Date: 2024-12-30 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00002432
IRAQ
IRAQ: AFTER THE AMERICANS
in 2012, Fault Lines travels across Iraq to take the pulse of a country and its people after nine years of occupation.
IRAQ: AFTER THE AMERICANS
in 2012, Fault Lines travels across Iraq to take the pulse of a country and its people after nine years of occupation.
Original article: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/fault-lines/2012/7/31/iraq-after-the-americans
Burgess COMMENTARY
This program was aired in 2012 and is fairly optimistic about the situation in Iraq. I am revisiting this about 10 years later at a time when it feels that many of the issues that were problematic in the Middle East are spreading to all sorts of other parts of the world, not least, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I have been concerned for a very long time that the modern economic system with its singular focus on profit performance and financial wealth creation for investors is both undesirable and unsustainable.
I like the idea of a business community that is 'in service' to society, but worry that what we have had increasingly over the past several decades is a business community that is only 'in service' to investors.
Clearly, there have been problems during the course of history. There was a time when life for most people was 'brutish and short' and living was a challenge. In the modern world, we have a huge amount of technical knowledge and it is possible for modern productivity to enable a decent quality of life for everyone on the planet. But this is not what we have ... a very few are benefitting from this amazing modern productivity, and most people are not. Many people are in crisis mode and too many people are seeing quality of life degrade. This is a system problem ... a management problem ... but for some reason very little is being done to address the growing crisis.
We can to better ... but this won't happen until we deploy a better set of management metrics for all the deicision makers in the socio-enviro-economic system.
Peter Burgess
'For the first time in nine years there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. After a decade of war that's cost us thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars, the nation we need to build is our own.' - Barack Obama, the US presidentIn keeping with Barack Obama's presidential campaign promise, the US has withdrawn its troops from Iraq and by the end of 2012 US spending in Iraq will be just five per cent of what it was at its peak in 2008.
In a special two-part series, Fault Lines travels across Iraq to take the pulse of a country and its people after nine years of foreign occupation and nation-building.
Now that US troops have left, how are Iraqis overcoming the legacy of violence and toxic remains of the US-led occupation, and the sectarian war it ignited? Is the country on the brink of irreparable fragmentation?
Correspondent Sebastian Walker first went to Baghdad in June 2003 and spent the next several years reporting un-embedded from Iraq. In the first part of this Fault Lines series, he returns and travels from Basra to Baghdad to find out what kind of future Iraqis are forging for themsel