Hi Karen, Robert D.Kaplan's widely-discussed article (Nov 2002 piece in the Atlantic Monthly) really needs a thorough analysis and criticism, so shot through is it with half-baked ideas and wrong historical facts. But much as I'd enjoy doing this, I have no time at present. Let me just dwell on one brief excerpt:
<<<< But first the immediate issue: Iraq. The level of repression in Iraq equals that in Romania under the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaus�escu or in the Soviet Union under Stalin; thus public opinion there is unknowable. Nevertheless, two historical cultural tendencies stand out in Iraq: urban secularism and a grim subservience. >>>> Nasty though Saddam is, it's just plain ridiculous to put him on the same scale as Stalin or Ceaus�escu. Stalin killed several million kulaks or "rich" (that is, enterprising) peasants outright in order to nationalise their land and cow the remaining peasants. He also killed or imprisoned a million or two intellectuals or those he imagined, in his paranoia, to be his enemies. There was scarcely a family in any city of Russia that had not had one or more members of his family taken away in the middle of the night. As for Ceaus�escu, he razed thousands of villages to the ground, causing millions to starve or be forced into prison-like apartments to work in heavily polluted metal extraction factories or coal mines. Both Stalin and Ceaus�escu both had an immense army of informers and secret police, far greater proportionately than Saddam's appears to have been. Ordinary Russians and Romanians lived in a state of fear far beyond anything that ordinary Iraqis are described as experiencing by pre-war observers. Nasty though Saddam is, and even though he gassed large numbers of Kurds, turned tens of thousands of Shias out of their natural waterlands, killed many hundreds more, and no doubt tortured and executed many who were a political danger to him in Baghdad, he also poured money into education in the '70s when he nationalised the oilfields that were then being selfishly exploited by western oil corporations. The fact that Iraq is more pluralistic and liberal than any other Islamic country (except perhaps Turkey) with a sizeable professional middle class is due to Saddam. Nasty though Saddam is, Stalin and Ceaus�escu were at least an order of magnitude crueller. Keith Hudson ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
