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The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities
Harperdog writes "Hugh Gusterson has written a devastating article about what has happened to Iraq's once great university system, and puts most of the blame for its total collapse on the U.S. Quoting: 'While American troops guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior but ignored cultural heritage sites, looters ransacked the universities. For example, the entire library collections at the University of Baghdad's College of Arts and at the University of Basra were destroyed. The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandresekara described the scene at Mustansiriya University in 2003: "By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day."'"
.. I guess you can't blame the looters.. I mean no-one wan looking, so it's like they WANTED all their shit stolen, right?
Even in videogames, you can not develop technology to attack or defend your virtual community without taking care of the essentials for your population first: making sure they are fed, clothed, housed, and educated.
The Iraqi universities are not the only victims of a failure to recognize the importance of these social pillars.
The First Nations of Canada have many communities where even those basic needs are not properly managed and delivered to the people.
Heck, the whole COUNTRY of Canada suffers from a government which places an emphasis on imprisoning people for growing plants that the majority of the population wants to see legalized, taxed, and regulated in poll after poll.
Without an educated and comfortable population, a nation has no hope of competing on the global market and being a "real player." Education creates jobs, it creates technology, and it improves the processes of business and society. Even people like Marx recognized that society would evolve into a "communist" or "socialist" state as the people became educated and concerned about more than their own personal needs. (Marx never espoused a revolution such as Russia or China had; he was merely discussing where he saw society evolving to.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Those ARE the looters... Hence they where protecting some oilfields instead of the citizens they came to 'free'.
So Iraq was supposed to be a push over, and the US was going to install a puppet government that would do what the US oil cartel wanted. This would be a counterbalance to Saudi oil power. Remember Bush and Cheney are both originally oil men, and they wanted to go back to the "good old days" of western dominance of Middle Eastern oil production.
There was no planning about anything except securing the oil resources. They made no plans about securing any civil society, not just the schools. They didn't even have a real plan to secure any weapons, or even the known stockpiles of uranium ore (yellow cake) that Iraq had obtained. Access to weapons was one of the things that made the following civil war so bloody, and made it hard for the occupation forces to restore order.
All the top military US military leaders left right after the collapse of the Hussein regime because they knew that it was going to be a disaster, and they didn't want their legacy to be associated with the resulting fuckup. Something like half the administrators who went over in the first wave to try and restore some kind of government did not have passports! They had never been outside the US. A sizable chunk were people who had worked for the Bush/Cheney election campaign and had no relevant experience. In short, completely clueless.
The winner on all of this has been Iran. Their regional power and influence in the Arab world has increased dramatically. A lot of the weapons that were looted during the lawless fall of Iraq ended up in Iran, by the way. Meanwhile, the US has been mauled by asymmetrical warfare in both Iran and Afghanistan. They win, we loose. The unexpected result that thwarted Iran has been the Arab Spring, specifically the near civil war in Syria. Otherwise they are well on their way to being the dominant Gulf power. They may still come out on top.
So here is the bonus question: Why has GW Bush been the invisible man during the current presidential campaign? The US withdrew combat troops from Iran and Bush's name never came up. That's like talking about the US Civil War without talking about Lincoln, or WWII without FDR or Churchill or Stalin. You would expect that he would be asked about the end of the conflict he started. We get nothing.
Now the press is all over the perceived weakness of the Republican contenders. It would be reasonable for someone in the press to ask the last elected Republican candidate, even if all they got was a "no comment". Again, nothing. When the Republicans scream about how Obama hasn't fixed the economy, no one, Democrat or Republican talks about how the Bush administration screwed it all up. Remember TARP and it's bailout were authorized when Bush was still in office. If you look at the press accounts, it's like our economic mess fell from the sky without human intervention.
I'm wondering what will happen during the Republican convention. Will Bush show up? Whoever the nominee is, do you think they want to be seen with Bush on stage? It would be like being endorsed by Charlie Manson. If Bush is a no show, will the press ignore the non-event? I assume that McCain will be there, and Palin will get some air time, so how could they not talk about Bush?
The disappearance of GW Bush is emblematic of the memory hole that now dominates US political discourse. We don't need the complexities of New Speak or the Ministry of Truth. Collective amnesia in the media is so much more effective.
Why is Snark Required?
Read the Geneva Conventions if you don't believe me.
Like the Convention Against Torture, those are very handy for us to use for convicting the petty thugs running penny-ante countries when we catch them.
However, they don't apply to the USA. Or won't, anyway, until some other country has the power to apply them to us.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Mainly Naomi Klein, who is known for just making stuff up as she goes along. ... Maybe the current situation is as good as it can get. The US went in there to prevent Iraq from being a pain in the butt and I think it helped. It's a shame we cannot keep people from each other's throats but even the US isn't powerful enough to do that everywhere on the globe, so yeah. Reality sucks.
Seriously though, the primary thing to blame for the end of Iraq's universities is Islam, because it was what fuelled the anger of the looters (against the un-Islamic curricula and against the education of women), because it is what makes Iraq inhospitable to science now and because it is what is preventing the Iraqi government from funding the building of new ones even though there's plenty of oil money available.
The only thing the US can be blamed for is naïveté. At least the military top and the administration had this attidude of "muslims are just like us, except they call God Allah". This is also why things turned out so shitty when the US didn't keep the oppressive military rule in place and why Iraq's democratic project is coming apart at the seams. Most of Iraq's problems were essentially caused by the US top refusing to do their homework before they went in.
