I understand under normal conditions that looting, stealing and destroying public property is not a sign of anything positve. It just galls me that they would point to the looting in Basra and Baghdad as a sign of lawlessness and moral decay that the US has brought along with the violence and the mayhem (we just cant win for all the losing if you follow the Arab media)
The Iraqi people have been beat down, cheated, oppressed, humiliated, made scapegoats and used as human shields. They have been starved, deprived of water and medical treatment and medicine. They are fearful of their lives, of their family’s lives and of their friends lives. Many have been tortured and forced into the military of Baathist party.
The Iraqi people deserve any peice of wealth or necessity they can get their hands on. The regime owes it to them. It was from the Iraqi people that the regime stole from to buy their computers, chairs, gold faucets and marble floored palaces and TV equipment and vases. The US coalition do not have law and order duties as of yet. They still have a military function which is to get the last remnants of the Republican guard and the Fedayeen. So long as the Iraqi civilians dont hurt themselves or the soldiers (which is technically hurting themselves) they should be allowed this temporary moment of insanity.
Once they get over this euphoria, theyre gonna wonder what the heck are they going to do with a 5 foot baroque ass ugly vase and some office chairs or computers with no internet connection or the head of a 20 foot Saddam Statue with a hundred boot marks on it.
I watched a Gen. Renuart discussing WMD this morning - he said they would soon be getting to parts of Baghdad and Iraq where they expected to find information about WMD. I wonder if that information won’t get taken when people rush into buildings to steal computers and other office equipment.
From what I saw of the people coming out to celebrate their liberation from Saddam, theyve been very forthcoming about any information that would lead to the arrest of anyone associated with the regime. Paperwork would be gratefully handed to the military, some possibly already sorted and translated. Any computers belonging to military are pretty much useless to civilians and can be handed over as well.
But the best information about finding WoMD would be witnesses, Iraqi military officers, workers and scientists. The paper trail is slow and have to be verified. A single officer can walk to a hiding place and just point out how to get to them.
Certainly, witnesses are a very good way to get information. I thought I was footage of someone leaving a building with a computer monitor. It just made me wonder if they’d go home and turn it on to see what is on the computer.
The looting of the government buildings doesn’t bother me so much (revenge on the oppressing regime, etc.) but I heard reports on the radio as I was coming home (I can’t even remember if it was a German station or AFN) that there were Iraqis pulling up in fron of stores and hauling off truckloads of stuff. That bugs me.
“The Iraqi people deserve any peice of wealth or necessity they can get their hands on”
Looting won’t give the wealth to the “Iraqi people” but a band of thugs. Those palaces aren’t going anywhere and would probably be used by a future Iraqi government or their contents could be sold to fund government activities.
And once the looters get going who is to say they will stop at government offices? Why won’t they start looting private shops and homes or start extortion rackets?
People who get drunk after the big ball game (or war) and smash a few windows downtown get cut slack. People who ransack the hospital at gunpoint get cut no slack.
Armed, organized teams taking hospital beds and equipment? This is no ordinary looting, this looks to me like the entrepreneurial spirit–“for resale later”. I can understand Joe Blow snitching an armload of jeans from a smashed storefront window to hand out to his friends and family, or taking a few paintings and rugs from Saddam’s palace in the Martha Stewart spirit, but what’s Joe Blow gonna do with hospital beds and fixtures except sell them to somebody else?
If my shop survived twenty years of dictatorships, a war, twelve years of sanctions, another war, and then got looted, I think I’d be pretty pissed off, actually.
Theft is theft. The palaces can be understood, although I wouldn’t exactly condone it. The rest of it, it’s just thuggery. Just because the Iraqi people are liberated doesn’t make them all angels. I’m sure there are bastards in Iraq, just like there are in the rest of the world.
Actually, the first thing that comes to my mind are Fedayeen thugs dressed up as civilains going for whatever they can get while their former jobs evaporate. Masked Gunmen? The normal looters you see dont care if anyone sees their faces. Theyre just out for some stuff which dont really even make any sense. I mean what are you going to do with used office equipment? Organized looting sounds sinister and that smacks of the “Martyrs for Saddam”. Theyre the ones using human shields and threatening to kill families if men dont volunteer. It would be just like them to steal medical supplies from the people to help their own. Ordinary citizens dont have guns by order of Saddam remember?
