Robert Sharp

The campaign grows to grant asylum for all those Iraqis who have worked for the British Armed Forces in Iraq. Bloggerheads publishes a list of bloggers who support the campaign, while Chicken Yoghurt and Pickled Politics have been keeping track of MPs who have responded to the letter writing campaign.

Over at The Ministry of Truth, Unity has produced some blog banners that you can add to your own site, linking to an appropriate explanatory article such as the one published by Dan. My favourite is this one:

What’s the Arabic for “We’ll stand by you?” - We can’t turn them away

(more…)

This time, I am behind the blog cycle, rather than the mainstream news cycle! Many others have already linked to Dan Hardie’s campaign to ensure that all Iraqis who have worked for British forces are given asylum if they ask for it.

There is now considerable evidence that their lives, and the lives of their families, are at risk: some former workers for the British have been murdered, and many others have fled to neighbouring countries or gone into hiding in Basra. The British Government, for whom they were ultimately working, has not offered them the right of asylum in the UK. This is morally unacceptable.

The most detailed recent report, by Jonathan Miller of Channel Four news, notes the murder of 17 translators in one single incident in Basra.

Dan suggests we write to our MPs, and even provides some handy text that you can paste into a letter or e-mail.

I recall that the plight of Iraqis was one of the first arguments against Tony Blair’s account of the war. When the WMDs failed to appear, the reasons for war quickly shifted to the brutality of the Saddam regime. While this might have been a convincing argument for many, it was certainly not a convincing reason for the government, who had denied many asylum applications from Iraqi before the war. It was therefore misleading and duplicitous for Blair to cite this as a reason post hoc.

However, the current British policy towards foreign nationals who help the armed services is unsurprising. The Ghurka regiment has for many years been mistreated by the government, with former soldiers denied citizenship, or even a pension on equal terms with other British servicemen.

Interestingly, the recent successful campaign to allow one former ghurka (a holder of the Victoria Cross, no less) to be given UK citizenship was also propagated online. The VC Hero site was set up by Tul Bahadur Pun’s solicitors, and a online campaign added political pressure. So Dan Hardie’s initiative stands a good chance of success.

One feature of the coverage of the crisis in Iraq, is the birth of compound nouns, words that cannot exist without their modifying adjectives.  Thus we hear about “The-Holy-City-of-Najaf” and “The-Radical-Shia-Cleric-Moqtadr-Al-Sadr.”

Is ‘radical’ still the word we should use to describe Moqtadr?  With all this talk of him representing the majority Shia population, and his control of six Iraqi cabinet ministers, he looks pretty entrenched.  By granting him the moniker ‘radical’, the implication is that he is still a fringe figure.  This is a distortion of the political situation in Iraq.  If the intention is to marginalise him, the tactic is clearly not working.

Of course, in the past few days, we have been presented with a more sinister example of how new technology is creating a ‘digital revolution’. The official film of Saddam Hussein’s hanging was undermined by alternative footage, videoed on a mobile phone.

The BBC report on how these cheap and portable cameras are being used as a key weapon in the propaganda war is not news to me - I had to watch several hours of insurgent-filmed shootings and bombings in order to find suitable footage for inclusion in the Black Watch video design. To watch unsuspecting marines wander haplessly into a sniper’s cross-hair is chilling. When they are hit, they fall quickly.

Despite the unpalatable subject matter, I think there is an interesting point to be made about how film and video is used here, which is the importance of the sound-track to moving images. In the case of Saddam’s hanging, notice how a particular audio track totally changes the tone of what we see, and the emotions evoked. Film makers and TV producers constantly manipulate us in this way.

An interesting aspect of the commentary that has surrounded the emergence of this bootleg video, is the ‘winner-takes-all’ conception of truth, and history. When the official video of Saddam’s demise was released, it was considered an accurate historical record. How can the camera lie? When the grainy bootleg emerged later, it replaced the official video as the definitive ‘truth’ of the event.

We would do well to consider the possibility that this video is unreliable too. The footage is grainy and shot from a distance. We do not hear the more muted of Saddam’s mutterings, nor the words of those standing right beside him at the moment before death. I have not watched the video all the way through to its grim finale, but I understand that there are cuts in the timeline. What was missed? It is essential that we remember that the footage has been released by someone who wishes to foist a particular historical narrative upon us, one obviously informed by a different agenda to the Iraqi Government. With this in mind, other questions arise.

