News From Blogger In Baghdad

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/

Friday, May 09, 2003 ::

i am going thru my mail and and cleaning up the boxes. you can stop bothering diane with mail. i just hope she is not too upset with me.
:: salam 12:06 PM [+] ::
...
5 US Dollars for a single hour of browsing. Talk about someone milking it, I wonder if they would let me pay for only half an hour.
I am not complaining; I would not have believed anyone who would have told me a week ago that I will be able to browse at all. There are more of these centers popping up here and there so the prices will go down. Besides I have heard today that a NGO called [Communication sans frontiers] has arrived in Iraq and will help. They will probably be doing what the Red Cross is doing, a center in Baghdad and a team moving around Iraq. The Red Cross has been moving its phone service, if you can call it that, around Baghdad. Two days for each district and they depend on the word of mouth to spread the news, usually they end up with huge lines and waiting lists but everybody is grateful. Many people have no way telling their relatives abroad how they are doing. A couple of Arabic TV stations, mainly Jazeera, has been putting their cameras in the street and allowing people to send regards to their relatives abroad, tell them they are OK hoping that they would be watching at the time. So what the Red Cross has been doing, and I think what Communication sans frontiers would ultimately be doing is much appreciated. The only way to communicate with the world otherwise is to go buy a Thuraya phone, very expensive by any standard ($700 down from $1500 two weeks ago, that is not counting the call charges). I don’t know how long it will take until a network can be put up. Since the one we had is now reduced to ruble.

I have made a very un-salam decision today. I let Raed talk me into going along with him on his next two day trip to the south. I am a bit of a coward; I am not dealing too well with all the bad things around me in Baghdad. I move thru the city with a wince. And what he has been telling me about his trip last week made me just want to crawl deeper into my cocoon. So what is Raed up to? Raed has been working for the last two weeks with a small outfit that is calling itself Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict [CIVIC], they think about the acronyms before the name, don’t they? They are a very small team of volunteers and almost-volunteers (I mean they are getting paid much less than their effort deserves) who are going around residential districts that have seen military action with these forms and trying to get as much information as they can about civilian deaths and injuries. They are also collecting hospital records in order to come to an estimation of the number of civilian casualties. Until now they have around 5000 injuries and deaths in Baghdad and they are starting to form teams in other Iraqi cities. This is what he wants to drag me into. We will go to Karbala, Samaweh, Naseriyah then basrah. And back thru Kut. These names should be familiar they have been thru quite a bit during the war. Raed has already been to these places, with the exception of Kut, and has put together teams there. In Samaweh we will meet one of our university friends and spend the night at his place because our driver abu-saif does not like the idea of arriving in Naseriyah late and spending the night there. He also says that the only unsafe bit of the trip will be the way thru Kut. Did you know we have a Hizbullah now in a Iraq? Rigt there in Kut an Amarah (do you know what Hizbullah means? It means God’s faction, allah’s party). This hizbulla is calling itself [hizbullah al iraqi] and is anti-Iranian. We will be going thru Hizbullah territory and this makes abu-saif uneasy. We’ll see. We will leave early Saturday and should be back on Monday, wish us a safe trip.

