See! It Is Like Saddam!

clipped from www.julescrittenden.com “When you came and liberated this country,” he continued, “Iraq had 25 million Saddams. America is turning us back into human beings. The quote makes me think, in rabbit-trail fashion, of an evening I enjoyed with a few Iraqi Army soldiers a few months ago. All three were officers- drawn from two different divisions to train new Iraqi soldiers to fight. I went up to Ali while he was smoking and said hello. He introduced himself, and invited me to join him and his friends for a movie. Partway through Apocalypto, he looked up from the scene of mass murder and brutality and exclaimed “See! It is like Saddam!” When tribes stop fighting Americans and each other, when the citizens of two of the most strife-ridden cities in Iraq start to contemplate tomorrow, when a man from Tikrit named Saddam steps up to help Iraq… That’s when I start to feel just a little bit of hope for this place.