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Nice post by Ali at Iraq the Model:

There are violent attacks that happen on a daily basis and most of the major media are trying to show that these will last forever and that there are street fights going all over Iraq, there’s the Sadr revolt and the unstable so-called Sunni triangle that the media shows as a place that refuses American presence totally, there was the alleged unity between Sunni and She’at against Americans that never happened and there is the somewhat mysterious political future that most of the world try to show as a dark one, and finally the polls that show that most Iraqis want Americans out and added to that Abu Gharib scandal which seems to be the only violation to human rights on this planet!! I’m not going to argue any of these because each one approaches these in a subjective way and it’s hard to remain objective while discussing them. I’m going to agree with this dark picture and will not, for this time, show my opinion on them. Instead I’m going to focus on this one tiny detail that do not fit in this picture; that is the Iraqi economy.

Yes, it seems that the Iraqi economy, from where Ali’s standing, is doing okay. How terrible if too many people realised that fact:

The bottom line, and to talk more seriously, is that the picture the media are giving us about Iraq is almost convincing, even to me, if it wasn’t for this insignificant detail, and something must be done to make it right before most Iraqis start to realize that! But to be fair our Arab and Muslim brothers, supported by the legitimate Arab leaders and cheered by most of the major media are aware of that, and of the dangers of the vicious cycle of (prosperity-stability-more prosperity-more stability) that the Americans and the Iraqi traitors (like myself) are trying to establish. They (our brothers) are doing all that they can; bombing oil pipelines and ports, beheading foreigners in the name of Iraqis and Allah, attacking electricity stations, creating chaos that allows thieves to loot everything they can, yet it’s still not working!! The Iraqi Dinar stands stable despite the fact that some Arab governments formally warned their citizens from dealing with it, the oil production is increasing, the markets are full of goods, most Iraqis are busy working, studying selling and buying and the average income is rising! Please, all those who care about the poor Iraqis and want to save them from the brutality of the American invaders and who want to prevent the Americans from stealing our fortune; meaning Bin laden, Zagrawi and their followers, Arab and Muslim tyrants, our good friend monsieur Dominique de Villepin, all the pacifists of the world, the major media, and in short, all those who hate America and obviously love Iraq: Get your s**t together and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT or else one or two years from now Iraq will be…a prosperous country, and then we will never forgive you for letting us down when we needed you!

Here’s a comforting thought from Arnold King at TCS:

In fact, not every possible disaster is occurring in Iraq.

He goes on to list eight disasters that have as yet not materialised: so you see, there’s always a silver lining. On the other hand, given time…….

Theodore Dalrymple has a short article in the Times on the redefinition of unemployment as sickness:

Almost the whole of human behaviour has been medicalised and turned into a syndrome or disease. Even persistently to lie about symptoms that one has never had is now considered a medical condition requiring treatment. If in the 1960s we were all guilty, by the end of the 1990s we were all ill.

The Mirror pictures are now, predictably, fanning the flames of anti-British feeling to the extent that graves in the Gaza Strip have been desecrated:

The images are too strong, and doubts about their authenticity too late. Pictures of British soldiers allegedly mistreating Iraqi prisoners have already drawn the retribution of the mob.
While Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, questioned the pictures’ veracity yesterday and the Daily Mirror abandoned its bullish confidence that they were genuine, a group of Palestinians did not wait to debate the fine detail.

They burst into one of the few havens of peace in the Gaza Strip and desecrated dozens of British soldiers’ graves that had lain untroubled for 87 years. Brandishing shovels, axes and rifles, they broke a number of headstones in the Commonwealth war cemetery, while others were daubed with swastikas, slogans and copies of the picures, which show inmates being abused by guards in Abu Ghraib prison.The slogans left little doubt that the attack reflected anger at the pictures. One read: “Curse will chase you for ever.”

Meanwhile in Italy:

Sir Ivor Roberts, the British Ambassador to Italy, had to be given police protection in Bologna yesterday after anti-war protesters shouting anti-British slogans threw stones and bottles as well as tomatoes at him as he arrived to give a lecture. He was unhurt.

