HEADLINE: Iraqis Celebrate Liberation

[Lemonite]

Try and go protest now.

Please feel free to post any stories or related quotes in this haven for sanity in FYM.

A Few of My Favorite Lines:

An elderly man added in broken English: ?Good, good, good ? Mr W. Bush, no Saddam.?

He asked: ?Everyone who refuses this war ? why??


Mr. Pink

Iraqis celebrate freedom
UK SUN NEWSPAPER
By MIKE DARVILL

JUBILANT Iraqis celebrate their new-found freedom yesterday ? by tearing down a statue of hated tyrant Saddam Hussein.

Hundreds begged US troops to help tie a rope around the 17ft high bronze figure and take a blowtorch to its ankles.

Then they pulled ? and whooped with delight as the statue crashed to the ground.

The symbolic scene came after the 101st Airborne division ? known as the Screaming Eagles ? freed the Shi?ite holy city of Karbala, killing 400 Republican Guards and capturing 100 more.


The fiercest fighting was for a bridge and the local Ba?ath party HQ. Fedayeen paramilitaries in the city, 70 miles south-west of Baghdad, also put up stiff resistance on Saturday, killing one US para.

A further eight were injured.

But snipers were pounded by artillery after their positions were pinpointed by helicopters.

Yesterday afternoon troops from the 2nd Battalion 70th armoured regiment oversaw the toppling of Saddam, cast in military uniform, his right hand outstretched.

First, an American welder spent an hour weakening the statue.Then locals hauled until the rope snapped. Another was fixed in place, and many among the watching thousands applauded as Saddam fell head first on to a stepped podium above a pool of water.

Scores clambered over the statue and beat it with shoes or anything else they could grab.

One onlooker said: ?It?s very good because we don?t like it.?

An elderly man added in broken English: ?Good, good, good ? Mr W. Bush, no Saddam.?

As US troops proudly wore flowers given to them by townsfolk, a 25-year-old said he could not understand opposition to the war.

He asked: ?Everyone who refuses this war ? why??

Pointing to the statue, he went on: ?Come here and live two days with this man, and then refuse this war.?

Others were still too frightened to celebrate. Karbala was one of the Shi?ite cities to rise against Saddam in 1991, only to face his wrath weeks later. This time, they pray, freedom is there to stay.

 

[Klaus]

Lemonite:

forget SUN, SUN shouldn't be called newspaper. If you are interested in new rumors about the royals, pick sun.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that i guess that the Iraqi people will be glad that Saddam is gone, but they will still hate the US. Another one here mentioned that most Iraqis loved their sons (2000 dead soldiers in the last days?) more than they hate saddam, i guess that's true too.

Lot of the people who were against that war are now affraid of the next war.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't the last war of G.W.Bush. Rumsfeld & Rice allready warned the next 2 arabic countries..

I won't say that these countries are innocent, but i disslike that innocent people have to die as long as there better other options.

As far as i can see it the US Government hoped:

-To find amounts of WMDs (we'll see if they found one, first to news-stories were wrong)
-To be welcomed by the Shiitic people with flowers (well they didn't forget what the US has done with them and they remained .. let's say "sceptical")
-He wanted to bring Democracy to this country (well let's see if he will do this in the future, for at least the next half year there will be a ex US-Military and ex Weaponproducer who will rule the country)
-and Rummy & Co were talking about Blitzkrieg and almost no colateral damage. This one was stupid because the Bush administration were putting themself in the tradition of Adolf Hitler, the "inventor" of Blitzkrieg, easy for anti-americans to use these phrases to recute new terrorists

Klaus

 

[verte76]

Just because they don't like Saddam doesn't mean that they are going to like Bush. Would Iraqis elect Bush president? I don't know. The guess here is that Iraqis want to choose Iraqis to run their country, not Americans. Remember we don't want to "occupy" Iraq. True liberation of Iraq is letting them vote for whoever they please to rule them. This could be an Islamic cleric. These people are often trained for leadership of the Islamic community. There is an eminent school of theology in Nassariya. The Iraqi lawyer who was instrumental in the release of Jessica Lynch is also from Nassariya. There is a religious scholar and authority in this town, which is full of Islamic holy places. If they choose this guy president, inaugurate him dammit! It's only fair and consistent that they get the leadership they choose. It would be a massive screw-up for us to run their country. No, they have to run it.

 

[melon]

I say Bush should become president of Iraq...and boot him out of the U.S. He seems to pay more attention to Iraq anyway...

Melon

 

[verte76]

I can just see a unilateralist American trying to run Iraq. OMG.