needs to be provided with work if pool shrinks to only unemployed men.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Iraq overnight becomes comparable with Afghanistan under Taliban control. It's a smaller shift than that, but one which is in the wrong direction.

There's more in Dear Raed and a link to this report. It's not enough tho'.

Now this is silly

From the Brains Trust: Mars Exploration "Fails" to Find Weapons of Mass Destruction.