printIbn Saud, Sultan of Najd (1876-1953), said this about the Iraqis:
It may be accepted as an incontrovertible fact that it will be impossible to manage the people of Iraq except by strong means and military force.
Like Saddam Hussein did?
No one is praising Saddam, yada, yada, yada. And perhaps I don’t have the stomach for Bush-style freedom, but then my stomach isn’t directly at stake, is it? I know that if I were made to walk in the shoes of these poor Iraqis, pooling their meager means to stockpile for civil war—or is “sectarian strife” more palatable?—I’d be wishing for the return of the Saddam era.
The San Francisco Chronicle employs journalists who actually go out into the field, rather than scoop stories fresh off… the AP wire:
Om Hussein, wrapped in her black abaya, lists the contents of the family’s walk-in storage closet: three 175-pound cases of rice, two 33-pound cases of cooking fat, six cases of canned tomatoes, three crates of assorted legumes, a one-month supply of drinking water, frozen chicken livers in the freezer. And in the garage, jerry cans filled with fuel are piled floor to ceiling.
Om Hussein, who was reluctant to give her full name, and her Shiite family are preparing for war. They’ve stocked up on food. They bought a Kalashnikov rifle and a second car — so that there is space for all 13 members of their extended family should they need to flee in a hurry.
“We are afraid of what will happen in the coming days,” she says. “Maybe there will be a month-long curfew, or maybe fighting in the streets will force my family to stay in the house for days at a time.”
So far, “hundreds of ordinary Iraqis [are] dead and dozens of mosques [have been] ransacked. Daily execution-style killings and car bombings continue. On Sunday, multiple car bombs killed scores. The bodies of scores more, many bound and garroted, have been discovered around Baghdad since Monday. The capital’s hospitals overflow with the wounded.”
Children, who once played safely in the street, can’t leave home, although Ali-Baba opportunists regularly invite themselves into homes and kidnap family members for ransom. “Shiites and Sunnis have become refugees in their own country, as they flee neighborhoods and outlying villages where they have found themselves members of a suddenly unwelcome minority.”
Imagine having to leave your abode and camp out like a nomad for fear of sectarian reprisals and still not be safe.
Let’s get straight the order of events: first came the invasion and its concomitant wanton devastation of life and property—Iraqi and American. With its preemptive, aggressive, and unwarranted strike, the U.S. conceived (unintentionally—I know, I know) the chaos and anarchy that have created a comparative advantage for Iraqi gangsters.
To say, as Christopher Hitchens has, that this is better than Saddam’s law-and-order dictatorship is preposterous. The only way ex-Trotskyites like Hitchens—for whom permanent revolution is evidently still an article of faith—can backup this apparently sincere conviction, is by taking up residence in what has become the most dangerous zone in the world: Iraq.