OT: A moving radio show about Iraqi music...

Whistle
1

Friends,

The whole situation in Iraq is so sad, the burning of the libraries, the looting (and just plain smashing) of the museums, the children dying of thirst I had to get this out in writing…I heard a story on the radio with three of the musicians of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra and I almost cried. There were a few musicians there, one was a clarinetist whose hand got severely injured in a bombing raid and he doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to play again, his house was hit by several tank shells. He was lucky, his neighbor and his neighbor’s 5 children were killed in the same raid.

Here’s the link to the show:

http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2003/04/20030418_a_main.asp

I just spent a while looking at the pictures and the image of the man playing the broken piano was just heart rending…you can hear it if you click on the link in the corner.

One of the violinists played a couple of just beautiful traditional, solo violin works that were hauntingly beautiful. One of the tunes was called “Over the Palm Tree” about to lovers in the top of a palm tree (it’s at the 21:40 mark if you want to skip to it).

We just don’t seem to understand what we do with our might. It’s like we only see the evil man in charge and if we get rid of him, it will be painless and suddenly the country will “see the light” and turn into a western-loving democracy. We just don’t realize that there are other innocents involved and that we are responsible for the effects that our actions have on them.

Before the war we might have seen the music school and concert hall and dismissed it as Saddam Hussein’s greed, and “justified” this smashing. Never once seeing the lives of the musicians and their art.

But this is just a small part we see with this show, there are thousands of “music schools” and millions shattered lives across the country…and we just guard the oil fields. We just dismiss the looting as the “the people getting it out of their system” so speaks Rumsfeld (I’m not kidding, that’s actually what he said). What does this “freedom” taste like?

So sad…

Paul

2

We just don’t seem to understand what we do with our might. It’s like we only see the evil man in charge and if we get rid of him, it will be painless and suddenly the country will “see the light” and turn into a western-loving democracy. We just don’t realize that there are other innocents involved and that we are responsible for the effects that our actions have on them.

I agree (I do that a lot).

3

Kuwait still recovering from Gulf War fires

From Ryan Chilcote
CNN

\ \ KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait (CNN)---In the waning days of the Persian Gulf War, as Iraqi forces retreated to Baghdad, Saddam Hussein sent a team of engineers into the Kuwaiti oil fields and blew up hundreds of wells.

Over the next seven months, more than 1 billion barrels of oil went up in flames, and Kuwait and much of the Persian Gulf was engulfed in a poisonous smoke, creating a large-scale environmental disaster.

As the specter of a new conflict between a U.S.-coalition and Iraq looms, some fear that Saddam Hussein could repeat the tactics of 1991 within his own borders, plunging the region into another, even greater, environmental and economic catastrophe.

In Kuwait, the Persian Gulf War left behind heavy environmental damage. Day vanished into night, black rain fell from the sky, and a vast network of lakes was born ... lakes of oil as deep as six feet.

Saddam also poured 10 million barrels of oil into the sea. Thousands of birds perished, and the people of the Persian Gulf became familiar with new diseases.

"My child, my son, now he has a problem with his breathing. He can't breathe very well. ... Sometimes he's coughing and feel dizzy," said oil worker Mohammad Najaf. "The doctors they told me that [it was] because of the smoke that came after the invasion," he said.

'An environmental disaster'

"Right now in Kuwait we are noticing an increasing number of cases of cancer. We think it's related to what happened in '91 when we had the oil fires. A lot of people breathe very bad air," said Dr. Meshal Al-Mesham, head of the Kuwait Environment Protection Agency.

Indeed, Kuwait is still recovering from the environmental damage it suffered during the Persian Gulf War, according Jonathan Lash president of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on global environmental and development issues.

"What many recall as a short-lived conflict resulting in the liberation of Kuwait was an environmental disaster -- one from which the region and its people have yet to recover," Lash said in a written statement, adding: "The oil that did not burn in the fires traveled on the wind in the form of nearly invisible droplets resulting in an oil mist or fog that poisoned trees and grazing sheep, contaminated fresh water supplies, and found refuge in the lungs of people and animals throughout the Gulf."

"Today," Lasher said, "Saddam could deliberately create another catastrophe if attacked."

Kuwait's Burgan oil field, second largest in the world after Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field, was nearly destroyed in just months. The environmental impact is still being felt.

The fires, according to a report prepared for Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander in the Gulf War, consumed more than 4 million barrels of oil a day at their height.

According to the same report, within six days of the fires being set, a cloud of smoke stretched from Baghdad across the United Arab Emirates to Iran, and "black rain" fell as far away as Turkey, Syria and Afghanistan.

"Of course. I mean, he did it one time. I expect him to do it again. He is the man that you expect the unexpected, and as long as he did it for Kuwait he would do it for other parts, even if it is for his own oil fields," said Ahmed Al Arbeed, chairman and managing director of the Kuwait Oil Co.

