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A very good article on post-war Iraq


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NOt many ppl know about the post-war Iraq...for most Americans, its a success and the Iraqis are living a grand life without Saddam....well, if you're gonna break something, you better be ready to rebuild it too!

How long has it been since the end of the war - and they can't even get electricity running properly yet???

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,972831,00.html

A latte - and a rifle to go

Baghdad's cafes are busy but there's no clean water. Galleries are opening, but visitors are armed. Patients freed from the bombed psychiatric hospital are returning there - because they feel it's safe. In this powerful dispatch, we reveal the reality of daily life in an upside-down city.

Euan Ferguson

Sunday June 8, 2003

The Observer

Can dust smell? A daft question, but it was instructive, going through my notebook afterwards, to come across a dispiriting little paragraph of jottings made at the end of my first night in Baghdad. Sitting in about the safest place in the city, outside the Palestine Hotel, which American tanks are now stringently guarding rather than shelling, and musing on the decision by the adjoining Sheraton to forgo that chain's usual dull corporate anonymity for a wholly new theme excitingly reliant on linoleum and fear and cockroaches, I watched as the full moon of Arabia competed in vain with the high romance of CNN's satellite dishes, and made a list.

I called it 'Smells of Baghdad', and this is what it said. 'Diesel. Burning rubbish. Non-burning rubbish, rubbish just very busy getting on with stinking. Shit. Dust, all over the trees. NB can dust smell? Nothing green, nothing growing. Cheap chemical disinfectant. Old sweat, goaty old sweat. Petrol. More dust.'

Instructive because, as the notebook rambled on over the next few days, I then began writing down other questions, the really important ones; or at least writing a word or two to remind myself of them. Aid. Rumsfeld. Sewerage. US interests. Heat, July. Jobs, money, trust, stupidity. The last got quite a few mentions; it would of course have been quicker, if short on gravitas, simply to write 'D'oh!' The questions were much as you would expect, and far more relevant to the land we have just conquered than anything about WMDs.

How, for instance, can the Americans still be failing, weeks after the fall of Baghdad, to keep any kind of electricity running for more than about an hour at a time, leaving the streets insanely, medievally dark? What are the aid agencies playing at and why, while we're at it, when it's about 40 in the shade, have the mad Koreans just sent a few tons of winter blankets? How hot will it have to get - and it hits 60 and above in July - before, still painfully short of clean water, normal Baghdadis take to the streets and finally do what Saddam wanted - go for the occupying troops with the many thousands of guns now looted from Baathist armouries?

And didn't anyone realise that, if you can surgically take out almost every ministry (the oil building was left strangely untouched), it might be an idea to have a vague plan to put something in their place? And why on earth are the Iraqis here, where nothing works, apologising to me ?

It was when I met the poet and the painter that I first began to question aspects of my tottering grasp on reality, but it was poisonously hot and I was, after all, in an insane asylum, which is actually a fine place to be if you're going to go mad.

Abed al-Kareem, now 44, is perky and wise and speaks perfumed English with an endearing lisp. Hagop Ouzourian, a Christian Armenian, used to help run his father's wine business in Mosul, and is apparently a fine draughtsman, trained at LA's Pierce College. Both were put into the al-Rashad Psychiatric Hospital during the Saddam years for tiny and tawdry reasons, which seemed closely connected to Baathist exploitation of fallings-out within their respective families. Both are toweringly sane.

As Baghdad was falling in early April, a detachment of US tanks made a couple of holes in the hospital's 15-foot walls, stayed for a day and then left. The looters poured in, and 1,400 inmates, among them several of Iraq's most dangerous psychotics, which is saying something, poured out. The looters, all armed, took everything. Every air conditioning unit, every fan. They raped six female inmates. I was walking round the female compound, trying to come to terms with the state of the women there, in this heat, without any drugs, as I was told this, and I have to say it opened up a whole new perspective on just how tissue-thin is, and probably always has been, our claim to civilisation.

They stole all the drugs; the floor of the pharmacy was left white with trampled pill-dust. The hospital authorities now have a few generators up and running: not enough to provide any respite from the heat, but enough to apply ECT to those patients now denied their medicine (mainly chlorpromazine); although doctors are swift to point out that for some patients ECT can be far more therapeutic and harmless than is imagined in the West after some fearsome Nineties propagandising. Still, no drugs, no moving air, not a whole lot of hope, a terrible many buzzing things, chiefly flies and electrodes: it's not the world's prettiest place.