Prices of weapons on the market have been going up. At one point you could get a hand grenade for 500 dinars, that’s a quarter of a dollar. A Kalashnikov for $200 and a brand new Uzi for a bit more. These are on display on the roads. In Baghdad-al-Jadida and al-baya districts but the cheapest could be found in Thawra (revolution) district (It used to be caleed Thawra then Saddam now they are calling it al-Sadir district). It is like a militarized zone in Thawra. If you don’t live there you better not go.
The streets markets look like something out of a William Gibson novel. Heaps of cheap RAM (stolen of course) is being sold beside broken monitors beside falafel stands and weapons are all available. Fights break out justlikethat and knives come out from nowhere, knives just bought 5 minutes ago. There are army sighting thingys, Weird looking things with lenses. And people selling you computer cases who tell you these are electric warmers, never having seen a computer case before. Really truly surreal. Software CDs, Movie CDs and cheap porn. And a set of 5 CDs called [the crimes of saddam] it has things from halabja, the footage they have taped during 91 while squishing the uprising after the war and other stuff about Uday, there is one whole CD about Uday. Have not seen any of them yet. They say there is some gruesome footage on them but the Uday CD is not as juicy as you’d think.
Back to the weapons. The prices have been going up because they are being bought from the market in big quantities. One of the very few bright ideas our new American administration has been having was if the looters want money for the stolen weapons let’s pay them for bringing them to us. Outside Baghdad it is said people are being paid a fixed price for each piece of weaponry they bring in. In Baghdad it is being bought off the market at street prices. But still no one is going into the Thawra District.
American civil administration in Iraq is having a shortage of Bright ideas. I keep wondering what happened to the months of “preparation” for a “post-saddam” Iraq. What happened to all these 100-page reports, where is that Dick Cheney report? Why is every single issue treated like they have never thought it would come up? What’s with the juggling of people and ideas about how to form that “interim government”? Why does it feel like they are using the [lets-try-this-lets-try-that] strategy? Trial and error on a whole country?
The various bodies that have been installed here don’t seem to have much coordination between them. We all need to feel that big sure and confident strides forward are being taken; it is not like this at all. And how about stopping empty pointless gestures and focusing on things that are real problems? Can anyone tell me what the return of children to schools really means? Other than it makes nice 6 o’clock news footage.
Schools have been looted; there are schools that have cluster bombs thrown in them when fedayeen were still there, no one bothered to clean that mess up before issuing the call on [Information Radio] that all students should go back to schools. How about clearing the mess created by the sudden disappearing of the ration distribution centers? How about getting the Hospitals back in shape? How about making it safe to walk in the street?
I mean there are a million more pressing issues for these committees meeting daily than getting children back to unsafe schools.
Yes yes I know. Patience. God needed seven days to finish his work and all that.
Living in my headphones. The best place to be these days.
:: salam 11:47 AM [+] ::
...
Just a quickie because raed will kill me if I will be late. I now not only have access to someone with access to email I now have access to a phone. So I got a chance to talk to Diana, she said I sounded British. And Stephan also called. If you have been reading the blog for a while you will know that he is the person I have shared a flat with for 4 years in Vienna. He said he will call again today and we will have more time to talk about the blog and all. I am sure some of this "talk" will end up published somewhere in Austria because he has been working with the Austrian News Agency. If you want to know more you will have to ask him since I have no idea what he does with these things, I still don't know what he did with that email interview we did a couple of weeks before the war started. Any way he said it is ok to put his email on the blog so go ask him kaltenbrunner.stefan [at] news.at. email addy was wrong it has been corrected now
Yesterday after emailing the huge entry to Diana I took a walk down Karad and saw three tanks parked in front of an ice cream shop. Pretty surreal. And later at night 4 of the soldiers stationed in al ameriyah street were walking back holding these kerosene lights we call 'laleh'. They have bought them from the shop down the street because their generator broke down or something. Night watch done in very romantic light.
laytah

:: salam 5:57 AM [+] ::
...
:: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 ::
A Post From Baghdad Station

Note: Salam Pax sent me this in a Word attachment earlier today. After weeks of silence everything's happening at once: yesterday I received an email from his cousin with his satellite phone number. I called it; Salam’s father decided to play grumpy patriarch and told me to call back in “two minutes," which I did. Salam sounds fine. We discussed as many things as we could in a short amount of time. Without further ado, I present his latest posts. Please excuse any formatting weirdnesses; I've already been warned not to blog at work, so can't take the time to clean anything up. -- Diana Moon

If you are reading this it means that things have gone as I hope and either Diana or my cousin has posted to the blog. One of the funniest things was talking to my boss in Beirut after the war (Thuraya should make an ad saying : “Operation Iraqi Freedom, brought to you in association with Thuraya phones”) and him telling me that someone called Diana Moon is bugging us about a certain Salam Pax. I can’t even remember telling her where I work. Diana you are the wise oracle of Gotham. [See note at end of post.]