Lakes may hide unexploded ordnance

Although much of the oil gushing from the ground burned in the fires, a sticky residue formed lakes that mar the landscape of Kuwait to this day.

Clean-up efforts are hampered by the knowledge that below the surface of these oil lakes may be unexploded ordnance from the conflict.

But with the second largest known reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia, Iraq simply has more fuel for the fire, and the Iraqi oil fields are less accessible than Kuwait's.

"You just look around, everything's flat -- the oil had just kind of spread all over the ground. It was just messy to get into, but in northern Iraq the terrain would be a lot more rough," said Clyde Kinsel, who works in the Kuwait oil fields for drilling contractor Pride International.

"It would be a lot harder to get equipment and personnel into these places to do an adequate jobs."

Pentagon planners believe that Saddam would set fire to his own oil wells if his hold on power is threatened (Full story), and Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, gave the following assurance that the lessons of 1991 had been learned:

"The oil fields are the property of the Iraqi people, and if a coalition of forces goes into those oil fields, we would want to protect those fields and make sure that they are used to benefit the people of Iraq and are not destroyed or damaged by a failing regime on the way out the door," Powell said.

4

Sometimes I sit and think about how in five billion years none of this will matter, and how futile it really is to argue or debate about anything at all. The earth will have been engulfed by the sun and our existance will be no more, so what’s the point of believing in anything, and what’s the point of even existing, much less arguing? But then…something happens and I start caring again.

5

Just for reference…the Exxon Valdez carried about 1.2 million barrels.

6

I believe we’ve saved maybe 100,000 linnocent people’s lives, principally
children, who would have died in the next several
years under Saddam’s regime. If you love humanity,
you have to count that too. Best

7

That would have died if the sanctions against Iraq enforced by the US were not lifted, as almost all the rest of the world wanted, you mean? Nice argumentation.

If you love humanity, you listen to most part of the humanity and try to avoid killing another part of the humanity for as long as it is possible.

8

Hi Andreas,

Saddam was responsible for the deaths of 600,000 of
his countrymen even before the UN imposed sanctions.
Saddam’s regime has always been a clear and present
danger to the people of Iraq.

You write: ‘If you love humanity, you listen to most part of the humanity
and try to avoid killing another part of the humanity
for as long as it is possible.’ Will you explain? I don’t
understand what this means.

If I may make a general point, in considering
the consequences of a policy, one needs to consider
not only the costs but the benefits too.
If we had bombed the crematoria at
Auschwitz, say, some of the bombs might
have missed and hit barracks filled
with Jews, gypsies, etc. Hundreds would
have been killed. It would be a mistake to
focus on that alone, to the exclusion of the
lives that would have been saved. One
cannot make a persuasive argument
against any policy–that it is blind,
foolish, heartless–by considering costs
alone.

Best, Jim

9

Not to start another war thread, but…

I am critical of the Bush administration around the issue of unilateralism and the way we handled the pre-war period, chiefly. However, I don’t think we fully realize yet how appalling the Saddam regime was. The current issue of Newsweek has a particularly horrifying article about the atrocities that are being uncovered. I highly recommend it. It helped me with my perspective on all of this.

Here are the LEAST horrifying things: They found gold-plated toilet plungers in the palaces.

Even though Saddam rarely stayed in any given palace, the kitchen staffs were required to put “three sumptious meals” on the table, 7 days a week.


Dale

10

I don’t trust American media in this issue. They all bought into the idea that in times of war we have to support the government. Even Public Radio has become pro-war.

This is a horrible situation, not much good discussing it in a forum like this; all we achieve is to get some nice people to express ugly thoughts. :sniffle: So i’ll contain myself and i won’t tell you what i really think about the neo-colonial wars of the 21st century. But as occupying power, the USA now has certain internationally recognized responsibilities towards the people of Iraq. I think it’s a good bet that they will do a better job taking care of those than they did in, say, Afghanistan. It would look bad if they didn’t, and nobody wants that, right?

Back to whistling.

11

Just to share something that has been in my thoughts lately.

An aquaintance of mine shared some e-mail she had recieved from her son who was with one of the first companies of soldiers into Baghdad. He wrote of when the Americans took control of a compound that had been used by Saddam and his regime as a place of torture and murder. As soon as word was out that the Americans had arrived, they were absolutley flooded with Iraqi citizans desparately looking for any trace of their loved ones who had been taken there by Saddam’s soldiers, some of whom had been taken within that past month. Many hundereds of thousands of men, women, and children had been taken there and had suffered horrible fates. Her son said that he had wondered a bit about what they were doing when he had first been sent to Iraq, but that when he saw this place, and had seen Saddam’s gruesome instruments of torture and death, when he talked with the people who were missing loved ones, who had suffered such terror at the hands of Saddam and his regime… well, after that he had no question that he was doing the right thing.

Just something else to think about.

All the best…

Sara “Sunnywindo”