Word: saddamism
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That was the theory. Instead, Iraq today is exporting less oil than it did under Saddam Hussein. And instead of offering the Saudis a model, Iraq has offered their rulers an alibi. Demand democracy, they can tell their restless subjects, and you'll get chaos instead...
...days before the American invasion of Iraq, Nahdi Mahdi, one of Iraq's most famous comedians, was starring in a play called The Wanderers at the National Theatre in Baghdad to a packed house of almost 2,000 people. Like many then living in the misinformation bubble created by Saddam's regime, war was the farthest thing from his mind. "It was such a surprise," he said of the war soon after. "We never thought it would happen." Now war is constantly on Mahdi's mind, and he himself is sort of wandering, one of the million Iraqi refugees...
...Berlin Wall fell. Soon after, we intervened to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. But that was apparently it. The end of history had arrived, after all, and we began spending the peace dividend and making excuses for ignoring what was happening elsewhere in the world. We were slow to act in the Balkans, we pulled out of Somalia, we stayed out of Rwanda, and we were uninterested in what was going on in Afghanistan...
Then came Sept. 11, and everything changed--for a while. We intervened in Afghanistan and went to war to remove Saddam, a brutal dictator with a history of developing weapons of mass destruction and fostering terrorism in the heart of the Middle East. We then thought we should try to stay to help these nations achieve decent and democratic governments. We are still engaged in this difficult task, and we have made mistakes in its pursuit...
...underlying a sometimes unwieldy body of work that includes his expressionistic paintings of steelworkers and, most recently, Saddam Hussein, has been his eloquent draftsmanship. From early sketches of train commuters in Kogarah to his first diary accounts of soldiers while making a film in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution, Gittoes has been interested in rendering the forces of industry and war. "I understand soldiers," he says. And his understanding has come about as much through pen, pencil and brush, as his new show of drawings at Sydney's Australian Galleries makes startlingly clear. Of his four trips to Baghdad...