Piers Morgan, as I argued here, is fighting to save his skin by arguing that it doesn’t matter whether the pictures are genuine or not:

Piers Morgan, the Mirror Editor, while no longer insisting that the pictures showed actual instances of abuse, says that even if they were reconstructions, “they still accurately reflect something that went on”.

This is breathtaking. Why bother with evidence at all? Just make up the news as you go along. “Here’s a picture of an Iraqi girl being gang-raped by British soldiers. It shows the sickening degradation of our troops, and the utter immorality of the war, a position which the Mirror has always maintained and which is now vindicated by the publication of these shocking photographs. The fact that we paid large sums of money for these photographs, and the fact, as it now turns out, that they’re extracts from a pornographic film entitled “Teenage Sluts on Heat” filmed in a garage in Slough, in no way mitigates the horror, for we know that this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time in Iraq.”

“political spirituality” that would “transfigure” the world) and from old standbys like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (“to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time”), there filtered down a vague notion that the United States and the West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that transcended the dull old class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of colonialism, the oppressive multinational corporation and the humiliation and erosion of indigenous culture brought on by globalization and a smug, self-important cultural condescension–all this and more explained poverty and despair, whether in Damascus, Tehran or Beirut.

There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race and class at home to colonialism, imperialism and hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these “area studies” that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank and the “freedom fighter” into some sloppy global union of the oppressed–a far hipper enterprise than rehashing “Das Kapital” or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel.

Of course, pampered Western intellectuals since Diderot have always dreamed up a “noble savage,” who lived in harmony with nature precisely because of his distance from the corruption of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy romanticism had an updated, political edge: The bearded killer and wild-eyed savage were not merely better than we because they lived apart in a premodern landscape. No, they had a right to strike back and kill modernizing Westerners who had intruded into and disrupted their better world–whether Jews on Temple Mount, women in Westernized dress in Tehran, Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in Islamabad, whiskey-drinking oilmen in Riyadh, or miniskirted tourists in Cairo.

An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female emancipation in Iran, who murdered non-Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to hunt down, torture and kill liberals nevertheless seemed to liberal Western eyes as preferable to the shah–a Western-supported anticommunist, after all, who was engaged in the messy, often corrupt task of bringing Iran from the 10th to the 20th century, down the arduous, dangerous path that, as in Taiwan or South Korea, might eventually lead to a consensual, capitalist society like our own.

Yet in the new world of utopian multiculturalism and knee-jerk anti-Americanism, in which a Noam Chomsky could proclaim Khomeini’s gulag to be “independent nationalism,” reasoned argument was futile. Indeed, how could critical debate arise for those “committed to social change,” when no universal standards were to be applied to those outside the West? Thanks to the doctrine of cultural relativism, “oppressed” peoples either could not be judged by our biased and “constructed” values (“false universals,” in Edward Said’s infamous term) or were seen as more pristine than ourselves, uncorrupted by the evils of Western capitalism.

Who were we to gainsay Khomeini’s butchery and oppression? We had no way of understanding the nuances of his new liberationist and “nationalist” Islam. Now back in the hands of indigenous peoples, Iran might offer the world an alternate path, a different “discourse” about how to organize a society that emphasized native values (of some sort) over mere profit.

The line which is slowly crystallising in sections of the media is that the Mirror pictures may have been staged, but were representations of something that probably really happened, so that’s okay really. Take this report in the Observer today:

The Ministry of Defence believes that controversial pictures purporting to show British soldiers beating up an Iraqi detainee were ‘reconstructed’ but revealed an actual event that took place.
In the latest twist to the furore over pictures published by the Daily Mirror last weekend, military sources have told The Observer that it would be difficult to prove how and where the photographs were staged.

‘We believe the pictures are reconstructions but cannot prove it, and so we are concentrating on whether the allegations … are true or not,’ said one official close to the investigation. ‘And on that issue there is a disturbing pattern emerging.’

In an interview with The Observer Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, insisted that the pictures showed a genuine event and that evidence from a third soldier, Soldier C, revealed in the paper last week, showed that abuse had taken place.

‘I, as I sit here, have not been presented with any evidence that contradicts either the testimony of the soldiers or their claim that these pictures are genuine,’ he said.

‘The government and the British army have had a week to verify or knock down these photographs and they have been unable to do either.

‘Even if we had gone to the army, as some have suggested, and given them a week’s notice they still would not have been in a position to say yes or no.’

