Riverbend on the anniversary

Riverbend (from Baghdad) hasn’t been posting a lot recently on her blog. But when she writes, it is always so well and so movingly done that it’s worth waiting for.
Here’s what she was writing yesterday evening about the first anniversary of the “liberation”:

where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of ‘liberators’ and ‘Free Iraqi Fighters’; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we’ve seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspections– journalists are being killed ‘accidentally’ and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.
But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that terrorism isn’t actually the act of creating terror. It isn’t the act of killing innocent people and frightening others– no, you see, that’s called a ‘liberation’. It doesn’t matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you’re not a terrorist- you’re a liberator.
The war on terror is a joke– Madrid was proof of that last week– Iraq is proof of that everyday.
I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don’t.

And while we’re on the subject of looting, I want to add in a note about my own frustration with all these reports of “so many hundreds, or thousands, of schools having been rebuilt by the US and coalition forces”.
Before the US assault on the country, just about all those schools were functioning. (Iraq is not Afghanistan, after all. Males and females have both been well educated for a couple of generations there.) A small number of the schools got damaged during the fighting of March-April last year– but the much larger number were ransacked and damaged during the looting that followed the US “victory”. Preventing any such looting was wholly the responsibility of the occupying forces: one they notably failed to exercise.
So for the US spokespeople to crow about how many schools etc they have renovated, and to make it seem like some kind of an achievement, is getting things backways on. That damage should never have been allowed in the first place. Rumsfeld should have planned properly for the post-combat phase. But he failed to. It is quite dishonest of him and his minions to claim any “credit” for having renovated a proportion of those ransacked classrooms in the months since then.
It’s like trying to claim “credit” for having (partially) stopped beating one’s wife…