Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Baghdad
October 17, 2003

Overcast morning. Our first very few drops of rain of the season.

No diary entry yesterday. I was busy adapting three diary entries into an article for the November Peace Newsletter. Since the three came in at a couple hundred words over the 1200 word limit I was given, I had to shave them a bit. Of course that only improved them.

One change in Baghdad since the invasion: more men wearing jeans. I asked Wadah, who these days always wears jeans, about this. When he was our minder last spring he was always dressed in creased slacks. He explains: more men out of work.

ART SCHOOL

In the late afternoon yesterday Cathy and I, later joined by Ewa, went to the opening celebration of Seasons Art School, a project of Childhood Voices, a new NGO out near the Shaker Al-Aboud Mosque. Ramzi wrote the grant for the project and circulated it last summer. Some Doctors for Global Health friends I sent it to agreed to pitch in several thousand dollars. But when I got here Ramzi told me a Norway aid group was already underwriting the project.

Emad Hadi and Udai Abdel Jabbar, sasbaghdad@yahoo.com, the school’s founders, have been frequent visitors to the house. In late September we gave them permission to put their sign up over our door for ten days until their school opened up.

The school is in a spacious “suburban” house about 20 minutes from here. The opening was a gala event. The program was primarily a professional entertainer–reminded me of Pinky Lee–to amuse the kids with songs, silliness and magic tricks. He was backed up by a musician with a keyboard. There were well over a hundred folks attending, including lots of kids. The classrooms, with their beaming faculty , were festooned with colorful gradeschool type paraphernalia; one room held five or six computers. Altogether an impressive display.

JONATHAN SCHELL

As I write Neville hands me a printout of a Jonathan Schell article from the Sept. 22 Nation. The opening lines: “The basic mistake of American policy in Iraq is not that the Pentagon–believing the fairy tales told it by Iraqi exile groups and overriding State Department advice–forgot, when planning “regime change to bring along a spare government to replace the one it was smashing; not that, once embarked on running the place, the Administration did not send enough troops to do the job, not that a civilian contingent to aid the soldiers was lacking, not that the Baghdad museum, the Jordanian Embassy, the United Nations and Iman Ali mosque, among other places, were left unguarded; not that no adequate police force, whether American or Iraqi, was provided to keep order generally; not that the United States, seeking to make good that lack, then began to recruit men from the most hated and brutal of Saddam’s agencies, the Mukhabarat; not that, in an unaccountable and unparalleled lapse in America’s once sure-fire technical know-how, Iraq’s electrical, water and fuel systems remain dysfunctional; not that the Administration has erected a powerless shadow government composed in large measure of the same clueless exiles that misled the Administration in the first place; not that the Administration has decided to privatize substantial portions of the Iraqi economy before the will of the Iraqi people in this matter is known; not that the occupation forces have launched search-and-destroy operations that estrange and embitter a population that increasingly despises the United States; not that, throughout, a bullying diplomacy has driven away America’s traditional allies. All these blunders and omissions are indeed mistakes of American policy, and grievous ones, but they are secondary mistakes. The main mistake of American policy in Iraq was waging the war at all.”