iraq ≠ freedom

About 200 people marched through Tikrit, chanting, "With our blood and souls we shall redeem you, O Saddam," a chant which was a fixture at state-sponsored events for years. Some carried pictures of him. "Down, down Bush!" they said in English.

American Humvees, escorted by two Bradley fighting vehicles, came to the area with mounted machine guns and boomed through loudspeakers in Arabic. "Return to your homes. What you are doing is forbidden," the messages said. "Otherwise we will use force."

"In Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, small groups of supporters, including some members of his al-Tikriti clan, staged demonstrations in favor of their overthrown patron and promised celebrations for years to come.

"Saddam Hussein is one of the great Arabic leaders. We did not import him. He was born in Iraq," said Abdullah Ialeh Hussein, who identified himself as Saddam's cousin. "The Americans have occupied us, but we will continue to support him."

Festivities ended when U.S. soldiers in Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees showed up, threatening to use force if supporters did not disperse."

And to be quite frank, a bunch of fat Ba'athists in Tikrit being asinine - I mean, these guys and free speech go hand in hand, right - Fuck 'em. I could care less.

Hstencil, shut up.

And to be quite frank, a bunch of fat Ba'athists in Tikrit being asinine - I mean, these guys and free speech go hand in hand, right - Fuck 'em. I could care less.

"Freedom is slavery."

oh the irony.

April 28, 2003
Hussein Birthplace Uneasy on the Eve of His Birthday
By DEXTER FILKINS

AWJA, Iraq, April 27 — On the eve of Saddam Hussein's birthday, members of his family are doing all they can to celebrate.

They are sprucing up the one-room mud hut where Mr. Hussein, the deposed president, was born. They are planning a protest march calling for his return. They are taking extra care to guard his mother's house from looters.

But by the forlorn looks on their faces, some of Mr. Hussein's closest relatives are having a hard time preparing for the day without him.

"I wish Saddam would come back," said Ahmed Watban, the president's nephew, standing outside Mr. Hussein's quarters here. "We would all be so much better off."

Mr. Hussein, run out of office by the American military earlier this month, turns 66 on Monday if, as most Iraqis believe, he is still alive. Across the country, Iraqis and Americans are anticipating the day with anxiety, with rumors rampant that he or his supporters are planning a big and possibly ugly surprise.

It is here, in the village where Mr. Hussein was born, that Iraqis will mark the day with the most fervor, and where they refuse to acknowledge the American victory. The Americans may have run Mr. Hussein out of his palaces, and they may have destroyed his army, but they have yet to conquer the people closest to him.

Only Saturday, hundreds of Iraqis, led by Mr. Watban, gathered in the center of Tikrit to blast their horns and call for the return of Mr. Hussein. In an altercation that is still unexplained, the Americans fired, the local residents said, wounding one Iraqi, and American tanks rolled over and crushed three cars. An American officer acknowledged there had been a confrontation with Iraqis but declined to provide details.

Today, American soldiers fanned out across the city, painting over dozens of placards and monuments bearing Mr. Hussein's face. Iraqis came out to jeer them as they did.

"By soul, by blood, I'll sacrifice all for Saddam Hussein!" a group of children chanted, their parents urging them on.

There is also a silent battle unfolding here, with the Iraqis painting slogans on walls and monuments celebrating Mr. Hussein and the Americans erasing them, only to find even more slogans later. Minutes after the Americans finished white-washing a poster of Mr. Hussein today, a young Iraqi ran to it and scrawled "Saddam Hussein lives" across its base.

The Americans appear to be preparing for violence. Today, the Americans got wind that Mr. Watban was planning to lead another march into the city. Soldiers began searching Awja's spacious homes for guns, and broadcast, from loudspeakers mounted atop their armored personnel carriers, a warning for all: stay indoors tonight or run the risk of being shot.

Mr. Watban, who called off the march, vowed to press ahead on the day marking Mr. Hussein's birth.

"Nothing will stop us tomorrow, I swear to you," Mr. Watban said.

Americans soldiers patrolling Awja and the nearby city of Tikrit acknowledged the popular opposition but insisted there were many pockets of support as well. Lt. Greg Hotaling, for instance, described how a maintenance man at Tikrit's public swimming pool offered the area up as a place for the lieutenant's platoon to live.

