From the Boston Phoenix’s Dan Kennedy, who mentions a poll of Baghdad residents: “By a margin of 29 percent to nine percent, respondents say they would rather live under US rule than under Saddam — even though they also say that their lives were better a year ago than they are today (47 percent to 32 percent). Optimism prevails: by 52 percent to 11 percent, they believe their lives will be better five years from now than they were under Saddam.”
Tyranny or chaos: tough choice! Meanwhile, historian Mary Beth Norton writes that Donald Rumsfeld sees a parallel between Iraq today and the United States of the early 1780s — a time of “looting, crime, mobs storming buildings, breakdown of government structures and institutions that maintained civil order, rampant inflation caused by the lack of a stable currency, supporters of the former regime roaming the streets.” Too bad Rumsfeld doesn’t know what he’s talking about.