It’s time to go out on a limb.
Saddam is captured and that’s great news. How or where they try him I don’t really care, but it would seem fitting for it to be done in Iraq by Iraqis. They are the people he’s brutalized for so long.
That’s the good news and now for that limb. There’s a lot of talk about how this will affect politics in the west but it seems to be based, in part, on the belief that now Saddam has gone, Iraq will stabilize and George Bush will be seen to be a true hero and far sighted visionary leader.
I can’t buy that. For starters the sequence of suicide bombings just doesn’t strike me as the work of Saddam supporters. Nobody would commit suicide in the cause of Saddam. In the cause of Allah or in the cause of independence maybe, but Saddam?
In that regard I think Saddam’s a bit of a Furphy. My guess is resistance, suicide bombings and ambushes of coalition forces and their supporters will continue. That’s the bad news. But I could be wrong.
It will make it easier for George to say "job done" and get the hell out of there.
In the meantime there is no denying the joy that has greeted news of his capture. This is genuine joy, unlike the put-up job in Baghdad on liberation day. I just wish they’d be a bit more careful with all that ordinance.
I’ve been absent from posting for a bit over the last 10 days or so. AWOL. There’s no good excuse except I’ve been really, really busy and feeling a bit uninspired as well. And I’d hate to blog just for the sake of having something up.
So uninspired was I yesterday that I spent much of the day cleaning up my bedroom. Why would that take most of a day? You don’t want to go there. It’s something me and the Girlie have in common. Getting into or out of our rooms is a bit like playing hop-scotch. You can’t remember what breakables are under those piles of dirty clothes, bedding, bags, papers and so forth so you jump left, then right and then forward onto the rare spaces of visible carpet and then make a mad lunge for the door – and freedom.
Anyway, I’d had enough of that.
Girlie was mocking. She’d walk past my door and say things like: “Why don’t you go out, Dad?” and “Haven’t you got any friends?” Such is the status, and rarity, of cleaning around our place.
When I’d finished I stopped and looked around and realized there wasn’t really all that much there. My possessions are few. Minus the mess my room was a bit of a monk’s cell. That’s a good thing, I think. Having finished Vincent O’Sullivan’s fine portrait of John Mulgan, I’ve been reading Keith Ovenden’s life of Dan Davin. I share Davin’s belief that possessions enslave you.
It’s best not to have too much baggage. Travel light. What more do you need beside the clothes on your back, the shoes on your feet and a good book?
And your stereo… And your PC of course…
And your PS2…
Juicer, espresso machine…