Missteps Soured Iraqis on U.S.

**Julie** · 04-08-2007, 23:37 PM

NEW YORK Apr 8, 2007 (AP)— In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes.

What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party from government, school faculties and elsewhere left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.
The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.

Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders. The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.

In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement."

Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.

On U.S. reconstruction failures in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath."

For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.

The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done.

As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise."

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=302117

Ray · 04-09-2007, 11:26 AM

Quote:

4 Years After Hussein's Fall, Regret in Iraq

Harley Fan Who Helped Topple Statue Wants Old Order Back

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 9, 2007; Page A08

BAGHDAD, April 8 -- In a garage filled with classic motorcycles, Khadim al-Jubouri stared at the four-year-old magazines he usually keeps tucked inside a wooden desk. All of them contained photographs of a lone, burly man wearing a black tank top and swinging a sledgehammer into the base of a tall, bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. The man was Jubouri.

Just days earlier, he might have been executed for his actions.

But it was April 9, 2003.

Crowds of chanting Iraqis, some clutching stones and sandals, swarmed Firdaus Square to deliver blows to the statue. Then, with the help of an American tank and a winch, it toppled, creating one of the defining images of the U.S.-led invasion. Over one photo of Jubouri, a headline reads: "The Fall of Baghdad."

"It achieved nothing," he said, after he had put away the magazines.

Four years after that moment, with violence besieging the country, Jubouri is concerned with neither benchmarks nor timelines, troop strengths nor withdrawal dates. What he cares most about is security and order, of which, he said, he has seen very little. He blames Iraq's Shiite-led government and its security forces, and wishes for a return of the era led by the man whose statue he helped tear down.

"We got rid of a tyrant and tyranny. But we were surprised that after one thief had left, another 40 replaced him," said Jubouri, who is a Shiite Muslim. "Now, we regret that Saddam Hussein is gone, no matter how much we hated him."

His faith in the United States has also vanished, he said. But he still has a passion for one thing uniquely American: the Harley-Davidson. On the wall of his cluttered office, next to medals he won as a champion weightlifter, hangs a tapestry emblazoned with an American flag, a bald eagle, a Harley and the words: "Born in the USA."

On most days, however, he cannot afford to buy gas for his own Harley, a 1982 Fat Boy.

His country today is politically fractured and struggling to find direction. He has seen four Iraqi governments since the fall of Hussein. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. At least 3,260 U.S. soldiers have been killed.

But the numbers that most directly affect Jubouri are these: Seven of his relatives and friends have been killed, kidnapped or driven from their homes. He gets four hours of electricity a day, if he's lucky. The cost of cooking gas and fuel have soared, but his income is a quarter of what he used to earn.

"It's gotten worse," said Jubouri, 50, a barrel-chested man with a thick neck and an oval, cleanshaven face. "We can hardly make both ends meet."

When he passes Firdaus Square these days, he says, he feels a mix of happiness and sorrow. He has no plans to celebrate on Monday.

"It is an ordinary day," he said.

Jubouri, a father of four, said he once serviced classic motorcycles owned by Hussein and his son Uday. They included a British-made 1937 Norton that Hussein rode to flee Iraq in 1959 after he took part in a failed attempt to assassinate the then-prime minister, Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem. Hussein later housed the bike in a museum that proclaimed his glory.

Jubouri bought up Harleys that Iraqi soldiers had stolen in Kuwait after Iraq invaded the neighboring country in August 1990, triggering the first Persian Gulf War.

"I would dismember them and smuggle them out" to Lebanon and Turkey, said Jubouri, wearing a white T-shirt printed with an Iraqi flag and the slogan "King of Harley."

In the mid-1990s, he was jailed for a year and a half for criticizing the government, he said. A few years later, workers began installing Hussein's statue in Firdaus Square, not far from a gym where Jubouri was a member.

"I told myself that my hope in life is to bring that statue down," Jubouri said.

On April 9, 2003, when it was clear that American forces had taken control of the capital and Hussein had fled, he took a sledgehammer from his garage and made his way to the square.

