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Saddam Hussein is bad man. As a 22 year
old he worked with the CIA on a botched effort to assassinate
Iraqi President Abd al-Karim Qasim. The CIA and Egyptian intelligence
got him out of Iraq and to Lebanon, where the CIA paid for his
Beirut apartment, and then to Cairo. In 1963, under the new government
headed by President 'Abd as-Salam 'Arif, he was placed
in charge of the interrogation, torture and execution of communists
whose names the CIA happily provided the new regime. He rose
in the Baathist party ranks, and although jailed between 1964
and 1966, grabbed power in 1979. The Reagan administration cozied
up to him after he attacked Iran; Donald
Rumsfeld met with him twice and provided his regime with
invaluable intelligence abetting his aggressive war on Iran in
the '80s, which took a million lives. A bad man and bad regime.
The propaganda of the occupiers requires that we believe things
have improved since his fall. But the evidence suggests otherwise.
Women were better off under bad Saddam, one-time U.S.
ally.
According to Houzan Mahmoud from the Organization of Women's
Freedom in Iraq, "Under the previous dictator[ial] regime,
the basic rights for women were enshrined in the constitution.
Women could go out to work, university, and get married or divorced
in civil courts. But at the moment women have lost almost all
their rights and are being pushed back into the corner of their
house."
Islamists are imposing the
traditional Islamic dress code on women, and the general climate
of lawlessness causes many women to adopt it for self-protection.
"Dalal Jabbar, 19, a resident of Sadr City, a poor Shiite
Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad, said Iraqi women are more afraid
today than ever before. 'There is no law to rule the country,'
she said. 'I see the scarves as the best way to protect ourselves
in Iraq now. When I walk in the street, I know I'll have no trouble,
because men prefer to look at others without a scarf, more than
me.'"
Christians were better off under bad Saddam,
one-time U.S. ally. According to Simon Calwell of The Times,
"in the Shia-dominated south of the country[a]ll women,
including Christians---who under Saddam could wear the latest
fashions and make-up, and go to work---are under pressure to
wear the hijab." Churches have been bombed by Islamists,
priests have been abducted for ransom, liquor shops owned by
Christians have been targeted.
Baathist Iraq was a basically
secular state. The current Iraqi constitution composed under
occupation declares, "Islam is the official religion of
the state," "a source of legislation," and "No
law that contradicts the universally agreed tenets of Islam"
may be enacted. Thousands of families have fled across the border
to secular, Baathist Syria---another country targeted by the
U.S. for regime change.
Gays were better off under bad Saddam, one-time U.S.
ally. According to Ali Hili, a gay Iraqi man recently interviewed
by Amy Goodman on MPR's Democracy
Now!Program, "Iraq, at the time of Saddam, was---I
mean, I'm talking about as a gay Iraqi---it was not as bad as
we can see now... There [were] no homophobic attitudes toward
gay and lesbians. Most of them[were] welcomed in the community
and the society It's a very dark age for gays and lesbians and
transsexuals and bisexuals in Iraq right now. And the fact that
Iraq has been shifted from a secular state into a religious state
was completely, completely horrific. We were very modern. We
were very, very Western culturalized -- Iraq -- comparing to
the rest of the Middle East. Why it's been shifted to this Islamic
dark ages country? [Saddam was] the worst thing that ever happened
to Iraq, maybe, until we saw these religious mullahs who were
brought to the government to lead this country. We were much
better off in the Saddam time, although he [was] a tyrant."
Intellectuals were better off under bad Saddam, one-time
U.S. ally. The Times Higher Education Supplement noted
in September 2004 "a widespread feeling among the Iraqi
academics that they are witnessing a deliberate attempt to destroy
intellectual life in Iraq." According to the Monitoring
Net for Human Rights in Iraq, over 1,000 Iraqi academics and
scientists had been shot to death between the beginning of the
U.S.-led invasion and late 2005.
According to Dr.
Saad Jawad, a prominent political scientist at Baghdad University,
" because of the chaos, the systematized assassinations
of Iraqi intellectuals have gone largely unnoticed in the outside
world. Iraq is being drained of its most able thinkers, thus
an important component to any true Iraqi independence is being
eliminated."
People in general were better off under bad Saddam,
one-time U.S. ally.
According to John Pace, former director of the human rights office
of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, "Under Saddam, if
you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression
and thought, you were physically more or less OK. But now, no.
Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can
do anything they want to anyone." Under Saddam the scale
of abuse was "daunting," but now, "It extends
over a much wider section of the population than it did under
Saddam."
I doubt it was the intention
of the Bush administration, once it decided to conquer Iraq and
humiliate its former ally, to empower the religious fundamentalists
who've launched their reign of terror on all these communities.
But the administration does include some extreme Islamophobes
who may delight in the general chaos they've inflicted on a mostly
Muslim society, and who may see in the worsening situation a
launch pad for more chaos in Iran. All this Islamic badness in
Iraq, they'll say, is encouraged by next door Iran. Things will
only improve, "democracy" will only prevail, when Iran
too enjoys a violent encounter with American goodness. As the
bloody "creative chaos" they've unleashed in Iraq and
Afghanistan spreads, they'll depict it as the necessary cure
for religious fanaticism---the very fundamentalist fanaticism
which secular Baathism was designed from its inception to prevent,
but which in its fundamentalist Christian variety (as manipulated
by secularist neocons) helps drive Bush's apocalyptic provocation
of the Islamic world.
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