What the
cheering was all about
by Tom Roberts, editor of NCR
I cheered with everyone else when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled
in Firdos Square in central Baghdad. The square is next to the Palestine Hotel,
which is across the street from the Al Fanar Hotel, where I stayed during a trip
to Iraq four years ago this month.
Cheering the downfall of Saddam
Hussein by someone who has persistently editorialized against the war might seem
disingenuous or downright hypocritical. Perhaps there is some of that in my
reaction. But the question never was about whether Saddam should stay but rather
whether war was the best way to go about it.
I cheered the toppling of that
statue as symbol of the toppling of a tyrant because I cheer whenever oppressors
are overturned. Sadly, too many times I have witnessed the overthrow of
dictators who were propped up by U.S. money and politics and whose military
leaders were trained on U.S. bases.
I cheered, too, because I could
imagine what a relief it must be to literally destroy the suffocating
manifestations of tyranny. Four years ago, the drive through the desert from
Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad required a stop at the border, a lonely outpost where
we spent several hours in a large room dominated by a wall size portrait of
Saddam. “For the uninitiated,” I wrote at the time, “it is a foretaste of what
is to come: Saddam the ubiquitous … the iconography of a dictatorship in which
severe punishment — life imprisonment or death — is constitutionally provided
for criticizing or speaking ill of the president.”
I cheered, but I knew that the
constant camera shot on the statue, standing, roped, beflagged and finally
toppled, was the easy shot. It was war gone right.
But the longer the cameras
stayed on that scene of the small crowd in the square, the less we knew about
other matters such as the hospitals that the International Committee for the Red
Cross claim are overwhelmed with civilian casualties. We knew little about the
numbers of Iraqi dead, civilians and soldiers. When will we know?
I was intrigued that the
Pentagon estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqi fighters died in the early stages of the
battle for Baghdad. How many were killed in the desert, in all the battles that
went on in the little towns and the cities between Basra and Baghdad?
And I cheered while mulling the
words of Fr. Frank Winters in an interview with our Washington correspondent Joe
Feuerherd that will appear in our April 18 issue, “The whole thing is evil,
whether it produces good is completely irrelevant — there is no excuse for
invading a country that is not waging war with you.”
I know the camera was unable to
focus on the endless sea of youngsters who died in hospital wards in Iraq long
before this latest phase of the war started, victims of the U.S. inspired
sanctions. The United Nations, in a painfully deliberate and documented report,
estimated conservatively that as many as 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of
five had died as a direct result of the sanctions.
The cameras have yet to catch
up with the middle class professionals, the engineers, airline pilots, teachers,
doctors and lawyers who ended up driving cabs or acting as government minders
because of the effects of the sanctions. Some sold their personal belongings,
their libraries and heirlooms to stay fed and to educate their children.
Are they cheering? Do they
harbor a secret contempt born of circumstances for which their liberators were
responsible?
On TV Tuesday night, writer
David Halberstam said that by invading Iraq, the United States had punched into
a hornet’s nest. He was referring to the wider Middle East region and the
uncertainty of what will follow in the wake of the invasion.
The cameras finally had to cut
from the statue. It was down. People had danced on it. No one quite knew what
was next.
******
An aside. Firdos Square is
next to the Palestine Hotel, which has a top-floor bar (that four years ago was
well-stocked with 7-Up and orange soda but not many alcoholic beverages) wrapped
with walls of windows that gave a panoramic view of the city. When I was there,
one could not take photos of government buildings, and photos in general were
not allowed without a government minder present. However, one afternoon a waiter
in the bar opened a door on to a small side roof and allowed me to take shots of
the city. |
