Iraqis demonstrate Nietzschean view of Democracy

[S.R. Prozak]

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=396051

Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after

Arson, anarchy, fear, hatred, hysteria, looting, revenge, savagery,
suspicion and a suicide bombing

11 April 2003

It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled
the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag –
flung
into a puddle of water outside the visa section – as a mob of middle-aged
men,
women in chadors and screaming children rifled through the consul's office
and
hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The
Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later.

At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve
the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of
thieves
stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of each other
and
sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and
nutrition across the floors.

The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of
thousands of thieves – they came in families and cruised the city in
trucks
and cars searching for booty – seem to have a different idea of what
liberation means.

American control of the city is, at best, tenuous – a fact underlined
after
several marines were killed last night by a suicide bomber close to the
square
where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on Wednesday, in the most
staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.

Throughout the day, American forces had fought gun battles with Saddam
loyalists, said to be fighters from other Arab countries. And, for more
than
four hours, marines were in firefights at the Imam al-Adham mosque in the
Aadhamiya district of central Baghdad after rumours, later proved untrue,
that
Saddam Hussein and senior members of his regime had taken flight there.

As the occupying power, America is responsible for protecting embassies
and
UN offices in their area of control but, yesterday, its troops were
driving
past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the
front gate.

It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that
American troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, I
saw
US Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the
streets
for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters – two of them
driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators – blocked
the
highway beneath.

Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the
unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth
visiting
because "we've already taken everything". Understandably, the poor and the
oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam's regime
who
have impoverished and destroyed their lives, sometimes quite literally,
for
more than two decades.

I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim
al-
Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a
former
defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security
advisers,
of Ali Hussein Majid – "Chemical" Ali who gassed the Kurds and was killed
last
week in Basra – and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private secretary. They came
with
lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys to
make
off with the contents of these massive villas.

It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that
senior
Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly
embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets
so
heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the gutted
home of
one former minister of interior, a fat man was parading in a stolen top
hat, a
Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of
stolen goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete
reservation and still lay dead at the wheel.

But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his
hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw
no
arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy
worked
in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the
furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while
children
were used to unscrew door hinges and – in the UN offices – to remove light
fittings. One even stood on the ambassador's desk to take a light bulb
from
its socket in the ceiling.

On the other side of the Saddam bridge, an even more surreal sight could
be
observed. A truck loaded down with chairs also had the two white hunting
dogs
that belonged to Saddam's son Qusay tethered by two white ropes, galloping
along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I caught a glimpse of four of
Saddam's horses – including the white stallion he had used in some
presidential portraits – being loaded on to a trailer. Tariq Aziz's villa
was
also looted, right down to the books in his library.

Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files,
computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the
Americans
have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no
intention
of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One can hardly be
moralistic
about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of
America's
so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's property has
been so comprehensively looted? And what is one to make of the scene on
the
Hillah road yesterday where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory
ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal
his
lorries. This desperate and armed attempt to preserve the very basis of
Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by
eight
soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their
tanks –
doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown are 200 metres
from a
US Marine checkpoint.

And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army of
occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a
motorway
bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers to
raise
his shirt and lower his trousers – in front of other civilians, including
women – to prove they were not suicide bombers.

After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American
Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians,
including
a little girl, in a car that failed to halt – then shot and killed a man
who
had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within
minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of another car and wounded
two
more passengers in that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from
Channel
4 Television was present when the killings took place.

Meanwhile, in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians – many of
them
killed by US troops in battle earlier in the week – lay rotting in their
still-
smouldering cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the "liberation" of
Baghdad.
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