On the ninth of April 2003, I was standing on the roof of my building in Baghdad, looking at the clear sky. The city was quiet; The Americans stopped bombing early that morning. In the distance, I saw a helicopter flying low over the houses. Unlike the stocky Russian helicopters we were used to, which flew left and right like huge flying rams, this one was nimble, like an angry wasp.
Thirty-five years of Saddam Hussein's reign dissipated overnight, collapsed without a trace. Baghdad, the city of fear and repression, was free for an hour between the departure of the dictator and the arrival of the occupiers.
In the years leading up to the war, I lived in one small room, barely big enough to accommodate a bed, a desk and a suitcase. The old air conditioner was broken and I didn't have the money to fix it. In the summer of 2002, the room was so hot that it felt like the walls were pressing on me. I haven't paid my rent in six months. As an architect in private practice, I received $50 every couple of months. During the sanctions years, I did menial work for ugly people who had the money to afford ugly houses. I wanted to leave the country, to travel and walk the streets of other cities, but I was a military deserter and without documents I could not get a passport.
I was not tortured by muhbarat, the regime's intelligence service, nor did anyone from my family disappear in a mass grave, but like the rest of the country, I was trapped without hope and a future.
What would happen, we asked ourselves, if the Leader one day became terminally ill? How would our lives change after his death? Would we be ruled by one of his sons? Would it be better than this? Up? In the years leading up to the invasion, I felt my life slowly slipping away from me in the hot and stuffy place I called home.
Then, at the age of 28, a different life seemed possible.
I went to my room to listen to the news when my neighbor knocked on my door.
"The Americans are here," he said excitedly.
"Yes, I heard on the radio that they reached Hilla," I said, referring to the town 60 miles south of Baghdad. "Hile?", he said. "They're here, down the street."
I got off and saw several armored vehicles that looked like boats at the intersection near my apartment. It looked like the Normandy coast was right behind the buildings. From one of the "ships" came American soldiers, like the ones we saw on television, and now here in my street, in my city.
The soldiers lined up along the street, got down on one knee and pointed their weapons at us, the handful of people who stood watching them. Behind the soldiers came men in blue vests carrying large cameras. On their helmets was written "TV".
I sat on the curb and watched as the soldiers aimed their guns at the buildings around them. One of the men in blue, tall and bald with two high-zoom cameras, moved cautiously towards us, like a wildlife photographer approaching a herd not wanting to scare them, yet unsure if they might attack him.
He came not far from me and pointed the camera at me; fuck it, i chased him away. I didn't want to become news, another face of a defeated country. The soldiers got back into their vehicles and drove down the street. A small group of people and children followed them.
You cannot bomb a country, humiliate it and hold it under sanctions, then bomb it again, and then tell it to immediately become a democracy. There are no such plans that can turn illegal occupation into liberation
The armored vehicles and the mass that followed them moved slowly, passing the Vatican embassy, where a papal diplomat, dressed in black with a purple ribbon around his belt, stood watching the invading army. He shook his head in disbelief and told anyone who would listen that this was bad, that this was an illegal occupation. Across the street, a stocky middle-aged Iraqi man stood at the entrance to his shop, hurling insults, but most of those following the Americans were excited.
American flag over the Leader's face
The old and dilapidated regime has fallen. The armored column stopped in front of the "Meridian" and "Sheraton" hotels, where most of the international media made a base. In front of the hotel was a large statue of Saddam, with an oddly raised hand, drawing disdainful looks from the crowd like someone who had come uninvited and stayed long after the party was over.
I stood there watching, along with a few other Iraqis and a large number of foreign journalists, as a handful of excited men began pounding the base of the statue with hammers and metal clubs, succeeding only in creating cracks in the marble slab. It was going on for a long time, and the journalists were already getting bored. Then an armored vehicle with a large crane started to return from the middle of the square.
A Marine climbed to the top and threw a thick rope around the neck, then pulled out an American flag. No, no, you can't do that, I sighed, let the semblance of liberation last at least one day.
But no, with the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, he covered the defeated dictator's face with the flag of his victorious country.
On the other hand, why not display the American flag? Perhaps of all the announcements and justifications of war by leaders and commanders who spoke of liberation and democracy, the act of that marine was the most sincere; he saw the war as a conflict between the US and Iraq - a conflict in which he and his countrymen won. He had every right to fly that flag.
The armored vehicle dragged, the statue resisted a little, then gave way and fell into the square with a dull thud. Like his country, the Leader's statue was just an empty shell with a single metal pillar supporting it inside. About a dozen people jumped on the statue, hitting it with chains and shoes. That scene was broadcast over and over again in every report on Iraq, as if these men represented an entire nation, their celebration an excuse, if only briefly, for the madness that would follow. The head of the statue was dragged through the streets, and men spat and cursed at it.
