For Iraqi diplomats in embassies worldwide, the televised images of U.S. Marines rolling their tanks through Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's statue toppling to the ground before their cheering countrymen created confusion, resignation and paranoia.
Outside the Iraqi Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, employees were burning boxes and documents after the image of the Saddam statue was beamed to South America, police said.
Embassy official Abdu Saif, the secretary to Iraqi Ambassador Jarallah Alobaidy, denied documents were being destroyed. "It's all lies," Saif said. "We are only burning garbage and recently cut grass."
The scene was similar in Sweden, where a spokesman for the Iraqi Embassy appeared unsure whether their operation would remain open - and if it did, who might be giving the orders.
"We don't know anything," spokesman Jamal Abdulrazak told The Associated Press. "All we know is what we see on television. We are just (government) officials. We have not received orders from the ex-government or a new government."
"If they want us to stay, we stay," said Abdulzarak. "If they want us to go home, we go home. We are Iraqi. We do our job."
In Hannah Arendt's classic Book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the author traveled to Israel to watch the trial of Eichmann, a Nazi smuggled out of Argentina in the 1960s and brought to Israel for war crimes. If I remember correctly, Eichmann's job was to make sure the trains ran from point A to point B. He would continue repeating this over and over when cross-examined. He never felt any remorse. He was doing his job. He was just following orders. What was his cargo? Jews. Where was he sending them? Concentration camps.
When you read stories about Iraqi children jailed because they won't join the youth branch of the Batth Party, how can feel bad for a bunch of middle aged opportunists who were living in fancy New York apartments, while their countrymen were imprisoned and starved?
It's these fools that acted as mouthpieces for a terrible regime worldwide. When they're questioned about their destruction of evidence they call it a lie, the same thing that have been saying for 20 years. Now, some of them are naïve enough to think that they may be asked to stay or that they may be welcomed home. They have the same detachment to their jobs that Eichmann did. Good Riddance!
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