Architecture reflects spirit of the Iraqis

It has been the breaking forth of water in a desert to read Nicolai Ouroussoff’s intelligent discussion of cultural survival via an examination of Baghdad’s architecture as a revelatory guide to the history of a place and a people [four-part series, Dec. 14-16].

The Iraqis are not objectified in his study as villains or as victims, but as people who have known a more civilized life in a place rich with millenniums of social history. It is ultimately a hopeful study, for though he recognizes the loss of so much for the Iraqis, from dictatorship to our more recent conquest, he cares for what reflects the spirit of a people, and one can feel that he wishes the Iraqi people well.

That recognition of complexity, of humanity, is what we of the dominant first world nations must be able to give to those we have made into our economic and political pawns. It is not roads, oil production and infrastructure that bespeak the wealth of a people, but their stories, their music, their art and artifacts, their parks, the pleasure of civic life, as Ouroussoff well conveys.

Alanna Kathleen Brown

Bozeman, Montana