By Abbas S. Mehdi
This is what Iraq's liberation looks like to me right now: a woman bleeding to death on a public highway, unable to get help because coalition forces have blocked the road while looking for insurgents. A large room in a hospital where corpses are laid at random on a dirty floor, some of them uncovered, with nothing to identify them, a scene of horror for those trying to find the bodies of their loved ones.
The woman is my younger sister. She was involved in a car accident on the road between Najaf and Baghdad, traveling home after visiting my parents. When she finally reached the hospital in Baghdad after being stuck on the road for more than six hours, no one could do much for her, and no one was able to get in touch with her family. The hospital was overwhelmed and disorganized, and telephone lines were down.
My parents didn't find out what had happened to their daughter until two days after her death. When my other sisters finally got to the hospital, the staff didn't even know exactly where her body was. They were directed to a large room full of corpses.
"Do you remember when we lost our luggage in Jordan?" one of my sisters asks me. "It was like that. The bodies were lying all over the floor like lost baggage."
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My eldest sister tells of waiting in a long line to buy gas. There was a quarrel, voices were raised, the American soldiers panicked and started to fire their guns, and the result was that six people died before her eyes. When I spoke to my younger sister in Baghdad last year, I could often hear the sound of gunfire in the background.
The Iraqi people I speak to are very frightened by the danger and random deaths they see all around them, at home, at work, in the street. They are also worn down by the hardships of their everyday lives. In this oil-rich nation, people wait in line for five to 10 hours for gas. The supply of electricity is still erratic, and clean water isn't always available. The main reaction of many Americans to the Iraq war and its aftermath may simply be confusion, but for me, and the people of Iraq, it has meant suffering, destruction and pain. In fact, the latest war has been hugely costly to everyone concerned, to Iraq, to the United States and to the rest of the world, in material and nonmaterial ways. No one is safe there now, not U.N. staff, or Paul Bremer, or Paul Wolfowitz. Even when the president of the United States visited Baghdad, he arrived in a darkened plane, in utmost secrecy, and stayed for only a few hours. My sister would not have died from her injuries if she had not been in a country that is unbearably unstable, to the point of anarchy. In this situation, no one is a winner, and no one feels liberated.
Abbas S. Mehdi is a professor of organization, management and sociology at St. Cloud State University.
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