Four Years

Today it is the sad anniversary of the war in Iraq. It has been four years since the Americans and their allies attacked Iraq, and the results of this choice are still questionable; and so are their methods. The countries that joined this coallition are gradually withdrawing forces, while even more American forces are sent to Iraq. Fighting is still on and the country is driven to civil war. Last night I heard in Newsnight that a national government with national police and military forces is needed in order to lead the country to a peacul and prosperous future. According to a (very optimmistic) forecast, presented on the same programme, in 2020 Baghdad will be looking at a bright (capitalist) future, organising the Olimpic Games sometime in the 2020s.

It all seems very questionable. The question is not whether Baghdad will be in a condition to organise the Olimpics, but whether the country will still be in its present shape. The local rivals are not agreeing on a basic level: what kind of a state they are going to establish. There seems to be no sense of political stability, and what's more important there is complete lack of nationhood, no national identity common in all its imagined ethnic variants. There is no nation, only divided populations that are not willing to co-operate. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that a nation will rise up in this case. On the contrary, what will come out of the situation is several fairly small spots of hostility on the globe. Little marks of reassuring instability on the globalized map of our post-modern global dream. Spectacles projecting our fears, simulating conflict. The image purifies the event in the eyes of the consumer, who is reassured for his own position within the dominant normalising order.