As a European that has spent several years in the Arab world, my political discussions are always on two fronts: When I talk to Westerners, I explain and justify the Arab-Muslim position; when I talk to Arabs, I do likewise about the Western stand. It is an interesting intellectual exercise, but I often feel caught in the middle, perpetually defending the other side no matter who I am talking to. It is not that I’m trying to be a moderate, I don’t think that’s intellectually honest. It’s just that I feel we should always try to see both sides of the picture.

On the issue of Iraq we could sum up the positions as follows: Firstly those, mostly Western pacifists, who oppose a war launched under false pretences to hide economic interests. Nobody can argue against that, but we can ask them where they were during the 12 years of embargo, when half a million Iraqi children died as the consequence of a criminal blockade imposed by the Americans and used as propaganda by a Saddam Hussein while he and his cronies continued to enjoy the high life with articles smuggled in from neighbouring countries. Not to mention the last 35 years, when the Ba’athist regime was torturing to death hundreds of thousands of political opponents or gassing the Kurds and the Iranians.

The second group are my friends in Arab world, who perceived the collapse of that regime as a humiliation. For them, Saddam Hussein was a champion of the Arab nation and a defender of the Palestinian cause (he did grant the Palestinians some financial and moral support, cynics would say for propagandistic purposes). A common remark amongst the defenders of this stance is that the Iraqis (whom the caliph Ali characterised in a famous and often-quoted speech as “the people of hypocrisy and division”) only understand the language of force and are best ruled by merciless leaders such as Al-Hajjaj (a murderous governor from the Umayyad period) or Saddam Hussein.

For both groups, the opposition is the legitimate resistance of an occupied people; some go as far as to draw parallelisms with the situation in Palestine. However, when I listened to debates on Arabic radio in the course of the last few months I could not help but noticing that, contrary to the other contributors, the Iraqis who phoned in did not share either of the opinions expressed above and seemed to regard the war and the occupation as a lesser evil. It was partly to find out whether they where representative of the Iraqi people that I recently visited that country. In this article I talk about what I’ve heard the Iraqis say in their houses, the markets, the collective taxis… The voices of a people tired after decades of war and blockade and overwhelmed by a very unstable situation.

Let’s start by saying that the occupation is rather well tolerated by the Iraqis themselves. Many even reject outright the word “occupation” and prefer to talk of “a transitional period”. My first experience of this fact was at the border, where we were help up for over two hours when American soldiers closed it alleging an unspecified security threat. For me, the situation brought back unpleasant memories of the arbitrary measures taken by the Israeli army in the occupied territories, but I was soon explained that “this is a very rare occurrence, and there must be a legitimate reason”. All in all, the dozens if not hundreds of people waiting there seemed remarkably patient.

In the towns, the occupation is surprisingly unobtrusive. Apart from a few patrols, Baghdad looks like a normal Arab town going around its usual business (although with more than the usual share of ruined buildings). It is true that I only visited briefly the areas where the resistance operates and the American presence is more aggressive, and I am aware that abuses have been committed there. However, these cannot be compared to the behaviour of the previous regime. Heard on a bus: “They moan that the (American) soldiers enter their houses and see their women unveiled, and that this is an affront to their honour; when Uday and the mukhabarat (secret police) were kidnapping and raping our daughters nobody dared open their mouths”.

In effect, the brutality of the previous regime cannot be overstated. The Arab satellite channel Al-Arabia (not known for its pro-American sympathies) recently broadcast the documentary “The family”, an account of the reign of Saddam and his relatives. Apart from amputated ears and tongues, the film showed the nightmarish vision of dozens of people being beaten to death. After the rebellion (the Iraqis call it Intifada) that followed the Second Gulf War, which has severely repressed by Saddam’s Republican Guard while the Americans and his allies looked the other way, the security forces leaked a film showing people being cut to pieces or cooked alive; hundreds of thousands were savagely massacred.