Morgan said the public was now more interested in the allegations of abuse than about the provenance of the photographs.

Morgan, of course, would say that. He is clearly manoeuvering himself into a position where he can claim that he acted in good faith when it turns out, as even he now seems prepared to admit, that the photos are fakes. The Observer seems very happy to help him in this, and is remarkably unconcerned at the possibility that another newspaper printed fabricated photographs of our troops brutalising Iraqis, pictures which have clearly inflamed Arab opinion and will make the jobs of our troops that much harder and that much more dangerous. Could this be just possibly because they would like to believe, with Morgan, that it’s true, and in the absence of evidence will gladly accept fakes? Isn’t there something about journalistic integrity being lost in all this?

Saudi blogger The Religious Policeman is back briefly with some words about the reaction to the recent terrorist attacks there (mentioned here over at Harry’s Place). He quotes Arabnews:

Speaking to top military and civilian officials in Jeddah last Saturday when four terrorists went on a shooting spree in Yanbu killing five Westerners and a National Guard officer, the crown prince said he believed Zionists were behind most terrorist attacks in the Kingdom. But in a press statement after the attack, Prince Naif blamed Al-Qaeda.

“I don’t see any contradiction in the two statements, because Al-Qaeda is backed by Israel and Zionism,” he said.

and is not too impressed:

It typifies our two Arab diseases – self-denial of the blindingly obvious, and blaming everyone else. With attitudes like that permeating the highest levels of government, we can be assured that our War on Terrorism will continue to be a futile farce. We might as well save ourselves the bother, let’s invite the Talibaan in right now, Mrs. A ought to stay in more anyway, my daughter would enjoy a break from school, and maybe our national soccer team will play better in full length pants.

For the past ten years or so, a regular feature in the TV review pages of all the broadsheets has been the Friends puff, along the lines of “oh boy, tonight it’s Friends again, and this episode is absolutely a must-see! Monica and Joey get together with Ross but Phoebe doesn’t know and thinks Chandler is with Rachel but then… It all ends hilariously as usual and the laughs are non-stop. Why (oh why) can’t we in Britain produce anything remotely as good as this?” I can’t recall any programme ever receiving so much adulation from the critics.

One explanation for this is that Friends is in fact a brilliant series, and fully deserves all this acclaim. This is easily refuted by the simple expedient of actually watching it. Okay, I may not have made it right through many episodes in full, but I’ve seen enough to judge, and brilliant it’s not. It’s slick, it’s professional, it delivers a guaranteed 4.7 laughs per minute, but it’s horribly smug and vacuous. I’ll admit to a slight prejudice in that I find the Ross character played by David Schwimmer (see, I know the names) completely unbearable. In fact the one episode I would gladly watch all the way through would be “The one where Ross gets the shit kicked out of him”. Also Phoebe, the weird one (kookie? ditzy? screwball? pain-in-the-arse?) is a little, um, hard to take. Come to think of it, I’m not that crazy about Rachel either…

Now the great Aaronovitch spends a whole column singing the praises of this wretched series, and with stunning originality wonders why (oh why) we can’t come up with anything as good in this country. He comes near to the truth here:

An American psychoanalyst of my acquaintance, one of the most intelligent men I know, now speaks exactly like Ross. And I don’t think Ross got it from him. So, if it was all just rubbish, then that says ominous things about society, television, my friend and my daughter.

but fails to draw the correct conclusions.

It’s a common theme that we in the UK think US TV comedy is wonderful, while in the US they think UK TV comedy is wonderful – check out the comments on Amazon.com for the DVDs of series like Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Father Ted, The League of Gentlemen and The Office. I tend to side with the Americans on this one, with The Simpsons as the exception that proves the rule.

rit of that neighborhood held sway, both through friendships among the participants and in the attitudes of Lévy and his associates. The Incohérents included many Hydropathes as well as a growing number of the younger participants in the Chat Noir group. In 1882, the artist and writer Henri Detouche summed up the artists’ basic motivations: “It seems to me that in front of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Moses, the true artist of today should say: ‘I would like to do something else.’ “

