Wednesday 9 March 2011

no fly zone

I shouldn't opine on this, since I'm pretty ignorant, but lots of people do who are even more ignorant, and this is less opining than throwing a thing out into the wind.

A friend of mine is writing a play about Iraq, and one excellent scene that probably won't make it into his final cut is all about the uprisings in 1991, which Saddam's planes crushed while the Allies didn't enforce a no fly zone. When they eventually did, the rebels were dead. It's not a scene about simple answers, but it's about how everything hard costs something, often lives, and military force is a real part of the story, and dictators don't stop until someone makes them. And about how our taste for intervention wavers depending on its most recent results. I've been thinking about the scene a lot this week.

(The scene also has some good jokes, and it's sexy. And it's likely to be cut. Just imagine how good this play must be.)

2 comments:

The Milk Tray Man said...

Imagine what it would feel like to be a Harrier pilot on a carrier in the Med, knowing that the civilian population of Libya were being bombed by the Libyan airforce on the orders of a Grade A mental. And you couldn't do anything to help because the political decision to enforce no-fly hadn't been taken.

Come to think of it, they could only imagine it too because... oh well, you know.

Ali H

Matthew said...

Apropos nothing, today's Guardian: "David Cameron has suggested that a court was too lenient in fining a man £50 for burning poppies at an Armistice day event. The prime minister said Britain should make a "stronger statement" that the incident was "completely out of order and has no place in a tolerant society"."