If you get the opportunity to do so, please read this post by Tish Durkin in the Huffington Post.

Apparently, Ms. Durkin spent a lot of time in Iraq at the beginning of the war.

There are so many interesting quotes that I am going to just post them randomly with a separater between them:

Don’t get me wrong. If I felt that this post were going to be read by a bunch of war apologists, I would take them angrily to task for the manifest, manifold failures in Iraq, and the criminally self-indulgent fictions on which those failures were based. But since this post is presumably being read mostly by war critics, I will devote it to challenging anti-war activists on their apparent belief that everything they say about Iraq is, always has been, and ever shall be true.

It is not, for instance, true that it was the American-led invasion that opened season on the slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Whatever else the Bush administration made up about Iraq, the rank murderousness of Saddam Hussein was not one of them. Amid the gunfire and giddiness of Baghdad right after its fall in April 2003, it was common to find people converging onto bits of infrastructure, manically fueled by the rumor mill: someone had said that there was a torture chamber underneath this stretch of highway; a secret prison built into this wall. People had no time to be interviewed; if they talked at all, they’d keep going as they panted: “My husband/brother/son disappeared twenty odd years ago; he could still be alive; I have to get him out.” I remember going to a mass grave; a “minor” one, not far from Hilla. People were digging there, too: for bones, which were piled everywhere, a sickening canine bonanza. Close by there still lived a man who had seen what had happened there in the days after the war with Kuwait, but kept his mouth shut for years: busloads of innocent Shi’ites, screaming ‘God is Great’ at the top of their lungs, had been unloaded, rung around pre-dug graves, and shot.

It is not true that the Americans invaded Iraq against the will of the Iraqi people. They did so against the will of Saddam, against the will of those who flourished under Saddam, and against the will of numerous Sunn’is and Christians, most of them utterly blameless for the crimes of the regime, who feared what would happen to them after the Shi’ites got out from under Saddam. This last is not an inconsiderable group - except as compared to the Shi’ites and the Kurds, who overwhelmingly wanted the invasion and welcomed it.

I know that these anecdotes will sound as if Karen Hughes or somebody paid me to cook them up, but they all really happened: The day I met Riyadh, he told me what he had been doing before the war. He and his family would sit around and listen to underground BBC radio. And if the French or somebody else in the U.N. seemed to come up with something that would offer the world a glimmer of hope that war could be avoided, their reaction was not, “thank God.” It was: “Oh shit.”

I remember that in May - after about thirty days without a shower - I went to a beauty salon that had just re-opened. This was in Aadamiyah, which is quite a Sunn’i district. Out of gratitude for the invasion, the owner would not let me pay.

In the late spring of 2003, like hundreds of reporters, I joined the multitudes flocking to Karbala for ashura, the Shi’ite pilgrimage which had been forbidden under Saddam. Concerns about violence were high, but unfounded: As it turned out, in every possible sense, it was the brightest possible day. Flags were flying. Great ropey lines of men were stepping rhythmically and ritually beating their bare backs. Granted, the whole scene could have been a coming attraction for theocracy, but for the moment, it looked and felt like an entire country’s drawing of a deep breath after years of suffocation. Like every woman there, I was swathed in black from head to toe. Throughout the day, I could feel myself being sized up by people, and this, I’ll admit, made me a little nervous. No need: when they were sure of the foreignness of my face, people did not insult or attack me. They smiled and said: “Thank you Bush, thank you Blair.”

None of this was really surprising. In the months prior to the war, I had spent almost all my time in neighboring, not-so-democratic countries. Among average people, the biggest sentiment expressed about the ever-more-likely prospect of American action in Iraq wasn’t “how dare you come to our region and topple a sovereign government!” It was, “jeez - why don’t you come here too?”

For several weeks, before the first anniversary of the invasion, I made it a habit to end any interview with any Iraqi — whether the topic was -de-Ba’athification or arranged marriage or the (extreme) availability of all kinds of weaponry on the black market - whether, knowing every negative thing - of which there were many — that they knew now about the Americans, they would turn back the clock, have the coalition stay home, and put Saddam back in the palace. But I should mention that during this time I was not in Fallujah or Ramadi or any of the so-called Sunn’i triangle, where my “poll” would have had very different results. Still, I was and am amazed that not a single person hesitated to say ‘no way.’

Now, I am sure that if I went back today and asked the same people the same question, many would answer differently. But now as then, I’d bet anything that many would also answer confusingly.

Asked, many times over many days, what, if anything, could be done to salvage the deteriorating situation, they’d insist: things would never improve unless the Americans supplied jobs, fought crime, restored the schools, guarded the banks, built homes and sewage systems, even mediated family quarrels….and also left Iraq immediately.

My point is not that Iraqis are somehow hopelessly loopy or illogical. It’s that, having careened from one kind of national trauma to another kind of national trauma, they have some strongly felt but deeply conflicting feelings about things.

It’s easy to rewrite a very complex story as a dark fairy tale that begins and ends with the evil of Bush and Cheney. This, presumably, is why so many people are doing it. But it’s still wrong.

Finally, what depresses me, and makes me despise so much war criticism even when I agree with it, is that so many of those positing it seem so happy about what’s gone wrong. They seem to relish the probability that Iraq will get worse and worse so that they can be righter and righter.

This isn’t new.

I remember an anti-war activist who was staying in our hotel in Baghdad, who had not come to Karbala for that first ashura. A good person trying to do good things, she had stayed behind to prepare a media alert on the horrors of the occupation — which, especially at a time when the coverage out of Iraq was largely very upbeat, was a very worthy thing to be doing. Still, one thing really bothered me about her. When, upon everyone’s return from Karbala, the activist heard that the day had actually been free of violence, and full of jubilation, she looked as if she had tasted a bad olive, and spit out her response: “Oh, [censored---J].”

How she must be gloating now. Reality has made sages of the most dire prophets. It’s perfect: Iraq really has gone to hell, and the demon neocons are the ones that sent it.

After you read the post check out the comments and you will see some who agree with her and some who do not, but the ones I read were fascinating.

Here is one of the comments, but from reading the first page of the comments this seemed to me to be the one to jump out:

I had always wanted America to be the world’s policeman; sending in troops to depose dictators of all stripes, then a diplomatic corps to re-build government and infrastructure. To allow the people of sudanburmarhodesia wherever, a chance to determine their own fates.
Naive, yes. But it wasn’t until Bush tried what I dreamed of that I realized it. The truth is, I did not want Bush to get the credit if it worked. As it turned out, that was the least of my worries. The list of mistakes is longer than I care to write, and we all know them anyhow.
In retrospect, If the aftermath of the war had been successful, I would have given Bush only grudging praise. Of course, Bush doesn’t really understand democracy any better than he understands anything else. Now it looks like the democrats will get their chance to make things right, only now the task is harder than ever. My apologies to the Iraqi people, and all freedom-loving people of the middle east for letting them down so badly.
By: melfamy on April 06, 2007 at 02:24pm

Come back and let’s discuss since you don’t have to register and wait a long time as I have heard to be approved over at HuffPo.

All opinions will be respected and we will engage in friendly debate as always.

Written by ~J~

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