|
I think one of this generation's top poets summed up the current media situation with regards to Iraq (and, while we're at it, I think the quote quite neatly applies to the whole of the Blog generation, too):
"Nowadays, everybody wants to talk, like they've got something to say, but nothing comes out when they move their lips, just a bunch of gibberish...”
However, to add my voice to the clamour, there’s a few separate issues I’d like to address.
The first is the current war (well, the one against Iraq). With perfect 20/20 hindsight it is, naturally, easy to see that this war should never have happened in the first place. This war happened because an evil regime needed to be removed. That regime, still in place despite the First Gulf War, grew worse and inflicted more suffering as it was squeezed by sanctions. Those sanctions were in place as a poor substitute for the West staying in the area, finishing the war properly and helping set Iraq back on its feet. Instead, once the oil supplies were under Western control, allied forces were simply ordered to high-tail it back home. Of course, it is possible that the First Gulf War could have been avoided altogether by better diplomacy and military intelligence, and pretty much certain it would never have happened if the West wasn’t so damn reliant on a cheap source of oil to fuel its motors and economy.
But anyway. War is upon us, and it’s too late trying to stop it now. Really. Pouring sugar into army lorry petrol tanks and blockading roads and airports is just going to piss people off, it won’t have any effect on a war happening a comfortable distance away in a hot country that not enough people know anything much about. What we should be doing is trying to assure that Western forces and aid will stay in the area once the shooting match is over. We need to make sure that any uprising by Iraqi resistance groups against their current regime is given proper military support this time around, and we then need to make sure that said groups don’t then promptly fall to fighting amongst themselves. If you want to help, do something that will provide aid and comfort to the ordinary Iraqi person. Don’t forget that the Iraqi soldiers are, for the most part, pretty ordinary people, too.
This brings me to my second, separate, point: protesting about the war. Trundling about the street in a mob, shouting and causing disruption, is a complete waste of that most valuable of uniquely human resources, intelligence. Humans get more stupid the more of them there are together, kind of a lowest-common-denominator effect. If you feel strongly that this war shouldn’t be happening, that’s great! Go and do something about it. Go and learn all that can be learn about the situation and figure out how to resolve it and avoid others like it in the future. The worst thing we could be teaching children is “how to protest”. I don’t want this generation to grow up thinking of The Government as some vague, amorphous, far-off concept that you have to whine loudest at for it to appease you. I want today’s children to realise that they are the next Government, and that however they want the country and the world to be run is how it should damn well be run.
Finally, I’d like to mention a couple of things that aren’t The War. The British Government chose yesterday to announce that it was imposing legislation to enforce a settlement on the firefighters union, effectively ending a long and bitter dispute that did have top billing in the headlines until something more interesting came along. And in other news, there was renewed action in Afganistahn, that place which everyone has forgotten about now but where it does at least seem the West is hanging around to see the job finished properly. I think the fact that these items were relegated to five-second slots in last night’s news bulletins illustrates quite nicely just how crappy TV news reporting can be sometimes.
|
