We Americans keep telling ourselves that an attack on Iraq will bring freedom and democracy to millions of people suffering under the totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein. It's unfortunate that throughout history very few well-intentioned military excursions ever turned out so rosy. We can even look into our own past and see how we justified the taming of the West as a process of bringing freedom, democracy and God to the indigenous people (yeah, it was slaughter by any one else's definition). That might be an extreme example, but even in the recent case of Afghanistan, we bombed the country and left it in ruin. We promised $5 billion for rebuilding the country, a paltry sum to begin with, yet so far only a few hundred million has been spend in rebuilding. There is still a lack of basic infrastructure like electricity and roads in Afghanistan, but we're already moving on to other things... It's a shame that we spend such a gross sum bombing the country only to get miserly when it comes to rebuilding the country. It seems we're good at silencing our critics and enemies but we're not very adept at making friends. I have to wonder whether American policies after Sept. 11th created more friends or foes? I think it's an important question to pose for the sake of world peace and self-interest. After all, friends don't let friends fly planes into occupied buildings.
Lately we've turned our attention toward Saddam, but as the following NY Times editorial reports, Iraqi citizens may not be very welcoming. That's not surprising though seeing how we've shut down their economy since the Gulf War and many of their citizens blame us for their surging infant mortality, cancer and deformities rate. Gosh, were those depleted-uranium shells? Our bad.
At least the Bush Administration tells us that with the educated population of Iraq, the rebuilding will be much easier than in Afghanistan. There is an existing pool of doctors, teachers, professionals. That's comforting isn't it? But what does it say when that educated population prefers the draconian rule of Saddam to the freedom and democracy-building pre-emptive strikes promised by the U.S.? As my high school history teacher Mr. Harvill loved to say, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Which are we?
The Stones of Baghdad By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOFBAGHDAD, Iraq - From their perch in Washington, President Bush and his advisers seem to have convinced themselves that an invasion will proceed easily because many Iraqis will dance in the streets to welcome American troops. That looks like a potentially catastrophic misreading of Iraq.
Consider Dahlia Abdulrahim and Intidhar Abdulrahim, two young women I met at an English-language used-book shop in Baghdad. Dahlia reads romance novels, while Intidhar favors Thomas Hardy. So will they be cheering the American troops rolling through Baghdad?"I will throw stones at them," Dahlia said.
"Maybe I will throw knives," Intidhar said brightly.
Those two women are broadly representative of Iraqis I spoke to. If American military strategy assumes popular support from Iraqis facilitating an invasion and occupation, the White House is making an error that could haunt us for years.
After scores of interviews with ordinary people from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, I've reached two conclusions:
1. Iraqis dislike and distrust Saddam Hussein, particularly outside the Sunni heartland, and many Iraqis will be delighted to see him gone.
2. Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America's intentions than Saddam's.
"America is a new colonial power that wants to dominate," warns Rahim Majid, a farmer from Karbala.
"Americans are not coming to help us, but for our oil," frets Naseem Jawad, a merchant in Najaf.
Public opinion is very difficult to gauge in a dictatorship as brutal as Iraq's, where reporters are mostly accompanied by government minders and where anyone who criticizes Saddam risks having his tongue amputated. It takes quite a bit of arak, the national drink, before conversations even begin to get interesting.
Still, Iraq is not as Orwellian as North Korea, and Iraqis listen openly and constantly to the BBC, Iranian radio, Israeli radio and especially to an excellent new American broadcast called Radio Sawa, which mixes popular music with news — and is a triumph of the Bush administration's focus on public diplomacy abroad. Furtive conversations with Iraqis leave a strong impression that most people know what's going on, worry about a war and hate what Saddam has done to their country.
Corruption is so widespread and morale is so poor that it sometimes seems the whole Iraqi system is close to disintegrating. A company of marines could perhaps slip through an Iraqi Army checkpoint on payment of a modest bribe. (But carrying all the bribe money would slow the marines down, for the Iraqi dinar is almost worthless. When I paid a hotel bill, I had to lug a shopping bag with 20 pounds of dinar bills to the front desk.)
Still, while I found few people willing to fight for Saddam, I encountered plenty of nationalists willing to defend Iraq against Yankee invaders. And while ordinary Iraqis were very friendly toward me, they were enraged at the U.S. after 11 years of economic sanctions.
"You see this?" asked a seething university president, waving a pencil in the air. "It took 15 months just to import pencils for our students." (The reason was both bureaucracy and the possibility that graphite could be misused for weapons.)
Worse, U.S. bombing of water treatment plants, difficulties importing purification chemicals like chlorine (which can be used for weapons), and shortages of medicines led to a more than doubling of infant mortality, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
In addition, every Iraqi knows that Basra is suffering a surge in cancer, childhood leukemia and grotesquely deformed fetuses. Some foreign and Iraqi specialists blame American use of depleted-uranium shells during the gulf war, and most Iraqis take this as established fact.
"We blame the U.S.," sputtered Dr. Amir Nissa, an obstetrician in Basra. "It was the U.S. that put in sanctions against Iraq. Every Iraqi blames the U.S. 100 percent."
So if Saddam thinks the average Iraqi is going to miss him, he's deluding himself. But if President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then he too is deluding himself.
Comments (2)
Makes you think twice about what we're doing, if the Iraqis would rather have Saddam in charge instead of welcoming our troops, you'd think the Bush administration would want to rethink invading Iraq. Where are they getting the information that our troops would be greeted with open arms? There must be another way to bring freedom to Iraq, why don't we try to help the people instead of trying to bomb them? We've already screwed them over, the least we could do is help them better the country. But it looks like our government would rather destroy more lives instead of helping the population. Since when did helping others in need take a back seat to starting war?
Posted by lisa | October 4, 2002 7:56 AM
Posted on October 4, 2002 07:56
i do not think you guys (americans0 are freedom fighter
why because yo guy afganistan is so crew up after you guys guys bommed that place
they did do any thing to u people so why make them suffer for no reason
Posted by sweety | January 3, 2004 10:16 AM
Posted on January 3, 2004 10:16