The Christian Science Monitor

One Republican's pride and joy

When Sheikh Yussef saw Hussein's statue fall on TV on Wednesday - he turned the machine off and gave it a smack for good measure. "I have watched enough TV these past weeks in any case," he explains. "It's time to get back to regular life."

But, just because the protests here in Cairo and elsewhere in the Arab world have ended, he warns, does not mean that the anger has gone away. "I lived in America. I am very familiar with the place and the mentality," he says, recalling fondly his three years as an imam of a mosque in Cherry Hill, N.J.

"They will want to stay. Be in control. Call the shots.... It's the American way," he explains, pointing to the brief raising of the American flag over the face of Hussein's statue on Wednesday as proof of his theory. "They have designs. But, let me warn you ... if the Americans do not get out of there very fast - we will hate the US even more, we will feel more and more pained."

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But one man's pain and source of hatred is, in this case, another woman's pride and joy. Tilly Fowler was once the highest-ranking woman in the US Congress, a Republican from Jacksonville, Fla., who fought tooth and nail against President Clinton's defense cuts. Today, she is a Washington lawyer and an advisor to Secretary Rumsfeld on defense policy.

Ms. Fowler could not get enough of the pictures of the Saddam statue being toppled. "I saw it... about four different times and it was great each time I saw it," she says.

Fowler supported the war in Iraq from the start. "We had a dictator with weapons of mass destruction who was not abiding by United Nations resolutions. There was no choice," she says, making no mention of the fact that no WMD have yet been found.

"It's been an amazing two-and-a-half weeks, and look what has been accomplished. It's not just technology, it's that our people are so well trained," she says. She especially appreciated "the compassion" of the troops. "When you see them holding a young child, giving candy to those children, helping an older person, I thought, 'These are Americans, that's what we are all about.'

"Yesterday, one of our guys was shown carrying a wounded Iraqi soldier on his back to get help," she continues. "Iraq wouldn't do that for our soldiers. Those images are so striking because they show us so much about what we are as a people."

What about all the humanitarian aid and compassion being given to the Iraqi people by the Americans, the sheikh is asked. "Please," he snorts. "You have killed children and desecrated a holy city."

Capt. Jason Smith from Baton Rouge, La., was in the Marine First Division "1/5" battalion that crossed the Tigris River into Baghdad in the wee hours of Thursday morning - avoiding sniper fire as it made a beeline for the palace, one of Hussein's favorites.

There, Captain Smith rummaged through the rubble of fallen chandeliers and broken mother-of-pearl table tops to look for "a souvenir" to take home to Baton Rouge. There were brass urns, and statues of lions and deer, and gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms. In Saddam Hussein's bedroom, the floors are inlaid with marble. "Most of this stuff is pretty cheap," he says. "Everything is fake, mostly kitsch and lots of plastic. But just to be here walking on this pool deck is a thrill."

The fighting was heavy driving in, he recalls, "and we had guys jumping out from behind walls shooting rockets at us, but we just fired back at them with such violence that they had to take a step back."

Now, on the green lawn behind the palace, the Marines wash their laundry in the Euphrates River. "If you asked me last year sometime if I would be standing in one of Saddam's Palaces, I would have laughed at you," says Smith, tossing back his head and laughing now. "It feels awful good to be a part of this, and I can tell you that the Marines in my company are feeling the same way."

• • •

Many in Baghdad don't feel as equally enthusiastic. "Liberation" has become, for some, even a dirty word. "I am very worried about the mob; people are stealing and looting everything," Ms. Methboub says from her apartment across town. "Maybe they will enter the houses and rape women and even the girls in our house. Things are not in order."

"This is not changing the regime. This is invading. It is occupation," says Ali Ahmad, a salesman and Methboub's neighbor. "I am one of those who was oppressed and depressed by the former government, but I wish that government would come back," says Mr. Ahmad, leaning forward in the lantern light to make his point. "I felt oppressed in this country, but I love Saddam Hussein. I don't know why."

He predicts that those Iraqis who destroyed the statue of Hussein would change their views in coming years, and that many who today say they welcome American troops are "hiding their true feelings."

