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I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam national |
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 Tuesday March 25, 2003 00:02 by Anti-War?
 I wanted to join the human shields in Baghdad because it was direct action which had a chance of bringing the anti-war movement to the forefront of world attention. I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam The Telegraph I wanted to join the human shields in Baghdad because it was direct action which had a chance of bringing the anti-war movement to the forefront of world attention. It was inspiring: the human shield volunteers were making a sacrifice for their political views - much more of a personal investment than going to a demonstration in Washington or London. It was simple - you get on the bus and you represent yourself. So that is exactly what I did on the morning of Saturday, January 25. I am a 23-year-old Jewish-American photographer living in Islington, north London. I had travelled in the Middle East before: as a student, I went to the Palestinian West Bank during the intifada. I also went to Afghanistan as a photographer for Newsweek. The human shields appealed to my anti-war stance, but by the time I had left Baghdad five weeks later my views had changed drastically. I wouldn't say that I was exactly pro-war - no, I am ambivalent - but I have a strong desire to see Saddam removed. We on the bus felt that we were sympathetic to the views of the Iraqi civilians, even though we didn't actually know any. The group was less interested in standing up for their rights than protesting against the US and UK governments. I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad - a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, "Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good". He looked at me with an expression of incredulity. As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam's regime. Until then I had only heard the President spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq's oil money went into Saddam's pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family. It scared the hell out of me. First I was thinking that maybe it was the secret police trying to trick me but later I got the impression that he wanted me to help him escape. I felt so bad. I told him: "Listen, I am just a schmuck from the United States, I am not with the UN, I'm not with the CIA - I just can't help you." Of course I had read reports that Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, but this was the real thing. Someone had explained it to me face to face. I told a few journalists who I knew. They said that this sort of thing often happened - spontaneous, emotional, and secretive outbursts imploring visitors to free them from Saddam's tyrannical Iraq. I became increasingly concerned about the way the Iraqi regime was restricting the movement of the shields, so a few days later I left Baghdad for Jordan by taxi with five others. Once over the border we felt comfortable enough to ask our driver what he felt about the regime and the threat of an aerial bombardment. "Don't you listen to Powell on Voice of America radio?" he said. "Of course the Americans don't want to bomb civilians. They want to bomb government and Saddam's palaces. We want America to bomb Saddam." We just sat, listening, our mouths open wide. Jake, one of the others, just kept saying, "Oh my God" as the driver described the horrors of the regime. Jake was so shocked at how naive he had been. We all were. It hadn't occurred to anyone that the Iraqis might actually be pro-war. The driver's most emphatic statement was: "All Iraqi people want this war." He seemed convinced that civilian casualties would be small; he had such enormous faith in the American war machine to follow through on its promises. Certainly more faith than any of us had. Perhaps the most crushing thing we learned was that most ordinary Iraqis thought Saddam Hussein had paid us to come to protest in Iraq. Although we explained that this was categorically not the case, I don't think he believed us. Later he asked me: "Really, how much did Saddam pay you to come?" It hit me on visceral and emotional levels: this was a real portrayal of Iraq life. After the first conversation, I completely rethought my view of the Iraqi situation. My understanding changed on intellectual, emotional, psychological levels. I remembered the experience of seeing Saddam's egomaniacal portraits everywhere for the past two weeks and tried to place myself in the shoes of someone who had been subjected to seeing them every day for the last 20 or so years. Last Thursday night I went to photograph the anti-war rally in Parliament Square. Thousands of people were shouting "No war" but without thinking about the implications for Iraqis. Some of them were drinking, dancing to Samba music and sparring with the police. It was as if the protesters were talking about a different country where the ruling government is perfectly acceptable. It really upset me. Anyone with half a brain must see that Saddam has to be taken out. It is extraordinarily ironic that the anti-war protesters are marching to defend a government which stops its people exercising that freedom. © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003. Terms & Conditions of reading.
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Comments (11 of 11)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11And thank you Mr. Conrad Black for the pay cheque ...
But now my worries are over .... I'm coming home in a body bag ... future generations of Americans will remember me and my comrades for securing a cheap and plentiful supply of oil for them ....
http://www.arabmediawatch.com/reports/reading/art2.htm
I think that the most powerful group in the world must be, not jewish bankers, WASPs, or oliarchs but....taxi drivers be it belfast, belgrade, beirut or baghdad there opinion is taken as the 'world of the street' the 'common man' that elusive truth.
One question for everyone what impression would a, say a Canadian journalist, have of Irish society and politics based of a journey to and from the airport with one of our more opinionated taxi drivers :)
C'mon bush regime change for the Irish, bomb St Lukes!
