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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/opinion/17FRIE.html
Telling the Truth in Iraq
(New York Times) Thomas Friedman - Many Iraqis today express real resentment for the other Arab regimes, and even toward the Palestinians, for how they let themselves be bought off by Saddam. They feel that Saddam used the Iraqi people's oil wealth to buy popularity for himself in the Arab street - by giving Palestinians and other Arab students scholarships and nice apartments in Baghdad, and by paying off all sorts of Arab nationalist writers and newspapers. These same Arab intellectuals and media gave Saddam a free pass to torture, repress, and starve his own people. "Arabism," in the minds of many Iraqis, is the cloak that Saddam hid behind to imprison them for 35 years, and now that they can say that out loud, they are saying it.