Turn on your TV now. If you are in Britain ITV is the right station to watch – never mind missing Bob The Builder on BBC2 – just do it, OK? You have just missed the sight of a Baghdad citizen in traditional Arab dress hitching up his robe to make a universally comprehensible pelvic gesture towards a picture of Saddam Hussein, said picture held up by another guy who has just finished whacking it with his shoe – oops, no, he hasn’t finished, more whacking left to do. They don’t think he’s coming back.
I gather the minders didn’t turn up at the press hotel today; like the rest of the Iraqi state apparatus they have melted away. Now the whole of Baghdad looks like the world’s worst organised car boot sale. Horns honking, people smiling, waving, jumping, shouting and looting every official building in the city. I just saw a lady carrying off a vase almost bigger than she is. Chairs seem to be popular, as do tyres. One practical-minded lad has gone for a large bottle of olive oil. Heavens, is nothing sacred? One reporter said that the mob had nicked all the UN vehicles and were driving them around.
I tell you, it’s anarchy out there!
Only – ahem- not our sort of anarchy. I am a minarchist most of the time, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays I am an anarchist, and I am a little bit worried about our good name. I can certainly cheer on the guys who have doused a mural of Saddam with petrol and set it alight; deconstructive art, I call it. Nor do I begrudge most of the looters their spontaneous redistribution of the ruling kleptocracy’s wealth back to the people. But it’s not all innocent fun: reports speak of shops being cleaned out as well as palaces, and that will be hard for those whose wealth and lives were tied up in those shops. Expect also to see the pent-up anger of the people bursting out into mob violence which will harm the innocent as well as the guilty.
When a drug addict undergoes the “cold turkey” cure, he will sometimes go into convulsions. This is the anarchy of cold turkey.
Wow. These are astonishing days.
Watching the scenes of jubilation this morning and the way the liberating troops are being greeted, I find myself experiencing strangely mixed emotions. I am deeply, unashamedly, proud of the coalition’s forces and the restrained and civilised way they have behaved in all this and I am also delighted for the Iraqis. But still there’s a troubling sensation nagging away at the back of my mind. It’s that the greater fight has yet to come. Not with bin Laden, Iran or Syria – the one against a far deadlier enemy, our own corrosive, mendacious Left and its fellow travellers: the Lib-Dems, anti-globalisation clowns, pacifists, religious ‘leaders’, self-styled ecologists and the rest.
Yesterday, even as the British were securing Basra and the Americans preparing to liberate Baghdad, I heard a radio phone-in during which an Iraqi in exile was pouring scorn on the liberation, saying that the people would never welcome our forces. He was, of course, wrong but will he would admit that today? He will not. Nor will the intellectually bankrupt army of Left-liberal academics, ‘experts’, ‘analysts’, broadcasters, politicians and journalists which has done nothing but undermine our efforts to rid Iraq and the world of Saddam’s wickedness.
Nothing will make these people admit they were wrong about almost every single aspect of this war. They will simply move on to criticise something else, not even pausing to reflect on their streams of negativity, lies and hopelessly inaccurate predictions (“millions of dead” “armageddon unleashed in the Middle East”, “ecological catastrophe” “it’s all about oil”).
It wasn’t easy to defeat Saddam. How much more difficult will it be to rout those working from within to tear down the very systems which allowed us to defeat this evil?
Stop Press: Even as I write, a BBC reporter in Baghdad is “sounding a note of caution” as he opens the next phase of the war, predicting a tide of anti-US feeling from Iraqis, weeks more fighting, more civilian casualties. This relentless spew continues, even as Uday’s palace burns and the reporter’s voice-over is broadcast to pictures of Iraqis rejoicing, celebrating and proving him a fool.
G Cooper, they are already getting ready for May day
After watching the horrible sight of Iraqis re-enacting what happened in the Basra torture chambers any “peace” creep who hoved into view would have got a punch in the face.
I watched the same footage this morning. I think I would want to do more than piss on a picture of Saddam if I’d been subjected to his tyranny for any length of time as well.
But in reality I would lay low and see what happens over the next couple of weeks.
Yesterday I saw a photo online of a young Iraqi man giving a flower to a very pretty British soldier around Basra.
Lovely!
LOL, pointed out by Spindly at LGF.
Old guy beats poster with shoe
So we’ve freed tens of millions of oppressed people who feared for their very lives every single day. That’s what we do when we can here in the Anglosphere.
Sure, there’s work to be done, combat to be resloved. There’s even a chance that disaster could strike even though the odds for that recede ever further every day. But today there’s celebration.
Yeah, it’s not gonna last. No party ever does. The Iraqis are, pretty soon now, going to start to bitch and moan about this that and the other thing. Everybody does sooner or later.
Just remember: How much bitchin’ and moanin’ would they be doin’ if Saddam or his boys were still around?
James
The Iraqi shop owners will prosper beyond their wildest dreams. Their capital is not their possessions but their talent.
How do we defeat the leftist whackos? Democracy!
“How do we defeat the leftist whackos? Democracy!”
err… how come it’s not worked so far then?
One well might suspect that the shops were “targeted”, too, as more than a few were owned by active Ba’athist loyalists. The looters are probably being quite discriminating in their choice of shops.