As the article points out, this is years before Dada, or its offshoot Surrealism. Why is all this forgotten? Apparently no art movement is accorded its place in art history unless it has its theoreticians, issuing proclamations about the state of the world and how they propose to change it, reaching some sort of nadir with the endless humourless and autocratic directives from the “pope” of Surrealism Andre Breton. As Friedrich writes:

[y]ou almost wonder if such good humor is ultimately unforgiveable to the mandarins of Modern Art History. After all, these people have seen fit to leave the Incoherents out of general surveys of Modern Art, or at least those I’ve read. (And I’ve read a quite a few.) It’s not as if this was all just a ‘flash in the pan’ phenomenon, either. Levy organized Incoherent shows and balls annually for more than a decade, and these events were attended by tens of thousands of people.

All of this ‘prefigures’ or anticipates the program of Dada, an post-World War I art movement that was ultimately the progenitor of conceptual art. (I think it’s fair to describe Dada as the most significant paradigm for contemporary art in the last quarter of the 20th century.) But why should Dada get so much ink, and the Incoherents none, when they basically did the whole ‘art-critiquing-art’ thing a whole generation earlier? Although I’m just guessing here, it strikes me as overwhelmingly likely that the Dada habitués of Zurich would have been well aware of their Parisian avant-garde antecedents. It’s hard to believe that the choice of the name, Cabaret Voltaire, wasn’t a reference to those antecedents.

Not only does Dada appear to be modeled after Arts incohérents, but it would appear that it was a far less graceful and light-hearted affair than its Parisian role-model.

But I imagine the Incoherents wouldn’t be overly troubled by the lack of respect shown to them by history.

The whole front page of the Indie this morning is given over to Robert Fisk. Beneath the headline “The Destruction of Morality” and the picture of Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a prone Iraqi prisoner, Fisk writes, “today, Lynndie smashes our entire morality, with just one tug of the leash.”

This is so over-stated that it seems counter-productive. This is the sort of report you might expect from the first journalists to arrive at Auschwitz. But Fisk is on a roll: at last he’s been vindicated.

First, Fisk makes the Saddam comparison; we’re as bad as them:

Not long after the occupation of Baghdad in April last year, we got our hands on videotape of the whipping of Iraqi prisoners by Saddam’s security police.

I’m not sure which circle of hell the victims were enduring in the 45 minutes of sadism which I still have on tape. They are whipped, they are kicked into sewers and they cower like dogs. And why were these war crimes filmed? I thought at first that it was intended for the enjoyment of Saddam or his disgusting son Uday. But now I realise the videos were taken so that the prisoners could be humiliated. Their suffering, their pathetic pleas for mercy were to be recorded – to add the final layer of degradation to their fate. And now I realise, too, that the pictures of the Iraqis so cruelly treated – so tortured – by the Americans, were taken for precisely the same reason.

No argument with the common theme of brutal humiliation, but there are a couple of points to be made which of course Fisk omits. Firstly, what happened to those prisoners of Saddam after the video finished? Nothing good, I imagine. In fact as we know this is mild stuff compared to the usual Saddam treatment.

But more importantly – crucially – under Saddam this brutality was standard and was sanctioned at the highest level. This was normality. It is not normality for the US. That’s why there’s such a huge furore about it, why a number of soldiers are facing court-martial, and why Bush has considered it necessary to apologise.

Fisk doesn’t buy this though, and is keen to establish that the soldiers involved, Lynndie England et al., were too stupid to come up with this sort of behaviour themselves (maybe that’s why he refers to England as Lynndie all the time; or maybe that’s just because she’s a woman):

We are not just talking “sick” here. We’re talking professionals. […] Lynndie and her boyfriend were not part of a “rogue” unit. They were told to do these despicable things. They were encouraged. This was an order from someone. Who? When can we see their pictures, their identity, their passports, their orders?

Where’s this leading? Who’s to blame? The US military? Well yes, but Fisk has a larger aim. We are all guilty: it’s our rotten racist Western culture. At last, for Fisk, it’s his moment of truth. He was right all along. The mask has slipped and the real nature of the occupying forces has been revealed:

“It’s part of a culture, a long tradition that goes back to the Crusades; that the Muslim is dirty, lascivious, unChristian, unworthy of humanity […] And our illegal, immoral, meretricious war has now brought forth the images that betray our racism.”