Month: April 2003

The great punk rocker Dr. Frank has memorialized the essence of the liberation of Iraq in a tune titled “Democracy, Whisky, Sexy” after the answer a man in Najaf gave to a New York Times reporter asking what the Amercans were bringing to Iraq. Go on over to his blog and check it out

But, because it may be of vague interest to the blogosphere, I did put up my little song about “Democracy, Whisky, Sexy.” I don’t know how to characterize it, except to say that someone who heard it said it was “a cross between Imagine and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I’m not too sure about that, but that’s a pretty intriguing description, so I’m sticking with it. Free, rights reserved, spare change appreciated, etc., etc. Send comments, on this song, other songs, songwriting in general, to [email protected].

Dr. Frank is one of the great musical talents of the age, in case you live in a cave or something.

The Daily Telegraph has the goods on German cooperation with Saddam, including a memo on payoffs for opposing the Anglo/American coalition:

Germany’s intelligence services attempted to build closer links to Saddam’s secret service during the build-up to war last year, documents from the bombed Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad obtained by The Telegraph reveal… the Iraqis offered to give lucrative contracts to German companies if the Berlin government helped prevent an American invasion of the country.

For those keeping score, we have new smoking guns on Russia and Germany, and the TotalFinaElf oil contact with France has already been reported.

Link via Command Post.

Christopher Hitchens is in fine form on Slate:

At any rate, a burning well is a tough proposition and an uncapped well –emitting a wholesale discharge–an even tougher one. The situation was being handled by Boots and Coots, a fire-control company with an almost parodically American name, which is based in Houston. Boots and Coots, which also worked in Kurdistan and Kuwait after the much worse conflagrations of 1991, is subcontracted for the task by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (another name Harold Pinter might have coined for an American oil company), which is in turn a subdivision of Halliburton. And “Halliburton,” which admittedly sounds more British and toney than Boots and Coots, was once headed by–cue mood music of sinister corporate skyscraper as the camera pans up in the pretitle sequence–Vice President Dick Cheney.

Well, if that doesn’t give away the true motive for the war, I don’t know what does. But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam’s fires should be allowed to burn out of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras. The number of companies able to deliver such expertise is very limited. The chief one is American and was personified for years by “Red” Adair–the movie version of his exploits (played by John Wayne himself!) was titled Hellfighters. The other main potential bidder, according to a recent letter in the London Times, is French. But would it not also be “blood for oil” to award the contract in that direction? After all, didn’t the French habitually put profits in Iraq ahead of human rights and human life? More to the point, don’t they still?

The mean old bastard is right, as usual.

Paul Berman has been a reliable liberal critic of totalitarianism, and he turns his lens to Iraq’s prospects in this piece for the Boston Globe:

Saddam’s Ba’ath Party has always claimed to be restoring the ancient national glory of the Arab people, from the glory days of the Caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arab Empire was on the march. But the Ba’ath is not, in fact, an ancient Arab institution. The party was founded in Damascus in 1943 on the basis of doctrines from the 1920s and `30s, which were subsequently updated to include a number of doctrines from later times, as well. These ideas were pretty much Mussolini’s and those of the extreme right in Europe, mixed with a few ideas from the Stalin era of Soviet communism and given a distinctly Arab varnish. The iconography of Saddam’s Ba’ath looks like the iconography of modern Western totalitarianism because that is, in fact, exactly what it is.

The modern age has been the age of totalitarianism, but it has also been the age of totalitarianism’s demise. In one country after another, totalitarianism’s overthrow has led to scenes of statue-toppling and dancing crowds-scenes of revolution. And so, it is natural to wonder if revolution is the scene before our eyes in Baghdad, too-if we are observing not just the superficial fact of a tyrant’s fall or what is cynically called ”regime change,” but the deeper reality of a growth in human freedom, the beginning of a revolution for the liberal values of individual and minority rights, the rule of law, tolerance, and justice.

The key factor is whether liberal democratic leaders come forward, as they did in Afghanistan and Poland, but didn’t in Yugoslavia:

Let us fear, then. But let us also remember that, at moments like this, every possibility is still in play-the worst, but also the best: the road that leads to Yugoslavia, as well as the road to Poland. Iraq could go either way right now. So let us hope, too. Let us press for greater American involvement, a more generous budget, an all-is-forgiven attitude that welcomes and even requests support from the rest of the world-a big campaign of reconstruction and not a small one.

Building a society of greater freedom than ever before in Iraq, a safer society for its own people and its neighbors and (not least) for us in far-away America-this possibility does exist, even if not in a fairyland version. There is a two-word name for this possibility: liberal revolution. If falling statues of tyrants are a familiar symbol to us, that is because, in modern times, more-or-less successful revolutions have also become familiar. And now let us get ready for the long haul.

There’s clearly going to be pressure on the US and Britain to play a limited role in Iraq’s reconstruction, both physical and political. Berman says we have to resist that pressure, and I agree. There’s going to be a temptation to turn the nation-building over the UN, and in rejecting that we have only to look at the UN’s track record; there are no Germanies or Japans on the UN’s resume, but plenty of Congos and Rwandas. Resistance is more important now than ever.

Link via A & L Daily.

Go on over to Michael J. Totten and read the entry in which this quote is embedded:

The second Gulf War has been a wonderfully revealing incident. An outbreak of anti-Semitism and ethnic hatred, an economic and social crisis, the desecration of a British military cemetery, the beating up of Jews and Iraqi opposition during the great “peace” marches, an alliance… with the unsavory Vladimir Putin, butcher of Chechnyans, the reception of the African despot Robert Mugabe in Paris, public insults directed to Eastern European countries who committed the sin of not slavishly obeying us — our great nation is not in the process of writing its most glorious page in the Book of History.

You’ll be glad you did.

Why did the Iraqis lay waste to their cultural museum? Eric Gibson explains:

Modernist art in Russia all but died in the 1920s, when Lenin denounced it as bourgeois and decadent, decreeing that the purpose of art was to glorify the revolution and the worker. The Nazis’ looting of private art collections from Jewish families was not only mercenary but aimed at destroying a people by robbing it of its culture.

Saddam’s regime was no different. “You have to understand that Saddam’s propaganda ministry made great play on Iraq’s cultural heritage, and he was forever linking himself with the great figures of Mesopotamian history such as Nebuchadnezzar,” Mr. Coughlin says; Babylon was “turned into a Disney theme park.” Saddam bulldozed large parts of the ruins, replacing them with bricked walls. “Tens of thousands of bricks used in the construction bore a special inscription,” writes Mr. Coughlin in his book, “reminding future generations that the ‘Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein.’ ”

In short, Iraqis laid waste to the museum in Baghdad because it had become the symbol of a hated regime. And little wonder. Saddam stole his country’s treasures, hauling off truckloads for his enrichment. But he also misappropriated Iraq’s history by making it a tool of his personality cult.

Still, Iraq has some cool stuff and it would be nice to get it back, for the children.