frslblg-0033UScomments

These baghdadi citizens, a housewife, a teenager, still little adapted to democracy, senselessly, as if in a panic walk through Baghdad's traffic congestion, on July 1st.
Baghdad, July 7, 2006

Are they unaware that democracy is sovereignty at last given to citizens? This is why every neighborhood of Baghdad is now handed over to a citizen who freely controls it, assisted by a legion (scoffing people call it a "mob", pooh!) of volunteers. That "emir" "dispenses justice" and "presides over prayer" in his neighborhood, decides "in everyone's interest" on the goods to be allowed to enter or pass via the neighborhood and the fees to be paid to him for them, on the persons allowed to cross the neighborhood, and on who may live here and who shall stop living here, etc. In the capital city, all the neighborhoods taken together, there are about 1,000 "sentences enforced" a month (scoffing people say "murders", bah!) let alone the "shelterings" (scoffing people call them "abductions", pooh!). No one knows what happens elsewhere in the country, for the circulation of news has been abolished so that the abolition of Saddam Hussein's censorship may be assured in full. The Iraqi government that the Americans have had voted for are useless, because a happy people have no need for government. The government have issued an offer of amnesty to every citizen who, because he had felt way too free to show his opinion, has "killed less than 2.500 people" (in reading this four-digit number I have sudden nervous mirth). So you are a murderer only with 2,501 or more corpses. Has any national community in History ever been able to boast such freedom and broadmindedness?
Fortunately, "bloodthirsty potentate" Saddam Hussein, who in his day had given rise to a "peace, but a tyrannical one," in the country until Zorro showed up and unshackled the nation's frustrated energy, will be sentenced and hanged. His more than suspect moderation—only a few hundreds of people placed under arrest and (on average) a few dozens of executions a year—brings the proof that a dangerous liberticide used to oppress Iraq, where all you want to do you do freely now, at last.
"Al-Bayyan Al-Jadidah", a Baghdad daily, "defeatist and undemocratic" (according to a US Army news bulletin), reports that que "The country is being on the verge of ruin and becoming rife with violence and assassination [...] Iraq is now a jungle where the weak have fallen prey of the strong and fraternity is disintegrating into sectarian fights [...] This is the result of the Americans and Britons' military intervention [...]"