Bremer has destroyed my country

[smartass]

Even the pro-US manager of Iraq's Pepsi plant feels betrayed by an occupation which has spawned fear, hatred and chaos.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1184900,00.html

[Disturbed]

1. A Right Wing View of Iraq

What has gone right in Iraq
Jeff Jacoby
April 2, 2004

With all the news coming out of the Middle East, here is a detail you might have missed: A few weeks ago, the United Nations shut down the Ashrafi refugee camp in southwestern Iran. For years Ashrafi had been the largest facility in the world housing displaced Iraqis, tens of thousands of whom had been driven from their homes by Saddam Hussein's brutality. But with Saddam behind bars and his Baathist dictatorship crushed, Iraqi exiles have been flocking home. By mid-February the camp had literally emptied out. Now, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports, "nothing remains of Ashrafi but rubble and a few stones."

Refugees surging to Iraq? That isn't what the antiwar legions told us would happen if George Bush made good on his vow to end Saddam's reign of terror. Over and over they warned that a US invasion would trigger a humanitarian cataclysm, including a flood of refugees from Iraq. This, for instance, was Martin Sheen at a Los Angeles news conference a month before the war began:

"As the dogs of war slouch towards Baghdad, we need to be reminded that as many as 2 million refugees could become a reality, as well as half a million fatalities."

Writing on the left-wing website AlterNet last March, senior editor Tai Moses dreaded the coming of a war that "could create more than a million refugees in Iraq and neighboring countries." The BBC, citing a "confidential" UN document, predicted that up to 500,000 Iraqis would be seriously injured during the first phase of an American attack, while 1 million would flee the country and 2 million more would be internally displaced -- all compounded by an "outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions." The Organization of the Islamic Conference foresaw the "displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees," plus "total destruction and a humanitarian tragedy whose scale cannot be predicted."

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

[izzie]

2. As always their are two sides of the story or lots of shades of gray

We had a country run from top down and that is how the Republics and business run things. This country, Iraq, wanted to run its own country, from the bottom up but with a Central powerful state with state run things. It is how it was done but the people want a say in that. A social democrat style and Bush is never going to let that happen.Business does not even understand that.And it seem out side business is taking over the country. And the US military is going to stay to protect that. British always did that.

[Bridget Burke]

3. So, who's Jeff Jacoby?

And where was this lovely prose first published?

[NashVegas]

4. The Arrogance is Unbelievable

Except .. it's true. How sad that America has come to this.

Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling picture of what a "free Iraq" will look like: the United States will maintain its military and corporate presence through 14 enduring military bases and the largest US embassy in the world. It will hold on to authority over Iraq's armed forces, its security and economic policy and the design of its core infrastructure - but the Iraqis can deal with their decrepit hospitals all by themselves, complete with their chronic drug shortages and lack of the most basic sanitation capacity. (The US health and human services secretary, Tommy Thompson, revealed just how low a priority this was when he commented that Iraq's hospitals would be fixed if the Iraqis "just washed their hands and cleaned the crap off the walls".)