better off under a brutal dictator

[Guest guest]

June 22, 2006

 

" Just Tell Me One Thing, Are You Glad that Saddam Hussein is Out of

Power? " And I Say, " No. "

Why Bush's Iraq is Worse Than Saddam's

By WILLIAM BLUM

 

National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in

NPR's Baghdad bureau, met earlier this month with a senior Shiite

cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as " a moderate " and

as a person trying to lead his Shiite followers into practicing peace

and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced

into exile. Jenkins asked him: " What would you think if you had to go

back to Saddam Hussein? " The cleric replied that he'd " rather see Iraq

under Saddam Hussein than the way it is now. "

 

When one considers what the people of Iraq have experienced as a result

of the American bombings, invasion, regime change, and occupation since

2003, should this attitude be surprising, even from such an individual?

I was moved to compile a list of the many kinds of misfortune which

have fallen upon the heads of the Iraqi people as a result of the

American liberation of their homeland. It's depressing reading, and you

may not want to read it all, but I think it's important to have it

summarized in one place.

 

Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that

84% of the higher education establishments have been " destroyed,

damaged and robbed " .

 

The intellectual stock has been further depleted as many thousands of

academics and other professionals have fled abroad or have been

mysteriously kidnapped or assassinated in Iraq; hundreds of thousands,

perhaps a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated

middle class, have left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after

receiving death threats.

 

" Now I am isolated, " said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to

leave. " I have no government. I have no protection from the government.

Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the

trash. " [1]

 

Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public's

health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are

rampaging through the country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health

centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely

damaged by the war and looting.

 

The UN's World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were

suffering from " dangerous deficiencies of protein " . Deaths from

malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly amongst children,

already a problem because of the 12 years of US-imposed sanctions, have

increased as poverty and disorder have made access to a proper diet and

medicines ever more difficult.

 

Thousands of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently from

unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are

a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random

scourge on civilians, particularly children.

 

Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the

Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and

infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed

babies. During the few weeks of war in spring 2003, A10 " tankbuster "

planes, which use munitions containing depleted uranium, fired 300,000

rounds.

 

And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous.

 

The American military has attacked hospitals to prevent them from

giving out casualty figures of US attacks that contradicted official US

figures, which the hospitals had been in the habit of doing.

 

Numerous homes have been broken into by US forces, the men taken away,

the women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the

family has said that the American soldiers helped themselves to some of

the family's money. Iraq has had to submit to a degrading national

strip search.

 

Destruction and looting of the country's ancient heritage, perhaps the

world's greatest archive of the human past, left unprotected by the US

military, busy protecting oil facilities.

 

A nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside of the political

sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle

East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more prevails.

 

Women's rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing danger

under harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas.

There is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates

physical attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with

a male friend.

 

Men can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children

playing outside in shorts.

 

Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious

issue.

 

Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security

they had enjoyed in Saddam's secular society; many have emigrated.

 

A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government feature a

wide variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psychological,

emotional; painful, degrading, humiliating; leading to mental

breakdown, death, suicide; a human-rights disaster area.

 

Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by US forces since the

invasion, but only a very tiny portion of them have been convicted of

any crime.

 

US authorities have recruited members of Saddam Hussein's feared

security service to expand intelligence- gathering and root out the

resistance.

 

Unemployment is estimated to be around fifty percent.

 

Massive layoffs of hundreds of thousands of Baathist government workers

and soldiers by the American occupation authority set the process in

motion early on. Later, many, desperate for work, took positions

tainted by a connection to the occupation, placing themselves in grave

danger of being kidnapped or murdered.

 

The cost of living has skyrocketed. Income levels have plummeted.

 

The Kurds of Northern Iraq evict Arabs from their homes. Arabs evict

Kurds in other parts of the country.

 

Many people were evicted from their homes because they were Baathist.

US troops took part in some of the evictions.

 

They have also demolished homes in fits of rage over the killing of one

of their buddies.

 

When US troops don't find who they're looking for, they take who's

there; wives have been held until the husband turns himself in, a

practice which Hollywood films stamped in the American mind as being a

particular evil of the Nazis; it's also collective punishment of

civilians and is forbidden under the Geneva Convention.

 

Continual bombing assaults on neighborhoods has left an uncountable

number of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges, roads, and

everything else that goes into the making of modern civilized life.

 

Hafitha, Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi ... names that will live in infamy

for the wanton destruction, murder, and assaults upon human beings and

human rights carried out in those places by US forces.

 

The supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal, and

reliable electricity have all generally been below pre-invasion levels,

producing constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching

115 degrees. To add to the misery, people wait all day in the heat to

purchase gasoline, due in part to oil production, the country's chief

source of revenue, being less than half its previous level.

 

The water and sewage system and other elements of the infrastructure

had been deliberately destroyed by US bombing in the first Gulf War of

1991. By 2003, the Iraqis had made great strides in repairing the most

essential parts of it. Then came Washington's renewed bombing.

 

Civil war, death squads, kidnaping, car bombs, rape, each and every day

.... Iraq has become the most dangerous place on earth. American

soldiers and private security companies regularly kill people and leave

the bodies lying in the street; US-trained Iraqi military and police

forces kill even more, as does the insurgency. An entire new generation

is growing up on violence and sectarian ethics; this will poison the

Iraqi psyche for many years to come.

 

US intelligence and military police officers often free dangerous

criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents.

 

Protesters of various kinds have been shot by US forces on several

occasions.

 

At various times, the US has killed, wounded and jailed reporters from

Al Jazeera television, closed the station's office, and banned it from

certain areas because occupation officials didn't like the news the

station was reporting.

 

Newspapers have been closed for what they have printed.

 

The Pentagon has planted paid-for news articles in the Iraqi press to

serve propaganda purposes.

 

But freedom has indeed reigned -- for the great multinationals to

extract everything they can from Iraq's resources and labor without the

hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations or worker

protections. The orders of the day have been privatization,

deregulation, and laissez faire for Halliburton and other Western

corporations. Iraqi businesses have been almost entirely shut out

though they are not without abilities, as reflected in the

infrastructure rebuilding effort following the US bombing of 1991.

 

Yet, despite the fact that it would be difficult to name a single area

of Iraqi life which has improved as a result of the American actions,

when the subject is Iraq and the person I'm having a discussion with

has no other argument left to defend US policy there, at least at the

moment, I may be asked:

" Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein is out of

power? "

 

And I say: " No " .

 

And the person says: " No? "

 

And I say: " No. Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee

problem and the surgeon amputated your entire leg, what would you think

if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer have a knee

problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem. "

 

And many Iraqis actually supported him.

 

 

 

Defending this corruption on which you are sat

You tell me what to think, you tell me this and that

`Freedom is O.K. you scum` but make sure it`s never used

In your defence of liberty I always stand accused