JANUARY 4, 2007

       My opinion of Iraq has slightly changed over the last week.  Like many people around the world I was glued to my TV watching the live coverage and waited with anticipation to see if Saddam Hussein would be executed.

       Whether or not the Iraqi court went through with the hanging had no impact on my life.  But as a person who lives in a free world I somehow felt that those living in the region overseas deserved to have the same opportunities in life as me.

       Why did I feel this way?  The image of Iraq that I had in my head was this is a country where people don’t have luxuries like we have in Canada.  I’d always had the impression that because the pictures we always see from Iraq are of the bombings and killings and it doesn’t seem like a very civilized place to live.  Maybe that’s partially my own ignorance for not educating myself about the country.

       However in the days following the Saddam hanging we learned of someone on the scene using his cellphone camera to record the execution and then later posting it on the Internet.  At that point I realized, “Maybe these people aren’t as bad off as I thought.”

       I think we’re so used to seeing corporate advertising everywhere we turn that it just seems natural in Canada.  But in Iraq you don’t see big signs advertising the region’s telecommunication companies.  And digging a bit deeper in my mind I then figured out that all the bad things I’d ever heard or known about Iraq were about the Saddam regime.

       And it’s pretty unfair to judge a country by its leader.  If that were the case people would look at us as being bigoted control freaks with bad hair.  It’s really no different in Canada with the exception of innocent individuals being killed (we prefer to have that happen overseas apparently).  Our leader has such tight control and what he says goes with his colleagues and we have no say in the matter.  Now that I think about it, I kind of feel sorry for us.