WHILE SADDAM WAS THANKING THOSE WHO OPPOSED THE WAR:

A thankyou to coalition peoples from a citizen of Iraq. (Firas Georges, 5/7/2004, Online Opinion)

I'm going to write about myself as an example and an ordinary Iraqi who was born in the second-largest Iraqi city (Basra) in 1967 and had a good chance to be taught by my well-educated parents, that school and study are my main goals.

I was 13 years old when the Iran-Iraq war started and we took seven years to come to the decision that we should leave Basra for Baghdad after I lost my father, who had a heart attack. Our community was scattered all over Iraq because Iran was about to invade our city.

We thought we won the war and tried to start a life, so we sold everything in our home city to start a life in Baghdad. But we faced a new law preventing Iraqis from buying a house or land in Baghdad unless he had lived in Baghdad since 1957. This was because the government services in Baghdad were good and all Iraqis wanted to live there. So we lost our house and savings, which my parents spent 30 years of their lives creating, and very quickly we lost what was left of our purchasing power because the Iraqi Dinar price started to go down compared with other currencies because of the Iraqi invasion in Kuwait and what the embargo and the sanctions brought.

We kept holding our breath all through the 90s for something to happen. We lost most of our relatives, who emmigrated to other countries, and the respect of foreign people so we tried to work for any foreign organisation or company that offered a good salary. Some of us worked for two dollars a month for the government and lived in fear of the day that we would be drafted into the army and couldn't say no. We saw our little children being taught in schools that our leader was nearly our God, and couldn't do a thing against it. Finally, when the threat of the coalition was very close we prayed to God that they wouldn't invade us because we would face hell on earth from our leader and his army and also from the coalition forces.

Nowadays the liberation is a fact and the generation I mentioned above are discovering a very different life. They can be paid enough for their work and save money and buy their daily needs. We have a problem that our need for electricity is rising rapidly because people are buying electrical devices - more than the outlets they have at home. The construction materials are very expensive but there are more building sites than workers available. We have a government and ministers that we can see among us daily. Maybe every Iraqi now knows at least one of them personally. We are not afraid for what our children are being taught in schools; we are watching our police and army getting stronger every day; we can feel as safe as all people in the world (i.e. terrorism problems are everywhere), and we can feel the Iraqi mentality changing for the better.

This was due to the liberation of Iraq by the coalition countries.