this is ot, but this thread is fairly small so I’m putting this book exerpt here…it’s better than looking at either Bush or Dukakis.
In the Belly of the Green Bird is a book by Nir Rosen that tells about Iraq after the U.S. invasion. The link is an exerpt from the publisher.
This is the story of the occupation, reconstruction, and descent into civil war of the new Iraq. It makes no attempt to cover the invasion or debate the decision to invade. (Those topics have been well covered, if not resolved, elsewhere.) Instead, this is an attempt to capture the story of the new Iraq from the point of view of the Iraqis themselves.
From the start of the liberation, Iraqis have been divided not only in their views of America, but also among themselves. Many Iraqis might have preferred an occupation, imperialist or not, to the anarchy that prevailed. When I would ask Iraqis what they wanted, they would always say “amn,” safety, security. Some called for an immediate evacuation of U.S. and British troops, others asked to be the fifty-first state, and some asked for both in the same breath. Most longed only for a place in the shade and a better future than their past, though they were proud of their history.
New political parties and organizations appeared every day, announcing their birth and their intentions on walls. Their banners covered the abandoned buildings they had confiscated. The Iraqi Communist party headquarters bore the hammer and sickle associated with dogmatic atheism, right next to a huge banner proclaiming their participation in an important Shia holiday. Seventy newspapers appeared in Baghdad after the war, their viewpoints as divergent as possible. Azzaman, the most popular, professional, and mainstream paper, was owned by a former senior intelligence official who worked directly for Saddam’s son Qusay. In May, Azzaman used a Reuters picture of an old Iraqi man being held by two American soldiers on each side. Its caption read “American soldiers help Iraqi man cross street.” Tariq al-Sha’ab, the Communist party paper, had the same picture over the caption “American soldiers beat Iraqi man.”
Everywhere I looked, I saw division, conflict, struggle. (Only one group of Iraqis remained virtually invisible amid the throngs. Iraq’s greatest majority, its women, outnumbering men by as much as 1.5 million, were imprisoned in silence. In my many months in Iraq, I met hundreds of men, but very few women. I became afraid to look at them or walk too close to them and thus arouse the ire of their male guardians. Among the Shias in particular, Arab tribal mores had combined with religious conservatism. The Shia women reminded me more of the prisoners behind the Taliban’s burkas in Afghanistan than their comparatively liberated Iranian coreligionists, who granted women far more participation and liberty.)
Civil war requires that fratricidal violence be organized. At first, after Saddam fell, the violence was mainly chaotic. But there was an endless supply of it, and it was soon organized, as the chapters that follow attempt to show.

Posted by: fauxreal | May 24 2006 17:52 utc | 4