IRAQ IS FAR WORSE THAN WE THINK
Two from Brit Reporter Robert Fisk

From ZNet, two essays by longtime British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk.

What Does Democracy Really Mean In The
Middle East? Whatever The West Decides

In the weird, space-ship isolation of Saddam’s old republican palace, the Kurds and the Shia have been tearing Iraq apart, refusing to sign up for a constitution lest it fail to give them the federations - and the oil wealth - they want. They miss their deadline - though I found no one in "real" Baghdad, no one outside the Green Zone bunker, who seemed to care.

And that evening, I turn on my television to hear President Bush praise the "courage" of the constitution negotiators whose deadline Bush himself had promised would be met.

Courage? So it’s courageous, is it, to sit in a time capsule, sealed off from your people by miles of concrete walls, and argue about the future of a nation which is in anarchy. Then Condoleezza Rice steps forward to tell us this is all part of the "road to democracy" in the Middle East.

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Theme Park Death

He grasped my arm and looked into my face. "Mr Robert," he said, "do you realise I was kidnapped?" Every day now, I come across Iraqi acquaintances - or friends who have cousins or fathers or sons - who have been kidnapped. Often they are released. Sometimes they are murdered and I go to their families to express those condolences which are especially painful for me - because I am a Westerner, arriving to say how sorry I am to relatives who blame the West for the anarchy that killed their loved ones. This time my friend survived, just.

Another good friend, a university professor, visits me for coffee the next day. The absence of identities in this report tells you all you need to know about the terror which embraces Baghdad. "I was invigilating the last exams of term in the linguistics department and I saw a mature student cheating. I walked up to him and said I believed he was cribbing. He said he wasn’t. I told him I would take his papers away and he leant towards me and made it clear I would be murdered if I prevented him completing his exams. I went to the head of department. I thought he would discipline this man and take away his papers. But he talked to him and then said that he could continue the exam. My own head of department failed me completely." My professor friend loves English literature, but he has new problems.

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We all know it's bad over there. What we don't know is that it's absolutely awful, far worse than Saddam Hussein's tyranny ever was. In addition to the insurgency, power and food disruptions, and straight-up abuse of civilians by US soldiers, plain old fashioned crime is completely out of control, and Iraqis live in a constant state of terror--there's absolutely nothing the United States can do to make life in Iraq any better, that is, when it's not intentionally making life worse. I've been hearing a lot lately about people wanting to hear Bush's plans for withdrawal. Here's mine: get out right now and beg the UN to take over. Offer them anything they want. Give them complete control. Pay for the whole thing. There's really no other choice. We can't do it by ourselves and we can't do it with help. If Iraq is ever to become a peaceful place in the future, the US simply will not be a part of it.

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