The regrets of the man who brought down Saddam

An Iraqi weightlifting champion, who led the crowd who pulled down Saddam's statue in Baghdad's Firdous Square - in an act that Rumsfeld and others hailed as a moment that stood alongside the toppling of the Berlin wall - has now said, "I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day."

Lets bear in mind that this is a man who had been sent to Abu Ghraib by Uday Hussein, so this is a person who experienced the very worst that the Saddam regime had to offer. And yet he believes, "The Americans are worse than the dictatorship".

He explained: "There were lots of people from my tribe who were also put in prison or hanged. It became my dream ever since I saw them building that statue to one day topple it."

Yet he now says he would prefer to be living under Saddam than under US occupation. He said: "The devil you know [is] better than the devil you don't. We no longer know friend from foe. The situation is becoming more dangerous. It's not getting better at all. People are poor and the prices are going higher and higher."

Saddam, he says, "was like Stalin. But the occupation is proving to be worse".

Nor is his pessimism especially unique, in a newly commissioned opinion poll by BBC, ABC News, ARD and USA Today, it has been found that "only 18% of Iraqis have confidence in US and coalition troops, while opinion is almost evenly split on whether to have confidence in Iraq's government."

About 86% of those questioned expressed concern about someone in their household being a victim of violence.

When one considers that the toppling of the statue was a stage managed event, then one can only conclude that Kadhim al-Jubouri, the Iraqi weightlifting champion, was part of the Chalabi crowd, as it was the Chalabi crowd who appear to have had the most to do with this particular piece of street theatre.

If the Chalabi crowd are now openly stating that Iraq was better under Saddam than it was under the Americans, the things really must be considerably worse than we have been led to believe.

The latest findings contrast strongly with the outlook among Iraqis in 2005, when respondents to a similar survey were generally hopeful about the future.

Asked whether they thought reconstruction efforts in Iraq had been effective, some 67% said they felt they had not.

Religious differences are particularly displayed in attitudes towards the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Sunnis questioned largely regarded the manner of the former Iraqi leader's death as inappropriate and unlikely to help the cause of reconciliation; Shias predominantly took the opposite view.

No one however wanted Iraq divided along sectarian lines.

I actually find it hard to keep writing this stuff. What we have inflicted upon these people is simply unforgivable. Nor was any of this done, as Bush and others pompously and piously claimed at the time, "to help the Iraqi people". Bush and his cohorts couldn't give a monkey's about the Iraqi people, as they are the same people who supported the appalling sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children.

The greatest irony of this war has been the way that the people who opposed the war were portrayed as the ones who didn't care about "the Iraqi people" whilst the war mongers portrayed themselves as their greatest defenders. It was a piece of almost Orwellian double speak.

Now, even the Iraqis themselves are waking up to the size of the lie that has been perpetrated upon them.

Tags: Bush, Rumsfeld, Iraq war, Saddam, statue toppled, Chalabi