Last year’s killings of Uday and Qusay Hussein in a gunfight with US soldiers came as good news to many Iraqis. The Hussein brothers were ruthless brutes. There were few Iraqis who mourned them
There were just about as many reasons to feel relieved by their deaths as there were Iraqis who lost a loved one to Qusay’s secret police. And then there were the torture chambers in the basement of the Olympic Stadium in Baghdad, to which Uday would send Iraqi athletes who didn’t match his expectations.
Over a year after an American led invasion deposed Saddam Hussein’s government, Iraqis can compete in the Olympics without fearing torture–for losing in the Olympics–on going back to Iraq. The Iraqi athletes received a standing ovation at the Opening Ceremony for the Olympic Games, which Greece is hosting this season.
Greece is of course the country that provided us with the word “democracy”. For George Bush, ignoring all the symbolism would have just been shame foolish, as the old saw goes in Texas (and probably Tennessee). His re-election campaign has come out with an ad defending his administration’s foreign policy, citing the participation of Iraqi and Afghani athletes in the Olympics as evidence that “Freedom is spreading throughout the world.”
“And this Olympics”, continues the ad, “there will be two more free nations and two less terrorist nations.”
Bush may yet evolve into a football hooligan, after announcing his plan to attend an upcoming soccer match to cheer on the magnificent Iraqi soccer team, which humbled Portugal in a 4-2 win. The Iraqis are doing so well that they may deny Bush the opportunity to remind them that, thanks to his administration, they have nothing to fear on returning to Iraq.
However, Bush must be relying again on Ahmed Chalabi if he thinks that the Iraqi team will greet him with cheers and bouquets. For instance, midfielder Ahmed Manajid would like to know how Bush will ” meet his God having slaughtered so many”, a rather grim contingency that the CIA evidently withheld in their briefings to the Evangelical President.
Team coach Adnan Hamad probably did not see Bush’s campaign ad, but he notes: “We don’t have freedom in Iraq. We have an occupying force…Freedom is just a word for the media.”
“The American army,” said the excellent coach, “has killed so many people in Iraq.”
Mark Clark, the team’s British manager, was livid at the press. He rebuked the media for soliciting answers that they “knew would be negative”, which is not what good journalists in the States are supposed to do. And the Iraqi soccer team? Clark’s tone is of forbearing condescension, as if he were a chimp handler apologizing for his critter’s loose bladder on the Late Night Show: “They are not very sophisticated politically.” The cameras shouldn’t have agitated the attraction. They’re “naive”, people should know. But Clark is “disappointed” with the team.
Salih Sadir, from Najaf, scored a goal against Portugal. “Its fantastic, isn’t it?”, gushed Bush of the soccer team’s presence in the Olympics, after they defeated Portugal. Sadir, however, is not exulting at the presence of the US in Iraq. He wants the Americans out of his city, which has witnessed months of fighting between American soldiers and militia men loyal to Muqtada Al-Sadir. “We don’t wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away.”
Manajid is from Fallujah. His cousin was killed by American soldiers. If he weren’t playing in the Olympics, he says that he would “for sure” take up arms against the occupation. He asks: “If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they’re terrorists?”
No. Perhaps “Baahthists”, and “Al-Kayduh”, according to the script. The truth is that not even the US army knows exactly who they’re facing in Iraq.
During Paul Wolfowitz’s visit to Iraq, where he narrowly avoided an assassination, he asked a general to tell him the identity of the “insurgents”. The general responded: “we don’t have the intelligence to lay this out on a chart.”
The canting columnist, David Ignatius, was present, and he found the general’s honesty “chilling.” A shame, for Wolfowitz, rightly considered the architect of Bush’s foreign policy, “bleeds” for the Iraqis’ oppression; Wolfowitz “dreams of liberating” them. Witness the second coming of Salahudin, who will yet liberate Jerusalem from the shackles of UN Resolutions 242 and 194. But for some reason, an Iraqi naively mistook Wolfowitz for Saddam. Now, if this Iraqi were captured, take a guess where he would have been imprisoned, and who would have been “bleeding” for whom.
The Iraqi soccer players are “politically sophisticated”– thanks Mr. Clark– and deserve all the praise for their splendid performance. They inspire. But really, they’re not “fantastic”–not in the vein of the Mr. Kurtzes in Washington who would have us Arabs bowing to their redeeming idea.
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