However, a common complain of the Iraqis is that the most basic services are yet to be restored: rubbish piles up on the street, the electricity is cut off daily for hours at a time and the telephone lines are only being repaired very slowly. In a country with a centralised economy and a ubiquitous state, where a large percentage of the population worked as government employees, many have lost their jobs overnight and do not know where the next meal is coming from. The ministers in the interim government contend that their coffers are empty; all the funds were stolen by the previous government on the run. This is one of the keys to the problem: the Americans and their allies are fighting one of the richest opposition movements in history.

The people’s main concern, apart from putting food on their tables, is the high level of criminality, brought about by the collapse of the old regime and the inefficiency of the coalition forces to control the situation. Shops and government offices have been pillaged and burnt, what sounds like random shooting can be heard every night, and murders and kidnappings have become quite common. Unfortunately, the police force that the interim government is trying to set up is a favourite target of the resistance. One of the weaknesses of those who demand an early end to the occupation is that they also condemn the Iraqi police as “collaborators”; whoever, in the absence of a local police force the occupation can only perpetuate itself to prevent total chaos.

The most usual expression I’ve heard to refer to the resistance is “the Arabs” (i.e. not Iraqis), “the Wahhabites” (members of a radical Islamic sect), even “the terrorists”. The Iraqis (at least in Baghdad, where I spent most of the time, and with no perceivable difference between Sunni and Shiite, Arab or Kurdish) seem to agree that there are two kinds of opposition: The first are the Iraqi beneficiaries of the previous regime, who worked in one of the largest and most brutal security apparatus in history and were paid handsomely for their services: while most government employees’ salaries were around 3 dollars a month, they were receiving thousands. They concentrate on the famous “Sunni triangle”, especially around the town of Al-Ramadi.

The second kind of resistance is made up of volunteers from the Muslim world; it is thought that many belong to Al-Qaeda or its local subsidiaries (such as Ansar Al-Islam). These fanatics, many of them veterans of Afghanistan or Chechnya, are convinced that they are fighting for Islam and do not hesitate to die because, as martyrs, they think they will go straight to heaven. They are the perpetrators of the suicide operations that kill American soldiers, UN personnel, NGO workers and Iraqi policemen together with any innocent bystanders. One of their main aims seems to be to foment a civil war in the country in order to have a base for their activities, as was (and, to a certain extent, continues to be) the case in Afghanistan.

In a statement found recently and attributed to Az-Zarqawi, thought to be one of the leader of the Ansar al-Islam, the Iraqi Shiites (around 60% of the population) are described as “infidels”, the Sunnis as “misguided” (term used in the Koran to refer to those who do not follow the path to salvation) and the Kurds as “traitors”. Many important Shiite figures have been murdered, in what many see as an attempt to provoke them to retaliate. However, the Iraqis I have spoken reject all talk of sectarian differences; furthermore, the most respected figure of post-war Iraq, the moderate Shiite cleric Ayatollah As-Sistani, refuses the idea that the Iraqi Sunnites are behind the murders, defends the separation of religion and politics and rejects the setting up of an Islamic Shiite republic modelled on Iran.

In addition, we should not forget the interests of the neighbouring countries, especially those with Kurdish minorities, who cannot allow the setting up of any kind of freely elected, federal government. Many Iraqis accuse them of allowing the infiltration of Al-Qaeda members and other Islamic extremists, for two main reasons: a fanatic out of their country is one fanatic less to worry about, and the destabilisation of Iraq is the best way to prevent the creation of a democratic government which could inspire their own populations to ask for a similar development in their countries.

So this is the situation as I saw it. The analysis may be accused of being too simplistic, but to my mind it is rather accurate. My aim by sharing it is to make people reflect, to invite them question what they believe. And, above all, to raise my voice on behalf of a people who have suffered tremendously while the West pretended not to know what was going on because, as the old American adage goes, Saddam was “a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch”. We have a chance to helping the Iraqis build a better future. They cannot do it on their own, because too many forces conspire against them. That is why we cannot give in to populist demands to “Bring the boys back home”. If armies can be used as a force for good, then we have a responsability to do just that. Otherwise, what is the point of having them?

Ana Soage