Monday 8 December 2003

Pic of the day: On an entirely unrelated note, I spent a couple hours playing Civ3. Here the civilized Scandinavian soldiers are helping keep peace in the Aztec jungle.

Occupants? We?

The state-owned Norwegian broadcasting, in its relentless search for truth and justice, has made a habit of saying "the occupation forces" instead of the official term "coalition forces" in Iraq. This makes it exceedingly interesting to see that the American leadership is including Norway among the nations that take part in the coalition...

This came to light because some pretty big contracts are up for grabs in Iraq, presumably related to the rebuilding efforts. So there are a few billions on the table, and the countries that didn't want to support the war effort are not welcome to take part in the rebuilding either. This includes of course Germany, France and Russia. But it does not include Norway. Admittedly we didn't send troops to take part in the actual conquest, so to speak. But our Prime Minister had spoken to President Bush and promised that Norwegian troops would show up as soon as the fighting was over to help with less controversial activities. This also came to pass. According to spokesmen for the Norwegian government, the Norwegian soldiers are doing humanitarian work; it's practically an aid agency, is the impression we get. Our boys are there to help the Iraqi civilians, not to subdue them. Journalists are not quite so sure: It seems Norwegian soldiers are sometimes mistaken for British. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.)

The funny thing is that among the political parties, the Socialist Left are pretty much alone in claiming that the Norwegian soldiers are part of the occupying army. (Well, there are the Communists too, but these are few and far between and people generally don't listen to them since they seem to live in their own world.) So now we have the Socialist Left and the American government agreeing, against everyone else. It could be just me, but I find this mildly entertaining.

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For those of you who are not familiar with Norway and its politics: Norway is a sparsely populated kingdom on the northern rim of Europe, the best country in the world to live in according to the United Nations, and certainly one of the very richest compared to the population. We consider ourselves world champions of loving kindness and can be found all over the globe trying to negotiate peace treaties for others. We also incidentally happen to have much of our military stationed in the territories that used to belong to the aboriginal Sami people. Not that anyone ever talks about that; after all, the Sami are much better off under Norwegian rule... So now we just have to wait for the Iraqis to find out the same thing.