Nurse describes life in Iraq since U.S. attack

Most of the Juneau residents who attended a speech Thursday night about post-war Iraq were familiar with the tales of chaos, hunger and other bleak conditions they heard from Seattle nurse Gerri Haynes.

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In the words of one attendee, Haynes was "preaching to the choir."

The nurse spent two weeks in Iraq last spring during her fourth trip to the country, and the report she gave at Thursday's event, sponsored by the Juneau World Affairs Council, was non-combative but strongly critical of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

Haynes said she is not an apologist for Saddam Hussein but noted several ways in which Iraqis were better off under Saddam than they are now.

Though Iraqis were intensely afraid of the dictator, they had free education when he was in power and now are losing it to privatization, Haynes said. She also spoke of a Christian clergyman she met in one village who was afraid he'd be persecuted for his faith in the chaos of post-war Iraq.

"Under Saddam Hussein, Christians had the right of free expression of their religion. But (the clergyman) lives in a Shiite area, and in this area people who sell alcohol are being attacked and killed, and women are being pulled off the streets and raped if they are not fully covered," Haynes said.

Saddam was notorious for his viciousness and ruthlessness and for his government's frequent torture and executions of citizens.

Haynes, a self-described grandmother of "eight and a half," is a former president of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. She traveled to Iraq most recently with an editor and photographer from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a young Iraqi boy named Mustafa who had come to the United States for medical treatment after being riddled with 41 pieces of shrapnel.

Haynes showed slides from her trip that featured a blown-up bridge, unexploded ordinance and children bathing in sewage drainage ditches because the war left them without a viable water source. She said the bridge was repaired by Halliburton for a $30 million contract when an Iraqi company bid $1.3 million to do the same work. She showed a slide of dung being used for cooking fuel and noted that dried dung is used for fuel in other countries, but rarely in Iraq, which has the world's second-largest known oil reserves.

Haynes also said many ministry buildings in Baghdad were decimated, but that the Ministry of Oil remains standing.

"The Iraqis look at that and say 'Is there any doubt why you came here?' " she said.

But even so, she said very few Iraqis were visibly angry at the American visitors.

"There were very few coming up to us and saying 'You represent the devil,' though some did," she said.

JWAC Program Committee Co-Chairman Nick Coti said the council likes to present a range of perspectives. He said Haynes' speech provided a good balance to a speech several weeks ago by an American lieutenant colonel who talked about Saudi Arabia from a perspective strongly aligned with the Bush administration.

Juneau resident Bob Sylvester said Haynes' talk was interesting and corroborated some of his own sentiments.

"Being a U.S. citizen, we don't understand the rest of the world and how they see things. We have a very distorted view," he said.

Haynes said the United States needs to cooperate better with the rest of the world.

"Probably the best answer would be for us to say we abandon our need to control the oil of Iraq and turn the whole thing over to the United Nations, but we're not about to do that," she said.

She said the United States is in a jam when it comes to foreign policy, and the solution is in eliminating corporate pull in the White House.

"(We have to) wrench control of our government out of the hands of corporations. Corporations are not with soul. They're not taking care of people who are not able to feed themselves," she said.