I met a friend, who was also standing in the square. We walked around the block imagining what would happen next: hopes, future, fears. The Unicef building, which was located less than 50 meters from where the Americans had set up their base, was looted.
A tattered carpet as compensation for tyranny
We met an old woman pulling a carpet from the Directorate for Dams and Irrigation. "This is my money, Saddam stole it from me," she said. The carpet was old and tattered and worth nothing, but perhaps she felt that it was part of the regime, part of Saddam's tyranny and rule, and that by taking it she would somehow magically erase the suffering of the last few decades.
The next morning, I saw that the garage of my building was full of garbage: an overturned bench, an old air conditioner, computer consoles and several monitors thrown on top of each other, all stolen from the premises of the daily Baat. The neighbor and his two sons cheerfully inspected the loot.
I decided to walk to the presidential palace. I wanted to see where the Leader lived. I thought that the walls of the rooms and corridors through which he walked, where he confided in his closest associates and ordered the destruction of tens of thousands of people, would bring me closer to him, help me understand what he was and why he shaped our lives and history the way he did . Or perhaps it was my act of demeaning the shrine of power, an act of insolence like those who plundered.
The presidential palace loomed in the distance. Giant bronze busts of the Leader adorned its four corners. His bearded head looked down with silent and solemn majesty, heedless of the insolent soldiers who occupied his palace, continuing to gaze at the distant horizon.
Inside, a young American officer showed me a large dining room, with a beautiful cascading wooden ceiling, which had been converted into a large dormitory with dozens of metal beds stacked side by side. I wanted to go on to the headquarters of the intelligence service, another symbol of the regime, but the American told me that the fighting was still going on, so I went back to the gate, and hitchhiked with James Mack, a British journalist who worked for the "Guardian". He hired me as his translator.
In 2003, chaos reigned in Baghdad. Everything was allowed and everything was possible. Beer and whiskey were sold on the sidewalks or from the trunks of parked cars. The mobs demolished government buildings and ministries, except for the Oil Ministry, which was guarded by American tanks. They looted factories, broke down doors and pulled electrical wires from the walls, and then sold the looted goods. Weapons and ammunition from looted military bases were sold on the market. In the months and years that followed, that arsenal fueled wars in Iraq and Syria, and some was smuggled into Yemen and Somalia. Soviet jets, hidden in the deserts outside military bases where they were supposed to be protected from American attack, lay half-buried in the sand like the skeletons of beached whales. Weapons and metal plates were also stolen from them. But probably nothing was more painful and caused more damage than the looting of the Iraqi museum. Almost 15 items were stolen and most of them disappeared forever.
Armed mobs roamed the city looking for loot. What they couldn't take, they burned, like the national library and television and radio archives that burned for days. In downtown Baghdad, I saw smoke billowing through the windows of the nationality directorate: archives and registers were burning. Yes, destroy everything, I naively thought. Why do we even need a Nationality Directorate? Didn't Saddam manipulate everything for his own interests?
Didn't he deport tens of thousands and deprive millions of the will to live? Wasn't our whole country a construct of his will? Then why not destroy everything, and a new country will emerge from the carnage, without fear of repression, where everyone will be equal and prosperous?.
When his statue was overthrown and the people wanted revenge for the years of repression, they not only destroyed the symbols of his power, his palaces, his statues and murals, they turned their anger towards everything that symbolizes the state, because the state was Saddam and Saddam was the state
The Great Leader dominated our lives for decades and shaped the entire country in his image.
Therefore, when his statue was overthrown and the people wanted revenge for years of repression, they not only destroyed the symbols of his power, his palaces, his statues and murals, they turned their anger towards everything that symbolizes the state, because the state was Saddam and Saddam is was a state, as he himself said. Even words like citizenship, solidarity, patriotism were defiled because they were associated with his rule. In such a destructive atmosphere, many, foreigners and Iraqis, were ready to completely destroy the very concept of the Iraqi state.
The poor moved out of their squalid, overcrowded settlements and started building on military camps and government land. These new slums of one-story concrete shacks with streams of green sewage and piles of garbage were called Hawasim, after the Leader's last battles - and the same name was given to those who subsequently acquired colossal wealth.
Unearthing horrors
It was a time of dark revelations, unearthing the horrors committed by the regime and its people. Mass graves have been discovered near prisons, or in remote locations, where thousands of people were buried after the failed 1991 uprising.
Some could identify the missing based on a picture in their pocket, or an identity card; others buried bones, any bones, so that they would finally have a grave in which to mourn their lost children. In homes, families hung pictures of relatives who had been executed or disappeared; now they could show that they are proud of the people they were forced to give up until a few weeks ago. In other houses, bright squares remained on the walls in the places where the picture of the Leader used to hang.
The history that the Leader was writing was exposed, and people demanded that the lies be corrected. They wanted reparations and apologies for the repression and inaction they had endured for decades.
