The palace photos spot on, especially the one with the BBQ grills on the balcony. Or the one with the soldiers sitting on a terrace overlooking the Tigris river looking, oh so, out of place, and light years from home. Oddly though, there is strange symmetry between the tacky U.S. military infrastructure and its icons, and the tacky Saddamist architecture and statues of himself.
Why anybody thought any of this would all somehow work itself out is beyond me. When all the Iraqi’s got was a more powerful and ham fisted Saddam with a strange foreign face.

Posted by: anna missed | May 29 2009 7:56 utc | 4

anna_missed, the video reinforces my opinion of U.S. law enforcement officials. In many decades in Europe I never once had a negative experience with British, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Scandinavian, Nordic or any other officials. In fact most experiences were not merely neutral but actually positive, and I’ve even had a German policeman taking my side (clearly a foreigner) in a street argument with a German couple trying to steal my parking space. He threatened to arrest them if they caused any more trouble! And this occurred in Right-wing Bavaria!
But every time I’ve been to the States the police have scared the Hell out of me, and I was once asked stupid questions by immigration officials at JFK for 2 hours, shouted at for no reason whatsoever and eventually let go without a single word of apology. This was in 1987, 6 years before the first WTC bombing, so paranoia couldn’t have been an excuse.
I cannot imagine such occurrences anywhere in Europe, and I’ve lived there long enough to know.

Posted by: Parviz | May 29 2009 9:18 utc | 6

Parviz,
I always follow the old Bukowski adage “it’s not that I hate cops, it’s just that I feel a lot better when they’re not around”.
And as an addition to b’s signs of faltering economy, I’ve noticed lately (on my little island) a much amplified police presence with no corresponding increase in crime ( we have virtually none here). I think the county is broke (as are other government bodies) and they are working the traffic ticket ruse to generate money. Just today I passed two cruisers hanging at their usual gas station hang spot, and a quarter mile later saw one pull out behind me in the rear view mirror. He was really on it and passed me with no lights flashing going about 80 and stopped the guy ahead of me. The speed limit was 25.I myself got stopped a month ago, and when I got out of the car and walked back to his he flew into paranoid conniptions and started hollering at me like I was coming back to cut his head off. It probably helped though, cuz he totally missed that my license tabs were expired by 8 months. Although he did get me for not wearing a seat belt, driving without lights, having a brake light out, no insurance card, and no current registration. $230.00 all in a days work at non-conformity.

Posted by: anna missed | May 29 2009 10:12 utc | 8

Thanks again, Anthony (#7), for unearthing another gem. I’ve redistributed this to everyone I know.
Interestingly, the Iranian regime kept its assistance to the U.S. secret at the time, for fear of being seen to have betrayed the Revolution, and even during the ensuing 7 years Iran mentioned little of this for fear of looking stupid for having gained nothing in return.

Posted by: Parviz | May 29 2009 14:19 utc | 10

@ Parviz # 10 – Anthony’s link @ 7 is Ahmadinejad’s election campaign – wherein he says the moderates cooperated with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and they got labelled the axis of evil for their efforts – hardly an unearthed gem – but they did succeed in getting all their buddies into the Iraqi government thanks to Uncle Sam of course. We still don’t know how that consequence is going to turn out.

Posted by: Sam | May 30 2009 5:28 utc | 12