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Posted on 04/11/2003 5:03:55 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
KANAN MAKIYA'S WAR DIARY
April 10
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 04.10.03
Baathism died in Iraq yesterday. The sight of the oversized bronze head of Saddam rolling in the dust and being beaten with shoes by exuberant Iraqis is perhaps the most important image of Iraqi politics of the last 50 years. It was the end of the republic of fear. Two Iraqis with whom I was camping out in Washington, D.C., woke me up at 5 a.m. yesterday so we could watch the images of a free Iraq. Tears rolled down our cheeks uncontrollably.
The greeting we had thought the coalition troops would receive in Basra took place two weeks later than we thought, in Baghdad. Perhaps because Baghdad did not rise up against the dictator in 1991, its spirit had not been broken by unfulfilled American promises the way the spirit of Basra was. How they must have hurt. At least 10,000 people must have died in Basra city alone when the dictator crushed the people's uprising. Many more tens of thousands disappeared into his prisons. No wonder they were cautious, suspicious even, of coalition intentions in 2003.
Freedom is a heady thing. To an Iraqi, it is like being awakened from a 30-year nightmare by a blinding blaze of bright white light. When a young man steals a television set from the Ministry of Education, he thinks he is striking a blow against the Baath Party. He has not yet become aware that he is in fact stealing it from a building that now belongs to him and is about to start serving his needs, and not those of his tormentors. In between the one state of mind and the other lies the beginning of a responsible and responsive government--law and order as a friend, not a tormentor.
To that end, the Free Iraqi Forces being assembled by the Iraqi National Congress in southern Iraq are the nucleus of a new Iraqi police force. It is a force that needs to grow, quickly, from its current strength of 700 or so men, with the help of the coalition forces. I shudder at the thought of Americans and Britons policing Iraqi cities. That task must be taken up by Iraqis. Let us make the mistakes that will inevitably occur. We need U.S. and British troops to remain draped in the mantle of liberation that they wore so successfully the day the statues of Saddam Hussein came crashing down all over Iraq.
Yesterday was also a special day for the people of the United States. Their army triumphed. It fought a just war more or less alone and in spite of opposition from countries that put commercial and other interests before the destruction of tyranny. We will remember those who stood by our side. The road ahead is, no doubt, very difficult. And now the burden shifts onto our shoulders, the shoulders of Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq. We thank you people of the great United States for the gift that you have bestowed on us. I cannot promise that we will succeed in making good of it. But I do promise that we will try very hard.
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