Today while going thru Karada street I saw a sign saying “Send and receive e-mail. Affordable prices” I am checking out the place tomorrow. If the price really is affordable I might be able to update the blog every week or two.

Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don’t let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don’t think about your “imminent liberation” anymore.

But I am sounding now like the Taxi drivers I have fights with whenever I get into one.

Besides asking for outrageous fares (you can’t blame them gas prices have gone up 10 times, if you can get it) but they start grumbling and mumbling and at a point they would say something like “well it wasn’t like the mess it is now when we had saddam”. This is usually my cue for going into rage-mode. We Iraqis seem to have very short memories, or we simply block the bad times out. I ask them how long it took for us to get the electricity back again after he last war? 2 years until things got to what they are now, after 2 months of war. I ask them how was the water? Bad. Gas for car? None existent. Work? Lots of sitting in street tea shops. And how did everything get back? Hussain Kamel used to literally beat and whip people to do the impossible task of rebuilding. Then the question that would shut them up, so, dear Mr. Taxi driver would you like to have your saddam back? Aren’t we just really glad that we can now at least have hope for a new Iraq? Or are we Iraqis just a bunch of impatient fools who do nothing better than grumble and whine? Patience, you have waited for 35 years for days like these so get to working instead of whining. End of conversation.

The truth is, if it weren’t for intervention this would never have happened. When we were watching the Saddam statue being pulled down, one of my aunts was saying that she never thought she would see this day during her lifetime.

But,

War. No matter what the outcome is. These things leave a trail of destruction behind them. There were days when the Red Crescent was begging for volunteers to help in taking the bodies of dead people off the city street and bury them properly. The hospital grounds have been turned to burial grounds when the electricity went out and there was no way the bodies can be kept until someone comes and identifies.

I confess to the sin of being an escapist. When reality hurts I block it out, unless it comes right up to me and knocks me cold. My mother, after going out once after Baghdad was taken by the US Army, decided she is not going out again, not until I promise it looks kind of normal and OK. So I guess the Ostrich maneuver runs in the family.

Things are looking kind of OK, these days. Life has a way of moving on. Your senses are numbed, things stop shocking you. If there is one thing you should believe in, it is that life will find a way to push on, humans are adaptable, that is the only way to explain how such a foolish species has kept itself on this planet without wiping itself out. Humans are very adaptable, physically and emotionally.

and I also confess that I am going thru massive internet withdrawal symptoms.


So here are what should have been 15 entries to the blog, for whatever it is worth.



1/5

Maytag, workers of the world unite. The Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Communist Workers Party are covering a lot of walls with red posters. I have not heard that Nadia Abdul Majeed of the Communist Workers Party is in Baghdad. I am still offering to volunteer if they do some cosmetic changes to their name. They have their hearts in the right place, unlike most other parties who have their hearts near their wallets. But “Communist”? I will look like a “Communards” fan if I start wearing red stars and buttons with the sickle-and-hammer thing. Nothing against Mr. Sommerville but I’m past that phase, and no one could ever sing along to his falsetto anyway.

Sa’ad al-Bazaz and his newspaper “Az zaman” [azzaman.net] have launched their attack on Baghdad. It is quite good compared to the leaflets newspapers the various parties are printing and distributing. Az zaman looks like it has big money behind it and there is very little advertising. It has a very good culture section called “Alef yaa” [alefyaa.com]. But people are reading everything they get their hands on.

With the exception of a newspaper called “new Iraq”, a weekly at the moment because it is privately funded by a number of Iraqi journalists, the rest is tripe. They could be one of the old Iraqi papers: a picture of the leader of X party “amongst his people”, news of the great achievements of that party. Bla bla bla. Good for the peanuts vendors on the street, makes good paper cones.

