… But Saddam Hussein Was In Power

It’d be interesting to see a shot of the same street today.

most of the iraqi bloggers i have read over the last few years agree. no matter how bad life was under saddam life, now in what is left of iraq, is so much worse.
croatoan…i`m not sure i want to know

Croatoan, such a juxtaposition of several scenes would be a worthwhile endeavor. Do we know any deep-pockets willing to send several photographers to “land between the rivers”?
Unfortunately, despite all evidence to the contrary, those with an idealogical perspective will keep to it. …no matter what.

You know what I would like? Could some reporter in Baghdad today hang their microphone out their hotel room window and record for a day. What does a day in Baghdad sound like? Can you hear explosions, gunfire, helicopters, fighter planes? My guess is that it wouldn’t sound much like any other comparable big city. I’d be curious to hear someone describe what it actually sounds like there.
We all know that Saddam was a bad guy, who ran a corrupt, violent system. Over the decades he was in charge what is the alleged body count? Does it add to anything near the 100 or so a day that have been dying violently in the last two years? I doubt it was anything close. I of course am persuadable if someone actually digs up the figures.

i think it’s very hard to define “Normal” for Baghdad. Certainly, on the eve of the invasion in 2003, I don’t think you could have called it normal even if it looked that way. True, the massive waves of terror and repression in the wake of the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings following the first Gulf War were over. But almost all Shiite religious activity was suppressed. There was no access to the Internet except through a few government sanctioned centers. Sanctions had been in place for 12 years. No international flights, no cell phones (except for a tiny and primitive system that barely covered downtown Baghdad), no international banking, no freedom to travel. Food and fuel prices were kept artificially low by decree and by the “oil for food” program. Schools, hospitals, and other public institutions did function, however inefficiently. The secret police was ubiquitous and ruthless, still, but the “fear” factor of the regime was in decline.
Now, of course, it’s much worse for the average person. Whole neighborhoods have become no go zones. There’s much to fear from American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers and police, sectarian militias, and last but not least, the insurgency. The educated classes have fled, the infrastructure is in ruins, and there’s no end in sight. In the place of unspoken terror and fear, there’s endless actual violence and murder. It’s the exception rather than the rule if a whole day can pass without fatalities somewhere on the streets of Baghdad. So the Saddam era seems relaxed in comparison.
But that doesn’t mean it was “normal.” In ‘03, most middle-class Iraqis that I spoke to then considered that their last period of “normal” life was the seventies, before Saddam, before the Iran-Iraq War. They yearned to be reconnected to the international world, to be once again citizens of a cosmopolitan city. Walking or driving around town, they would point sites out to you and recall that there were once nightclubs and discos, they would remember strolling along the river with lovers and friends, that kind of thing. And at that time they were filled with hope that life would become like that again. For the first year, under the CPA, they hoped and waited. For the year after that, with elections and “democracy,” they were still optimistic despite their growing impatience with the American occupation and they were still willing to blame problems on the insurgency.
By late 2005 and early 2006 I think is when the hope finally died under the intolerable pressure of open Sunni-Shia civil war and the continuing inability of the Iraqi government to move beyond sectarianism and narrow self interest.
“Normal”? It’s a dream, a phantom, a barely remembered fantasy, if that, for most Iraqis.

Thanks to Alan for excellent comments, a “picture” of Baghdad.
What is more valuable to people in these war-torn countries, or in countries broken by poverty and disease?
Is it “freedom and democracy” or is it “security and stability”?
Easy for Westerns to blow hot-air— millions of people don’t even have the security/stability to know whether there will be enough food for their kids tomorrow.

The picture is that of seeming normalcy, almost like that of a picture of Washington, D.C.: when, all the while, corruption and violence lie under the superficiality of the surface. Bush has not quite met the lawlessness and violence of Saddam towards his own countrymen, but he is certainly equally contemptuous of any dissent. Watch out, folks!

