In the end, Saddam Hussein didn't live up to his new role as a martyr in the fight against American-Anglo aggression in the Middle East. In the short term, it appeared the quick exit stage left by Hussein's government, for whatever reason, had the promise of saving a lot of lives, especially the lives of the vulnerable Iraqi civilian population. That promise quickly evaporated, as the tumult of war gave way to the fruits of peace for the Iraqi people: one of the great plunderings of public wealth in history. US soldiers stood by and watched, and by some accounts even encouraged, the wholesale looting of virtually every public institution in Iraq, except for the country's precious oil wells and Ministry of Oil. A couple days after the badly stage-managed toppling of that statue of Saddam virtually all of Baghdad's hospitals, already crippled by 12 years of US and British imposed sanctions, were in complete ruins after looters had stripped them bare.

By April 11 Al-Jazeera was reporting, "Two days after Baghdad fell to US-led forces, government buildings, hotels, and hospitals were stripped of medicines, stethoscopes, air conditioning units, and incubators as US troops stood by...'Out of the 32 hospitals in Baghdad, only three are currently, operating, and not in a normal manner,' said Pascal Jansen, an ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)." The irony of US soldiers standing by as Baghdad's hospitals were stripped of their incubators can't be lost on us. One of the rationales for assaulting Iraq in 1991 was the propaganda lie that their soldiers had taken hundreds of babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital. Don't be surprised when a US-based hospital chain like HCA gets a federal contract to manage Iraqi's wrecked hospitals handed to them.

As public building after public building was set afire in Baghdad, the Independent's Robert Fisk opined that "the arsonists have to be paid," and that "there is also something dangerous--and deeply disturbing--about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I followed one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town." What Fisk is obviously suggesting is that the US government or its proxies in the Iraqi National Congress must be paying the arsonists to burn down Baghdad's public buildings.

A first-hand account of the sacking of Baghdad published April 11 in Sweden's largest newspaper Dagens Nyheter suggests the looting was deliberately encouraged by US soldiers. The article featured an interview with a Swedish researcher of Middle Eastern ancestry. Khaled Bayoumi told the newspaper, "I happened to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the plundering." He described how US soldiers shot security guards at a local government building on Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris, and then "blasted apart the doors to the building." Next, Bayoumi said, "from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them." At first, he said, residents were hesitant to come out of their homes because anyone who had tried to cross the street in the morning had been shot. "Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building," Bayoumi continued. "The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the plundering continued there. "I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one that watched with disgust."

There is a method to the sacking of Iraq by the American-Anglo invasion forces. The plundering of public wealth for private gain has been elevated to the status of an official religion in our country, trumpeted as a virtue by economists and pundits in the media. Now our ethic of plundering public wealth for private gain is being exported to Iraq. First the US government teams up with Britain to dump 20,000 tons of bombs on Iraq, and is now poised to dole out billions of dollars of more taxpayer largesse to US businesses to rebuild Iraq. The big early winner of the Iraq invasion sweepstakes is Betchel, which was just awarded a contract worth of up to $680 million to rebuild Iraq's electric utilities. Perhaps Pacific, Gas & Electric or Enron will get the contract to manage Iraq's electricity once it's up and running again.

In the end, "regime change" didn't simply mean overthrowing Saddam's government. It also meant smashing Iraqi civil society and the ability of Iraqis to govern their own affairs. We won't know how many thousands of Iraqis will die because of the complete collapse of the Iraqi health care system under the watch of US soldiers, but we do know that before Baghdad fell Iraq's hospitals were so overwhelmed with the war dead and wounded they gave up trying to count them.

Iraq will be "rebuilt," but the generous welfare system the Baathists administered, helping to give Iraqis one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world, will never be allowed to serve the needs of Iraqis the way it used to. Any US-backed puppet government will find itself in the same boat the puppet regime in Saigon did from the late '50s until 1975. It will be so unpopular that it will be unable to hold onto power without the assistance of the US military power.

The quick defeat of Iraq's ragtag army by the American-Anglo invaders has proven that Saddam Hussein's government was not the threat the Bush administration claimed it was. The quick collapse of Iraqi society under US and British watch only adds to the laundry list of charges the anti-war movement should demand George Bush The Vandal and Tony Blair The Vandal be tried for in the International Criminal Court. It won't be enough for the anti-war movements in the US and Britain to successfully throw these vandals out of office. Whether or not they are ever arrested for their crimes, we all owe humanity nothing less than warrants for the arrest of these vandals and their henchmen in Washington and London.