Sa’ad al-Bazaz is an example of how it is nonsense to say “throw all the Ba’athists out”. He was the editor of one of the “regime’s” big newspapers. He left the country in a mission to write a book about saddam or something like that and never came back. If you are going to “de-ba’athify”- as Chalabi is calling it – then I guess you will have to throw him out, but that would be a mistake. The newspaper coming out in his name shows that he might be helpful in licking Iraqi media into shape. And there are many like him. There are of course unforgivable atrocities committed by a number of Ba’athists but there is no need to get every single Iraqi who was one into house arrest. That would mean we would have no teachers in schools, no professors in universities and everybody who worked in a state company will be made to quit his job. G, would kill me for saying this, he is still waiting for the masses to rise. He believes in something he calls “the Red Mullahs”. The Islamic Dawa Party and the Communist Party should be in a coalition, he says. Tsk tsk, this coming from a Christian. Maybe I should give him my “Communards” tapes. The people are doing their own filtering anyway. After many have been called to go back to their jobs some are refusing to work under certain people whom they know are too Ba’athist to tolerate now. A friend was telling me when the bus came to take him to his work place one of them turned around to one of the Ba’athists who worked there telling him that if he is coming in the bus he will have shoes thrown at him and kicked out of it, there were other Ba’ath party members on the bus but everybody knows who was the bad apple. Generalizations, like al-Chalabi’s deba’athification plans don’t solve problems.

There are stories in southern governorates of Ba’athists making “pre-emptive strikes” at people they are scared might come and kill them.

And the looting goes on. A week ago the hottest items to steal were number plates from cars. People started putting them inside the car to make sure they don’t get stolen. You see, after a bazillion cars were stolen many without any numbers on them they had to find a way to make them look legal because some cars were being stopped in the street if they didn’t have a number. There are three different numbers you can get. The worst are the plates stolen from the number-plate factory because there is no way you can get papers for that, they simply did not exist but they are cheap 15,000 Dinars only (exchange rate these days is 2000 dinar for a US dollar. The second best are the numbers found for sale on the street, stolen from cars parked right there but with no papers. The best are numbers with all the necessary papers. You’ll pay for that quite a bit, and if you are lucky you will find papers for a car just like the one you have “liberated”, no one looks at things like chassis numbers anyway.

But that is old now; if you are an enterprising looter you go to the weapons factories around Baghdad. The huge empty cannon shells you find there are very desirable items; the metal is melted and used. And there is an endless supply of these shells. There are big battles being raged around the qa’qah (al qa3qa3) factory every night to control it. There are until now around 30 dead people and a number of wounded. The coalition forces is enjoying the scene and keeping its distance.

They are like that in most of the cases, they sit looking a bit bored watching the looting. Sometimes, if it is not too troublesome, they will go check on what is happening if you jump in front of their tanks shouting “Ali Baba, Ali Baba!!”. Cute, isn’t it? We have found common ground in the stories of 1001 nights. Everybody knows the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, but not everybody speaks English. So if you are lucky the Americans will come to check what Ali Baba is doing, sometimes they care sometimes they don’t.

A couple of days ago I was walking down al-rasheed Street when the Americans seemed to be interested in an “Ali Baba” situation, a bit too interested. Two small armored vehicles were coming down the street with a couple of soldiers running after the vehicles with their guns pointed to the front. The gods, enjoying another one of their sick jokes, put me right in front of the door of the building they were checking at the exact moment they decide to go in. the two cars come in real fast, one in front one behind me, the soldiers start running faster. I almost pee in my pants with my hands up saying “don’t shoot don’t shoot”. They didn’t. The next day I walk by the same building the entrance looks burned. Almost a statistic. G also had such a near death experience while standing near a barbwire fence somewhere in the north. He was standing there when a man came out of a car, wearing a dishdasha with his hands in his pockets and walking toward the fence. A soldier standing near G. starts humming to himself “get your hands out of your pockets” in a sing-song way and pointed his gun at the man. Thankfully the man decides to stop scratching his balls and starts scratching his nose. Gun goes down.