Not all the inmates fled. (One of the very few who stayed, a murderer named Ali Sabah, apparently remained because, in his own words, 'I don't want the monkey to see me, and I don't want to see the monkey.') But both Kareem and Ouzourian, our very sane poet and painter, took the chance and legged it, keen to pick up their lives in Baghdad.

Now here's the thing. Both chose, after a few days in the city just liberated by the Americans, to come back. Each, of their own free volition, decided that the safest and sanest place in postwar Iraq would be a steaming cell in a state mental hospital.

Kareem tries in his kindly way to guide me past the worst of the main holding-cell, as the bars shut behind us and we aim for the relative peace of his own section of corridor. It is hard, however, not to look. There are many naked men. There are others half-dressed in what it would be an exaggeration to call filthy rags. Their hands are busy between their legs, but still not quite as busy as the flies.

'I am in paradise,' says Abed al- Kareem, not that ironically. 'Out there is where it is crazy. A kid boy of 11 has pistols and wants to shoot me? In here, the Americans are back at the gate, and, for the moment, we are safe. Baghdad was not safe. And I am free, I can go when I want. I want to see another country, help others, marry a beautiful girl. I can go when it is safe.' Ouzourian nods in agreement. 'This is the only place in Iraq that takes care of the people. Three meals a day, and it is safe.'

Kareem is terribly keen, though, not to blame the Americans. Not to blame them too much, anyway. 'You must remember how much we hated Saddam, how happy we are that he is gone. Saddam not only damaged us physically, but he damaged the ... the grain of ourselves. So much that was good and beautiful about the Iraqi people. There was no culture, no teaching, and he turned humans into animals, which is what you see in the streets of Baghdad. This is not true Iraqi people . These are people made mad by Saddam.' And then he writes me a poem. Not a brilliant poem but still a poem, and about Saddam. It ends something along the lines of, 'Butterflies will be dancing/ Sometimes solo, sometimes together/ And the heart that tastes freedom will be fresh.' He happily signs and dates it, and adds, with something approaching pride: 'Al-Rashad Hospital. Section 8'. And then he says quietly, as we field our way back through the throng of patients, who have decided that they want to kiss me for luck: 'We still dream of him, Saddam. Always, we dream of him.'

They don't dream of him, not much, in the café, the famous old café at the end of al-Mutanabbi Street, but they do talk about him. Whether he's still alive (yes), where he's hiding (Russia), whether he can ever come back to power (a resounding and joyous no). They have always talked about him, the poets and writers and artists who have for many years met here, in the al-Shah Bender, on Friday mornings, but in distinctly muted tones. Since the café reopened, the talk has been open and occasionally argumentative, and frankly the Americans aren't coming out of it at all well.

To reach the al-Shah Bender you walk, in the stifling noon heat, past a burnt-out fire-engine and then down past the Friday morning book-market which at first sight looks colourful and exciting. Then you start looking, properly, at the very few books in English, their covers blued and yellowed after many years in the sun. Dated, motley, vaguely pathetic. The Glory of Amsterdam. The Anglo-American Threat to Albania. Advance Training Course for Customs Officers in African Countries, 14 Mar-15 July 1973: Course Report. Something called Dynamic Vibration Absorbency, by J.B. Hunt. Aids: You Can't Catch it from Holding Hands.

And you realise, belatedly, just what a cultural as well as physical effect sanctions brought to Iraq: not one single English-language book came into the country after 1992. The national literacy rate was 89 per cent in 1985; by 2000 it was down to 58 per cent. This is a theme I am going to hear repeated in the café, often: they talk not about 'before the war' or even 'before Saddam', but about 'before sanctions'.

They're pragmatists, all of them, sipping vanilla tea and waiting for the hookah to come round, as has happened in all the years since the café first opened. There is undoubted, repeated condemnation of Saddam and delight at his departure, but there is nothing at all approaching blind gratitude.

Hussein al-Araji was a teacher and football coach in Kut who fled to Baghdad, and a job selling clothes, when the Baathists asked him to spy on his players: you could disappear yourself, in the old Iraq, if you didn't want to be disappeared. 'Of course we are glad the Americans have done this, at last. Maybe sanctions will now end, maybe we can live like a free people. And Saddam was terror, simply terror. A man could not say anything. He fell from the wall when he spoke anything. Have you seen the cemeteries? No one did this but him.

