Unless you leave your head under a rock, it’s hard to avoid hearing about the ongoing war in Iraq. I’m still kind of ambivalent about it, since I don’t think that there’s been a clear cut case either for or against (but the US have done a very fine job at screwing up international relations; they’ve got as much diplomatic ability as I have). What I find quite interesting is listening to other people’s points of view - some of them are quite surprising, and a few of them are quite random (in the DramSoc sense of the word). The taxi driver who took us back to Luton Airport today piped up when we were talking about foreign currencies, and french francs in particular. He said, in fairly halting English, that he didn’t think much of France and Germany, and "when they say no, is bad - they were enemies of us in the past, so to do that is not safe’. Fair enough - he can see that the actions of those two countries (and I didn’t like the french attitude of ‘we’ll veto it, no matter what it says’) could lead to destabilisation of relations between them and the US and UK, and that ain’t a very good idea.

Another fairly interesting viewpoint, and surely one you’ve already seen linked to, is that of one of the Human Shields who travelled to Iraq, and found it quite different to what he had expected. One of the main points being that he was totally mistaken in wanting to help the Iraqi civilians, since he found that, at least for some, they wanted to be ‘liberated’, and his actions would hinder that goal. See, he didn’t actually know what they thought, he just assumed. Which is a bad thing to do.

But perhaps the best thing I’ve seen came off of the weblog of a Mozilla developer, Kovu. The best bit was when he was talking about religion:

As far as killing innocent Iraqis, yes, that sucks. But you have to look at death differently than we do. Life is precious, but it is also Hell compared to the next world. You cannot say that death is bad and that God exists; the two are mutually exclusive. If death were bad, God cannot exist because then God is bad.

Now that’s just trying to get peoples backs up.