No photos allowed after Iraqi blasts
BAGHDAD – Police fired warning shots in the air at the scene of a double bombing Tuesday, enforcing an order banning news photographers and TV camera operators from filming the aftermath of deadly bombings…
The Iraqi government said it decided last weekend to keep photographers and camera crews away from blast sites to prevent them from damaging forensic evidence. Media groups feared the order was aimed at preventing scenes of horrific carnage from being broadcast around the world…
Iraqi and U.S. authorities have frequently complained that the publicity surrounding car bombings and suicide attacks is jeopardizing their efforts to stop the violence, which has proven unrelenting as Sunni insurgents adopt new tactics to evade stepped-up security measures…

Well, it looks normal until the secret police came to drag you away for some real or imagined offense. And Uday, Hussein’s son and heir apparent, was mentally very unstable, also reportedly sadistic. The best case scenario for Baghdad in 2003 was that some kind of coup would put Qusay, the less warped of the two sons, in power after their daddy’s death. And whither from there? A dynasty of international pariah strongmen, power struggles, bloody usurpations within the family and around it. That’s not exactly a bright future if you think about it.
I am not a supporter of the war by any means but let’s face it, Baghdad was NOT very cheerful under Hussein just because the buildings were standing and there was traffic in the streets. Hussein owned that country; he didn’t need to tear anything down to destroy the people.
If I have any quibble with Michael Moore, it’s that his film sequence of Baghdad under Hussein gave only a rather bucolic surface gloss to the brutal regime; kids flying kites, etc. This was misleading.
That said, it wasn’t for us to go in there and try to change it. Just looking at the pics does not give us an accurate idea…but hey, if it’ll turn folks even more against the war, go for it. But like Alan Chin says normal is neither the war nor Hussein. Both have been terrible for Iraqis.
A possible worse consequence of the war would be people saying…Hussein was not so bad…..EEK.

People prefer order to chaos. It’s as true in Iraq as it is in the US. We prefer to look away when a persons rights are abrogated when we don’t know that person, or if that person can be portayed as an enemy. That was as true under Hussein as it is under Bush. Watch, both in Iraq and the US, we are moving to the authoritarian model, where it is better to keep you head down and the trains apparently run on time (if they didn’t who could you complain to?). Life is easier in certain ways when you have no choices.

An elevated long view photograph of a main thoroughfare, a woman up close, centered and in your face. This lady looks like a mother to me. Whether under Saddam or under a brutal American occupation its always the mothers which ultimately pay the greatest emotional, spiritual and financial cost of conflict.
In a recent article entitled ‘What price Slaughter’ TomDispatch-offers an interesting analysis of the financial costs of compensation.
Widows from 911 on average got $ 1.8 million in compensation, while eligible widows in Iraq average $ 2.000.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=194387
ummabdulla, do married women wear wedding rings on their left hand in that part of the world, hers is showing but my screen doesn’t have enough resolution to check it out.

That does look like a gold wedding band when I zoom on it. I don’t know about Iraq, but wedding rings are not traditional in Islam, and generally aren’t worn in the Gulf countries. (And practicing Muslim men don’t wear gold, so even if they wear them, they’re silver.) But in some places, people take on foreign traditions, like wearing wedding rings or women taking their husbands’ last names.
I would also note that she’s wearing hijab. Some people would have us believe that all Iraqi women used to wear miniskirts and hate the hijab.

There’s already a lot of Saddam denial going on here. People need to be made to read Republic of Fear, by Kanan Makiya, one of the few surviving dissidents of the Saddam charnel house, and then line up to view the woodchippers Saddam routinely threw people into. His was a reign of terror no matter how much you hate the war.

Johanna, “His was a reign of terror no matter how much you hate the war”
Your accurate but really please credit the USA led by Donald Rumsfeld, the French, Great Britain and France for their great support and DISCREATION. Of course they were not overly concerned or displeased that almost a million lives were lost in the war with Iran.
President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States “could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran”, and that the United States “would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.” (Yep Ronnie’s the guy that called the contras in Nicaragua “freedom fighters” as illegally, Negroponte passed on the cash to these terrorists, bandits and criminals.)
The more things change the more they stay the same, of course in Iraq its definitely not about o-l either.

Iraq was a better place for everyone when Saddam was alive and in charge. The lives he took every year were the lesser evil of what the Chaos unleashed there by us consumes every day.
Sometimes, not doing something is the best choice possible.

As to the woman in hijab—sure a lot of women wore then just as many wear it in Turkey now. Riverbend has blogged very eloquently about the hijab issue in Iraq for those who are interested. She concludes that it isn’t too much fun, to say the least, to be forced to wear it because you fear for your life if you don’t. Before you had a choice. There’s a difference.