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The day the statue fell, as seen from Cairo to the Carolinas
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A fighter returns from exile
"Mike," like Timothy, didn't see the images of the fall of Baghdad on TV either. But he is no kid- he was just busy fighting.
Twenty-five years ago, this man, code-named "Mike" for security reasons, fled Iraq as Hussein consolidated power. Two weeks ago, he returned as a member of a US-trained opposition militia. "I left by car and I came back by Humvee," he recounts. "I was happy to come back with the Americans." In 1978, when he left, he took a handful of dust and kissed it. When he returned, he took dust and kissed it again.
As he rode in the Humvee en route to the former Iraqi air base of Talil, outside Nasariyah, Mike looked intently at the people. The kids waved at him. But the older people looked away. Mike chalked it up to the US pullout after the first Gulf War. "They were still afraid," he said to himself. But he wanted to tell them: "No, my people, this time it will be real.'"
When Hussein's statue toppled in Baghdad, Mike's comrade Ishmael ran up and told him the news. "I thought he was kidding so I took the radio," he recalls. Then he heard it for himself. "I was crying, I was screaming."
"I wanted a TV. I wanted to see it with my own eyes," he says. He likened the moment to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Back then, he remembers, the East Germans came over saying they wanted Volkswagens. "In Iraq, we want freedom, and freedom will bring us the right way to rebuilding."
• • •
Walid Aldalu was composing an e-mail on Wednesday afternoon in Amman, Jordan, exploring the prospects for work in post-war Iraq, when he looked up from his computer, glanced at the television, and saw the Stars and Stripes wrapped around a statue of Hussein. Was that the sort of "freedom" the Iraqi people deserved, he wondered, upset.
"What do you want to show, that you are torturers?" he yelled out at the young American who had tied the flag to the effigy. "Don't do it!"
Mr. Aldalu, a Palestinian who runs his own satellite-dish installation business in Amman, is not pleased with the behavior of the Americans. Nonetheless, he has high hopes for the aftermath of the war - both for Iraq, and for himself personally.
"I want to be part of reconstructing Iraq," he says. "I have contacts in the communications field, and in construction, and I hope I can do something useful for the foreign companies that will come," he comments. "The economic situation in Jordan is not so great at the moment, and I want to improve my income. Everybody wants to do that, but I want to do it in a good way."
Abbas, the Iraqi exile in California, has similar hopes and plans. He is searching, through the Defense and State departments, for safe ways back to Iraq to check two homes sacked by Hussein and three pharmacies he owned before the Baath Party expropriated them. He has spent the last three days with no sleep, with customers and acquaintances hugging him at the local Rite Aid where he fills prescriptions.
The family of his wife, Sabria, still owns 300 acres of farm near Najaf. She will go to Washington this week to begin a series of formal training in childcare, primary education, health care, and basic finance to teach compatriots after she heads back to help in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Daughter Esra, meanwhile, an activist for women's issues who was given audience last week by President Bush in the White House, says she will stop at nothing to make sure the democracy planned for Iraq, will be "proper and complete." She sees a very tough road ahead for the new Iraq.
"We are going to have to show the world that we can see beyond our differences and unite," says Esra. "We are going to have to rebuild block by block."
"I'm telling everyone I don't want our next leader, whoever that is, to put all our money in his pocket, like Saddam did. I am going to fight for a diverse government, one that is fair to all groups including women. I mean it. I will fight for equal rights, equal pay, equal opportunity."
"It's been wonderful for many of us here in America to see first hand what democracy can provide," says Esra. "I want it all: schools, movie theaters, restaurants, pools, fast-food. I am not going to be silent."
• • •
Back in Havelock, N.C., Elizabeth has no business plans or ideas about taking part in the reconstruction of a future Iraq. All she wants, is for her husband, Tom, to come home.
Indeed, as the war came to some conclusion last week, Elizabeth's task turned, like the men and women in Iraq, to cleaning up the aftermath. Instead of burnt-out tanks and spent shells, she had to content herself with different sorts of havoc wrought by the war: The children's rooms were a mess, the two youngest had been fighting nonstop, and Andrew had been getting into trouble at school, acting out and unable to contain a deep rage that he's then unable to explain.
The fall of Baghdad has set a new course for the Clingersmiths: After the chaos around the departure, the uncertainty in the days afterwards, the slow reckoning of absence, there's now a diligent return to form: "I'm starting to cook dinners again," says Elizabeth. "There's leftovers in the fridge right now - that's a good sign." And this week, she vows to get everybody's room cleaned up, and settle in to wait for the return of their Marine - a wait which just got, she hopes, a little shorter.
• • •
They all saw the statue fall - The young Iraqi deserter in Northern Iraq, wearing borrowed civilian clothes too big for him and hoping for a better future; The toughened Washington, D.C., lawyer, sure of the righteousness of her country's ways; The excited Marine in Baghdad, meandering through a marble palace and picking out an gold gilded ashtray for his wife back home; And the Baghdad man, missing the dictator, though unable to explain quite why.
Whether Hussein himself saw the fall of his likeness, and from where is besides the point. It was toppled, and the world was immediately very changed.
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Reported by staff writers Danna Harman in Cairo, Daniel B. Wood in Chula Vista, Calif., Peter Ford in Jordan, Scott Peterson in Baghdad, Ilene Prusher in Kirkuk, Cameron W. Barr in Kifri, Ben Arnoldy outside Nasiriyah, Iraq, Gail Russell Chaddock in Washington, and Philip Smucker in Baghdad, as well as Patrik Jonsson in Havelock, N.C.
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