I recently wrote about how good the <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4913" author="" source="">Best of This is Hell! 2023</a> end-of-hear series has been. The episode <a href="https://thisishell.com/interviews/1679-rasha-al-aqeedi" author="" source="This is Hell!">Best of 2023: Living and Reliving the U.S. Invasion of Iraq / Rasha Al Aqeedi</a> was a counterexample. I thought Rasha's analysis was more superficial than the standard set by the other episodes. <ul> She says no-one should cheerlead a war, especially when they’re not involved, that any war is a tragedy, a diplomatic failure … but then she says that she’s totally pro-Ukraine. ARRRRGGGGHHHH. Don’t be pro-anything. Be pro-peace in Ukraine. God, why can’t people stay ideologically pure for one goddamned second? I also can’t tell if she’s kidding that Iran and Syria are in the "Axis of Evil" — I think she might believe it. Chuck, of course, calls her on none of these inconsistencies. Because I don't think he even sees them as such. In fairness, he almost never pushes back on his guests, so this is not an exception. Now she’s jabbering about "terrorist attacks in the U.S.". Did I miss something? She linked those directly to Trumpism … holy crap! Is she angling for a job at CNN? This is one of Chuck’s personal selection for best interviews of the year. C’mon Chuck. You’re as bad as Jeffrey, who's pretty much gone around the bend these days. Now she’s saying that the U.S. was just hoodwinked by duplicitous Iraqis! Wow! The poor U.S. was thwarted in its good intentions. Just overwhelmed by the vagaries of a war they never wanted, but were forced to fight. This is incredible. She’s full of shit. And Chuck loves it. </ul> <bq><b>Chuck:</b> Was it a combination of incompetence and arrogance? <b>Rasha:</b> Absolutely. That’s a perfect way of describing it.</bq> Ah, so nice to be able to remove agency. The U.S. was just floating helplessly down the stream of history, just like the rest of us. OK OK OK. Now, they’re vibeing about privilege. She talks about her having been privileged to have grown up as a Sunni in a country with an oppressed Shia majority. But neither of them talks about how the problem that most people have with discussions of "privilege" is that it doesn’t explain <i>everything</i> like people wish it did. She didn’t mention the sanctions regime once. She’s a bit like a lot of people of that generation and class—she can recognize that her class separates her from most of the other citizens of her country, but she still kind of judges them for wanting to go back to the old days, when there was a dictatorship. <img attachment="saddam_hussein_s_last_minutes.jpeg" align="right" caption="Saddam Hussein's last minutes">Look, middle-aged and older people in Iraq might very well remember that their country had one of the highest overall living standards in the Middle East and Africa. You have to deal with that, without telling them that they can now vote every four years. She doesn’t quite get around to saying that they don’t really have a democracy. She just says it’s a failure of democracy. It’s not a language barrier. She’s totally fluent. She now lives in Fairfax, Virginia, which is, quite frankly, the heart of the empire. She says very explicitly that she's never going back or moving back to Iraq. Maybe I'm completely misinterpreting her, but she doesn’t seem to place much blame on America, even for the continuing muddle that is Iraqi domestic politics. The U.S. is still heavily involved there, but gets no mention. I understand that we want to focus on the people of Iraq taking responsibility for their own country, but the reality is that there is only so much room to maneuver that they're going to be allowed by the U.S. If Iraq wanted to establish an Islamic state, that ... would not be allowed to happen. I don’t expect her to be ululating "Death to America", but she barely even acknowledged the U.S. influence. Maybe it’s because I just finished season 1 of Blowback, which recounted a lot of Iraqi history, with a preponderance of American influence in the last 50 years.