Thursday, July 31, 2008

Occupation Iraq: Bush's Liberation

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The country has been destroyed. More than a hundred thousand people were killed, the infrastructure was obliterated and the country became an open battlefield for terrorists from everywhere to settle their scores with the Americans. We never heard of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia before, but now they are there. We never heard of car bombs or I.E.D.s, but they are still killing us every day. There is no horrible way of death that we haven’t seen since 2003, and for what?

After five years, Baghdad still has no reliable electricity, no clean water or any kind of services. Recently, sandstorms struck the city for five days and people had to lock themselves inside their houses, with the temperature at about 120 degrees F. and no electricity, not enough water and a big fuel crisis.

Who can live in such conditions? You need to buy fuel for your generator on the black market, but that costs $25 for 4 gallons that won’t last for one night, and you are jobless and have no money. Can anyone imagine that this is happening in an oil producing country? These are just a few examples of what is happening in Iraq, and how the Iraqis now live after they were overwhelmed with freedom and democracy.

So my question is, what should the Americans do before leaving?

If I put a bomb in someone’s house and destroy it, then I cannot just simply say “sorry” and leave. I have a responsibility to fix what I have broken, I have to rebuild the man’s house and bring it back at least to what it was.

The politicians have been talking about reconstructing Iraq for five years now, but I as an Iraqi, haven’t seen any. We used to hear about all the good things that we would get after “liberation” — factories, beautiful houses, fancy restaurants, movie theaters and playgrounds. “Baghdad will be more beautiful than Dubai,” a Western journalist said to me back in 2003, and the funny part is that the looting was still going on and half of Baghdad was on fire.

But what have we got? After five years of “liberation,” Iraqis still barely get electricity. People have started to make jokes about it, calling it “holy electricity” or “Ayatollah electricity,” because you have to pray to get it. One hour of electricity every day and sometime every three or four days … what a blessing!

And what about the hospitals, schools, factories, all the museums and libraries, the lives of the Iraqis who were killed since the invasion? I remember one of the Iraqi politicians who came back to Iraq in 2003 saying that “Iraq under Saddam was floating over a sea of mass graves.” But I never heard him say a word about the mass graves we have now....

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