Off topic IRAQ....Pulled this from another site thought it expressed a different opinion of things than we are supplied here at home FWIW:
This is from The Jerusalem Report (magazine) - 5/3/2004
Not all has changed for the worst since Saddam. Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south no longer fear the threat of genocide. Satellite TV and the Internet are now available for the first time, and information is greedily devoured. The crippling sanctions have been lifted and international trade can resume. Newspapers can flourish. But the first few weeks of looting after the war, the constant violence and the brutality of the occupation have made a happy ending impossible.
I was sitting outside at dusk with an Iraqi friend, Rana, at a cafe called Sandra, sipping a strawberry smoothie. Rana was eating imported ice cream, explaining that she does not eat the local ice cream for fear of contamination in the milk from the nuclear waste looted after the war. As Rana waxed nostalgically about the good old days under Saddam when there was amn wa-nidham, or security and order. It is a refrain I am used to and I tried not to roll my eyes. Two sharp gunshots cut her words short. Though the sound of shots is so frequent that it rarely distracts Iraqis, this time it was too close to ignore. "They killed a man!" someone shouted. A man in suit lay colapsed on the curb, blood spreading from beneath his head. The two assailants, who'd taken his pistol walked off laughing into the dark. The victim was a colonel in the Iraqi police, the seventh officer from his station to be assassinated.
A year after the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Fardus Circle, the cruel order he imposed has been replaced by anarchy. As a journalist who has been based in Baghdad since April 2003, I have watched the good will that Iraqis at first harbored toward the coalition forces being squandered and turned into hate.
The violence in Iraq is relentless. Explosions from bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and artillery as well as the pop of small arms fire can be heard all day and night. Baghdad is a huge, sprawling city with poor comminications. We don't always get to know the details of the explosions, most of which remain anonymous; we just hear the distant thunder or feel the slight change in air pressure. The locations are usually impossible to determine. Most people are, in any case, not foolish enough to search for them, especially after dark, when gangs and wild dogs own the streets.
The violence is now so mundane that unless an explosion is particularly close, nobody even pauses in midconversation or stops chewing kebab.
In the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya, there are nightly RPG and mortar attacks on the local U.S. base. The men on the street erupt in cheers and whistles at the sound of the explosions. In Baghdad, mosques of different sects are attacked every night and clerics killed, leading to retaliations. Mosques now have armies of young volunteers wielding Kalashnikovs to guard them.
The ubiquitous, random danger is why most Iraqis and journalists, many of whom now travel with armed bodyguards, stay home at night. And the fear may lead neighborhood mosque militias to unite and form neighborhood armies, to fight rival mosques or rival neighorhoods. "We don't talk about civil war," one Sunni tribal leader told me. "We just prepare for it."
Each group arms itself in self defense, which is interpreted by other groups as an offensive threat. Now everybody is armed and scared, and all it would take is a match. "We fear this match," said a leader in Hudheifa mosque.
The Sunnis fear an impending Shi'ite takeover of Iraq if anything resembling a democratic election takes place. Many Sunnis cling to the fiction that they are, in fact, the majority, and the Shi'ites are all Iranians. Shi'ites hate the Kurds, accusing them of trying to divide the country with their calls for autonomy. Shi'ites have started supporting the Turkmen in the north in their bloody clashes with the Kurds.
Despite the divisions, there is one thing that the Sunni and Shi'ite clerics are in agreement about: the Americans. In every Sunni and Shi'ite mosque one can purchase the DVDs, CDs, tapes and literature of the Islamic revolution that rejects "American democracy" and "American freedom." All religious leaders, Sunni and Shi'ite alike, condenm the new interim constitution for its secularism. The Koran is their only constitution.
Secular Iraqis are a scared minority on the defensive. Unorganized, unarmed and lacking any charismatic leadership, they can only watch in teror as violent anti-modern forces seize power and kill liberal intellectuals and academics.
The American security forces are a blunt instrument. They arrest hundreds at once, hoping somebody will know something. Over 10,000 Iraqi men are being held in detention, most of them innocent. Two of my friends were jailed for four days in late March after an explosives sniffer dog outside a main Baghdad hotel decided their bag smelled funny.
One morning last winter in the village of Albu Hishma, north of Baghdad, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever belongings they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. In the Sunni triangle, the American sodiers pursuing wanted ment will often seize their wives and children as "material witnesses" until the men turn themselves in. Americans claim this is very effective.
The Americans are not deliberately making the lives of the Iraqis miserable, but they are learning there is no such thing as a good occupation. It is a situation that creates inherent confrontation. |
