INTERESTING STORY ON THE FALL OF BAGHDAD from The New York Review of Books:

While I was talking to the looters I met Staff Sergeant Nicholas Clark of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, who was making his way through the crowd, with his pistol drawn. He was smiling at them. I thought perhaps he would stop them, but he did not, and asked me to follow him so that he could show me why. Next to the Finance Ministry’s building was another warehouse, which a couple of Marines were guarding. Inside were crates of ammunition and mortar shells, tear gas, piles of rifles and other guns. Some of the boxes were marked in Arabic, some in English, and some with Cyrillic lettering. Some boxes were labeled “Jordan Armed Forces.”

Sergeant Clark then showed me another building that he said was crammed with ammunition, and then he took me to yet another warehouse a few minutes away, which was full of crates containing rocket launchers, hand grenades, and more than a dozen antiaircraft guns. To put it simply, he said, quite apart from the Marines’ not wanting to get into the “police business,” the problem was that local Iraqis had been asking the Marines to protect the many ammunition stores across the city. Fighting was still going on anyway, he said, and the Marines did not have the additional manpower to stop looters. They had to stop these guns from falling into people’s hands; otherwise the situation would get even uglier than it was already.

Surrounded by piles of weapons in one of the warehouses, I asked Sergeant Clark, who had grown up in Lansing, Michigan, and fought in the first Gulf War in 1991, if this war had been easier than he had expected. “Much,” he said. “He”—meaning Saddam Hussein—”promised us street fighting, but where we have encountered it, it has only lasted for twenty minutes or half an hour. I don’t think they are doing a very good job. For me, street fighting means holding this building, for example, until there is no more ammunition left.” Before I left, Clark took me through the neighboring Army Sports Club. At the bottom of the empty swimming pool was a sandbagged position from which weapons could be fired. In a small side room were trampolines, javelins, and ten white-finned missiles with red tips, each two yards long. Sergeant Clark told me he thought they were air-to-air missiles, but he said that it looked as though someone had been tampering with them, trying to adapt them for something else. He was waiting for the men from intelligence to come and inspect them. He laughed and said, “I don’t know if the UN reached this site.” . . .

Now some of Ahmed’s friends were surrounding us and giving their opinions on what was going on, about the future, and about what they thought of various exiled politicians, including Baqir al-Hakim, who is in Tehran, and Ahmed Chalabi, who has US backing, and was about to arrive with a number of his fellow exiles in Nasiriya. There were, unsurprisingly, many conflicting opinions. Hakim was a good man, some thought; Chalabi was, or was not, a crook, others thought; the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was a traitor for making a deal with the Americans, and so on. Ahmed said he hoped the Americans would set up a transitional government without these men, and with technocrats instead. “For example the minister of health should have experience in his field.” It struck me that it was a stunning event that this discussion, which already seemed quite normal, was now taking place in Baghdad. “When was the last time we could have talked openly like this?” I asked Ahmed. He took a while to reply. “When I was student in 1967,” he said.

I then asked Ahmed, “Do you feel as if your country has been occupied?” His reply was, “Definitely.” I said, “But you just told me you could not have talked openly like this since 1967, so don’t you feel that this is also a liberation?” He replied, “Well, yes.” “So perhaps there is an odd contradiction. Occupation and liberation both at the same time?” He and his friends argued about this. “Yes,” he said, “that is true.” “What next?” I asked, and he pointed across the street to where a house had been leveled, not by bombs but because someone had cleared away an old house. “That is where we are now. We need a shovel to build something new.”

Indeed. Read the whole thing.