Kittens and Iraq (by Eve Garrard)

Kittens are cute, no two ways about it. Even those who prefer dogs to cats must acknowledge how ridiculously charming they are, as they play innocently in the sunshine, climbing in and out of irresistibly cute boots, baskets, and bunches of pink ribbons. Their 'Awwwww!' factor is astronomically high. And it's because of this somewhat saccharine sweetness that they lend themselves to metaphoric uses. An interest in cute playful kittens is easily deployed as a metaphor for a certain kind of aesthetic and moral shallowness, a frivolous desire to see only safe, pretty, untroubling things, and a corresponding (and discreditable) desire to be sheltered from the harsh realities of the world around us. No disrespect to kittens, of course, but that's how their iconography works.

So when Belle Waring informs us that a desire (as expressed by Bird Dog at Tacitus and Arthur Chrenkoff) to see the newspapers tell us about good news from Iraq really amounts to a preference for stories about kittens being cute, we know we're being told that an interest in such news is shallow, superficial, and wilfully blind to the terrible realities of that unhappy country. Now there are indeed terrible realities in Iraq: to ignore the bombings, murders, and appalling lack of security would certainly show a culpable failure to face up to the facts. But nobody, so far as I know, has suggested that we should ignore these things. The suggestion was that there are other, more positive, things going on too, things such as improvements in medicine, and education, and economic affairs, and the slow struggle to develop a democratic political system; and that these should also be reported, partly for reasons of balance and partly out of solidarity with those in Iraq who are actually engaged in that painful struggle to make life go better there. Now maybe these more positive developments, which might induce some optimism in us about Iraq, are already doomed to failure. I'm not sure how we'd know that, unless we have some alarming certainties about how little is possible in the Arab middle east; but perhaps the attempt to get Iraqi democracy off the ground is bound to go down in blood and flames. Maybe we should always have known this, just as the anti-warriors have always said. (I don't believe this myself at all, but I'm anxious to give the view in question the strongest run for its money that I can). If that's so (as I don't myself believe), how should we think of the heart-breaking signs in the other direction, the signs that perhaps things might turn out well, even though (ex hypothesi) such signs are totally misleading? Maybe we're fools to take them at face value, to think that more is possible than the blood and death and tyranny which seem to be the likeliest alternative. But such folly is tragic folly, since it involves more hope for the human condition in Iraq than (again, ex hypothesi) is really justified. And whatever is wrong with the tragic folly of misplaced hope, whether it's culpable blindness or irrational faith in humanity, it surely isn't shallow and frivolous. In the most extreme cases, the maintenance of hope against hope (see Nadezhda Mandelstam) in human possibilities is one of the remarkable and admirable things that humans can do, even when the hope is misplaced. I don't believe it is misplaced in the case of Iraq, though of course I could be quite wrong about that. But misplaced or not, that hope is not a contemptible one. Depicting the desire to hear about signs of progress in Iraq, which might support that hope, as amounting to the cheap sentimentality of calendars full of kittens displays its own heartless frivolity, of a kind that even a critical stance toward Western intervention in that country can't entirely explain or justify. (Eve Garrard)