In today’s New York Times there was one of those man-in-the-street stories which revealed that most Iraqis couldn’t care less about the “constitutional process.” After a couple years of pouring billions of US taxpayer money into some bottomless pit, the basic infrastructure of Iraq is, as we say in Yiddish, “in drert” (literally “buried in the earth” viz. worse off than the dead). Add to that the daily bombings, the general insecurity and uncertainty, and Hobbes pithy description comes to mind – the lives of the Iraqi people are “nasty, brutish and short.”
The Guardian carries an interesting article by Alain Gresh, editor of Le Monde diplomatique, which addresses the question of why Iraq’s infrastructure is in such a sorry state.
“But no committee of inquiry has been set up to investigate the most glaring scandal of all: the imposition of sanctions on Iraq in August 1990 and above all their maintenance after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. These have had devastating consequences on the country and will be a burden on it for a very long time to come. …Despite the inventiveness of Iraqi engineers, the state’s infrastructure crumbled…When the US invaded, Iraq needed only a little push for the worm-eaten state to collapse.”