'But you must also look today at Baghdad. We do not understand it. There are different prisons. There is a prison now where we don't have food. Where we don't have safety, or enough water, and our women cannot walk alone, and no one can go out after dark. What kind of freedom, yet, is that? We simply do not understand. They can do anything, says America. And yet it looks they can do nothing.'

He's joined at our table by young Mansour Hassein al-Raikan, a published poet, who is, of course, infinitely safer now to write what he wants, but human enough to resent the slow failure of the coalition to restore anything Iraq needs in the here-and-now. 'No salary, no water, no safety, nothing but confusion. Of course we are starting to resent it all. We would like the Americans to go now, please, and begin to let us run our country. I do not see how we could do a worse job than at the moment.' The café's owner, Haji Mohamed, shakes his head at the situation. 'No security, fuel, electricity. We are growing very worried for us now. We are not without experience. The British came here in 1917 and did the same thing - but there was never this feeling of danger, never. We cannot understand it. People are going to get angry. We do not want Saddam back. But we do want a government, some order.' Hussein al-Araji, the teacher, is about to leave, with a book under his arm. Shakespeare, the Complete Works, edited by G.B. Harrison. He is hoping to sell it for perhaps three dollars, to get some food for the weekend. I give him $20 and tell him to keep the book, which I am sure he will. For perhaps a week.

It's not all grimness and misery, not quite. I went one day to the first art opening since the war, a little gallery called al-Ufuq (the culture). 'Arassat Street,' said the invite, 'opposite branch of pizza rest. The seventh house No.8/1, Lane 27, Babylon Quarter 929'. There have been easier art galleries to find. But inside was a little oasis, of some rather fine art and tentatively happy people: cake and Pepsi was handed round, and I saw the first women in perhaps five days, certainly the first without veils.

Nizar Arrawi, the bubbly owner, showed me some of her own sculptures, and then explained that she had recently owned better ones but her workshop had just been looted. But at least this gallery was open, and they were proud to welcome the good Dr Ayad Alawi, long-exiled leader of the Iraqi National Accord, a charmer of a man, who asked, passionately, that the West act quickly to trace all the looted art. And for a moment, although the streets outside are still rich with rubbish and choking with smelly dust, you realised a little of this ancient country's cultural heritage and began to hope for the future; and then the doctor's entourage left, guns waving busily, and the faint sounds of another firefight came from across town, and we were back in modern-day Iraq, after the fall.

Ah yes, the bloody guns, always the guns. It's estimated now that about 75 per cent of Baghdad's population are armed, and the percentage is increasing as the remaining quarter realise that they probably need a gun for their own and their family's protection. A hundred and fifty dollars or so for an AK-47, double that for a pistol because it's easier to hide. You can buy them rather easily from the street-markets. These are patrolled hourly by US forces whose job is to check for people selling guns. The traders get round this with diabolical cunning by looking at their watches and, once an hour, hiding all the guns. The liberating forces offered a cross-Baghdad amnesty a couple of weeks ago: the grand total of guns deposited was a magnificent none.

It's almost bearable, during the day, although if a silhouetted someone tries to wave you down, with a gun, in a long hot road full of heat-mirage and six-year-olds siphoning petrol, you have to choose: chances are it's a Bad Person so you keep the foot down, but if it's the Americans and you race past, they'll shoot at you, lots, because they're as scared as everyone else in this shambles of a city. No girls are going to school. No women are going to the markets. After dark it becomes a fast shade of worse.

One night I visited a friend about a mile away, and foolishly stayed up talking, and ended up trying to get a late taxi home. Outside the hotel they shrugged, and then one brave young thing disappeared for a minute and came back carrying lots of guns and walked me through the blackout for 10 minutes until we came across a darkened little street party of severely scary drivers, the fat moon winking its light off a battery of gold teeth and metal teacups and, for all I'm really sure, recently bloodied scimitars. Not for $10,000, I was told. 'Ali Baba, Ali Baba,' they repeated. Some Iraqis get annoyed by this - the thief of the 1,001 Nights was Kuwaiti - but the verbal shorthand is fast and always works: the thieves are out, and have guns, and even though we have guns too we're not going to risk it. Are you mad? Where are you from?

