IRAQNESS: Iranian blog reactions to Saddam’s capture.

Healing Iraq: “I still haven’t been able to get rid of this deep sadness that has overcome me the last two days. People have been emailing asking me to explain. I wish I could, but I simply can’t.

“…If you had lived all your life ruled by a tough dictator elevated to the level of a god and then suddenly without warning watched that dictator displayed to the public on tv as a ‘man’, you probably would have related with my position.

“The images were shocking. I couldn’t make myself believe this was the same Saddam that slaughtered hundreds of thousands and plundered my country’s wealth for decades. The humiliation I experienced was not out of nationalistic pride or Islamic notions of superiority or anything like that as some readers suggested. It was out of a feeling of impotence and helplessness. This was just one old disturbed man yet the whole country couldn’t dispose of him. We needed a superpower from the other side of the ocean to come here and ‘get him’ for us. I was really confused that day I went out and almost got myself killed by those Fedayeen and angry teenagers in the Adhamiya district.

“…He must be handed over to Iraqis. I don’t care about legitimacy. He must be tried publicly in an Iraqi civil court by Iraqi judges. The rest of the Arab dictators should see it and learn from it.

“And I’m still wondering why? Why did he have to put himself into this? Why did he have to destroy Iraq? What did he gain from all of this?”

Enormous amount of stuff at Iraq the Model and you should read all of it. Including: “I met him in a photo copy office owned by a friend. My friend introduced him to me, his name is Firas Mahmood Ya’koob, a junior resident in Al-Karkh hospital for surgery in Baghdad, a shy young man, holding some photos of men, women, and children. He wanted to make copies of them so

I knew there was a story behind them. I couldn’t help asking him about it, he said ‘I’m from Al-Dujaile.’

“I understood what he meant.

In Saddam’s time we used to whisper about Al-Dujaile, we all knew that a massacre happened there, but we didn’t dare to ask about the details and I never met any one from there. Now I can know all about it from my new friend and here it is, in his own words…” more

Plus news bites. And this: “I asked one of the waiters about the secret behind this sudden improvement, he laughed and told me: Saddam’s gone now, and our boss can expand his business without worrying about being kicked out of this place and losing every thing he spent on this coffee shop, Saddam and his relatives had enormous greed for any piece of land near the river.” And more.

Where Is Raed is back on the air: “There was another moment when the GC members were describing their meeting with Saddam and told the journalists about the deriding remarks he made when they asked him about the Sadir’s assasination and the mass graves, he sounded like he has totally lost it.

“I want a fully functioning Saddam who will sit on a chair in front of a TV camera for 10 hours everyday and tells us what exactly happened the last 30 years. I do not care about the fair trial thing Amnesty Int. is worried about and I don’r really care much about the fact that the Iraqi judges might not be fullt qualified, we all know he should rot in hell. but what I do care about is that he gets a public trial because I want to hear all the untold stories” more