Someone apparently decided that it was time the US Army does some public relations work and is sending the soldiers around the city for a walk and talk mission. The Ameriyah street, a couple of days ago, had 4 tanks parked along the streets and soldiers in groups of 5 strolling along the street talking to shop owners and grocers. Flak vest and guns in front of them but they were trying to look amiable. Laughing and asking for prices of stuff. One of them was holding a huge sack full of candy and the kids were on him like anything. Bought bottles of Pepsi and were offered Iraqi bread. This scene I saw later in other places.

Some of the most dangerous places to be at these days are gas stations, too many accidents. And with all the long lines and people waiting their turn the number of casualties is high. I generally avoid crowds these days; no one knows what might happen.



26/4. G and I went to the Meridian to do an errand.

The day we went to the Meridian most of the media was checking out, if they were staying for long periods it makes more sense to get a house for yourself.

After we left the hotel we stood for a while looking a “demonstration” in front of the Meridian, Iraqi army officers were doing something in the “Alwiyah Club” building and everybody is selling photocopied papers which are supposed to be job applications or something.

A whole market has emerged right there in front of the two hotels, Meridian and Sheraton. Thuraya [thuraya.com] phone owners standing in front of their cars offering you phone calls abroad for $5 a minute (it actually costs less than a dollar). Photocopy shops to make copies of whatever the coalition is throwing at the people today. People with foldable chairs and cardboard boxes in front of them offering to exchange your dollars, no idea why the cardboard box. Maybe to make it look like an office. Cigarette vendors, various sandwiches are at offer but they don’t look too safe to eat. The atmosphere is like a festival. We only needed live music and a beer stand.

Whatever….. G. had a falafel sandwich and we drank “ZamZam Cola”. Baghdad is flooded with “ZamZam Cola” – named after the “holy” well in Mecca. Iranian product and tastes too sweet. But since it is called ZamZam it must have some divine qualities. I have been drinking ZamZam Cola for a while now; I am expecting to grow angel wings any day.



23/4

Yesterday I almost died of thirst in front of 30 bottles of pure water. I had 30,000 Dinars in my pockets but couldn’t buy a 2,000 Dinar bottle. (2000 in itself is a crime you used to get 4 bottles for that price, but what to do, the war and all). 30k Dinars in 10,000 bills which now have the stigma of being stolen on them. There is no way to plead and swear on all that is holy that these are pre-invasion 10k bills. The story goes as follows: The money printing works have been looted just as everything else. Al-Jazeera showed the 10k bill press wrecked and showed an Iraqi who was not identified, he could be one of the looters for all we knew, that guy said that printed but unnumbered 10k bills were stolen and the printing templates (or whatever they are called, we call them ‘kalisha’) as well. Paper and the shiny stripes too. Al Jazeera said that what is on the market now are the printed bills with counterfeit numbers on them. Havoc rules the street. Your 10k bills are not accepted at stores. and there are people who buy your 10,000 for 8,000 Dinar. And what does Mr. Zubaidi, who knows fuck-all, say? His “financial adviser” – another self appointed ex-thief befriended with al-chalabi – told him that the Iraqi Central Bank is able to cover the money so it should not be a problem. Ho-humbug. Who are you to say anything about the central bank? A little aside here before I get back to the 10k bills. Do you know what the new scepter and crown of this state is? A THURAYA phone and an ‘Iraqi National Conference’ flag – Chalabi’s people. Makes you wonder. Anyway, anything al-zubaidi says can be taken with a ton of salt, we be listenin’ to what the Americans say. I would rather look at the puppet master than the puppet.

