iraq

I’ve been horribly busy the last few days with a research project—it is done for the moment, however, so in the time in between now and when I can calm down enough to write a ‘real’ post, here’s a list of interesting tabs that have been open in my Firefox since a few days ago:

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

Well, I guess this is one example of progress, or something: the newly-redesigned (again) Iraqi flag is finally being flown in the northern Kurdish region. The new flag has removed the three stars, which represented Iraq’s hope (decades ago) eventually to join Egypt and Syria in a United Arab Republic (whence the two stars that are still on Syria’s flag). It also features Kufic script to write ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great), a neutral replacement for Saddam Hussein’s own handwriting.

Say what you will about the new Iraqi flag; it’s a damn sight better than the awful proposed white-and-blue striped flag, designed by the Iraqi Governing Council (remember, the government set up during the U.S. occupation?) which looked eerily similar to the flag of Israel. If I remember correctly, people didn’t know that the two blue stripes were supposed to represent the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, or that the gold stripe was somehow standing for the Kurds, or that a flag with no black or green or red was supposed to be an Arab flag.

Nota bene: the two blue stripes on Israel’s flag do not represent the ‘Zionist dream’ of a Jewish homeland ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’. The stripes are modelled after the tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. Although, I suppose, if the proposed Iraqi flag had gone through, at least one blue stripe on some flag somewhere would have represented the Euphrates River…sigh.

According to the recent report of an FBI agent who interviewed Saddam Hussein after the former leader of Iraq was captured in 2003, Iraq wanted to trick the rest of the world into believing that it had weapons of mass destruction to intimidate Iran:

Saddam Hussein let the world think he had weapons of mass destruction to intimidate Iran and prevent the country from attacking Iraq, according to an FBI agent who interviewed the dictator after his 2003 capture.

According to a CBS report, Hussein claimed he didn’t anticipate that the United States would invade Iraq over WMD, agent George Piro said on “60 Minutes,” scheduled for Sunday broadcast.

“For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that (faking having the weapons) would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” said Piro.

Kind of like Israel, but in reverse, I guess—trying to make a deterrent out of making everybody think you have WMDs when you actually don’t.

The report will show up on tonight’s 60 Minutes, but I plan to be watching the rebroadcast of the 2008 U.S. figure skating championships, which will be sure to hold my interest for much longer, for two (related) reasons. One, who the hell remembers or cares about weapons of mass destruction? WMDs as a justification for war with Iraq went out of fashion about six months after the invasion, when none were found. At that point, it became all about turning Iraq into a democracy, ending the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and other reasons that seemed to come out of the blue. So I have to wonder how much impact this is going to have on either the political policy or the public consciousness of the United States. (Though I might look for Bush to throw in a veiled dig or two at this report in tomorrow night’s State of the Union speech). And second, this report doesn’t change anything: Hussein was already executed back in 2006, the U.S. military is still bogged down in a war in Iraq with no end in sight, and at this point what does it matter whether the initial justification was right or not? Not that it would have changed anything back during the run-up to the war years ago anyway…

Update: Think Progress has a video and transcript of the original interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes here.

The U.S.’s National Public Radio aired an important story yesterday on its All Things Considered programme about soldiers who return from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exhibit all sorts of classic PTSD-indicative symptoms, are diagnosed with PTSD, and then receive ‘less-than-honorable’ discharges, which deny them medical benefits.

Matt McLauchlen … spent months in military hospitals after a rocket explosion in Iraq almost severed his spinal cord and caused permanent disabilities. When he told a colonel he was so depressed that he had smoked marijuana, commanders at Camp Pendleton sent him to court martial—and discharged him with only partial benefits.

This is only one example: the news item is full of other half-forgotten soldiers: remembered long enough to get kicked out of the armed forces and denied their rightful benefits. Veterans’ groups have been trying to raise awareness of this issue, but their efforts have only accomplished so much. And of course the U.S. government had nothing to say about it on or even off the record.

The Vietnam War and the first Gulf War rightly focussed attention on the realities of PTSD and ultimately turned it into a recognised medical condition. Treatments exist to help those it affects. So why aren’t they getting to those soldiers who need them? Why are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans denied their rights to help? Unfortunately this is yet another item on a long list of things the Bush administration needs to be held accountable for, and it’s probably not very high up on that list priority-wise. But just take a listen to the NPR story linked above: would that more media outlets still possessed that sense of journalistic integrity and passion.