You would think they’d realize that looting form each other, and particularly from hospitals (which they are now doing) was only gonna hurt them in the long run.
What happens when there is no longer anything left to steal ?
Wont take long to find out at the rate they are going.
I cant see how the current behaviour can be blamed on them having lived under an evil dictator.
What the ever-loving Shitting Jesus? Iraqis are probably the best armed civillian population outside of the Continental USA.
Like I said, the rest of the world has no monopoly on bastards. I was under the impression that most of the Fuyadeen were still fighting in the bits of Baghdad the street parties aren’t happening. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t, either.
I’d cut them a lot of slack, but not including the hospitals. It would be great if there were no looting, but totally unrealistic to expect the Iraqis not to loot. After what they’ve been thru, looting is about like us taking some post-it notes home from the office.
Order can be restored once the US figures out who and where are the remaining Fedayeen and Elite Republican guard are. Once they can isolate these thugs, then the next order of business is restoring order under military rule. Theres going to be obvious grumblings that exchanging one dictator for a foreign one wasnt that big of an improvement, but it has to be done. Iraq is technically still under war. Rounding up criminals isnt exactly the army’s strong suit.
Yes, unfortunately you can’t go from dictator to democracy in a week. This will be a really good test case for the US. Doubtless there are many in the world who will not give us credit no matter how well it turns out. Anyway, we need to be scrupulous beyond belief in this effort. Not sure Chalabi, as a long time Iraqi exile, is the right guy for the times. And I don’t honestly know much about him. I’ll be real interested to see how the future gov’t is set up wrt keeping the various factions more or less happy.
X~Slayer(ALE), so we’re agreed then, that the situation is uncertain, nobody really knows anything, and it’s as likely to be one as the other?
Alrighty then.
John Mace, really, I’d rather throw my “cut slack” behind the people being looted, on top of everything else, rather than the ones doing the looting. Call it looking out for the underdog, but nobody said that shopkeepers had it extra-easy during the last ten years.
I saw one of the CentCom briefings this week, when they talked about the looting in Basra. Burridge (the UK spokesman) commented that what you were seeing was the evidence of a power vacuum, in that the rigid controls on everyday life had been removed. At the time, he used is as support for the fact that Saddam’s power was crumbling, in that the local population no longer felt afraid of their previous “masters.”
Not sure that a long-term military rule is the answer though. Clearly what needs to happen is for the local people to be heavily involved in setting up their new infrastructure (including police) with some careful support from the military forces during the transition to indiginous Iraqi rule. (If that’s what X~Slayer(ALE) means by military rule, then I have no problem with that).
I’d hate to see Baghdad turned into Mogadishu, where the rule of law was replaced by the rule of warlords. First place I ever saw a “technical” as such.
I am concerned that the US policy seems to be to bring in a bunch of exiled Iraqis as the new ruling class – not sure how well these former citizens will be viewed by the locals. I have to compare some of them to the Cuban refugee fringe in Miami; not sure how Cubans who suffered under Castro would view thpse monkeys coming in to take control (but that’s a separate discussion).
I …agree. I would like to point out that the cite you provided obtains the same data as the Iraqi information minister.
I would like to reiterate that in my cite the US Marines estimated the strength of the Elite republican guard to be around 10,000 and they have not verified killing near that much. Their jurisdiction is Baghdad, if they are nit dead, they will ne in that area.
I surmise that the plans for US military rule would include security for the administrators, search and destroy missions to weed out the remaining republican guard and any foreign combatants, security for humanitarian aid and relief. I based this on what they are doing currently in Afghanistan. They dont seem to impose any outside political agenda on Kurzai’s govt, but they do protect him 24/7.
As for Chalabi being a long time exile being accepted by the locals, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the locals do. Mr Chalabi already expressed that he does not want top be part of any interim govt altho he is going among the iraqi people to get them used to a new kind of govt that doesnt include Saddam or the Ba’athist party.
