Award-winning Observer corespondent Julie Flint has just returned from
Iraq. Her report in the Obs this Sunday was by no means entirely
supportive of the invasion, liberation and occupation, but is at least
free of the taint of guilt, cant and thoughtless anti-Americanism.

Please read, especially if you're an American, with doubts about the
moral purpose of the invasion:

Julie Flint
Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer <http://www.observer.co.uk>

Half a century ago, in a blistering denunciation of the Korean war,
the British war correspondent Reginald Thompson wrote: 'It was clear
that there was something profoundly disturbing about this campaign and
something profoundly disturbing about its commander-in-chief.'
Thompson's words could equally well apply to the US-led campaign in
Iraq and its commander-in-chief: George W. Bush, head of a cabal that
seeks to install a client regime in Iraq as a first step to bringing
the region under American-Israeli control.

As last week's report by the Iraqi Survey Group makes clear, the
stated rationale for the Anglo-American war - destruction of Saddam
Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - was at best exaggerated and at
worst plain wrong. There was a case for deposing Saddam, the Pol Pot
of the Arab world, but it was not the case made by George Bush and
Tony Blair. They could have pleaded Saddam's past use of WMD against
his own people; the present threat, from his security services, to
every Iraqi man, woman and child; the future threat from WMD, and
biological weapons in particular, for, as the ISG report also makes
clear, Saddam was concealing work on two BW agents and conducting new
research into two others. But they didn't. Their unilateral war may
make Iraq more safe, but the wider world less so. Disturbing, indeed.

But there is something disturbing, too, about the way that post-war
Iraq has been portrayed. Visceral distrust of Bush/Blair has created a
disregard both for fact and for the victims of Saddam. Arab
commentators have had no shame in urging Iraqis, exhausted by three
wars and more than a decade of sanctions, to launch a new war 'of
liberation' against their liberators. Western commentators have
luxuriated in the setbacks of the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), as if wishing failure upon it - and by extension, the Iraqi
people.

Disaster has been prophesied, self-servingly, at every turn: the war
would be long (it wasn't, and most Iraqis had no direct experience of
it); tens of thousands would die in the battle for Baghdad (they
didn't); there would be a fully-fledged humanitarian disaster (there
wasn't). Now, we are told, Iraqis fear the very real prospect of civil
war. Not those I know. Not yet. Nor those polled in Baghdad last month
by Gallup: 62 per cent thought getting rid of Saddam was worth the
suffering they've endured; 67 per cent thought their lives will be
better five years from now.

From the very beginning, the anti-war lobby has refused to listen to
those Iraqis who supported war over continued tyranny. Banners saying
'Freedom for Iraq' were confiscated at anti-war rallies and
photographs of Halabja, where Saddam gassed 5,000 Kurdish civilians,
were seized. No voice was given to people such as Freshta Raper, who
lost 21 relatives in Halabja and wanted to ask: 'How many of you have
asked an Iraqi mother how she felt when forced to watch her son being
executed? How many know that these mothers had to applaud as their
sons died? What is more moral: freeing an oppressed, brutalised people
from a vicious tyrant or allowing millions to continue suffering
indefinitely?'
In the summer I spent more than a month in Iraq. What I found did not
correspond to what was being reported - most crucially, that the
liberators were already widely denounced as occupiers. As a rule, that
simply wasn't true.

In Baghdad, where US forces had permitted looting (although not as
much as reported) and where security and services were virtually
non-existent, attitudes towards the Americans were mixed. But even in
Baghdad, even with Saddam and his sons still at large, the sense of
relief at the toppling of the regime was palpable.

A university lecturer living above a bakery where colleagues were
burned alive told me: 'I feel as if I have been born again. Iraq was a
prison above ground and a mass grave beneath it.'

Outside Baghdad, in the Shia south, the mood was overwhelmingly
upbeat. In Basra, ordinary people gave the thumbs-up at the mere sight
of a Brit. In Najaf, a waiter blew kisses.

The occupying forces admittedly got off to a wretched start. In
stressing stability, the first US administrator, General Jay Garner,
opened the doors of the new Iraq to discredited servants of the old
Iraq. His successor, Paul Bremer, went to the opposite extreme,
disbanding the entire Iraqi army and in so doing making enemies of
half a million serving and retired officers and NCOs.

But Bremer has belatedly accepted the need for greater reliance on
Iraqis in the field of security - more than 55,000 are now enrolled in
law-enforcement services - and has set about transforming a bankrupt
economy burdened with a Stalinist industrial structure and three
decades of mismanagement.

He has yet to announce a timetable for restoring sovereignty to
Iraqis. But he has ushered in an Iraqi governing council that embraces
a range of opinion unequalled in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and an
Iraqi cabinet that is not without virtue. 'These are people who have
been to Harvard, Oxford and MIT... educated people!' says an Iraqi
archaeologist who opposed the war. 'Some of Saddam's Ministers hadn't
got beyond primary school.' All Iraqi cities and 85 per cent of towns
have fully functioning municipalities. The nine district councils of
Baghdad that form the city council meet regularly and appear to work
harmoniously.

'The degree of transparency and cooperation in the work of the council
is impressive,' says Rend Rahim Francke of the Iraq Foundation, a
non-governmental organisation working for democracy and human rights.
'Self-government, long advocated for Iraq, appears to be working well
when put into practice.'
For the first time in almost half a century, Iraq has no executions,
no political prisoners, no torture and almost no limits on freedom of
expression. Having a satellite receiver no longer means imprisonment
or even death. There are almost 200 newspapers and magazines that
require no police permit and suffer no censorship, and more than 70
political parties and dozens of NGOs. Old professional associations
have held elections and new associations have sprung up. People can
demonstrate freely - and do.

Unemployment is still a huge problem, but more people have jobs and
salaries have risen both for qualified people seeking work in the
private sector and for civil servants. Shops are overflowing with
imported goods. Food prices are lower thanin Saddam's last years. In
Baghdad, the electricity is on more often than off. (In Lebanon, that
took years to achieve.) More Iraqi policemen are on the streets,
directing traffic, guarding buildings and enforcing the law.
Approximately 85 per cent of primary and secondary schools have
reopened. Outside Baghdad, security and services are better and crime
is lower.

Western reporters detail, quite properly, the misdeeds, the crimes
even, of the occupying forces. But this is only part of the story.
'The behaviour of US occupation troops has indeed at times been
unacceptable, but on many more occasions it has been innocuous,' says
Mustafa Alrawi, managing editor of English-language weekly Iraq Today.
One line being peddled today is that there is growing popular support
for a war of resistance against the CPA and Iraqis working with it.
The number of violent deaths is unacceptable - among Americans and
Iraqis alike - but this doesn't mean that there is a popular Iraqi
resistance.

Iraq is not Vietnam. At the root of the current instability are the
very people most Iraqis reject - the remnants of Saddam's Baath party,
and extremists flooding in from neighbouring countries in hope of
establishing religious rule. They, not the liberators/occupiers, are
the real threat to peace in Iraq and stability in the wider region
today.