I mention Scotland, and we have one of those extremely odd late-night conversations, this time about Mel Gibson. Apparently one of the very favourite films in Baghdad is Braveheart, because Saddam used to show it repeatedly, nightly, with furious subtitles, to demonstrate just what bastards the English were. I explain that few Scots have a television because most are still running around in woad, thanks to the English. We raise a happy toast - sticky, sweet tea - to the general fog of historical propagandising and the more specific idea of 'Freedom!'. Somewhere nearby - a mile away? A street away? - another stupid pop-pop gun battle breaks out, and they really won't take me home, and so I say I might walk, and they raise their teacups again and say you must be either very brave or very stupid, when the truth of course is that I am neither, but something else again relatively new to them, which is very quietly drunk. I bravely wake up my friend and sleep on the sofa.

No one sane could doubt the rich monstrousness of Saddam's many years climbing to power and hanging on with cunning and thuggery. One trip banishes all doubts. The former palace of Saddam's great chum General Maher Mustafa al-Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris, has been appropriated as one headquarters of the Committee for Free Prisoners, set up to try to track down the whereabouts, or more honestly to confirm the deaths, and match names with graves, of the staggering numbers who began disappearing from the face of Iraq when Saddam began his rise. Outside in the courtyard mothers in black are holding wet wipes, against the heat and the stink of rubbish, and studying lists of names on the wall, hoping to see a mention of their son. The lists are held up with brown duct-tape. There are about 14,000 names. Inside, the committee has turned the basement into a haphazard research room, trying to match more names. Battered filing cabinets tumble over each other, lying on top of a broken WC: they contain many more thousands of files detailing what happened to 'political prisoners'. This is just the start. One of the staff, Abd al-Ratha Alekabi, has spent the week digging up graves. On Friday he gives his hands a good wash and comes here to dig up names.

And then you drive back, through the centre, and see what has happened to the ministries and powerhouses that used at least to keep some of the country alive, and realise that they have not merely been looted but invaded, lobotomised, trepanned. The Americans are hardly in evidence, and soon it will be dark again, and the guns will begin again: and you can't help but wonder how, when we managed to get the surgical excision of Saddam so right, we have apparently managed to get everything else so wrong in this country. An old and an interesting country, and one in which everyone has been unfailingly, unaccountably courteous and helpful, apart from the ones who are trying to shoot you. They welcomed me into one mosque for Friday prayers, this know-nothing Westerner whose country had just helped bring their city to a halt, careful as they washed their feet not to use too much water. Prayers were all-male: women have stopped coming out for the moment.

Others offered me their bottled water, as they always offer it to each other. It is sweet to see the way in which old men unembarrassedly hold hands on marches, quick to pull each other out of the way of traffic (or perhaps it's just in case they're hit by one of the cacophony of toots: they laugh, here, about their drivers' propensity for the horn, and call it 'Baghdad music'.) A kindly and spectacularly ravaged people, and I'm not sure quite what's about to happen to them.

Madeeh, my self-effacing driver/translator, goes off to buy us some juice. We have just been debating what he might use my dollars for: he wants a TV satellite dish, but is tempted to buy a pistol, to protect his family, even though he hates the idea and has never owned a gun. I notice he has left a notebook open, where he has been writing down new words, Arabic aligned on one side with halting English from a leaky biro, to help him in his command of the language. His new words for the day are 'retreat', 'struggle', 'clashed', 'invaders' and 'criminals'.

That night Karim, a friendly ex-hairdresser who was forced to stop when Saddam decreed that women's hair could no longer be styled - he made this lucrative career the preserve of friends and family - remembered the 60 heat of last July. 'A friend of mine was out in the countryside and came across some travellers. They were making their tea without fuel: simply putting the water into a can and letting the sun boil it. And there was a water crisis. And I hate to say this, but at least Saddam was appearing on television, telling us what to do, telling us there would be tankers. I am very scared what will happen this July, if the Americans have not got something right. And I am a little scared for the Americans.'

Baghdad has turned into Afghanistan faster than Afghanistan. As I write this, the UN weapons inspectors are going back in to see whether the looting of the city's main nuclear power station has given Baghdad a radioactive water supply. Could this really imaginably be, in the minds of those who went to war for even the best intentions, the preferred legacy? A land where all the children smell of petrol? A land fit only for flies?

