Today on TAP online: Ann Friedman argues that we could learn a lot about the realities of fighting -- and perhaps avoiding -- wars if we only paid more attention to the daily lives of civilians in a war zone:
The news outlets that still report from Iraq rarely publish accounts of daily life there. Rarer still are narratives from outside the confines of the Green Zone. Sure, we get snippets of information from Iraqi reporters working with Western journalists, but most of the time, Iraqis' voices come to us in the form of react-quotes after a marketplace bombing or sectarian uprising. We don't see what it's like for Iraqis to walk home from the scene of the violence, then make dinner, then put their kids to bed. We lack the humanizing power of detail. ...Blogs used to fill some of this void. Widely read Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend, the 26-year-old pseudonymous woman who wrote a daily account of life in Baghdad, and Raed Jarrar, whose entire family blogged the first three years of the occupation, gave international readers important insights into the real impact of the war -- in the form of long, winding narratives, not fleeting quotes.
But between 2006 and 2007, almost all of those bloggers, Riverbend included, left Iraq out of fear for their safety. Some continue to blog about the war, but do so from places like Philadelphia or Amman, and primarily rely on news accounts and updates they hear from relatives still in the country. Meanwhile, day-to-day stories of life under occupation have become much harder to find, especially for readers who don't read Arabic.
And Paul Starr looks at the situation on the ground in Iraq and sees little reason to conclude that we're "winning" anything:
Some analysts hope that even with a weak state, a stable equilibrium will emerge among the warring sects, tribes, and militias, but that hope goes against the historical record and widely held expectations in Iraq that the contest for power will be settled by violence. The United States now finds itself in the bizarre role of arming rival factions to stop a civil war.If you want to receive automatic notice of all articles on TAP online as soon as they're posted you can subscribe to our articles RSS feed here.And the contradictions don't stop there. The president has defined victory in Iraq as the creation of a state that will be an American ally, while the Iraqi government we are supporting has close ties to Iran and is unlikely ever to oppose it.
But what about staying in Iraq to fight al-Qaeda? General Odom answered that question in his Senate testimony: "The concern... about a residual base left for al-Qaeda if we withdraw is utter nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al-Qaeda if we leave Iraq. The Kurds do not allow them in their region, and the Shiites, like the Iranians, detest al-Qaeda."
--The Editors