Back home I find uncle M. who is a banker type, actually the executive director of a bank, after telling him what happened he says that they have been having meetings with the “puppet masters” and they are going to issue a statement concerning the 10k bill problem, but this will be more directed at the banks until there is a way to get this to the street level because there is still no TV or radio and no electricity, he kept banging on about those vultures who are trying to make a quick dinar and making matters worse, uncle M. riding his high moral horse and galloping off to the horizon. I actually only wanted to know what to do with my 10k bills, burn? Make paper airplanes? Shred to confetti? He gave me the answer I wanted to hear: “give here, will get you your 250 dinar bills tomorrow”. He was annoyed with me and I was too happy to have banker people in the family.

The last couple of days I have been having the vilest thoughts about Chalabi, Zubaidi et al. I can’t stop myself muttering filthybad things about them whenever one of these names gets mentioned. Oh and the hideous flag they have.

Who gave them permission to camp at the grounds of the ***** Social Club and the Iraqi ***** Club. What am I supposed to do with my membership? Where do I find another big indoor swimming pool? No, seriously. What is this thing with these foreign political parties who have suddenly invaded Baghdad? Do they have no respect for public property? Or since it is the “season of the loot” they think they can just camp out wherever they like and, ahem, “liberate” public buildings. PUK at the National Engineering Consultants’ building. PDK at the Mukhabarat building in Mansour. INC taking an army conscription center. Islamic Dawa at the children’s public library. Another Islamic-something taking a bank. Outoutout. Liberate your own backyard; you have no right to sit in these buildings. There is only one “liberated” building I did find worth applauding because it was only symbolic; on the side entrance to the Central Mukhabarat building in Harthiya you will find written in red spray paint “The Iraqi Communist Party”. In a twisted macabre upside-down way this is the center of the Iraqi commies, these buildings have been filled with Iraqi communist party members who were imprisoned, tortured and killed there.

The “Iraqi Media Network” started broadcasting yesterday. Nothing to go crazy about, they are apparently recording one single hour and broadcasting it for 24 hours. They are using it for announcements by the coalition forces mainly, beside the coalition radio station “information radio”. They have brought Ahmad al-Rikabi from (Radio Free Iraq/Radio Free Europe). Yesterday also, the Iraqi media people (journalists, TV and radio people) were demonstrating in front of the Meridian Hotel asking for their jobs back, wait in line, we all are.

The irony, during the last couple of weeks in this big media festival called ‘Iraq War’ there is not a single Iraqi voice.

A conversation overheard by G. while in the Meridian Hotel – the Iraqi media center :

Female journalist 1: oh honey how are you? I haven’t seen you for ages.

Female journalist 2: I think the last time was in Kabul.

Bla bla bla

Bla bla bla

Female journalist 1: have to run now, see you in Pyongyang then, eh?

Female journalist 2: absolutely.

Iraq is taken out of the headlines. The search for the next conflict is on. Maybe if it turns out to be Syria the news networks won’t have to pay too much in travel costs.



17/4

Too much has happened the last couple of days but my head is as heavy as a lead boulder. Hay fever time. The sexual life of palm trees makes me weep.

I still can’t bring myself to sleep upstairs, not that anything too serious happened after that night but I rather sleep under as many walls and roofs as possible, fist size shrapnel gets thru the first wall but might be stopped by the next, seen that and learned my lesson. So the million dollar question is of course “what the fuck happened?”. (Syrian/Lebanese/Iraqi) Fedayeen were somewhere in the area.

It has become a swear word, dirtyfilthy and always followed by a barrage of verbal abuse. Syrian, Lebanese and of course Iraqi sickos who are stupid enough to believe the Jennah-under-martyrs-feet rubbish. They want to die in the name of Allah, so what do they do? Do they stand in front of “kafeer infidel aggressor”? No they don’t because they are chicken shit. They go hide in civilian districts to shoot a single useless mortar shell or a couple of Kalashnikov shots which bounce without any effect on the armored vehicles. But the answer they get to that single shot is a hell of mortars or whatever on all the houses in the area from where the shot came. This has been happening all over Baghdad, and in many places people were not as lucky as we have been here in our block.

