Did the invasion make things worse in Iraq?

A reporter who has watched the country unravel compares its hellish present to the nightmare it lived under Saddam.

By Nir Rosen

Read more: Politics, News

July 5, 2006 | Events in Iraq have long ceased to dominate the news. The trial of Saddam Hussein, which the media once seized on as yet another "defining moment," has been lost amid the daily repetition of car bombs, assassinations, the countless numbers of Iraqi and American dead. It is a sideshow for Iraqis, who are too busy trying to stay alive, and a bore for Americans, who have ceased to be interested in the war's many retroactive justifications. But the show in the Green Zone proceeds, and the well-groomed deposed dictator maintains his defiance, even hoping, it has been revealed, that the Americans will realize their mistake and reinstate him. He stands accused of bearing responsibility for 148 Shias killed in 1982, a paltry number compared to the cases to come, including a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. Safe from the chaos engulfing the rest of the country, the closest Saddam may come to experiencing the terror that now consumes Iraq is the murder of three of his lawyers.

Outside the Green Zone, any hopes for a better future in post-Saddam Iraq were dashed a long time ago. As early as the summer of 2003, Sunnis had been sufficiently alienated to long for their halcyon days under the Baathists, and since then the situation has deteriorated catastrophically. With Shia death squads torturing and executing Sunnis, Sunni insurgents killing Shia, criminal gangs running rampant and a vicious civil war raging, people frequently ask me: Are things worse for Iraqis now than they were under the man who now stands in the dock?

I don't know the answer to that question. But the very fact that it can legitimately be asked is horrifying. For Saddam's Iraq deserved the name given it by the exiled writer Kanan Makiya: "Republic of Fear." I began to learn why soon after I arrived in the country in April 2003.

He picked me up in his taxi on a busy street, that first spring in Baghdad. In Iraq you never know who will stop for you when you hail a cab. Most taxis were orange and white "Brazili" Volkswagens made in Brazil. When you asked them what the fare was they would disingenuously insist, "No, it's on me." When you insisted on paying and asked for a price they would say, "As you wish," knowing you would be too uncomfortable to pay them what you really wished, and in case you did, they would say, "No, that's too little." Taxi drivers were my oracles in Iraq. They knew all the rumors, more often false than true, they were my spies, they knew what explosion had happened in what neighborhood, what neighborhood was off limits thanks to the resistance, the Americans or some other militia. And like their colleagues throughout the world, they were always eager to talk.

My driver was a thin middle-aged man, olive-toned, wiry, bony and angular. The thick hair on his arms was gray, as were his grizzled cheeks and bushy mustache. He had large eyes, sunken and hidden beneath the shadow of his brows. I felt like striking a conversation. "How are things in Baghdad?" Driving, he hung his arm straight out of the window and gazed at it silently as I waited for an answer. Without uttering a word or demonstrating that he had even heard the question, he stared ahead expressionless. Worried, I realized his jaws were tightly clenched and his eyes were glazing. Anxiously I watched a tear swell and burst off his eyelashes, slowly making its way down his cheek. I resisted the urge to reach over and wipe it for him. "I'm sorry," I said, "did somebody from your family die?"

He struggled to answer me. In a controlled whisper, he said, "We all died."

In those first weeks, I began to learn what he meant. I was present when family members exhumed the corpses of loved ones killed by Saddam. I even stumbled upon my own treasure trove of documents in an abandoned police station, papers that revealed the reality of life under the dictator. But then new horrors took center stage, pushing the old ones aside.

When I arrived, Iraq's walls were already covered with leaflets and banners announcing the deaths of "martyrs." At first, the walls bore the names of those killed by the liberating American military, but soon there were new martyrs, victims of the nihilistic anarchy spreading in the country -- the faudha, or chaos, as Iraqis called it. These Iraqis were killed by the criminal violence that sprang up in the power vacuum, and then by the insurgents -- Sunni men seeking to kill the "Crusaders and Jews" who were occupying Iraq. Others were killed by the aggressive U.S. military that was now occupying them.

I spent nearly three years writing about the new victims, those killed under the occupation or during the civil wars being fought in Iraq. In my focus on Iraq's newest victims, I forgot about Saddam's victims.

The trial of Saddam reminded me of the files I looted from that security station, and of my notes from those first few weeks, which I had forgotten. And as the people of Iraq endure yet another nightmare -- one the United States unlocked -- it seems important to remember them.

Abdel Satar al Musawi's dark brown decomposed remains lay on the ground above his former grave. His older brothers sat beside them, holding them and crying. Although he was arrested in 1998 and killed in 2001, they had only learned of his death three days before. They had come to claim his body. "His crime was loving freedom," said his friend Abdel Karim, who had come to find his own brother.

I had only been in Iraq a few weeks, beginning my career as a journalist. I had opposed the war, not because of illusions I had about Saddam's brutality, but because I knew that helping the Iraqi people was not on the Bush administration's agenda, and nothing good would come of war. It was simple to me: A war predicated on lies was wrong, and would subvert democracy at home as well as international law. In the early days of the war, the magazine that sent me asked me if I wanted a gas mask or a suit to protect me from chemical weapons. I scoffed at the need, explaining that I did not believe Iraq had those weapons anymore. I had come to Iraq to give a voice to Iraqis, and this meant restraining my views, and listening to Iraqis. As Iraqis rubbed their eyes and awoke to the new reality in a mix of shock, depression and euphoria, I was as confused as they were, and nothing seemed black-and-white.

With the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of thousands of political prisoners were finally being revealed to their families. Iraqi families could find the files on their loved ones and discover their fate. More often than not, the news was not good.

Several dozen members of the al Musawi family had come to claim four of their brethren from the Karkh cemetery in Haswa, outside of Baghdad and near the Abu Ghraib prison, where many of Saddam's political prisoners were murdered. All four were cousins: Abdel Sattar al Musawi, born in 1966, from the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, married with two children; Salah Hadi al Musawi, born in 1974, from Baghdad's Thawra neighborhood; Salah Hasan al Musawi, born in 1971 and also from Thawra; and Saad Qasim al Musawi, born in 1967, from Thawra, married with six children. A family friend, Qasim Ahmad al Maliki, born in 1966 and also from Thawra, married with no children, was also buried in the cemetery. All were killed in 2001.

"They were political prisoners," a friend of the al Musawis explained, "killed for no reason. There was no justice, no court, no defense."

Next page: Amid wails of "my brother!" the body was wrapped in a white cloth