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Opinions/Editorials Title: Times Online: Iraqis Prefer Misery Over Saddam Good news for neocons. Iraqis, who we are to believe revel in collective masochism, overwhelmingly approve of the destruction of their social infrastructure and prefer occupation at gunpoint, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and sectarian violence and murder over the rule of Saddam Hussein, or so Rupert Murdoch’s Times Online would have us believe. “Most Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today,” the neocon newspaper reports. “The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week.” Naturally, this “opinion poll,” obviously skewered, is for public consumption in Britain and the United States. In fact, the situation in Iraq is far worse than anything experienced under Saddam Hussein, even when murderous sanctions, imposed by Bush Senior and continued by Clinton, were in full swing. “Mounir Zeid, 32, says he likes to remember the good old days before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, most people were employed and his income was enough to afford holidays abroad. Today, however, poverty has struck and he finds himself sharing one room with his four brothers,” IRIN reported last October. “In Iraq, despite the government working hard to fight poverty in the country, the situation has not changed. Indeed, the opposite is happening. Unemployment is rising and more and more children are leaving school to work and supplement their parents’ income.” But then, of course, Iraqi children like unemployment and poverty, same as Palestinian kids do. “The UN children’s agency UNICEF has said that Iraq’s maternal mortality rates have increased dramatically over the last 15 years. In 1989, 117 Iraqi mothers out of 100,000 died during pregnancy or childbirth. That ratio has now increased by 65 per cent,” Reuters reported last December. But then, of course, Iraqi mothers welcomed Bush Senior’s Iraq Invasion I, twelve years of brutal and decimating sanctions, and Bush the Lesser’s invasion and occupation, resulting in three quarters of a million dead people, piled up on the 1.5 million people who perished since 1991, bringing the toll well over a staggering 2 million. Iraqi mothers are proud of skyrocketing infant immortality rates. It is an encyclopedic accomplishment. Meanwhile, “Caritas Internationalis and Caritas Iraq say that malnutrition rates have risen in Iraq from 19 percent before the US-led invasion to a national average of 28 percent four years later,” Caritas Internationalis reported last week. “Caritas says that rising hunger has been caused by high levels of insecurity, collapsed healthcare and other infrastructure, increased polarization between different sects and tribes, and rising poverty.” In other words, the neocon plan is on schedule. “Sectarian and tribal conflict infects daily life in Iraq. Primary and secondary schools, hospitals, police, government are all divided along these lines. You cannot even go to the supermarket without fear that you will not return,” Claudette Habesch, president of Caritas Middle East North Africa, told Reuters. “The last four years, but in particular 2006, we have seen life get worse rather than better for the ordinary Iraqi. And people are voting with their feet. Everyday 5000 people leave Iraq. In 2007, one in ten Iraqis is expected to leave the country.” Obviously, this is a demographic Rupert Murdoch missed. Indeed, amidst generally ignored antiwar protests and futile efforts by Democrats to yank the war funding rug out from beneath Bush and the neocons, the balkanization of Iraq is well underway. “The chairman of the Iraqi Red Crescent said on Saturday that Iraq’s ‘very fragile’ security and its suffering economy continue to prompt the flight of people from their homes across war-torn Iraq,” reports Ya Libnan. “In an interview with CNN, Dr. Said Ismail Hakki addressed the issue of displacement, a dire symbol of the cost of the four-year-old war. He cites large numbers of refugees, people who flee to other countries, and internally displaced people, those who flee to other parts of their country over this last year.” In short, the bantustanization of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines is well advanced. But then most Iraqis want to live on reservations, locked in open-air prisons guarded by U.S. soldiers (as we are told continually the United States will not leave Iraq anytime soon), same as the Palestinians do. Now, please, forget about the war crime that is the occupation and dismemberment of Iraq and concentrate on the possibility that Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears may be an item again.
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