The media does a good job at painting vivid images. I don’t necessarily think that’s how everything necessarily happens. As tanks rolled into Baghdad we saw images of people celebrating in the street. Iraqi citizens helping U.S. soldiers topple a statue of Saddam Hussein. I guess that’s what images of liberation look like. Or is it? What about this image? Between April 13th and August 31st, there have been 2,846 violent deaths documented by the Baghdad morgue. In mid-April there were about 10 violent deaths a day, by mid-August the number had reached 28 violent deaths a day. I can’t imagine there is much celebration in the streets now. Where has the U.S. been? We’ve toppled Saddam’s regime, but we have done little in restoring order and peace to the so called “liberated” citizens of Baghdad.

Now, I’m no fan of governments that control their citizens through fear. Removing Saddam from power is a good thing. I’ve adopted this fairly simple philosophy: dictators = bad. However, we cannot march into a country waving the flag of liberation, destroy an existing government and then leave the citizens with very little. Many of the violent deaths that have taken place between April and August have been a result of Iraqi on Iraqi violence. The citizens of Baghdad have been left to live in a city without order. It’s literally chaos in the streets. The people of Iraq lived under harsh rules for so long. The police force that once maintained order is now non-existent, and we’re doing very little in trying to restore order. The UN has resolved that it is the responsibility of the US and the UK to restore and maintain order in Iraq. Being that the US and the UK are the only occupying force in Iraq with the ability to do so, I don’t think the UN is asking for too much from our governments. What have we done? We’ve left soldiers, American citizens who aren’t much different from you or I, thousands of miles away with the job of policing a country that they know very little about. We’ve left them to protect the same people we sent them to kill.

I know it’s easy for me to criticize. Here I am sitting behind a computer in Pittsburgh. I’m not out on the streets in Baghdad dealing with the chaos we’ve left behind. Then again, the people in power in Iraq are not far away. While I’m sitting here in a library in PA, they are sitting in their offices and conferences in D.C. I’ve always been under the assumption that when you set out to do a job, it’s generally a good thing to finish it. When faced with a problem it’s better to resolve it rather than ignore it. With estimates of civilian casualties somewhere between 7,390 and 9,193, I’m wondering just what are those people in Power doing? Just out of curiosity I looked up the definition of “liberate”. Using Merriam-Webster Online, I found this definition:

LIBERATE: 1 : to set at liberty : FREE; specifically : to free (as a country) from domination by a foreign power 2 : to free from combination 3 : to take or take over illegally or unjustly

It’s pretty interesting that the definition of liberate ranges from setting free to taking over unjustly. Maybe we have done what we set out to do. Our government set out to liberate Iraq. This entire time I thought they meant to free the people of Iraq; I guess it was just a misunderstanding. All along they were using the other definition of liberate... to take over unjustly.

by Jake Reinhart, Nov. 2003