This article by Anthony Shadid in Wednesday’s Washington Post seems to best capture the flow of contradictory forces now at play inside Iraq. In the south you have the fedayeen Saddam and members of the Iraqi army keeping a tight grip on the cities, and apparently doing a pretty good job of it. Then you have the US-UK army trying to wrest control of these cities. And finally you have civilians — terrified of Saddam’s paramilitaries, frightened by the American bombing, at least suspicious of the Americans themselves, though not necessarily hostile.
Pretty clearly, most of these folks just don’t want to get killed and are most concerned about getting through all this with themselves and their families in one piece. But their plight deepens as the fighting drags on, supplies dwindle, and the infrastructure is degraded and broken down. The article doesn’t give you much of a clear sense of what will happen or what these civilians will be saying after Saddam’s regime is displaced. But it provides a compelling view of the fluidity and chaos of the situation, and how it could play out in very good or very bad ways.
