Back in Basra (One year later what Iraqis are saying)

[leftchick]

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/vincent200506090754.asp

~snip~

Another change is the number of abiyas you see around town. As the religious parties flex their muscles, their various sheikhs and imams exert a steady, if unlegislated, pressure on women to cover themselves in hejab. Layla once wore Western-style clothing and a scarf; now she has to add a thin black tunic to appease Basra’s guardians of female virtue. “If you don’t abide by their wishes, they will harass you on the street — or worse,” she complains.

“This has become an Iranian city,” contends Salaam Wendy, a Basra native who recently returned to his hometown for the first time since he fled to Canada in 1986. “In the ’70s and ’80s, you used to find bars, nightclubs, casinos — and no women wore hejab. Today, you can’t even find secular books or music CDs, the religious parties have such control of the city. This isn’t the place I remember.”

~snip~

But those are Shia voices. As for Basra’s Sunni population, many adopt a different attitude. Recently, I spent an afternoon in a mosque in Old Basra, listening to a Sunni sheikh denounce America. The insurgents, he informed me, are patriots struggling to free their country from foreign occupation. The U.S. has long hungered to dominate Iraq and steal its oil, whether by putting Saddam into power, engineering the Iran-Iraq and Kuwaiti wars, or launching an illegal invasion of the country. Today, the U.S. is not only behind the terrorist bombings of Shia religious centers, it has also created a fictitious enemy named al-Zarqawi to justify its repressive tactics. Even the rise of crime is the work of U.S. policy, which seeks to brutalize and coarsen the Iraqi temperament. Do the Iraqi people not share some responsibility for these catastrophes? “No,” replied the sheikh. “They are America’s fault. Before America meddled in our affairs, Iraqis were warm, peace loving people.”

Few people here go that far in ascribing blame to the U.S. or its allies. Still, there is a feeing of helplessness, bordering for some on a sense of futility, among nearly all Basrans. They know their city has great, if untapped, potential. Yet at the same time, even after the fall of Saddam, the historic Iraqi elections and the billions of dollars poured into their region by American and British governments, in addition to the U.N. and numerous NGOs, they have seen little effect in their daily lives — water is still bad, electricity spotty, gas lines intolerable. “How can this be? We should be rich!” Saad, a former translator for the British army exclaimed to me. “Where is the money going, why is nothing happening? Tell your readers,” he added in a distraught tone, “that we are willing to work to make Basra beautiful again — but we need their help, we need the world’s help.” So it is throughout the city on the banks of the Shatt-al-Arab. Basrans can almost see the arrival a better and more prosperous tomorrow, but for now, that bright future is frustratingly, inexplicably, just beyond their reach.

[leesa]

1. "inexplicably beyond their reach" Maybe a bright future is impossible when

one is being shot at and blown up daily by an occupying force.

[acmejack]

2. American style freedom on the march

The ingrate doesn't even seem grateful that we brought democracy to her fair city.