Robert Fisk : Baghdad, the day after
One can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted?
One can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted?
One of the real advantages of being able to draw in this awful context is that it affords the chance to manipulate a little of this flood of imagery and turn it back on itself; since I'm certain the vast bulk of these mega-pictures constitute a campaign of deliberate obfuscation.
This explains the western media's strange combination of squeamishness and prurience. They don't want the gory bits, thank you very much, but they are inexorably drawn towards them nonetheless. Then they shut their eyes tight at the crucial moment, for isn't such explicit imagery both tasteless and intrusive? Surely that's the bloody idea.
I have no idea what that last sentence is supposed to mean in the context of the one that came before it unless it's just the Times slagging MSNBC. I include it only for the sake of thoroughness.Even as American officials were preparing to install an interim government in Iraq, the hoisting of the American flag over the statue's face was a brief but powerful reminder that unlike the Soviet empire, Iraq's regime did not implode from within. A closer historical analogy could have been the photograph of a Red Army soldier raising the Soviet flag over a bombed-out Reichstag in 1945.
That iconic picture by the Russian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei was carefully planned and posed. In Baghdad, the Stars and Stripes were hurriedly pulled down and replaced with a pre-gulf-war Iraqi flag, tucked into a chain around the statue's neck like a large dinner napkin. As one commentator on MSNBC said, "It looks like cooler geopolitical heads have prevailed."