Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (London Observer): Fiddling while Baghdad burns

[Jack Rabbit]

From the London Observer (Sunday supplement of The Guardian Unlimited)
Dated Sunday August 28

Fiddling while Baghdad burns
Iraqis need time and patience to come up with the right constitution. First we must stop the civil war.
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

In 1453, the Ottoman armies were marching towards the gates of Constantinople while inside the city walls, the Greek Orthodox priests and a delegation of Latin Catholic cardinals were trying to come up with a Manifesto of Understanding between the two sects before forming an alliance that would fight the marching Muslim Turks. The clerics were engaged in futile discussions on issues such as how many angels can stand on the end of a pin and whether the angels were males or females.

They never found out the answers as the Ottomans soon overran the city.

Sunni, Shia and Kurdish Iraqi politicians and clerics, sitting in the fortified green zone behind huge, concrete blast walls and besieged by escalating waves of violence, have indulged themselves in the same sort of futile discussions to define the shape of their country, the role of religion and the influence of the clergy on family and state matters.

This is not to suggest that federalism and human rights are as banal as determining the angel's gender, but when the whole country is falling apart, when dozens of Iraqis die every day, when the insurgency is stronger than ever and the sectarian violence is already referred to by many as a civil war, and when inter-Shia violence is spreading throughout the south of the country in the midst of all this, it is simply unrealistic to be debating huge, important issues that will shape the future of Iraq.

Read more.

[bemildred]

1. He diagnoses the situation well.

I am skeptical at this point that any rabbits will be pulled from any hats to rescue the situation.