Beyond Saddam

Saddam and his sons have been a useful tool for the US. Having them on the run has made then valuable tools to blame the failures of the occupation on. "Baathist" is a nice term which really doesn't mean much, like bandit or terrorist. Killing them is a nice one day story, but does not return power or security to Iraqi cities. Which, in both the short and the long term, will be the ultimate defnition of a successful rebuilding effort.

The reality is that the average Iraqi still lives in conditions worse than when the war started and political organization is limited to nonexistant. The Governing Council doesn't have real power and can't even decide on a leader. As the CSIS report goes into great detail on, the basic lack of services, combined with an ongoing hostility towards the West, which is endemic in trans-Arab culture, not just Iraqi, makes any Western led reconstruction effort fraught with difficulties. Without wider support, we cannot expect the open cooperation of the Iraqi people. Fear of Saddam is far less of a factor than we may have come to believe.

A few Iraqis took the news in their stride, still more anxious about the present chaos rather than the fate of men who were considered to have lost power for good.

"It doesn't make any difference to me," one said. "It isn't important whether they have been killed or not. The main thing is the lack of security and electricity, and all these problems with infrastructure."

Saddam is past history in Iraq. Whether he is killed or tried or fades away, most of the problems facing the CPA will not go away. Among them are the folowing:
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Below is thanks to Altercation.

Name: Rich Enough to Forget My Name
Hometown: Burlington, VT
Eric,
This weekend I finally had a chance to catch up with my cousin in-law who just got back from Iraq last week. Twenty years old he is now a different person than when he left and not in a good way. His pictures tell the story. The first few rolls are of him and his buddies clowning around and striking posses with their various weapons in Kuwait. It looks like a regular old NRA wet dream, young boys and guns. The sad thing about the pictures is how young they look. When you see the Marines on TV in full combat gear they look very menacing, but strip them down to t-shirts and baseball hats and you see what the kids that they really are. The pictures at first almost made it look like a good time. There was regular college hijinx going on. It was Frat Row Baghdad style. In the latter rolls the mood started to change. You never saw any of them without helmets or vests on. He told me the night they rode into Baghdad was the scariest night of his life. The vacation was over and the shooting began. An RPG scorched the hood of his Humvee. They felt the heat in the cab. He estimated that he was 1-2 feet away from being blown to pieces. Which is a lot better than one of his friends fared. Last he saw that guy all they could find was the body and a bunch of brains sprayed all over the inside of a truck, no face or head left. He also fared better than the family he watched get killed. His unit emptied their weapons into a home when they took fire. He watched as a four year old was, in his words, “vaporized.” After looking at about three rolls of film I asked him where the rest were. (He took 12 in all). He told me that he threw them away. Everything that happened after the first three rolls he wants to forget. He said he looked at them once and wanted to vomit. Do you really need the Kodak version of a scene that is already burned into your mind? The biggest tragedy of all is that his belief in America has been shattered. He went over there idealistic. He was protecting US and freeing the citizens of Iraq. Now he just feels used. “It was all a f**king waste,” he told me without emotion. And he is one of the lucky ones; he is home.