"It runs hot and cold," Lieutenant Hotaling said. "Some days they all come and out and wave, and other days no one does."

With all the American troops patrolling the streets of Tikrit, the spacious homes in Awja still occupied by Mr. Hussein's family members have gone mostly unnoticed.

In the 24 years of his reign, Mr. Hussein drew heavily from his family and tribe, al-Bu Nasir, for people to run the affairs of state. They were, he was often said to believe, the only people he could trust. In Awja, many of Mr. Hussein's relatives are still around, tending to the wreckage that was only weeks ago the spiritual capital of Mr. Hussein's regime.

One of Mr. Hussein's nephews, Khalid Abdullah Ammar, spends his days shuttling back and forth between the mud hut monument to Mr. Hussein's birth and the house of the president's mother. Approached by a pair of Western reporters, he was happy to offer a tour of each.

Mr. Hussein's birthplace stands as a kind of sentimental reminder of the man's humble origins. It is a simple thing, a single room with walls made of mud and hay, and a roof made of grass. Inside, the home is bare of furniture or fixtures; two rows of gas lanterns and a fireplace are its only adornments.

"It's a simple place, of course, but his father was a farmer," Mr. Ammar said.

For years, Mr. Hussein's tiny home was heard of and talked about but mostly unseen. The word among those who had seen it was that Mr. Hussein had insisted, in contrast to the spectacular mansions he built around it, that it be preserved in its original state. A rainstorm collapsed the roof a few years back, Mr. Ammar said, and the place was rebuilt with steel reinforcements and a new shower and bath in the rear.

The house bears little sign that it once housed a man of Mr. Hussein's ambitions. After his birth, Mr. Hussein was raised by his stepfather, Ibrahim Hasan . A gigantic bronze statue of the man who raised him stands a few hundred meters from the small house, at the entrance to a row of splendorous palaces.

Awja these days has an empty feel about it; many of those closest to Mr. Hussein have left, and many of the homes, now empty, have been looted. But a retinue of Mr. Hussein's family members stand guard around what remains, trying to the preserve a last scrap of dignity for their former leader.

At the home of Mr. Hussein's mother, Subha Tulfah al-Musallat, portraits and photographs of her son still hang on the walls intact in their gilded frames. By contrast, the portraits that once hung in the presidential palace blocks away have been smashed and defaced. In the living room, there is the portrait of Mr. Hussein opening his hands in supplication, a photograph of Mr. Hussein kissing a schoolgirl, a mirror emblazoned with Mr. Hussein's silhouette.

Mr. Watban looked depressed. His father, Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, a former senior government official, surrendered to the Americans nine days ago, and he has not heard from him since. He would like to believe that most of his neighbors in town want, like he does, for Mr. Hussein to return. As to Mr. Hussein's whereabouts, he "has gone to Baghdad," Mr. Watban said. But many of his own townspeople have deserted him, he said.

Standing in Mr. Hussein's mud hut, Mr. Watban allowed himself a moment of nostalgia. He recalled the many moments he had spent with his uncle, Mr. Hussein, and the nice plot of land the president had given him on his wedding day.

But there was one thing about their relationship that, even now, seemed to bother him.

"I never could call him "Uncle Saddam," Mr. Watban said. "Only sir."

(God I am a dumbass)

Not that I don't personally think S.H. is/was an asshole, but this "the Iraqis love their freedom! and those that don't want our kinda freedom, well, they'll learn to love it!" is nauseating, not cause for pride. Ned, you surprise me.

Our kind of freedom vs. Shiite fundamentalist Iran-backed freedom = Tikritis might actually live to die of natural causes. Amazing concept, really.

Why so? My annoyance here is more a generally unfocused one that takes a couple of precepts to heart:

1) The US government has, as with its dealings in general with any intervention of any sort over the past decades, a vested interest in making sure everything is Nice and Neat in their viewpoint as much as possible and will say as such to everyone else

2) Too many anti-war/intervention protesters seize on even the smallest bit of evidence to the contrary to create an impression that something Exactly Opposite From Nice and Neat is occurring, an exact mirror image that reflects dispositions and reading things a certain way as much as BushCo does.

3) The truth as faced by the people actually stuck there by BushCo being something else entirely is going to be subject to whatever amounts of potentially conflicting orders and principles, political decisions and god knows what else can be imagined pounding on their heads over time.

