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Also in this section:
LIBERATION
- FREED IRAQIS DEBUNK PEACENIKS' POSTURING
By JONATHAN FOREMAN in Iraq
March 24, 2003
You may know the statistics: The sixth of the Iraqi population that lives in exile, the 100,000-plus disappeared persons of the Kurdish "anfal."
You may have read the books and articles describing the brutal oppression of Shiite, Kurdish, Turkmen and Marsh Arab minorities - who together make up a majority of the Iraqi population.
You may be familiar with the regime's cruel efficiency when it comes to rooting out and destroying all opposition.
But nothing
could bring home the rightness of this campaign in Iraq - and the deluded
wrongness of the peace movement - like the sight that greeted the 54th
Engineer Battalion (and this writer) yesterday morning in a string of
small towns on Route 8 near the city of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq.
In village after dusty village, the people - most presumably Shiites - rushed out to greet the troops. They lined the highway: portly older men, teenage boys, little girls in brightly colored pajamas, waving, giving the thumbs-up sign and smiling.
Bravo Company's Sgt. Roy Lee Brown III (32) of Hackensack, N.J., said, "This gives me a real good feeling. It's the first time I've ever been deployed that I've seen people so happy that we're here." (Bravo Company just returned from a tour of duty in Kosovo.)
Sitting next to him on the M113 APC, Lt. Kevin Hallstrom ,25, of Albuquerqe, N.M., observed: "They look so beat down, the people here." But they also looked elated. And I never felt more proud of being an American or of America's armed forces.
Yes, some of the kids wanted MREs, or cigarettes or pornography. The 54th was not the first unit to travel along this road (you can see that by the empty water bottles and empty MRE packets along the highway.) And it doesn't take long for Third World children to become corrupted by little gifts.
But it was clear from the way we were greeted - with cheers rather than stones - that these people saw the approaching army as a force of liberation, not oppression, pace all those who insist that the campaign is a great crime.
One man actually approached the APC and shouted, "Bush good, Saddam bad!" His enthusiasm wasn't that surprising, given that close to Route 8 are some of the famous marshes that the Saddam regime drained, impoverishing the inhabitants and destroying a way of life that goes back almost to the days of ancient Sumer. (Indeed, Ur of the Chaldees, birthplace of the prophet Abraham, is not far from here.)
The 54th
recently traveled through one of these former marshes, now a desolate
brown flatland, a dry crust covering damp earth.
During the run-up to the war, the peace movement never engaged with Iraqi exiles from here in the south or from Kurdistan in the north (where a fierce U.S.-backed uprising is again under way). Nor did it talk with any seriousness or conviction about political conditions in Saddam's Iraq, preferring instead to focus on the supposedly evil motivation of the Bush administration, the criminal "carpet bombing" that would accompany any invasion, or past mistakes in U.S. foreign policy.
The "war for oil" argument has been exploded ad nauseam, and the French and Germans have made it all too clear what a foreign policy based on cynical financial interest really looks like.
There has been no "carpet bombing," and isn't likely to be any. If anything, the U.S. Air Force will be even more discriminate in its choice of targets than it was in Desert Storm - arguably a campaign in which humanitarian considerations played a larger part than in any major war in all of human history. (As I write on the roof of my stopped APC, I can see an allied aircraft attacking targets in the town of Samaweh - and it certainly doesn't look anything like "carpet bombing.")
Yes, America has indeed made terrible mistakes in the past, including the support provided to vicious Latin American tyrannies like the Argentine junta (though its record of torture and murder is dwarfed by that of the Saddam regime). But the liberation of Iraq is a chance to make belated good on those mistakes and more.
And if the government had listened to the naysayers and not come here and liberated these people, that would have been a real crime.