The ideals worth rescuing from the deserts of Iraq
Despite the terrible mistakes made after the removal of Saddam, the case for liberal interventionism is still compelling.
…You can have ‘ad-hoc coalitions for action that stir massive controversy about legitimacy’. In other words, as Mr Blair didn’t say explicitly, the Iraq war. You can have ‘paralysis in the face of crisis’, which means tolerating genocide and allowing threats from terrorist groups and rogue states to grow unchecked. Or you can try to renew the idea of interventionism through reinvigorating global institutions.
That is a high ideal and a noble cause. The reforms advocated by Mr Blair sound admirable. He paints a wonderful portrait of a future in which the powerful nations work in concert and within agreed international rules to tackle terrorism, poverty, genocide, humanitarian catastrophe, climate change, disease and conflict. Great theory; shame about the reality. The trouble is getting America to sign up to this vision of liberal global governance, never mind China or Russia. The nightmare of Iraq appears to have made Tony Blair even more of a dreamer.
And yet his optimism, as open to ridicule as it is, must be more attractive than the pessimists who argue that nothing can be done nor should be done when the poor and the persecuted cry out for help. If the cause of humanitarian interventionism is lost in Iraq, it won’t just be Tony Blair who has tragic cause to be sorry.
guardian.co.uk
These are the last who should be called ‘when the poor and persecuted cry out for help.’ They themselves create the poor and are the persecutors. ‘Liberal’ IS a dirty word.
Iraqi Charities Plant Seed of Civil Society
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 22 Ñ In the wave of lawlessness and frantic self-interest that has washed over this war-weary nation, small acts of pure altruism often go unnoticed.
Like the tiny track suits and dresses that Najat al-Saiedi takes to children of displaced families in the dusty, desperate Shiite slum of Shoala. Or the shelter that Suad al-Khafaji gives to, among others, the five children she found living in a garage in northern Baghdad last year.
But the Iraqi government has been taking note of such good works, and now, more than three years after the American invasion, the outlines of a nascent civil society are taking shape.
Since 2003 the government has registered 5,000 private organizations, including charities, human rights groups, medical assistance agencies and literacy projects. Officials estimate that an additional 7,000 groups are working unofficially. The efforts show that even as violence and sectarian hatred tear Iraq’s mixed cities apart, a growing number of Iraqis are trying to bring them together. “Iraqis were thirsty for such experiences,” said Khadija Tuma, director of the office in the Ministry of Civil Society Affairs that now works with the private aid groups. “It was as if they already had it inside themselves.”
The new charity groups offer bits of relief in the sea of poverty that swept Iraq during the economic embargo of the 1990’s and has worsened with the pervasive lawlessness that followed the American invasion.
Sick. No matter how well-intentioned. Dead babies don’t need tiny track suits.