Again, I really don't see what's surprising about any of this.

I think that people are asking for Dubya to live up the rhetoric that he killed people behind. Either we killed a lot of innocent Iraqis to defend their right to political freedom - including the freedom to call for a asinine former-US ally to be put back in place - or we killed them because, uh, Saddam tried to have Daddy Bush wacked.

(This reminds me of the Bill Hicks piece where he talks about what he has in common with Saddam - both want to see George Bush's head rolling down the street.)

Millar...I don't know, what can a person say to you? Rah rah, the U.S. army, God Guns & Butter, what're those people thinkin' over there, etc

1. freedom to assemble doesn't hold a lot of water on a battlefield

2. an al-Tikriti at this point in history should be happy they are still alive at all. This is unprecedented.

But whoop whoop all I care about is my right as an american to shoot camel jockeys, right? God forbid anyone argue an opposing viewpoint on these threads, I must be a fascist.

"That's the way it goes" isn't a defense.

You're defending the American actions - why shouldn't these people be allowed to peacefully assemble? Is there any evidence that they had violent intentions?

Yes, even non-combatants. "Thank you for not killing me, Mr American soldier man! Your benevolence will be sung throughout the ages!"

My problem isn't with any of this, Stuart. It's because I know these guys, Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and the whole brain trust behind the invasion and the long-term geopolitical consequences of it. I've read their position papers, their strategy documents. I've seen how they handled the diplomacy leading to the invasion. I've seen the post-invasion state of things and Rumsfeld's lame-by-any-estimation justifications and jokiness about it. And it doesn't feel right. We're talking about the most volatile region in the world, with the most capital at stake, with institutions most foreign to our way of thinking. Let's pretend all they want is to remove a dictator and establish a democratic government in this snake-pit. The whole operation is an enormous roll of the dice for Bush. Everything has to go exactly right. Militarily, it did, relatively speaking. But from the evidence I wouldn't trust these guys to even pick me up at the airport.

Or, cross-post: what Tracer just said. This is not a simple job, and the people handling it are not people I trust to do it well!

What you completely fail to understand is that people's critical attention to this whole transitional process -- all of this watch-dogging for iffy abuses, unnecessary violence, and just general bad policy -- is a direct result of all of those long-term concerns: it's not some whiny effort to support anyone's anti-war stance, it's simply a way of paying attention to the fear people had from the beginning, which was that we were going to do a bad job of this. Of course these people are going to throw in a little "told you so," because they did: their point all along was that things aren't as simple as just invading and making everything magically okay -- their point was that it was going to be a giant task and that they had massive doubts about our ability to accomplish it effectively. You don't have to defend the coalition against those charges, and you don't have to defend the war itself: if anything, if you're as concerned as you pretend to be about the state of Iraq, you should pile on with us and push for the absolute best handling of this entire transition that's humanly possible.

Because in the long run, it's not going to be a matter of Iraqis saying "ahh, well, better than Saddam." Fine, you think it's worth it for everyone, but you're just some guy who knows fuck-all about Iraq beyond what he reads in Newsweek. A significant portion of Iraq's fate and Iraq's direction currently lie in the hands of the coalition and what we decide to do: that's fucking important, and if we don't do a good job with this, it stands to irreparably harm Iraq, irreparably harm opinions about the U.S., and come back to bite us on the ass, hard. What you need to do is stop making knee-jerk excuses, stop talking about "better than Saddam" and address the actual question, which is a simple one: are we doing a good job of this or not? And if someone can point to some element in which we're not doing a good job, don't run around trying to sweep it under the rug -- just admit that we should do better. Because we should.

I'm not really interested in defending US govt. policy at this point. It seems that Rummy and Dubya are quite satisfied with their poll ratings at this point and are more concerned with making sure future appointments and domestic legislation go their way than in ensuring that the Iraq expedition doesn't turn into a giant muddle. I have a lot of faith in Garner, but I worry about my colleagues on the ground in the 'secured' cities, especially in west and north Iraq. This situation is no more their idea or fault than it is yours or mine.

I don't understand where exactly I was supporting summary execution.

It's not generally a good idea to argue with someone based enitrely on assumptions you choose to make about their thinking. Just a pointer.