• • •

American anti-war activist and grandmother Cynthia Banas climbed out of her basement shelter in Baghdad after three weeks of aerial bombardment and met some of her countrymen- US troops- on the street. Weeks of debate and anxiety among the handful of Western peace activists beneath the al-Fanar Hotel about how to script the first meeting, fell away when they saw how hot the troops were. Banas brought them water, explaining the Iraqi tradition of welcoming strangers.

The soldiers told her that Iraqis had been "kissing their feet all the way up from Najaf," Banas recalls. "I said, 'Well you know, your air force terrorized the people of Baghdad for three weeks, and I don't think all Iraqis feel that way about you here." She blames the American troops for the bedlam and destruction which followed the fall of the city. They should have stopped it, she argues. The troops, on their part, were surprised to see American citizens here, and, some were presumably not impressed with their activities.

But both sides were cor- dial to one another. "They were very respectful. It's not like we were yelling 'Go home.' It was a very serious time," recounts Banas. "I told them: 'You can risk your life for war, but we need people who will risk life for peace.'"

• • •

Kurdish Col. Riyad Haji Abdullah feels sorry for the young Iraqi deserters. "It was very sad to see them like that," says Colonel Abdullah. The Kurdish logistics officer, with hair the color of minced carrots and a complexion already scorched by a hot April's sun, was fighting last week near the northern city of Mosul. "They were forced be in Saddam's army."

After just one night of fighting, the Iraqi units he was up against put down their weapons and came out carrying white flags. Abdullah was not triumphant. He watched more with pity than pride as the Iraqi soldiers turned themselves over to the Kurdish pesh merga. He, too, had once been a young, frightened recruit, drafted into the Iraqi army. Toward the end of the 1991 Gulf War, he defected and slipped over Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia, later making his way to northern Iraq, where his fellow Kurds were staging an uprising against the Hussein regime.

The Iraqi army brutally crushed that rebellion, regaining this very town after Kurds had liberated it for about a week.

The end of the war this time, for him - as for so many Kurds - is startling because, for a change, it did not have devastating consequences for the Kurds.

As Baghdad fell, Abdullah and his men fanned out across this town and waited for order to drive deeper towards Mosul, Abdullah's hometown. They were itchy to push forward, but wary of jumping ahead without orders from their U.S. allies. The challenges ahead, he acknowledges, are enormous. Abdullah, a father of seven children, has five sons who might also grow up to be soldiers. In the new Iraq, however, he hopes they won't have to follow in their father's footsteps. "Maybe they can be doctors, engineers, whatever," he says. "But not soldiers."

• • •

Timothy Clingersmith does not watch the news. He is 6 years old and his mother does not allow it. Instead, this skinny young boy in Havelock, N.C., engrosses himself with The Weather Channel, and when his dad - Marine mechanic Tom Clingersmith - gets in touch from Iraq, the two discuss neither war nor victory nor, of course, the deaths of innocent children far away. Only sandstorms.

"He's been the hardest hit by all this," says Timothy's mother Elizabeth. "He's at an age where he can't put this in context, and where maybe he's convinced that all the soldiers are going to die."

Elizabeth does not watch much news either these days. Her wartime TV diet has become the afternoon soaps. She is one of the few Marine wives here at Cherry Point Marine Air Station who has limited the news stream, mainly to shield her three kids, but also, she admits, to keep her own frayed nerves from fluttering.

But, on Wednesday, after hearing about the scene in Baghdad, she sat for hours, watching the images replayed over and again. Not gloating, like Tilly Fowler, but relieved. Her e-mail circle of friends sent inside information on the event - even naming the marine who wrapped the flag around the statue's head. "It's great to see the Iraqi people wanting to hug the Marines," says Elizabeth, who has been married to Tom for 15 years. "They're out there so we don't have to live in fear, like [the Iraqis] have for so long."

That evening, she sat the kids down on the family's plush couches and tried to share her excitement over the fall of Baghdad. But she was careful to temper their expectations about Dad's return. The kids just listened, unsure, it seemed, of how to connect the joy of a liberated people with their own sadness.