Day: April 11, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Thanks to Doc I found out about an exchange between Frank Paynter and Tom Shugart regarding Tom’s posting in response to Jonathon’s fundamentalism post. (Tom had a couple of additional postings on this, but the Blogger permalinks seem to be screwed up. Frank, also, has continued this. Jonathon is wisely staying out of this fest, choosing instead to write about less flammable issues.)

Frank says that Jonathon and Tom are “rooting for the Bush team” because of their expressed views on peace protests, if I understand the discussion correctly. In a follow-up post, he also writes:

I believe that by acts of mass demonstrations and civil disobedience we may yet break the stranglehold of the media oligopoly and inform our fellow citizens of the great evil being perpetrated on the world by the Bush regime under the guise of American patriotism and self protection.

And I think that is the choice. You are either with them or against them. Any hand wringing about how the war was bad but now we owe it to the people of the region to help them rebuild begs the question of who benefits. Will the Iraqi people be any better off with our support than they would with the support of the European community? Not. Who benefits is the cartel that provides reconstruction services… the Halliburtons the Bechtels, the whole Bohemian Grove kaffee klatch.

I believe from what Frank writes that I must also be said to be supportive of the Bush team. (Note to readers: No real worry here.) I also stopped supporting the peace protests when I felt they did little good. And I won’t attend the ones this weekend because, to me, they lack focus and discipline. Are we protesting to support Iraq? Or against Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft? Are we for UN? Or against the Patriot Act? And before you say the lines are clear on all these issues, they aren’t. The ‘peace movement’ needs to make a decision about what the fight is, develop an effective voice, and then stick with it.

Frank’s reasoning is based on the old adage, if you’re not with us, you’re against us. We’ve seen this on both sides of the fence this last year, haven’t we? We’re all so sure we’re right. Doc talks about ‘certitude’, and in a play on words, calls the participants ‘certitudes’. He wrote:

It’s about partisanship and paranoia. To me all the certitudes are equally off base because they’re convinced the Other Guys are part of some big-ass Conspiracy, or are what Craig Burton calls EWBU: Evil, Wrong, Bad and Ugly.

Doc, can’t say it better than you write good. Certitudes. For women, would it be certibo—, uh, never mind.

Doc makes a good argument, but I’m not nice like Doc – I don’t call it certitude, I call it pig-headed dumb-ass stubbornness. Regardless of whose spit is flying through the air. Including my own.

Peoples, said once before and worth repeating again – we need an end to the rhetoric. An end to the accusations and the blame, the finger pointing, name calling, and petty squabbles. This is not helping anyone.

Point blank: if you can read this, you’re doing better than the people in Iraq. They’re the ones with the right to complain – we’re just along for the ride. It’s time to figure out how to help them. Tomorrow we’ll fight the evil empire, but tonight, dammit, people are dying.

Yes, we are not all going to agree, and we have different agendas and objectives, and yes, even different fights at times. And this includes different opinions about marches and protests. However, I don’t think there’s a one of us that doesn’t want the best for the people of Iraq right now, regardless of the events leading to this moment. Agreeing to this one point is not selling out, or going over to the enemy, is it? And it’s a start, a follow up to a belief that there’s hope.

This disturbing exchange between virtual friends did me in on politics for a bit. In particular, the last posting and story has made me yearn for some quiet times. I know that a silver harp isn’t the same as an Iraqi’s life, young or old, but the thought of the harp gone forever, or worse, the clay tablets with humanity’s oldest writing destroyed, well, sorry, but I’ve hit my temporary overflow point.

On Tuesday, if I get my eagerly anticipated but not yet arrived final advance from O’Reilly for Practical RDF, I’m heading to San Francisco to see what I can grab from my storage unit. In the meantime, I want to focus on other things such as my photography and poem pairs (this is becoming an obsession). And Steve’s hopefully continuing with his discussion about weblog writing as literature.

Maybe I’ll see if I can find a set of duck footprints to photograph for Dorothea. D, would geese do, instead?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There is so much to be concerned about with Iraq now. The people, and their continued survival. People being fed, given water, feeling secure. The end to fighting so that re-building can occur.

Unfortunately, when the re-building occurs, it will be too late to save one aspect or Iraqi culture that all of us share – our historic heritage.

In Beautiful Protest I talked about the Ziggerat or Ur, the site of the first known city. In Beautiful Protest Bridges of Brick, I talked about Iraq as the source of religion, of culture, of community. In this one country resides some of the most exquisite artifacts of our past. Steps still exist in Iraq that were once walked by Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

At least, I think they still exist.

Catching up on my reading, I found this at ABC News:

So far, reports suggest U.S. troops have treaded over at least one site  ancient Babylon. The Reuters news agency said that U.S. forces had moved through the location of the ancient King Nebuchadnezzar’s city on Wednesday. A tank from the 101st Airborne Division rumbled onto the main Babylon site, containing elaborate reconstructions of the city. A general rebuked the move.

“We just can’t have that,” the general said, according to Reuters
…
“If there is a time when you’re going to lose the collection it’s now  during this volatile transition between Saddam Hussein’s regime and whatever comes next,” said Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist at State University of New York in Stony Brook. “Even here when Hurricane Gloria came through, people were looting and doing outrageous things.

“And that was just a hurricane. This is a regime change.”

In the London Times:

In the capital mobs looted the country’s largest archeological museum, and US troops shot and killed a shopkeeper who was defending his premises with a Kalashnikov rifle against looters. In the southern city of Basra, Irish Guards shot dead five looters after the gang opened fire on them.

From the Times of Oman:

Mobs also looted Baghdad’s cultural and historic treasures, including Iraq’s largest archaeological museum, as shopkeepers resorted to arming themselves amid a collapse in authority after US troops routed Saddam Hussein’s regime.

A dozen looters helped themselves undisturbed in ground floor rooms at the National Museum of Iraq, where pottery artefacts and statues were seen broken or overturned and administrative offices were wrecked.

The museum housed a major collection of antiquities, including a 4,000-year-old silver harp from Ur.

I wonder if the harp will escape being melted down?

From boston.com:

Reports coming out of Baghdad (and just confirmed by ABC News) indicate that mobs have looted Iraq’s largest acheological museum amid a breakdown in civil authority following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Lotters helped themselves to treasures in the National Museum of Iraq, which housed the remains of ancient civilizations, one of the richest archeological heritages in the world.

And there’s more.

Read the story? Watched the Movie? Now own a piece of your own.

Iraq: Coming soon to an eBay near you.