At the end of the day

Before shock and awe bombing, and before sanctions and the Gulf war, there was a nation called Iraq. Saddam Hussein and his secular, socialist minded Baath Party shared Iraq’s oil wealth with his people more generously than, say, Saudi Arabia did with its people. He built roads and schools and brought in electricity. Iraq had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world. He spent generously to help agriculture and public health. He contained the clerical power, and he promoted literature and art. He also provided citizens with subsidized homes and cheap energy. Gasoline was plentiful and cheaper than water. Women participated in society almost on an equal level with men.

Since the Shiites form a large majority, it is their religious commitments that are now bound to dominate. For Shiites religion and politics seem to be inseparable. This is not good news for democracy to take root. It is not good news for women, and the chances are slim that Iraq will remain a secular society.

Baghdad was known for centuries as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Baghdad was the center of an ancient Muslim civilization, famous for its architecture, arts and culture. It was known as the “City of Peace,” a city of parks, gardens, mosques and marble palaces.

Baghdad has lived through years of bombing and sanctions. Today Baghdad is in decay and one of the most dangerous cities to live in. The city has been turned into a war zone, marked by burned-out buildings and barbed wire. Daily explosions can be heard while US tanks are roaming the streets.

Many smaller cities met the same fate and were left devastated. They smell of sewage and corpses. There is no water and no electricity. Mangled cars give testimony to what were once cities throbbing with life.

Today there is little electricity, water or gasoline. There are daily power failures and there are long lines waiting to fill up while the world’s richest oil fields are just down the street.

In 1991, during the years of UN-imposed sanctions, Hussein introduced free food rations that went to the rich and poor alike. There were monthly food rations of sugar, beans, rice, cooking oil, flour, powdered milk and tea. More than half of the Iraqis live below the poverty line and depended on these monthly food baskets for sheer survival. One of the many edicts Paul Bremer, US Envoy to Iraq, left behind was to stop these subsidized monthly food rations. Today hunger and the threat of starvation is part of their daily life.

To be an Iraqi policeman is the most dangerous job today, but with a 65 percent unemployment rate and large families to feed, they have no choice but to volunteer for the Iraqi police force, even if it may cost them their life. In spite of repeated attacks and carnage at recruitment centers, new volunteers continue to line up.

Although Hussein was responsible for his share of massacres, they were carried out against those who posed a danger to his power. He was predictable. Most average Iraqis who remained politically uninvolved lived a comparably decent life.

What makes today’s situation so nerve-racking is that insurgents can strike, maim and kill anytime and anywhere. Violence has become part of daily life. Nobody is safe, not even children crowding around soldiers who are handing out candy. The government can’t provide security, not even for themselves, as insurgents target and assassinate their members.

The devastating casualties of the Iraqi people (whom we are supposedly liberating) are not part of the news. Only an occasional poignant picture showing blood-drenched bandages hanging from mangled bodies and women and men crying out in grief at the loss of a family member bear testimony to their trauma.

These pictures make a mockery out of the claim that the Iraqi people are better off now that Hussein is gone. American troops are now faced with the unnerving truth that their very presence motivates the insurgents they seek to crush.

Yes, Iraq has a future, but the human cost of this war that the Iraqis did not ask for will be great. Life will go on, the suffering will go on, the dying will go on. But sometime in the future this nightmare will be increasingly more remote and eventually the Iraqi war will take its place in history books as one of humanity’s many tragedies.