First full day in Baghdad, time to look for our selves.
What makes a man kill? What brings down one of the oldest civilisations in the world? The cradle of civilisation, home to the Garden of Eden. A culture of obviously tolerant friendly people: what went wrong?
I went to the market, or the remnants of the burnt out shops. As if this were the spring season of commerce, markets and shops are growing up through the cracks of a broken city. I bought a couple of pirate DVDs today, 'Matrix reloaded' (unwatchable and shot on a shaky cam corder from the back row of the cinema) and one festooned with pictures of Saddam Hussein, a curiosity. I'm not so curious now...
It was a savage tale of the lengths to which Saddam went to make sure his rule was unchallenged from the inside, even to the point of preventing his own sons' popularity with a by-then predictable brutality. But it also contained some material I wish I hadn't seen: executions, not the clean firing squad kind, not the sanitized Hollywood variety. No! Knives punched through throats, decapitations and then I stopped watching. But that is the reality or was the reality. A reality I simply don't have the stomach for.
There are many elements of reality I don't have the stomach for. Many questions I don't have the intellect for. What happened here? Why did it happen? Why should the many beautiful children I've seen in the streets and villages of Baghdad not have the same opportunities that my own children have? This is a very rich country. I know its naive. I know that the world is a very complicated place. I know I sound like a three year old who has just learned to question. But that is exactly how I feel.
It reminds me of a song lyric: "Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die?"
Every Iraqi I have spoken to from the wealthy in the areas around the Hussein palaces, to the poor in the market, or around the Tuwaitha nuclear complex, are grateful to the US and its allies, they are happy that the Saddam years have been brought to an end. "For this we love the Americans." But their praise comes with a warning, they expect the US and the Brits to deliver them democracy, a principle that many barely understand. They expect altruism, not a "ram raid."
They tell me have the skills and the experience to rebuild their war-and-sanctions-torn country, they learned much after the Gulf war about putting things back together. They know how to get things done quickly. After all when Saddam wanted a new bridge built over the Tigris - a bridge that only he would be allowed to use - the contractors were told he wanted it not in six months but in 43 days, in time for his birthday party. They knew that not only did it have to be done quickly but it had to be done properly, or it would be the last thing they ever built.
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