panzade wrote:but surely the agony of the last two years pales in comparison to the suffering of the last 10.
That remains very much the question. Perhaps a future stabilisation of democracy and/or prosperity will still make the agony of the last two year pale, but that's something else. Yes, they no longer suffer under a dictatorship. But in return they've so far gotten degrees of anarchy. Conceptually, I prefer anarchy over dictatorship. But in terms of daily life its none the easier.
At the Rotterdam film festival two months ago, I saw the first Iraqi movie that was made after the fall of Saddam:
Underexposure. Interesting story behind it: during the looting, boxes of film material had turned up - but they were ten or twenty years old, nobody even knew whether they'd still even work. But this guy and his friends started filming anyway. Why? To catch what's happening.
It was a quirky, kinda meandering film, in which a rudimentary storyline is acted out but mixed up with a film about the film, in which the director keeps wondering out loud about things. He says: "We don't need a story ... it is the city, the city that calls me to film, film what's outside, her pain ... I have characters in my head, they haunt me". So, on the one hand we see a story. The wounded soldier who falls in the family's alleyway, whom they carry inside and hide, and try to nurse over - but he's too heavily injured, dies. The slightly retarded son, obsessed about the soldier, floats him off into the river when he dies - and then himself follows him, to drown himself. The dirt and fear. The older father of the house, who in desperation sighs "All we want is peace, bring us peace". And then on the other hand there's the director himself, arguing with his real-life girlfriend (wife?) who pleads for him to stay inside, telling her "The suffering outside is demanding me to film." The girlfriend/wife, a teacher by profession, who slowly is driven crazy by having to stay inside herself at all times - because it's no longer safe for a woman to go outside. One time, she near-hysterically demands to go out, to go to her school, to teach her children - but they cant let her.
You know what they always said about Mussolini? Oh yes, he murdered all those people, but the trains rode on time. And Hitler built good roads. I was always nonplussed by the continuing opinion polls from postcommunist Eastern Europe that kept showing a sizable minority saying that "things used to be better" before, anything from 20% to 50%, until one day I came across an opinion poll from postwar Germany, where a similar percentage of West-Germans in 1946 or so said the same. Incredible but true. Similarly, democracy is nice, but under Saddam the woman could go out and teach - without headscarf or anything, too. There was no crime, no random bomb explosions on the street corner, no war. Now none of that proves that the whole Saddam dictatorship would have been better left alone, cause there were also the torture cellars. But you know how it is: dictatorships take out slice after slice of human victims, torturing and executing. But if you keep your head down and obey at all times and you're lucky, you can still have a stable enough daily life. Compare anarchy, in which noone is powerful enough to impose and eliminate over all - but random violence can strike anyone, at any time. For now, in terms of daily life, the Iraqis have gone from the frying pan into the fire, or vice versa. In Baghdad violence is rampant - except for in Sadr City, where the Islamists rule and keep order, but brutally apply Islamic law in return.
Perhaps it will all be all-right in the end, or at least better. That prospect of a better future is something that wasn't there under Saddam. And if things do indeed get better, it will all have been worth it. But to say that the last two years
themselves have already just been a pale shadow of the years before sounds all wrong.