I was telling Hstencil to shut up based on the fact that at that time all he was doing was inserting random "amusing" one-liners and had nothing to say besides. I thought it was really irritating. If I told people to 'shut up' based on disagreeing with them then I'd have been doing that a bit more often, don't you think?

Since when does Stuart's reasoning have anything to do with this? You all decided that you didn't want to argue with him because his interpretation of the facts is different from yours, and instead of ignoring him at that point, you all just got pissy and told him to "eat a bag of dicks." Repeatedly. It's just a little juvenile, that's all I'm saying.

I think you're overly suspicious of our motives. Things are going wrong, okay? Can we all agree on that?

Now onto the stickier question -- what are we doing over there, anyway?

But anyway, big-picture: I don't understand what your conviction that we're doing a generally good job is based on -- it sounds like sheer optimism to me, or at best some sort of vague shruggy sense that things haven't gone worse. What I have seen is that we waited until a crisis developed to begin trying to maintain any sort of order, in the process allowing not only really damaging looting (coalition forces had even been warned of the dangers of letting the museums get ransacked) but also pointed looting to destroy incriminating government documents. I've seen that humanitarian aid workers have been continually frustrated in their attempts to provide supplies to the Iraqi people, and that the coalition's response to this has been weak at best. I've seen that Iraqis whose homes and families have been destroyed by bombing or shelling have turned to coalition troops for aid and have been turned away helpless. I've seen that our approach to subduing anti-American factions has been confused and violent, a fact that threatens to turn certain Iraqi cities into dangerous and antagonistic zones over a really long term. I've seen that we've had very little idea how to deal with the tensions that have arisen from Kurds reclaiming land Saddam forced them off of. Obviously things in a post-war leaderless nation aren't going to be fine and dandy, and it's not as if they were fine and dandy before, but none of those things give me much faith that we're up to the challenge of shepherding things along very efficiently. And it doesn't help anyone to throw our hands up and say it's a big and difficult task and we're trying our best, because we're the ones who made the decision to invade in the first place: deciding to overthrow the regime came with the responsibility for ensuring things improved afterward.

I don't think things look as positive as you think they do, Stuart. The real test, of course, will come as we attempt to set up a functioning transition government. But judging by the entire process so far, I'm very, very skeptical about how well that process will go.

Resistance is futile. You will assimilate.
Freedom is slavery.
It's the American way!

Tell that to Trent Lott,
after all, it's the only one we got!

Am I Momus?
PARTY! GIRLS GONE WILD! WOOH!
Insh'allah,
Eat a bag of dicks!

Sounds filling.

At this stage in the game its hardly even worth arguing with stuart. There seems to be nothing to back up his recycled demagoguery.

Now, hold on a second. Let's not drive Stuart away. He seems at least genuinely interested in this. Unlike, say, Gier.

All weapons bar the standard rifle should be put away now so there is no risk of machine guns being used on civilians, as at falluja. If soldiers get pinned down in difficult positions, they can call for back up.

This seems to be the only way to try and rebuild the damage that has been done recently. Its also been what British forces have been doing since day one in Basra, when the commander of the troops there basically told his soldiers, that they could do as they wished headgear wise, but he was going walkabout in his beret.

Now I accept that british forces are policing more anti-saddam areas, but this has not made them any more pro-coallition.

Restraint is what is required.

i actually think stuart could maybe a reasonably interesting guy, but that the problem is he is a reactionary in a possibly overly liberal environment, so doesnt reveal any of his own self as such but merely snipes, there is a lack of nuance/personality. but maybe that isnt because stuart lacks this, but that the envrionment here isnt conducive to him showing it? i think in possibly a more conservative environment, or at least one with more right wingers in it, that stuart might be a bit less blanket america eulogiser, and display more filled out and nuanced opinion, with differing viewpoints dependant on different situations/contexts. so, perhaps the "eat a dick" stuff isnt conducive to this?

I was twisting your argument somewhat. I read that US troops shot demonstrators who were celebrating Saddam's birthday, offering not entirely convinving arguments about acting in self-defence (having Northern Ireland on your doorstep makes you somewhat sceptical about armies who fire live rounds into demonstrators "in self defense"). You said that people who celebrate Saddam's birthday deserve everything they get.

it's like, lets face it – the u.s. ignored world wide opinion, went in anyways - so don't fuck up. i know that it is a crazy situation they're in and it's hard to do everything perfectly. but i have no sympathy for that.