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UMM QASR, Iraq ·
It's hard to smile
when there's no water. It's hard to applaud when you're frightened.
It's hard to say, "Thank you for liberating me," when liberation
has meant that looters have ransacked everything from the
grain silos to the local school, where they even took away
the blackboard.
That was what I found when spending the day here
in Umm Qasr and its hospital, in southern Iraq.
Umm Qasr was the first town liberated by
coalition forces. But 20 days into the war, it is without running water,
security or adequate food supplies. I went in with a Kuwaiti relief
team, who, taking pity on the Iraqis, tossed out
extra food from a bus window
as we left. The Umm Qasr townsfolk scrambled after that food like pigeons
jostling for bread crumbs in a park.
This was a scene of humiliation, not liberation. We must do better.
I am sure we will, as more relief crews arrive. But this scene explained
to me why, even here in the anti-Saddam Shia heartland of southern
Iraq, no one is giving U.S. troops a standing ovation.
Applause? When I asked Lt. Col. Richard Murphy, part of the U.S.
relief operation, how Iraqis were greeting his men, he answered bluntly
and
honestly: "I have not detected any overt hostility."
Overt hostility? We've gone from expecting applause to being relieved
that there is no overt hostility. And we've been here only 20 days.
As I said, I'm certain things will improve with time. But for now,
America
has broken the old order -- Saddam's regime -- but it has yet to put
in place a new order, and the vacuum is being filled in too many places
by looters, thugs, chaos, thirst, hunger and insecurity. A particular
problem here in the south is the fact that British troops have still
not totally secured Basra, the regional center. Without free access
to Basra, the whole southern economy is stalled.
It would be idiotic to ask Iraqis here how they feel about politics.
They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature. When I asked
Dr. Safaa Khalaf at Umm Qasr Hospital why the reception for U.S.
forces had been so muted, he answered: "Many people here have sons
who were soldiers. They were forced to join the army. Many people
lost their sons.
They are angry from the war. Since the war, no water, no food, no
electricity. We have not had water for washing or drinking for five
days. There is
no law, no policeman to arrest people. I don't see yet the American
reign of running the country."
The scene at Umm Qasr Hospital is tragic. A woman who delivered a baby
an hour earlier is limping home, and her mother has the baby tucked
under her black robe. An old orange Dodge speeds up and a malnourished
teenage
boy moans on the back seat. A little kid is playing with an X-ray film
of someone's limb. In the hospital lab, the sink is piled with bloody
test tubes, waiting to be washed when the water comes back on.
What is striking, though, is that after people get through complaining
to you about their situation, they each seem to have a story about
a family member or cousin who was arbitrarily jailed or killed by Saddam's
thugs. They are truly glad to be rid of him. America did good in doing
that, so now we must build a peace we can be equally proud of.
But this is such a broken land. Its spirit was broken by Saddam long
before we arrived, and now, because of this war, its major cities
and iron-fisted order are being broken as well. Killing Saddam alone
will
not bring America the thank-you's it expects, because Iraqis are
not yet feeling free. Only replacing Saddam's order with a better
order
will do that. "There is no freedom because there is no security," said
Dr. Mohammed al-Mansuri, the hospital's director.
We are so caught up with our own story of "America's liberation of Iraq," and
the Arab TV networks are so caught up with their own story of "America's
occupation of Iraq," that everyone seems to have lost sight of the
real lives of Iraqis.
"We are lost," said Zakiya Jassim, a hospital maintenance worker. "The situation
is getting worse. I don't care about Saddam. He is far away. I want my country
to be normal."
America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary
responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn't flow, if the
food doesn't arrive,
if the rains don't come and if the sun doesn't shine, it's now America's
fault. We'd better get used to it, we'd better make things right, we'd
better do it soon, and we'd better get all the help we can get.
Thomas L. Friedman is the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary.
Write to him at The New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036.
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