“Fallen, Fallen is Babylon the Great”:The Iraq War as “The Biggest Western Foreign Policy Disaster” as Reflected in Gregory Burke’s The Black Watch

Year 2016, Volume: 6 Issue: 2, 483 - 500, 30.12.2016

İmren Yelmiş

Abstract

The Iraq War which started in 2003 under the leadership of the U.S.A., the Bush administration, has entailed an irreparable loss, not only for Iraq as thousands of civilians died in the war, and chaos and disorder still prevail in the country, but also for the soldiers of the Scottish Black Watch regiment who, after they went to war, found themselves in “the Biggest Western Foreign Policy Disaster”. This war, actually, began through a fiction formulated by the two contemporary Western imperialist countries, the U.S.A. and the U.K. which argued that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons in Iraq which would be used for terrorist activities. This fiction was enriched by some other myths or fabricated “truths”, in which they argued that they would enter Iraq only in the name of “democracy,” “civilising the barbarians” and “bringing human rights to them”. Later, however, it was proven that this biological weapon story was nothing more than a fiction formulated by these two countries, and they used it to justify their invasion of Iraq, with the real reason for the war being the “oil” in Iraq, a reflection of the prevailing Western imperial ideologies. In this context, the Scottish playwright, Gregory Burke’s challenging play, The Black Watch, might be considered a metaphor for the tragic consequences of the war. In line with this, this paper argues that Burke, in this play, uses the theatrical performance as an instrument of satire and a mirror reflecting the fact that Western imperialist ideologies continue in the 21st century, causing enormous damage, Iraq War being most evident proof of this.

Keywords

The Iraq War, Oil, The Scottish Black Watch Regiment, Gregory Burke’s The Black Watch

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