UP CLOSE WITH THE TRUTH

And it is very, very ugly.

You need to read the whole thing.

In Baghdad, however, the picture could not have looked more different. Waiters smiled at me when I identified myself as an American, cabbies brushed their palms together in a good-riddance gesture as they declared, "Saddam gone, America great!," and on the campus of Baghdad University I was approached by a man who wished to tell me "how honored Iraqis are that the Americans came to rid us of a tyrant."...

But in the catalogue of Saddam’s evil, perhaps the most gruesome entry concerned the use of torture...Men were fed alive into wood-shredding machines. A general who had earned Saddam’s displeasure was devoured by rabid dogs. According to one macabre report, women prisoners were forced to eat chunks of their own flesh that Baathist thugs had sliced from their bodies...

"In a thousand years, there have been few tyrants like Saddam Hussein," the lawyer finished, fingering his prayer beads.

I heard this refrain numerous times in Iraq: Saddam’s evil was in a category of its own. Because his regime lasted 35 years, because Iraq is a relatively small nation, because he was so open and boastful about his tyranny—and because the outside world seemed so ready to ignore his crimes—there seemed no way for Iraqis to escape his grasp...

STORIES LIKE these, defining the reality of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, made me begin to wonder how Iraqis were dealing with the fact that many outsiders seemed to question the value of their country’s liberation. Among those I talked to, the prevalent reaction was sheer disbelief. "If they had lived for five minutes under Saddam they wouldn’t think like this," expostulated an Iraqi translator for the U.S. military.