A fellow who worked for the same NGO in Viet Nam as I did has posted a blog on Iraq. You can, and should, read his entire blog at Peace Talk.

He's not retired but until his retirement he headed Christian Peacemaker Teams which worked in Iraq both before and after the invasion. In July of 2003 he traveled to Iraq and his blog has many interesting observations.

"After the Jordanian officials were done with us, we went on. At the technical border we were greeted by the first fruits of occupation, a massive broken down monument to the Iraqi state and several more dilapidated buildings. No one could tell us where to go. Just as I was deciding to look like I knew what I was doing and keep walking to the place where you find the taxis and buses to Baghdad I saw the real border - two American soldiers sitting at a broken down old table, head in hands and fast asleep. “So this is the New Border,” I thought. Hardly a picture of the great awakening to the age of democracy. I kept walking, still stamp less and paperless. In darkness I stumbled with others to a taxi and the six hour ride northeast to Baghdad.

"The image of sleeping soldier border guards appears in my mind every time I hear of foreign fighters in Iraq. A year later in a meeting with former US Senator Simon of Illinois I told him the story of the sleeping border and I explained that it was my hypothesis that the early policy of open borders in Iraq was put in place intentionally to lure violent activists to Iraq for elimination. The Senator laughed at me. He said, you give them too much credit. They [the Pentagon] didn’t have the ability to think up such a sophisticated plan. These things just happened because they didn’t have a plan. But I didn’t abandon my hypothesis."

"During the hearings in Congress this month he had a conversation with his neighbor. "Later in a discussion with my next door neighbour he said he saw Iraq as, “an impossible situation with peoples who have been fighting each other for thousands of years.” He is not the first person who has explained the situation to me using metaphors based on violent culture. In fact, it turns out to be one of those universal commentaries on war and violence about “those people” and “their proclivity to violence” that turns up in war time when the conquerors can’t make things come out their way. It is part of the pattern of explanation for the need for war or policing reaching all the way back to the violent European acquisition of North America when Indians were consistently described as “savages”.

"This is a description that makes us feel bleak about Iraq. But the Iraq I met is not bleak. By the time I reached Baghdad just four months after the occupation, Iraqi human rights and emergency assistance groups had sprung up all over Iraq, largely unnoticed by the occupation forces. When we began to meet and talk we quickly discovered that we did not just have common goals for people’s rights. We discovered deeper common values, hopes for the earth, humanity and the environment as well as curiosity about nonviolence. I have often discovered these traits among hopeful people and activists. "

...

"I have lost confidence in any possibility that Americans will make things come out according to their right prescription for democracy but I do take hope from the folks I worked with, laughed with, planned with in 2003 and 2004. I know them to be people like the poet Robert Frost, who understand the importance of borders, “Good fences make good neighbors."

"Some of them are now dead. Many have lost family members. Some have been forced to flee to safety beyond Iraq’s borders. Some have stayed. And, they can be depended upon to try to do the right thing. They know that their lives and common recovery reaches beyond blame into the world where humans recognize the hopes in one another. "

Peace Talk

Gene may be retired but he's still hard at work.

Barry

Earth will be safe

When we feel in us enough safety.

Thich Nhat Hanh