Then again, the only way to prevent all this would have been to institute a tight (and expensive) military rule followed by a thorough (and expensive) re-education program. I can see the headlines now.
Possibly the greatest military blunder off all time was coalition provisional authority order number 2 which dismissed the Iraqi army. This action sent hundreds of thousands young unemployed trained soldiers into the hands of the various mullahs. Arguably, it was the tinder that fuel the Iraqi civil war. L. Paul Bremer, the man who committed the blunder was rewarded with the Presidential medal of Freedom.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Yes, I was dealing with some Americans just yesterday. They were saying something about sweeping generalizations but I couldn't hear them because they were so fat and arrogant.
Look who were targetted by the West ?
Saddam Hussein
Muammar Gaddafi
What kind of countries these guys were controlling?
Iraq and Libya - both countries were considered as "Modernized Islamic Countries" because they allow the women to do drive, to work, to do most things men were allowed to do
Why the West targeted Iraq and Libya?
You may not believe in conspiracy theories but there is suspicion that the West doesn't really want the Islamic countries to become modernized
True, both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were despicable despots. Both of them killed their own people.
But then, please tell me which Middle East leader never treat their own people like shit and/or being tyrannical ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Some [wikipedia.org] have even suggested that it was on purpose.
...
Seriously though, the primary thing to blame for the end of Iraq's universities is Islam.
This is a good opportunity to put Occam's razor to use. We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot. It doesn't matter whether it is natural disaster, invasion, or just a neighborhood breakdown in public order. This even includes ordinary people who would not ordinarily steal. I once talked to an anthropologist whose work on a Caribbean island was interrupted by an unusually powerful hurricane. There was looting, but several days later many people sheepishly returned things they'd stolen, unable to explain why they'd taken them in the panic.
Looting is probably an instinctive human response to the rapid onset of environmental or social disorder. But we don't have to accept that. We only have to accept that disasters cause looting. Introducing the hypothetical intellectual backwardness of Islam simply multiplies causes unnecessarily. The looting would have occurred whether or not Islam was as you characterize it. The looting is neither proof nor disproof of your notions about Islam. Your notions of Islam have no bearing on the looting, even if you had actual evidence (which you don't) of the motivations of the crowd.
Now as for the looting of important cultural institutions being an intended consequence, Occam's razor applies here as well. The administration's general lack of preparation or even awareness of basic facts about Iraq that was evident in the aftermath of the invasion. That is enough to explain the lack of steps to protect universities and libraries. To suggest that was part of the invasion suggests an awareness of the importance of intellectual inquiry that was not otherwise evidenced in any of the administration's other behavior. This was a president who proudly said he made decisions by gut instead of reason, as if that were an admirable thing. It is more plausible that it never occurred to the Bush Administration that a country like Iraq *had* important cultural institutions .
It really makes no difference whether the looting was an intended consequence or not -- either practically or ethically. Undertaking drastic, irreversible actions fatal to so many is not excused by ignorance. Doing that in unexamined ignorance is arguably worse than causing many of the things that happened after the invasion intentionally. Arguably somebody who *wanted* those things would have to be sick. Somebody who is just intellectually lazy deserves no pity. The uncaring deserve less pity than the honestly depraved.
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They loot libraries?
Well, sure. It's not like people sit down and ask themselves, "what are the highest value places for me to loot today?" It's an instinctive behavior. The anthropologist I mentioned said that people were often mystified by the things they took, because they had no use or practical value.
I think looting libraries makes more sense if you look at the behavior in terms of its statistical benefit to a displaced population (i.e. like you were in charge of natural selection). If your goal is to have as many people in a community survive, you don't want them all hunting for the same optimal loot to take. You want everyone to go straight to the nearest thing of value and carry it off. They can sort it out later, there will be more diverse loot, and you won't have a lot redundant effort with everyone looting the same few things.
It's also possible that in a fight or flight situation, grabbing stuff is a low marginal cost addition to flight that occasionally pays off. That would be consistent with the way looting follows in the *wake* of the disaster. Imagine a village being attacked in a cattle raid. In the early stages they grab their weapons and secure their valuables. If they lose the fight, in the later stages of the raid (i.e. the looting and raping stage) it makes sense for the losers to grab anything they can and run away.
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We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot.
Like the Japanese at Fukushima? Not.
In fact there *was* looting after the earthquake ( citation). However the authorities moved quickly to quell the looting, before the looting ignited a vicious circle. Which brings us right back to the predictability of the looting response and the *effectiveness* of steps taken to restrain it.
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Again it is simply not true there was *no* looting in Japan after earthquake and tsunami. There was but it was eclipsed in the news by the enormity of the natural disaster and the nuclear situation. The authorities moved quickly and efficiently to stop the looting before it became a secondary disaster.
Another point is that I am a human and would never loot and hoard.
I hope so, but you can't really credibly make that claim until you've found yourself in the kind of situation where people loot. But in all probability you won't loot. So far as I know I can't think of any instance of looting where *most* of the people in the population were involved.
As for myself, I am certain that I am less likely to loot than some, and reasonably confident I'm less likely than most. However, I'm far from certain I would *never* loot under *any* circumstances, no matter how desperate, fearful or angry I got. Haven't *you* ever done or said something under the influence of anger or fear that you would not have after sober consideration? If so, you're a better human being than I am, or indeed any that I have ever met.
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