Genghis (Bush) and his gang have recently told Iraqis to get with the program: form a government, or else. There is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis for not getting it together. As though Iraq ever had it together; Saddam’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people, which did not, I might add, ask to be invaded—and “improved.”

Under our ministrations, Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state. Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order or under a force made up of ideological terrorists and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

I know what my answer would be. But then I’ve actually had some experience—nothing compared to the experience of the Iraqis, but certainly something compared to the inexperience of the types (Hannity, O’Reilly et al.) who talk up this war.

I lived under a dictatorship in apartheid South-Africa. So did millions of Africans. Crime was never an issue then. Africans suffered indignities, but not much violence. Unless one made a point of clashing with the authorities, one’s life was secure. Now that “freedom” has come to South Africa, lawlessness is such that the “democratic” government has implemented “an official blackout” on national crime statistics. The place is one of the most violent spots on earth, after Iraq, Haiti, and some other African countries.

A few weeks back I got the news that my youngest brother and his family (wife and new baby) were attacked in their suburban fortress at 2:00am by a gang of Africans. The alarm was bypassed. Luckily they escaped with their lives.

In my father’s upmarket neighborhood, another dad was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. The loot? A cell phone and some cash. He begged the savages to take his car and all his possessions and spare his life. Two of my husband’s colleagues are dead; one shot in broad daylight as he left his girlfriend’s apartment.

South-Africa is heaven on earth compared to Iraq. So don’t speak to me about “liberation.” The removal of Saddam is not to be equated with liberty in Iraq; a Saddamless Iraq is not necessarily a free Iraq.

Let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention.

In addition to their society’s cultural limitations vis-a -vis the attainment of democracy, if Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented it is because they are busy… busy dying at rates much much higher than those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” according to a Lancet report. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

As I once wrote, people “whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.” And people who risk such a fate daily are not free in any meaningful way.