Ideology and Rapture by tristero

by tristero

A wonderful insight from John F. Burns, recapping his long career as a foreign correspondent for the NY Times:

In my case, poking from the very top of my traveler’s backpack is something you might expect of a reporter who spent long years in what were then some of the nastiest places in the world, each of them fraudulently dressed up, in their enveloping propaganda, as something entirely different, and benign. What those years bred in me, more than anything else, was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises.

Agreed, and Burns gives a great example of North Korea’s lunatic ideology in his article. But:

  …I, like other reporters, undoubtedly failed on occasions when my passions, and the passions of those around me, ran at their highest. 

Those moments, I fear, might have to include for me the hours after American troops overran Baghdad in April 2003. At the time, I witnessed and shared the wild public rapture at Saddam Hussein’s fall, which gave way almost overnight to grim forebodings about the murderous sectarian chaos that was to ensue, and which continues, with a redoubled vengeance, in Tikrit, Mosul, Ramadi and dozens of other Iraqi cities and towns where the Islamic State has held sway.