As the mass graves were exhumed, local conflicts, resentments and conflicts were bubbling to the surface after decades of being buried under the regime's monolithic power.
And just as the mass graves were being exhumed, local conflicts, resentments and struggles were bubbling to the surface after decades of being buried under the regime's monolithic power.
In May 2003, I met an old man in a poor and overcrowded suburb in eastern Baghdad. He was sitting on the empty box, a big smile on his face. He said that the Americans who brought all those tanks and planes would take care of everything in a few weeks.
It will bring electricity and turn his ruined neighborhood into a paradise. He spoke as if he could see how his street had changed, as if the sewage flowing by his feet was already disappearing, as if there was no poverty, as if the houses had been cleaned and repainted. However, weeks and months passed, and the situation only worsened. The Iraqis' collective intoxication at the end of the regime quickly wore off, and the residents of Baghdad quickly turned from euphoria to frustration and then anger.
When they wanted to go to the hospital, they saw that it had been robbed. Schools were either burned down or people lived in them. No one was in control, and public services collapsed. Kilometers of queues were in front of gas stations as oil fields and refineries were damaged in the looting. There was no electricity because there was no fuel for the power plants and because the transmission lines were stolen. Without electricity, the water pumps did not work, and the sewage flowed into the rivers. Doctors and nurses carried weapons and guarded the few hospitals and clinics that were not looted.
American soldiers, exhausted by the Baghdad heat, stood clueless in the middle of the chaos, and Iraqis, accustomed to decades of efficient centralized bureaucracy, were baffled by the hasty and arbitrary way in which the Americans were running the country. Everything was discussed quickly.
The myth of prosperity and the reality of occupation
Sometimes the soldiers would try to prevent the looting, but mostly they just stood and watched. Iraqis could not believe that their colonial masters had not prepared at all for what would happen after the invasion. Or that the whole adventure was based only on their power and the messianic half-beliefs of Bush and company. When the myth of American prosperity collided with the realities of occupation, chaos and destruction ensued. All the suppressed anger of the previous decades exploded.
Much later, we were told that the whole adventure of the Iraq war was based on the short-sighted vision of a group of American neoconservatives, who, in their desire to project American power in a unipolar world, claimed that regime change would bring democracy not only to Iraqis but to the entire Middle East, bring him to the United States. Iraq's oil wealth, they thought, would pay for reconstruction. Some use the same argument to advocate war with Iran.
In May 2003, the UN Security Council gave posthumous legitimacy to the illegal war by giving the Americans "occupying power status" with all the happy connotations that the word "occupation" has in the Middle East.
After several wasted weeks, a new US administration was installed, headed by Paul Bremer, a close ally of the neoconservatives in Washington.
He became the viceroy and ruler of the country, and was given extensive legislative and executive powers reminiscent of that of the British proconsul of the Indian Raj.
The new occupation government - called the Coalition Provisional Authority, CPA - was teeming with young, naïve, jaded people who had unquestioned authority to shape Iraq the way their masters wanted it.
They represented the worst combination of colonial hubris, racist arrogance and criminal incompetence. Many of them will later write books about their heroic struggle in Arab countries.
Some of these CPA officials were appointed to head ministries, collapsing existing administrative systems. Others ruled entire cities or provinces.
In Baghdad, the presidential palace, former government buildings and neighboring streets have become a green zone, the center of a deceptive administration. The approach to Americans in those chaotic days when piles of dollars were given out without supervision established the model of corruption on which the new state would be based. Contracts were inflated for projects that were never built, and in some cases there was corruption within the CPA itself. Riches have been acquired, corruption institutionalized. Long lines were formed in front of the gates of the green zone, in which there were those sincere who wanted American help to form NGOs, renegade tribal sheiks who wanted recognition and financial grants, and opportunists who were looking for anything they could use.
In the years that followed, many Western writers and journalists argued that Bremer's two fatal decisions, the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the entire security apparatus and the banning of Baath Party members from public service, which left hundreds of thousands without pensions and wages, helped in fomenting a rebellion that will engulf the country. Those Western pontificators lament the stupidity of Bush and the neocons. If only, they claim, they had done their homework and made plans for Iraq after the invasion, everything would have been different. However, the truth is that the occupation was doomed, because you cannot bomb a country, humiliate it and hold it under sanctions, then bomb it again, and then tell it to immediately become a democracy. There are no such plans that can turn illegal occupation into liberation.
A war based on lies not only destroyed Iraq and launched a sectarian war that would engulf the region, but also permanently thwarted democracy in the Middle East. So, democracy is another victim of a criminally incompetent administration. "You want democracy? Have you not seen what democracy has done to Iraq? - became the refrain of dictators and strongmen throughout the region.
The text is taken from "The Guardian"
Prepared by: N. Bogetić
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