'What have you done to us, George Bush?'

“What have you done to us, George Bush?” Ra’id screams at the television.

He’s watching scenes of Moqtada Al-Sadr as the young cleric touts his plans for a new religious Iraq. Then Allawi comes on the screen, the unelected Prime Minister, appointed by the military occupiers. He pledges to crush with an iron fist anyone who opposes the US forces in Iraq.

“We have a new Saddam! But this time he uses the missiles, bombs and tanks of foreigners against us,” Ra’id cries in disbelief.

“And we have a religious cleric who wants to put Iraq into the dark ages.

“What have you done to us, George Bush?”

Raid, 32, like other Iraqis his age has lived through a regime, three wars, the suffering of the sanctions and now the occupation.

“This is the worst,” he says.

“Everything is worse now. The violence is everywhere, it’s unpredictable.

“At least under Saddam you were safe if you kept quiet, but now everyone is in danger. Every day we don’t know if we will die.”

I know how he feels. Living in occupied Iraq, death is ever-present. When I left my Baghdad home in the morning, my last thought was always: “Will I make it back?”

Car bombs explode in all neighbourhoods, gunshots ring out late into the night. Wherever US troops are present, the violence is present and the troops are everywhere – in their rumbling tanks, thunderous choppers and provocative foot patrols.

The military occupation lays a heavy blanket of oppression over the city of Baghdad.

Parents are frightened to send their children to school. Women rush to the market and back home again without socialising with friends, many cafes close at sundown, where once they opened until midnight. Men are listless, unemployed and frustrated.

The living conditions in the city are appalling.

Almost a year and a half since the invasion and there’s still no reliable power. The electricity cuts are a constant frustration as families now deal with 45-degree heat without refrigeration or air-conditioning.

The water is still unclean, causing widespread disease and deaths in many country areas. Rubbish lies in the street uncollected. People wait as long as eight hours to buy petrol, and military road blocks cause traffic chaos that makes doing business in Baghdad impossible.

Welcome to the free Iraq – the one you don’t see reported on CNN.

“Saddam was bad, but at least he could keep the lights on!” is one of many comparisons made between the new and old regime.

For many Iraqis it has become as basic as that. That’s because they used to have the basics: jobs, security, power, clean water etc. Now they don’t.

They were promised freedom and liberation, but they don’t have that either. Airing your political views in the "free" Iraq can mean imprisonment and torture.

There are other similarities between the new and the old regime – the coalition bureaucrats live in Saddam’s palaces behind heavy razor-wire bombardments and don’t come out to talk to Iraqis or experience the chaos the invasion has created. They send out terror squads who cruise the streets in black Mercedes Benz with smoked windows. Soldiers raid houses in the middle of the night, trash everything and take away a prisoner without charge or trial, just because he "spoke badly" about Americans, despite the fact he doesn’t own a weapon. He is not heard of for a year, no family visits are allowed. There are stories of torture.

Remind you of something?

Understandably the Iraqis now feel betrayed and humiliated.

The chaos, the challenges of surviving everyday life in the new Iraq and the oppression of the violence have left Iraqis exhausted – physically, spiritually, emotionally.

Living in this daily chaos, they are bemused by politicians outside Iraq who talk of "sovereignty" with that blank electioneering-gaze in their eyes and satisfied smiles on their faces.

Not surprisingly, Iraqis dismiss the interim government as illegitimate. “I don’t remember voting, did I miss something? When was the election?” one Iraqi man told a journalist when asked his opinion about the new Iraqi Government.

With US-appointed politicians known only by their bad reputations making up the so-called Iraqi Government, with the tanks of foreign military occupiers still rumbling down the streets, with the horror of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures still haunting everyone, with the bodies of women and children massacred in Fallujah so numerous they had to be buried in a football field and with smug politicians saying everything is okay in Iraq, when it’s clearly not; the Iraqis are losing their patience. The pseudo-sovereignty has changed nothing.

After living in the Iraqi community in Baghdad for six months, after hundreds of conversations with ordinary Iraqi people, I know there is one thing they desire above all else: peace and security.

This cannot be achieved while ever violent foreign occupiers remain in control of the country and pull the strings tied to the interim Government.

“But the troops must remain in Iraq to provide security!” cry commentators who have never been there to see the carnage the troops have created.

Spend 24 hours in Baghdad and it becomes blatantly obvious that it is the pure presence of the troops that is causing the lack of security.

While ever they are there, violence will continue.

A day in Iraq will also destroy the well-spun myth that there are divisions in the Iraq community that would cause civil war. This is a convenient story created by the coalition and happily propagated by the mainstream media. It is the means to "divide and conquer" and to justify further military involvement. The fact that Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, and Christians, have been living in harmony in Iraq for centuries is overlooked.

Withdraw the troops and the Iraqis are ready. Ready to elect their own government, to provide their own security, to manage their own oil and natural resources, to control their own destiny.

They are ready for peace.

Governments, media commentators and people of the world must stop the patronising. Stop telling Iraqis what we think they need and give them the chance to tell us.

Coalition partners should withdraw troops and contribute to the reconstruction of Iraq in a more meaningful, practical way.

Send home the soldiers with guns and bad attitudes and send over people with tools, tractors, toys and training.  
  
Send friends to help – human beings to walk alongside the Iraqis as fellow human beings. 

This will create the peace the Iraqis are waiting for and the peace they deserve.