Who let the bombs out?
Jim Jepps
Well, according to
Aljazeera the occupying forces are clearly to blame for the mosque
bombing.
https://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=10813
Here's an extract "Wednesday’s attack on al-Askariya shrine is an insult
to the sanctities of all Muslims that could be seen as the continuation of
the offensive move by some Western newspapers that published disrespectful
cartoons of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH)... With Iraq heading closer to civil
war, many feel like Dr. Nabil Salim, a political science professor at
Baghdad University who says that U.S.-led occupation forces share blame,
directly or indirectly, for the shrine bombing."
Now we don't know who is responsible for the bombing but I was shocked by
the attempt to directly link the publication of the racist cartoons
(our take
on the cartoons row) with the bombing. The
Hindustan Times gave prominence to this "[Mahboob Ahmed] vehemently
denied the US charge that the recent bombardment of Shia shrine in Iraq
was the work of Al Qaeda. Entire Iraq, he pointed out, was at the mercy of
US and British troops and nothing could be done without their connivance."
Some other voices seem to share the idea that the occupiers might not
simply be indirectly responsible (which I think is completely reasonable)
to actually saying they might be directly responsible - despite there
being no evidence for this at all, other than a respectable hatred of the
occupying powers.
For example the normally excellent Lenin's Tomb moves into this territory
here, but I wonder if this isn't a little hasty... Now the occupiers
are dirty bastards - no question - this report
from
Socialist Worker is very useful at showing this, or this piece from
the
San Hose Mercury News, but that does not mean we should jump in feet
first blaming every act of barbarism in Iraq on US special forces or
whoever because "nothing could be done without their connivance" which is
just plain rubbish.
The occupation has created the conditions where horrific acts of violence have become a daily occurrence and human beings are perfectly capable of acting against their own self interests at the slightest provocation. I'm not ruling out the possibility that US forces are to blame - but I'm certainly not going to suggest they were until I actually have a reason to think it.
Otherwise the anti-war movement is just going to be a mirror image of the pro-war ideologues like in this CBS piece which blames Al Qaeda without evidence. I suppose if we have a world full of goodies and baddies we know without the necessity of proof that the bad things are all done by the bad people and the good things by our lot. Unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) the world is slightly more complex and we actually need to investigate things before we know what happened.
This piece in the Guardian
is far more reflective for example (Martin
Kettle) and what it helps clarify is that the allied forces can be
held responsible for the mayhem, of which the recent bombings are a part,
without necessarily being the people who laid the explosives. Of course
there are also lots of things in this article that the anti-war movement
will have an issue with, and rightly, but there is much here that's worth
engaging with too.
I think it would be worth moving away from the 'good vs. bad' sloganising
model of analysis on the war, particularly because most of the public are
now convinced that the war was a bad idea. What we need more of is an
understanding and discussion of the complexities of the situation - a bit
more depth and a little less posturing perhaps.
Comment on this article here
March 2006
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