Sometimes you didn’t even know that those creepy fucks have moved into your street for the night. All over Baghdad you see the black cloth with the names of people killed during these things. It is even worse when the Americans decide to go into full battle mode on these fedayeen, right there between the houses. I have seen what has happened in Jamia and Adhamiya districts. One woman was too afraid to go out of her house hours after the attack because she had pieces of one of these fedayeen on her lawn.

Now whenever fedayeen are seen they are being chased away. Sometimes with rocks and stones if not guns. If you have them in your neighborhood you will not be able to sleep peacefully. The stupid fucks. For some reason the argument that if he wants to die then he should do it alone and not take a whole block down with him does not hit home.

As if the crazy loonies from Syria are not enough Iraqis are doing quite the damage themselves. Looters. How to explain this? Does anyone believe those who go on TV and say no-not-us, must-be-from-abroad (they mean Kuwaitis but they are scared to say it) explain all the looting that has been going on. How much can we blame on “the systematic destruction of Iraq by foreigners” and how much on the Iraqis themselves. I heard the following on TV don’t know who said it: “if Jengis Khan turned the Tigris blue from the ink of the manuscripts thrown in it, today sky has been turned black by the smoke rising from the burning books”. Try to rationalize and fail. The same crowd who jumped up and down shouting “long live saddam” now shouts in cameras “thank you Mr. Bush” while carrying whatever they could carry. Thank you indeed. This is not the people reclaiming what is theirs, these are criminal elements on the loose.

So how clean are the hands of the US forces? Can they say “well we couldn’t do anything” and be let off the hook? Hell no. If I open the doors for you and watch you steel am I not an accomplice? They did open doors. Not to freedom but to chaos while they kept what they wanted closed. They decided to turn and look at the other side. And systematically did don’t show up with their tanks until all was gone and there was nothing left.

We sealed ourselves away. There is nothing a voice calling for restraint can do in front of a mob. Oh and thanks for the tank in front of the national museum. And the couple of soldiers on it lounging in the sun while the looting goes on from the back door.

Since we’re talking about looting, Do you know who was the biggest smuggler in recent years was? Arshad, Saddam’s personal guard for a very long time. He even tried once to get the head of one of the winged minotaur in Nineveh out of the country some years ago but it turned to a fiasco and he had to get back to the smaller things, and a Tikriti officer offered G. 70 pieces from the National Museum a couple of days after the reported looting, he and his other Tikriti friends had 150 pieces plus other pieces from a much later period. (They turned out to be not the real thing but copies, at least that is what the Americans told G. when he showed them photos of the stolen pieces but that is another story).

A ten minute walk from the National Museum, the Saddam Arts Center is showing now white stains on its walls instead of the collection of modern art it used to have. Some of the paintings were not stolen, they were slashed or shot. Now that is a nice concept for you, hate a painting? Go shoot it. Strange thing. There are places where if you are seen with a weapon these days and shoot it you end up dead, but it seems that if you are shooting paintings or blowing up vaults no one minds the weapons. The worst is of course that idiot Al-Zubaidi and his so called Civil Administration. Did you see on TV those police cars and police men he supposedly got to work. I saw them on TV too, that is about the only place I have seen them. People in districts with a strong social fabric took over the police stations themselves and were stopping and arresting the criminals themselves. Police, don’t make me laugh.

Too depressing.

I see Raed and G. every couple of days. G in one of his impossible and crazy adventures ended up working with a Guardian team. I am just too glad that I see them again. The whole issue of American presence and Iraqi government makes us argue until we are too tired to talk. Usually Raed ends up calling me and G. pragmatic pigs with no morals and principles. He wants to stick a sign on my forehead saying “Beware! a Pragma-pig”. He talks of Invading forces and foolish loonies (me) who believe that the US will help us build a democracy. But what we all agree upon is that if the Americans pull out now we will be eaten by the crazy mullahs and imams, G. has decided that this might be a good time to sell our souls to the (US) Devil.

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/