• Might not Saddam’s pious recitations at his moment of death - the invocations of Mohammed that we did not hear on the ‘official’ recording - actually enhance his image, rather than humiliate him?
• We do not witness what happened immediately before the footage was shot. Perhaps Saddam or others provoked the abuse, and the now-famous taunts were more out of anguish than vindictiveness
• Are we sure that the audio was not doctored or enhanced before its release? Were the names of other leaders chanted, in addition to Moqtadr Al-Sadr?

These new fangled technologies, generating their subversive, low-resolution footage, have become the thorn in the side of those wishing to control a political situation. There may never be another time where a government can control the media as it did during previous conflicts. But the new technologies are just as suceptible to abuse by the purveyors of propaganda as the old.

Primary sources can be illuminating, but they can also be decieving. This historical constant remains true.

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, calls the execution a ‘lynching‘. (via The Daily Dish)

Labour MP Austin Mitchell has a weblog. He has a ‘general ramblings’ spot, where he writes a light-hearted. His latest entry chronicles a set of missed divisions because he has forgotten ‘Whip-speak’, and finishes thus:

Having seen how much David Blunkett has got for his diaries I am doing mine for posterity. Please help me find something interesting to do. Any offers of seduction, sex, scandal, drugs, rock and roll, even promotion, would make life interesting.

I’ll tell you what, Austin. How about actually voting for the debate on the Iraq war, instead of just signing the Early Day Motion which proposed that debate? Or did you also miss that vote because you don’t understand ‘Whip-speak’? Instead of attempting to make money as the next Alan Coren, you could actually be holding the government to account, something that you are already being paid to do. Now that would be really interesting.

Its been a little while since I engaged with the Iraq War debate. A short piece from me at The Sharpener resurrects the perennial argument of whether it was right to invade when we did:

As people come out with expressions of regret that they supported the war, they rarely do so with reference to those who do not regret protesting against it. I wonder if there are any hawks out there who now think that some of the protesters had a point? Reading people’s analyses of their own decisions on the matter, it is as if there was no opposition to the war but a bunch of shrill communists who took a stroll through Hyde Park.

Much talk in the media about the recent missiling of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

I’m waiting for the inevitable scandal to break, when we will discover that the air-strike was a mistake, and US forces were actually aiming at an Iraqi wedding party.

Garry the CuriousHamster takes the Pentagon to task over the massacre at Haditha. A succint post with something for everyone:

In truth, the real difference between US democracy … and dictatorship in these cases is that democratic governments can on occasion be forced, kicking and screaming all the while, to investigate human rights abuses perpetrated by their representatives when confronted with damning evidence collated by the free press.

The idea that the US government can be trusted to effectively investigate abuses by their own military personal voluntarily is, it should be clear by now if it wasn’t already, utterly fallacious.

and

How many bad apples do there need to be before for it to becomes clear that the managers of the orchard are the root of problem?

(The extra ‘root’ at the end there made me smile).

CuriousHamster is spot on. Legitimate opposition to the Iraq war stemmed from an opposition to the hypocrisy of the people waging it. This massacre makes a mockery of the sacrifice made by American and British troops, especially that of Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, whose death apparently sparked the violence. President George Bush is apparently “troubled” by the reports. He should be absolutely livid.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan at Time’s Daily dish is slowly cataloguing the Bush Administration’s retreat from basic freedoms, arguing that it is profoundly unconservative.

Was Iraq better under Saddam? Of course not. But at least back then, we didn’t have the so-called Leader of the Free World erasing the lines between right and wrong.

Over at The Sharpener (I wish I’d called this blog that, but its way too late now), Jarndyce repeats the reasons why he supported the war in Iraq:

I do think we owed [the Iraqis] big time, in a collective sense, and had the power to do something.

The problem with a lot of pro-war argument, is the manichean world it assumes. Jarndyce’s (very pertinent) point is an argument for a war, not an argument for that war.

Jarndyce goes on to condemn unilateral intervention, in favour of invervention backed up by better, more robust international law. It was interesting to hear President Bush apologising for his gung-ho rhetoric in the past - Better diplomacy could have resulted in a better planned war, possibly with the UN on board. Would blue berets in Bagdad have provoked the backlash?

The release of Norman Kember returns him to normality. For four months he has been a ghost, hovering on the edge of our consciousness. Now he is human again, we can criticise him for going there in the first place, or not thanking the troops enough. We would not talk of Ken Bigley in this manner.