Unlike almost anywhere else in Baghdad, you could dine at the cafeteria in the Republican Palace in the heart of the Green Zone for six months and never eat hummus, flatbread, or a lamb kebab. The palace was the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the American occupation administration in Iraq, and the food was always American, often with a Southern flavour. A buffet featured grits, cornbread and a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner. The cafeteria was all about meeting American needs for high-calorie, high-fat comfort food.

None of the succulent tomatoes or crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it into the salad bar. US government regulations dictated that everything, even the water in which hot dogs were boiled, be shipped in from approved suppliers in other nations. Milk and bread were trucked in from Kuwait, as were tinned peas and carrots. The breakfast cereal was flown in from the US.

FULL (Google Cache of story who’s original link broke.) Here’s another link in case the first one breaks too.

Then follow up with THIS ONE, then THIS ONE.

Please forward this widely, with links. Layla Anwar doesn’t make anyone comfortable, but she has things to say that aren’t being said by anyone else as an Iraqi woman. Hear her bitterness; and you will know why this war cannot be “won,” and why the occupation itself is the basis of “inter-Iraqi violence.”

Posted by stan in News, Analysis