Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

Liberation, however, proved to be messier than anyone had hoped. Cheney and Makiya were right when they said that Americans would be welcomed as liberators by Iraqis. They were, at first. Long-suffering Iraqis were jubilant at Hussein’s fall. The stories of torture that spilled out in those days after the statue fell made up a Stalinesque tapestry of cruelty. Where Cheney and Makiya got it wrong was presuming the welcome would last or that the joy over Hussein’s overthrow necessarily translated into enduring amity for the overthrowers. Iraqis had endured a dozen years of international sanctions that Hussein had blamed for widespread malnutrition, disease, and every economic malady. They had been told that a rash of cancers was the result of depleted uranium in American bombs left over from the Gulf War or used to enforce the no-fly zone. Shiites and Kurds were still resentful that after freeing Kuwait, the Americans did nothing to help as Hussein brutally crushed their uprising in 1991. And there was deep-seated suspicion that the Americans had come back not to help them but to take their oil. It did not help that American troops sat by and did little to keep order amid the chaotic scenes following the collapse of the Hussein regime as looters ransacked government buildings. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld glibly said. But forces were being set loose that would take years to control.