Saddam Has the Last Laugh (by Robert Scheer for Truthdig)

[marmar]

Saddam Has the Last Laugh



Posted on Mar 20, 2007

By Robert Scheer

Yep, you did it, George—mission impossible accomplished. Unbelievably, four years of a bungled occupation have managed to make Saddam Hussein’s tyranny look good in comparison with “liberated Iraq.”

At least, that is the view of the Iraqi weightlifter made famous through a video of him taking a sledgehammer to Saddam Hussein’s statue. “I really regret bringing down the statue,” Kadhim al-Jubouri said on British television this week. “The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day.”

That’s the judgment of a man who spent nine years in Hussein’s jails, and, unfortunately, it is one shared by a majority of his countrymen, according to an authoritative poll sponsored jointly by ABC, BBC and USA Today: Only 38 percent of Iraqis believe that the country is better off today than under Hussein, while nearly four out of five oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.

Even more disturbing is that 51 percent of Iraqis think it is OK to attack coalition troops—triple the number that thought that way in a 2004 survey. Square that with our president’s assurances, offered since the first month of this unnecessary adventure, that the insurgency represents a small handful of terrorists. While most of the antipathy is registered among Sunnis, 94 percent of whom favor attacks on coalition forces, and by only 7 percent of Kurds, a surprising 35 percent of Shiites endorse that sort of violence. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070320_scheer_iraq_poll/