Without evading the difficulties, David Aaronovitch writes in today’s Guardian that even knowing what he knows now, he doubts he could have opposed the war ‘on the [Human Rights Watch] basis that too few Kurds were currently being killed by Saddam’. That is the right conclusion, as I shall in due course argue here again. He also details the ‘many good things [which] have been happening’ in Iraq.
In another part of the same newspaper Christina Asquith writes in detail about one of these:
US teacher trainer Nadia Al Jadir hardly considered “student participation” a revolutionary educational concept. But her audience of 400 Iraqi high school teachers at Al-Kharka high school for girls looked stunned when Al Jadir told them to “listen to your students and let them express themselves.”
“There will be chaos in the classroom,” said one teacher, in a pink headscarf.
Under Saddam Hussein’s hidebound education system, high school teachers lectured, students listened passively. Classroom debate did not exist, and students would never, ever, approach the sacrosanct blackboard. But after this month, Iraqi classrooms may never be the same.
US-led teacher training sessions took place across Iraq earlier this month, introducing 33,000 high school teachers to the latest in western-style instruction techniques. Iraqi teachers learned teaching tactics common in most US and UK classrooms, such as “group learning”, in which students break into groups to solve a problem, and “peer tutoring”, in which students teach each other. They watched Japanese videos in which students voiced their opinions, debated the teacher’s point and even wrote on the blackboard.
Read the rest. Asquith, for her part too, speaks of the difficulties involved. But they don’t detract from the picture of the ‘many good things’ happening today in Iraq.
In yet another part of the newspaper, Geoffrey Wheatcroft expresses a rather harsh view of Tony Blair’s moral character:
On the question of Iraq, [he] isn’t so much a deceiver as someone who simply has no grasp of objective truth.
…..
Only someone for whom “integrity” and “deceit” have no real meaning would fail to understand why we mind.
The ‘we’ Wheatcroft purports to speak for here, to judge from his own view of things, aren’t going to be giving Blair any allowance for the good he brought about in getting rid of Saddam Hussein – even though Wheatcroft does allow parenthetically that it may be to the credit of ‘a group of politically formidable and ideologically zealous Americans’ that they’ve been advocating regime change in Iraq for several years. Regime change considerations are evidently too trifling, however, to affect or inflect ‘our’ minding.