bahti's iraqi party
i was 8 when the invasion happened. my parents were staunchly against it and i was taken on the march in london holding up a placard with printed images of dead children reading "this is what war is". on bonfire night we'd make effigies of bush and blair and blow up a model of the white house and all that. when i went shooting a few years later mum likewise drew pictures of bush and blair as targets. my dad's still very keen for blair to be done for war crimes. so throughout my childhood bush and blair were these boogey men.
when i was 12 i discovered chomsky and absolutely devoured it. i remember going to foyles and buying maybe 10 of his books in one trip and just tearing through them. for 18 months or so my whole outlook was solely defined by chomsky. i'd only read writers he recommended. i'd only have opinions that he had, etc. i volunteered with the stop the war coalition for my work experience and socialised with people from it for a few months after that
i saw chomksy mention keynes in an interview and so i started to read that. it was the beginning of the end of my chomsky affair. i'd been exposed to something outside the bubble and it soon didn't hold up to scrutiny. i read more and more widely and the chomsky view of the world became increasingly discredited in my eyes.
i got really obsessed with iraq when isis first emerged. i read tons and tons about it. i knew all the intricacies of the various ayatollah dynasties, who their constituents were, i knew all the political parties, all the major players, all the military theory and strategy, loads of history. at one point i knew iraqi politics inside out. i could follow it as though it was british parliamentary politics.
it was at this point my understanding of the invasion became far more nuanced and, by extension, far less certain.
my uncertainty isn't out of intellectual laziness, it's the opposite. i don't know quite what the comment about my life experience means; the only iraqi's i've known have been kurdish, so they were obviously sympathetic to invasion. in a broader sense i've seen real people suffer and i have tremendous empathy for other people. i wouldn't be comfortable just playing contrarian thought games in the context of people's suffering.