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I am willing to give the US the benefit of the doubt--in that this is going to take time. I think the impatient media, always quick to pounce on perceived failure, needs to inject a little common sense into their reporting.

No one said this was going to be easy, no one. Are there going to be significant ups and downs along the way...of course. Are there going to be Iraqi people who grow impatient with the US---of course.

But this does not mean in the long run, this will not be successful.

Why are the same people who wanted to give useless weapons inspectors 6 more months to "disarm" Iraq now only willing to give the US a few weeks on a massive project?

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Originally posted by igloo

Why are the same people who wanted to give useless weapons inspectors 6 more months to "disarm" Iraq now only willing to give the US a few weeks on a massive project?

Because, in the additional 6 months the weapons inspectors would have been there, the Iraqis would still have had food, water, electricity, some security from common crime, etc. How long does it take to restore basic needs in just one single city - Baghdad?

Its been over a year since the Aghanistan war - the ppl over there are still in need of many basic necessities.

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Originally posted by raver_mania

Because, in the additional 6 months the weapons inspectors would have been there, the Iraqis would still have had food, water, electricity, some security from common crime, etc. How long does it take to restore basic needs in just one single city - Baghdad?

Its been over a year since the Aghanistan war - the ppl over there are still in need of many basic necessities.

What good does food, water, and electricity do for the Iraqi people would would have murdered, tortured, and raped by the Hussein regime in those additional 6 months?

Why do you continually discount the atrocities caused by Hussein?....do the mass graves mean anything to you, that you are more willing to focus on US negatives that what these people lived under?

Are you that blinded by your anti-Bush, anti-war stance that you can not see that over the long run this will be good for the Iraqi people?

Don't get trapped into what the media hypes....I mean, the left is always so quick to point out that the US media "brainwashes" mainstream America...well if that is the case, is it possible that the anti-war media has an agenda too????.....WHy is it that the media has not been reporting on the cities that are doing fine?

Yes, restoring common services has been a challenge---infrastructure is outdated and was sabotaged.....hhhmmmm--where did all that UN money go???...but these services will get restored, and the anti-war crowd will just find something else to zero in on, continuing to ignore the world is a better place now that Hussein is gone

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Originally posted by igloo

[

Why do you continually discount the atrocities caused by Hussein?....do the mass graves mean anything to you, that you are more willing to focus on US negatives that what these people lived under?

Good point.

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Originally posted by igloo

What good does food, water, and electricity do for the Iraqi people would would have murdered, tortured, and raped by the Hussein regime in those additional 6 months?

Why do you continually discount the atrocities caused by Hussein?....do the mass graves mean anything to you, that you are more willing to focus on US negatives that what these people lived under?

Are you that blinded by your anti-Bush, anti-war stance that you can not see that over the long run this will be good for the Iraqi people?

Don't get trapped into what the media hypes....I mean, the left is always so quick to point out that the US media "brainwashes" mainstream America...well if that is the case, is it possible that the anti-war media has an agenda too????.....WHy is it that the media has not been reporting on the cities that are doing fine?

Yes, restoring common services has been a challenge---infrastructure is outdated and was sabotaged.....hhhmmmm--where did all that UN money go???...but these services will get restored, and the anti-war crowd will just find something else to zero in on, continuing to ignore the world is a better place now that Hussein is gone

I'm not - it just seems like the Iraqi people are starting to. What to do then, if there is some sort of revolt? Crush it?

And how about Afghanistan? There are still tons of people who are living in equal if not worse conditions than before the Taliban. Its been well over a year...don't you think things could have gone faster?

I agree that Iraq is much better off without Hussein...even though I am/was anti-war, I will agree with that. However, its time to mend the damage done and let the Iraqis run themselves, and their resources. Remember my initial concern was that this war was for oil...and nothing so far as changed that view. And now the US and UK want the UN to officially identify them as "occupying powers"?

The infrastructure, as far as I understand, was not any more outdated than any of the neighbouring countries, and was working fine before the war. Most of the damage was due to bombing. If you remember, targets included water-treatment plants (there was an article posted here a few months back that mentioned that).

Since I'm posting articles that potray the negative side-effects of occupation, why don't the pro-war people post news pieces that show the positive (if any) consequences.

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