Draw Breath

With all the talk of American primaries and the continuing unrest in Pakistan and Kenya, Iraq has slipped from the news radar slightly in recent days. The Boys from Baghdad High screened last night by BBC2 brought the reality of living in war-torn Baghdad to life in a far more vivid manner than any news item could do.

The Boys from Baghdad High involved giving video cameras to four boys from the final year class in Baghdad High. With the cameras, they recorded their day to day life over the academic year. They were all of different religion and of very different temperament; English is seen as a ticket to university for one, as a way of becoming a singer songwriter for another. A third boy has no interest in studying whatsoever and is on course for failure across the board in his final exams.

Danger and death is part and parcel of the lives of these seventeen year olds. Even the simple omission of forgetting to send a text message sends one of them into a day-long worry for the safety of his girlfriend. Yet, through it all, what emerges from the Boys of Baghdad High is the resilience of the teenagers featured. Who can forget the excitement of coming up to one's final exams in secondary school. The sense of tangible freedom and possibility. The intensity of relationships with friends and others. Above all, the sense of fun imbued in the teenage spirit. This is not lacking in the four boys of Baghdad High. They are funny, disarming and terrifyingly well-adjusted considering the menace surrounding them. That they should be beaten down on their journey to adulthood is yet another travesty of this war.

There's a strange debate going on at the moment over the US Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual (pdf). One Ralph Peters objects to its (as he sees it) over-emphasis on politics, while Dave Dilegge responds by taking issue with various parts of Peters's analysis (hat-tip Mark Grimsley).

I'm certainly not qualified to comment on any of these debates in depth, although I do object to Peters's misconception that we academics only cite examples that support our arguments. We undergo a peer-review process specifically so that we can't do that. Anyway, I have a feeling that Peters also misunderstands the 20:80 military-political ratio cited in the report. He says that progress can't be made without squashing the more unruly of the natives (perhaps that's just a little bit of a misrepresentation). So, he concludes the military aspect of counter-insurgency is far more important than the ratio gives it credit for.

Perhaps Peters ought to have a peek at the British Army's report (pdf, with thanks to Will Crawley for the link) on Operation Banner. As I recall, one very significant aspect of this report is the army's (revisionist perhaps) self-conception of holding the line and containing the violence until politics could actually kick in and resolve the problems. I suspect that that - not some totting up of various actions on a war-war/jaw-jaw balance sheet - is what the 20:80 conception refers to.

I'm not usually a fan of Johan Hari's writing, but his review of Nick Cohen's What's Left is absolutely excellent in pointing out what's so profoundly mistaken about the pro-war left.

Marvellous. The pre-Iraq war carousel starts again. See here and then here.

Much like Richard Delevan and others, I've been very much impressed with Barack Obama. He's spectacularly articulate and, I hear, has a spot of the Clintons about him (the good bits).

At the same time, I can't help but be disturbed at his line on Iraq. I'm disturbed, in a sense, by what Obama's rhetoric says about how Americans might remember this war once they leave. read the rest of this post »