Phone call from Dallas

[muckefuck]

So my Bahraini friend finally caught up with me this Sunday. We've been playing phone tag for some weeks now. I think about him a lot, but I've been particularly conscious of how long it's been since we talked since (a) the war began and (b) I decided to fly to Texas for caitalainn's wedding.

I was at home in the middle of rearranging my bookcase when he rang. The conversation began on a depressing note when he told me that his brother was leaving Chicago because he was fed up with the political climate here. He himself had decided that, although he still loved Dallas, he had to get the hell out of Texas. "I've talked to too many people who believe that the reason we're attacking Iraq is that most of the 9/11 attackers were Iraqi....What can you say to someone who thinks that?"

We'd both had enough trouble talking politics lately that we eased into it gently. As it turned out, we agreed on more than I thought we might and agreed to disagree on the rest. Why is this so hard for people to do? If we can't preserve civil society in this country, how the hell do we expect to export it elsewhere? As a Shiite, he's far from happy to see his coreligionists being bombed; as a liberal, he'd like all the Arab dictators gone. "So Syria is next? Great! Take out Assad--he's at least as bad as Saddam!" He was surprisingly bullish about developments in his homeland. Apparently, the parliament has been given real authority. Most of the problems they have sound like the same ones common to any modern democracy--curbing corruption, securing the rule of law, etc.

Besides giving me a tip on Arabic usage [see below], he also recommended an Arabic source of news for those who are fed up with the one-sidedness of Western coverage: London-based Al Hayat. Although owned by a Saudi businessman, they zealously guard their independence. There's less of the anti-Semitism that makes al-Jazeera's coverage unreadable for me, though I still have trouble accepting talk of a "Likudist bloc" in the US administration as legitimate discourse. I guess my own prejudices are showing.

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I find Michael J. Green's blog sort of soothing as war talk goes. He's a U of C philosophy prof who is pretty centrist on the war; his approach to discussing it tends towards collecting the less ideological arguments on either side, and subjecting them to basic logic checks.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Oops, that's just "Michael Green." I was conflating him with someone else.