‘We Will Turn Bush Into a Dog’
The Americans badly miscalculated by believing that the Iraqis would welcome them as liberators
Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
March 27 — Dogs do not live happy lives in Iraq. Considered “unclean” by Muslims and rarely kept as pets, most of those that you see are feral curs slinking through the streets late at night.
IT’S NORMAL PRACTICE for Iraqi soldiers to cull the packs with machine guns. But the commandos of Saddam’s fedayeen, terrorist-shock troops organized in the mid-1990s, sometimes tear a dog limb from limb and sink their teeth in its flesh. Repulsive brutality, after all, is a badge of honor for these troops; this particular rite of passage was even captured on a government video.
“The fedayeen are animals!” says a young Iraqi woman who fled her country for Jordan a few months ago. “They are trained to be like animals! Everybody is frightened of them.” And even though there are only an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 of these militia, inside Iraq it feels as if the fedayeen— meaning “those who sacrifice”—are everywhere. These days, Iraqis say, they are forcing others to put their lives on the line in the face of the American invasion. “Saddam has succeeded in establishing a strong structure that is loyal to him,” says Issam Chalabi, a former Iraqi oil minister now in exile. “These fedayeen are not only fighting the Americans, they are mainly against those who want to surrender or refuse to fight.”
And yet, neither the frightened young woman, nor Chalabi (who is no relation to a would-be exile leader with the same last name), nor any of the other Iraqis or Arabs I’ve talked to since the fighting began last week, believes that the Iraqis’ resistance to the United States is solely a matter of intimidation and fear. That plays a part; the role of the fedayeen is important. But the resistance to the United States “is a matter of Iraqi patriotism,” says Chalabi. “No one will accept the Americans’ presence there. And if you say anything about me, say this: I am against the war. I am against the occupation.”
American administration officials and sympathetic pundits fundamentally miscalculated by believing that, as some exiles told them, because the Iraqi people hate Saddam, they would love their American “liberators.” “That’s where you went wrong,” a Lebanese friend tells me, summing up sentiments I’ve heard all over the Arab world, “The Iraqis do hate Saddam—but they do not love you.”
The best example of this lies in the largely Shia population of southern Iraq. There was a common assumption that, given the chance, the brutally oppressed people there would rise up against Saddam’s cronies and soldiers again just as they did in 1991 after the last gulf war. But what many of us forgot was the way in which the people there remembered that uprising, when U.S. troops stood by and let them be massacred. It was thought in Washington that this time around, with the Americans suddenly serious about eliminating Saddam (as the Bush I administration obviously was not 12 years ago), Iraqis would seize the day, and even the government. Not at all. Many who lost brothers, sons, wives and mothers in the savage reprisals of 1991 believe the American offensive is a dozen years too late and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives too short.
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