Kate Chisholm

After Saddam

‘The problem is why,’ said the health project officer of a British charity working in the marshlands of southern Iraq close to Basra. ‘No one answers why?’

He was talking to the BBC journalist Hugh Sykes about the state of Iraq, ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He agreed that the Americans and British had done ‘a good job’ in getting rid of the dictator but said that this had changed nothing in Basra, whose economy had been destroyed by Saddam as he drained the marshes, turning a landscape that was vivid green into burnt ochre. We also heard from the farmers who in the hours after Saddam’s fall set out with a JCB to destroy the dams and redig the ditches to bring back the water. It began to flow again, but was soon discovered to be salt water, and no longer any use for irrigation. In what was once thought of as the Fertile Crescent, blessed by both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, drinking water now has to be brought in by tanker.

The roads are even worse, little more than dirt tracks; power cuts are a part of daily life (under Saddam at least power of that sort could be relied on); and the streets of Basra are lined with piles of stinking rubbish. The liberators might have done the right thing in getting rid of Saddam, the health project officer explained, but they didn’t know, or perhaps crucially didn’t want to know, what was the right thing to do afterwards. ‘Billions of dollars have been spent,’ he said, ‘but there is nothing to show for it.’ He wanted to know why? Why is Iraq now such a mess?

Sykes was in Iraq for his two-part Radio 4 and World Service programme After Saddam (produced by James Fletcher).

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