NO SADDAM

"What has been surprising is the negative media coverage and the shameless exploitation of the war for partisan political purposes that I've seen since returning from Iraq in September. "


'No Saddam'
It'll be hard now for the media to deny our accomplishments in Iraq.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BY JOHN R. GUARDIANO
Monday, December 15, 2003

At first I thought I was dreaming. I was half asleep and only turned on the TV for a weather report. Snow and an accompanying "wintry mix" had been forecast for the Washington area, and I was concerned about not being able to shop for family Christmas presents.

"Saddam Hussein may have been captured," CNN was reporting. My thoughts quickly raced back eight months to the day I arrived in Al Hillah, Iraq. My Marine Corps reserve unit had been activated before the war, and my team had found itself in the Babylon province. We were 60 miles south of Baghdad and were to help stabilize and reconstruct this small Iraqi city.

The war was just a month old when we arrived in Al Hillah, yet already the facts on the ground had changed dramatically. The eerie silence of war had given way to large and boisterous crowds of young people--happy, smiling children who rushed out to greet us. Most of what they said was in Arabic and thus unintelligible to me. But their facial expressions and body language said enough. They were happy to see us. Some even managed to shout more than a few English phrases.

"Americhi, Americhi!" they shouted. "Bush good, Saddam bad!" "What's your name?" Some enterprising young Iraqis even offered to sell us soda and water. All of them, it seemed, gave us a hearty thumbs-up and vigorously waved and pumped their hands in gratitude and appreciation of our presence there.

The kids surrounded our vehicles en masse almost as if we were rock stars. They were eager to see us and to talk with us. To them it was clear that we were heroes who had liberated them from Saddam Hussein.

Their reaction had surprised me and, truth be told, scared me more than a little. Of course I was heartened by their reaction; it made me want to both smile and cry. But as far as we Marines were concerned, we were still in a war zone with plenty of bad guys--embittered Baathists, Saddam loyalists and angry foreign jihadis--who were determined to kill us.

We all knew that it took just one sniper or one suicide bomber to send us home in body bags. It would be easy, I thought, for the bad guys to hide behind these children and attack us. I shuddered at the thought of the mayhem and carnage I knew would result from such an attack.

We kept our guard up and I resolved not to become too sentimental. After all, at first I was but one of eight Marines riding along in two Humvees. And I had an immediate security problem: I was sitting in the back of a Hummer peering out the back when the canvas top came lose and blocked my view. The Iraqi crowd was descending on us, so I moved quickly to jerry-rig the canvas out of the way. But with no real success, so we decided to junk the top altogether.

Our comfort level with the Iraqi people grew considerably in the coming weeks and months as we assumed effective governing control of Al Hillah and the surrounding province. We came to realize that the gratitude and affection we experienced on that first day was far from fleeting and ephemeral. It was instead deeply rooted in the people's recent collective conscience.

Al Hillah is overwhelmingly Shiite, and the Babylon province is home to at least two mass graves, where thousands of innocent men, women and children were buried (sometimes alive) after Saddam and his henchmen had tortured them. Virtually everyone, it seemed, had a story to tell about a family member abducted in the dead of night by the Baathists, never to be seen or heard from again.

For the Iraqis who endured the sadism and cruelty, there was a deep-seated, lingering fear that Saddam would one day rise again, that the Baathist tyranny would resume under his leadership if the United States tired of the fight and left the country.

That is why the most common question I was asked by Iraqis, especially in those initial weeks after the Hussein regime had been overthrown, was, "Where's Saddam?" The Iraqis found it quite reassuring to hear me, a young, gun-toting Marine, tell them, "No Saddam!" as I ran my finger across my throat to simulate his throat being cut.

I also would point to the ground and stomp my feet to indicate that Saddam had been buried (I didn't realize how right I was). The children would smile back happily, give me the thumbs-up sign, and imitate me. Soon I was being greeted with shouts of "No Saddam!" as the children slapped their hands and stomped the ground. This became a bond of understanding and appreciation between us.

Not surprisingly, the kids were quick to praise the killing of Saddam's sons. "No Uday! No Qusay!" they shouted to us last summer after the two were killed in a firefight in Mosul.

I was therefore not surprised to see ordinary Iraqis cheering Saddam's capture and firing rifles into the air. What has been surprising is the negative media coverage and the shameless exploitation of the war for partisan political purposes that I've seen since returning from Iraq in September.

"It's almost as if what we did over there never happened and doesn't matter," one of my staff sergeants told me. But what we did, and what the U.S. military is still doing, does matter, as the Iraqis whom I was privileged to know and befriend will tell you.

And although I certainly am thankful to be home, I wish I could see the faces of the Iraqi children today when they ask, "Where's Saddam?" Because I could forthrightly tell them what U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday: "We got him."

No Saddam, indeed, not on our watch.


Lance Cpl. Guardiano is a field radio operator with the U.S. Marine Corps' Fourth Civil Affairs Group and, as a civilian, defense editor of Rotor and Wing magazine.