Sorry i don’t buy it Dan. You state you have traveled extensively around the middle east, and yet are naive to how a oppressive regimes work?.. Come on ,who are ya trying to cod - china, Cuba, most of middle east countries ALL have repressive government or dictator style population control.
Take those black and white glasses off for a moment, and realize that what most people are protesting about is the justification offered for this war, and the consequences during and AFTER the war is completed. ie very high potential for multiple civil wars(3 factions of Muslims with hatred going back generations, wars-within-wars(turkey-curds), expanded conflict, increase terror reprisals to US and conversion of Avg Muslims to extremists groups ie Flood of new recruits to Mr. Bin man’s crew.
They is something smelly in the state of Telegraph here.
skeptically yours,
Padar. (STL, USA unfortunately)
shock shock, awe awe - stop press!
Iraqis in 'don't like saddam' scandal!!!
fuckin hell, if i had known this a month ago then i'd have enlisted.
i have an iraqi friend, an exile who lives in dublin, whose uncle was executed on saddams orders, and his family forced to flee because before 1991 (ie before saddam was a baddie) his father had travelled extensively around europe. the family was considered a 'western threat' - he hates saddam more than you or i or any concerned citizen of the west can ever do - but does he support the US/UK war on iraq. hell no!
diatribe like this from that rag is not useful - and i'm assmunig put up by a cop havin a laugh
The way our war (sorry delete that I mean THE war) is going, I think that shamrock must have been cursed or something.
"Until then I had only heard the President spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq's oil money went into Saddam's pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family."
Jaysus didn't we have a cunt like that over in Ireland a long time ago ... what was his name now CJ Haughey if I remember correctly .....
Thank God he was overthrown by the County & Western faction of the Irish Baathist Party ....
In more recent times we have been blessed to live under the mildly repressive regime of a rat in an anorak ....
Let us be thankful for small mercies ....
I really wish the pro-war people would stop confusing pro-peace people with pro-Saddam people.
The protest is not against Tony and George trying to get rid of Saddam, it's all the other stuff, like the war, the death, the destruction, the aftermath, the hidden agendas, the hypocracy, the fact that they flew in the face of the U.N. which is supposed to be the authority in these things, the fact that George can get away with whatever the hell he likes, the precedent this will set regarding "preemptive strikes" (India can now invade Pakistan, possessors of mass destruction, using George's logic), the empire building, the violence (did I mention the death?).
WAR SHOULD BE USED AS A LAST RESORT ONLY.
But Bush has been looking for a fight since the whole thing started, showing us this war is *not* a last resort. There was no diplomacy, no discussion, no imagination, no debate.
People say, "The war is terrible, but Saddam must be overthrown". But why does it have to be one or the other? It's like me saying, "Burning down my house is terrible, but I have to get rid of that rat."
Ok, I'll admit it, I put this up to see how people would react. I'm anti-war myself and I've lost count of the number of demos I've been on both in Dublin and Shannon and I know all about the global elites various crimes eg genocide in Guatemala, East Timor, Vietnam etc. However I would like peoples opinions on Iraqis who are pro-war. Now I'm sure plenty of them are stooges and I'm well aware of corporate media-CIA propoganda but I've heard lots of Iraqis saying they are pro-war,and they can't all be CIA plants. I'm guessing they think it is the lesser of two evils, ie they know that the Yanks are after the oil and will try to install a puppet regime in Iraq and that thousands of innocent Iraqis will die, including themselves, but that the war might give the country a slim chance of a better life afterwards. Maybe they haven't realised the destruction the US will cause. Some Catholics in Belfast welcomed the British army in 1969 because they thought they were there to protect them from the Unionists, they soon realised that the army was there to replace the RUC/B Specials because the Catholics could no longer be controlled by these Unionist armed forces. It seems clear that most Kurds support the war even if they are afraid the US might allow the Turks to replace Saddams oppression in Kurdistan. I know there are lots of anti-war Iraqis but how do anti-war people here feel when they hear Iraqis saying they are pro-war, when pro-war media/politicians say Iraqis are pro-war what argument do we have against them if its true?
"Where Is Raeed?" is a blog coming out of Baghdad. The entry for Sunday, March 16, 2003 sheds some light on this issue.
No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying "come on bomb us" it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know, not all of us in any case.
The blog was mentioned yesterday on indymedia. There is some debate about whether it can be trusted. If it is a hoax, it's certainly an elaborate and convincing one.
Regarding the question of the Kurds, I wonder whether the Kurdish support for the war may be compared to the famous Irish protestant support for King William of Orange. Perhaps that's an unfair analogy, but the Kurds do stand to gain against their ethnic rivals, and, since their population resides in an autonomous zone, they will suffer less from the heavy bombardment witnessed elsewhere in the country.