By Jo Wilding
May 27th

You can find Honey Buckets all over Washington State and beyond, not sweet-smelling receptacles of goodness but foul stinking pits of raw human waste with a note on the side specifying that they are designed for use by up to ten persons for a working week and if overused they are liable to overflow.

I say this, of course, with tongue in cheek, but if a Portaloo (or Porta-Potty, as Andy assured me they are known in North America) can be called a Honey Bucket without any apparent controversy then why should not an invasion and occupation which kills civilians and replaces the ruling Baathists with ruling ex-Baathists be called a liberation or the devastation of Falluja a ‘pacification’?

A young woman gave us directions to Fairhaven Campus and bowed. The administration at West Washington University in Bellingham tried to shut down the teachers’ union but found itself unable to do so because international as well as state laws protected the union, which was fighting, among other things, lack of funding and the drop in lecturers’ pay to less than it was a decade ago in real terms.

The Global Forums lecture series is organised outside of the normal lecture programme to allow students access to speakers from a variety of disciplines. The campus itself is multi-disciplinary, a display on the wall showing the final project of a young woman who spent a few weeks working in India with a farmers’ group, looking at the effects of the global agricultural and biotechnology industries’ efforts to control them.

By Jo Wilding
May 25th

“Anyone would have inhibitions about taking someone’s life, but there are a variety of ways that we’re indoctrinated and desensitised. The esprit de corps, the sense of pride they instil in us and each other, sometimes it seems like some sort of monastic brotherhood or cult. You learn unwavering devotion to each other. When we’re fighting it’s not for the cause or country. It’s for each other, for the person to your right and your left.

“That was the hardest thing, leaving my friends, people from my unit, having them go without me, dedicated, hard working people whose values are being exploited by the US government.” He left when his unit was sent to Iraq, having spent two years applying for conscientious objector status. He applied before his unit was sent to Afghanistan, requesting a transfer to a non-combat role. It was deliberately mishandled, the authorities claiming they had never received it but later giving the papers back to him in a package with a further application and advice to drop the matter.

Jeremy Hinzman was one of two US soldiers who left the army and applied for political asylum in Canada on the grounds of refusal of his conscientious objector status. A baker for four years after high school, he felt his life lacked structure and focus and wanted to be part of something bigger than himself. The military was great for that, he said. “I thought I’d be spreading freedom, democracy and apple pie recipes.”

But dehumanisation of the people in future warzones begins from the start of basic training. “It’s easy to get one person to shoot another. In the first week we shoot at black circles, learn how to aim, how to breathe, and the next week there are shoulders added and then torsos and then they become pop up targets, but all the time they’re targets, not people, and shooting them is a reflex.

By Jo Wilding
May 22nd

The newspaper at Birmingham airport said civilians have been killed in Nasariya. I thought of Maha and Kenaan and got on the plane. The immigration officer at Los Angeles didn’t flick through my passport to notice all the pre-war Iraq visas, being more concerned about the saxophone I was carrying. I promised on my honour that I wouldn’t be playing any professional concerts, confiding reassuringly that I’d only been playing for three days and knew a grand total of seven notes. Apparently looking more like the illegal worker type than a terrorist I was allowed in without further questions.

LA is enormous and the way around is by a mass of six lane highways with an inordinate number of signs, giving directions, radio frequencies for congestion information, religious and moral advice and invitations to Adopt A Highway. Unlike the more common adoptees such as children, dolphins and large mammals, which require either a lifetime of parenthood or a standing order at the bank, highway adoption apparently demands a commitment to litter clearance. Taxes apparently don’t cover removal of roadside rubbish.

The first talk was in a community centre and radical bookshop called Flor y Canto in a Latin American part of town. Run by volunteers, it’s got meeting space, a little kitchen and a row of four computers where Latino kids were surfing the internet. That part of the city had signs in Spanish or dual Spanish and English and murals to “Libertad, pobre, solidaridad”.

By Jo Wilding
May 9th

“The US fought the people of Falluja because it said they were Saddamis. Now they are letting the real Saddamis have their old jobs back. For a year we have been told there are no jobs, but suddenly there are 6000 jobs for Baathis.” Saleh was one of a few thousand men at a demonstration that went from Kahromana Square to Firdos Square against the re-employment of all but the highest-ranking former Baathists.

“The Governing Council decided this without consulting the people. Now the Baathis will be representing us. They started killing people before. They never did good things before. It is impossible. There are not enough jobs. They have to give the chance to new people.” Taalib was a politician in the Daawa Party, forced out by the Baathists.

Mehdi was employed by the Ministry of Information, fired along with 50 other workers because he did not join the Baath Party. “Now they are bringing the Baathis back we will face the same problem.” The same is true for teachers. Hassan graduated in 1991 and applied for a job as a teacher but was refused because he was not a Baath Party member.

“The employees who humiliated us are now Ministry of Education employees. After the war they said all the politicians and teachers and others would get our old jobs back but none of us did,” Hassan said.

The decision is only a public announcement and a larger scale advancement of a policy which has gone on since the US took over in Iraq. Adil went to apply for a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when it reopened after the war and found the same Baathi still there on reception, refusing to let him in, telling him no, there were no jobs there for him.

Neo-Baathism, the process of slipping the old party back into power, was predictable. When the US and UK talked about De-Baathification they hinted at a massive operation but appeared to plan for much less. The regime figureheads were to be changed, its loyalties, but not its power base. The people were expecting more, especially the ones who lost people to the Baathists.

By Jo Wilding
May 8th

A loud scraping noise and a jolt announced the arrival of the other car in the back driver side of ours. It was gentle, as collisions go, and the deformity of the bumper was quickly rectified but the debate over whose mother had been a canine looked like taking a bit longer to settle, so we paid the driver and found another who, admittedly, didn’t know the way but at least he was moving.

The highway towards the university is partly on a flyover which affords a perfect view of the layers of smog that envelop the city. For a lot of the way the road was quiet, which is not common. “I hope there’s not another Fatwa,” Anna said, referring to the order not long ago from Al-Sadr that students should not go into university.

The young women were all immaculately dressed, not a hair astray between them, let alone an eyebrow, black lines around their eyes, lips painted. This is the only place they get to meet up with their friends, the most likely place to meet a future husband, so apparently it’s worth getting up at stupid o’clock and making the kind of effort I and my friends only used to make for a big night out. I’m sure the wearing of hijabs on campus is less down to conservatism or religious belief than the only way out of hours of tortuous hair styling.

Anna teaches English conversation to the final year students at Baghdad University, who wanted to talk to someone with a British accent and I wanted to talk to them about university twinning links. Because it’s all over the news here the same as everywhere else and because I introduced myself as a clown and trainee lawyer, the topic of conversation moved quickly onto the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.