"As I hit the statue, I was out of my mind. I was full of hatred," Jubouri recalled. "When it fell, I was so happy. I thought things were going to improve."

Initially, life did get better. Under Hussein, average Iraqis could not import or export motorcycles. Suddenly, Jubouri could buy them from Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon by calling his suppliers on once-unavailable cellphones. The Syrian border was easier to cross, too, he said.

"I bought Mafia-smuggled motorcycles from Syria," he said. "The borders are so open you can even bring TNT."

Jubouri sold Harleys to American diplomats, and some months earned as much as $5,000, he said. Whenever U.S. soldiers entered Battaween, a rough, industrial neighborhood in central Baghdad known as a hangout for prostitutes and thieves, the Americans would stop at his garage to admire his Harleys, he said.

That did not mean he approved of the U.S. presence in Iraq, Jubouri said, but he blamed that on Hussein.

"I hated this guy because he's the one who brought the Americans, and we hate the Americans and the occupation," he said.

By 2005, many of his customers had begun leaving the country, at a pace that quickened last year as sectarian violence deepened after the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra. He has sold only four motorcycles in the past year, he said.

He called the new Baghdad security plan "a failure from the beginning." Although he has noticed that Shiite militias have faded from neighborhoods, suicide bombings have not stopped, he said. Every time he hears an explosion, he worries that his friends and relatives are among the victims.

Under Hussein, he never faced day-to-day corruption, Jubouri said, but now he must pay bribes just to get a license or file a police complaint.

"I feel lost now," he said.

In his garage are dozens of classic motorcycles -- Harleys and BMWs, Triumphs and BSAs. Many are old and rusty, badly in need of repair. But the violence has shut down many nickel and chrome factories. And without electricity, how can he operate his equipment? And without customers, why bother?

"Now, Friday is better than Saturday, and Saturday is better than Sunday," he said, looking longingly at his Fat Boy.

4 Years After Hussein's Fall, Regret in Iraq - washingtonpost.com

That the man who brought the statute of Saddam down yearns for the days of Saddam would possibly be the outcome of his frustration of not being able to live a normal life because of the violence and because the basic amenities have broken down. That is but natural.

There is no doubt that no matter what one's religion , sect, nationality, status or whatever, one wants to lead a normal life with basic amenities and food being available. If that is not there, everything becomes meaningless.

People like Jubouri were hopeful of a new dawn with the fall of Saddam, but that has eluded them.

It would be natural to blame the US for their fate, but the long and the short of it is that it is the internecine Shia Sunni rivalry that is not allowing thing to settle down and which is widely exploited by the Iraqi politician and religious leaders for their own purpose.

The message that should be drummed in is that it is the Iraqi Sunni and Shias internecine war and their leaders and religious leaders making political capital out of it, is what is preventing things from not returning to normal! It is only when the common Iraq seriously understand this, will their joining either side abate.

Side by side, it would be more important if the basic amenities are made available to the common man so that life becomes bearable. Grandiose economic rejuvenation plans is good, but that does not calm the trouble common man!

04-08-2007, 23:37 PM	#1 (permalink)
Julie Moderator Join Date: 08-04-03 Location: Georgia, USA Posts: 6,340 Country:	Missteps Soured Iraqis on U.S. NEW YORK Apr 8, 2007 (AP)— In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators." "The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment. The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly. First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes. What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders: The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance. Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party from government, school faculties and elsewhere left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time. An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises. The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business. Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders. The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget. In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement." Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship. On U.S. reconstruction failures in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath." For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance. The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done. As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise." http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=302117

Thread Tools
Show Printable Version Email this Page
Display Modes	Rate This Thread
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode	Rate This Thread:

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Iraq in Books - Review Essay	Shek	The War in Iraq	9	02-29-2008 06:08 AM
Debate about China, india and US economies, by Businessweek	oneman28	Political Discussions	7	11-28-2007 08:43 AM
Liberals Blame America for Nick Berg's Death	Leader	Political Discussions	43	08-20-2007 04:30 AM
Do G4 have a case.	crooks	Political Discussions	165	12-31-2006 06:58 AM

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)