24 Mar 05 Palace Life

People often ask me what it is like to live in one of Saddam's palaces. Well for me it is just like living in the movie office space. The only reason I say that is because work is work. This palace has been totally restored and transformed into a Coalition Headquarters. See most of the headquarters personnel got to just move into there previous sections offices as we took over the fight of the war. Which works good. For example, you work in Public Affairs; when you get to iraq you can go to the Public Affairs section and find your counterpart and eventually take over there desk when they leave iraq with the rest of the unit. The above scenario works really well unless you do not have a counterpart to take over for which is the case of my section. So our fist two months here have been trying to get all the equipment that we need to become fully mission capable.

So How do I feel about living in the palace. Well like so much of iraq the beauty is only skin deep. Just the symbol of the palace is enough to make me get angry. You see this palace was built with oil for food money. Some of you might remember that disatrous program run by the U.N. subsidized byt the U.S. This program was supposed to be help the poor starving iraqis. Also this place was built by french designers with cheap iraqi labor. So every time a marble slab comes off somewher you can look behind the facade ans see the shotty construction work. This place looks huge and it is but eventhough it looks like a castle it was not as well contructed as a castle. It is nice to know that the french pretty much screw everybody. One example is bricks are stacked in some places to make up the walls. No mortar no rebarb just stacked. In some cases my 4 yearold can stack blocks better.

There are carp that are in this giant man made lake around the palace I guess it was supposed to be moat or something. The carp are huge. some of them are like 4 feet long and 8-10 inches in height. When you throw food into the water they turn almost as ravenouse as pirhana's. It is kind of neat actually but it does make you wonder how many people were fed to them.

There are only two roads that cross the moat. One we blew up when we bombed this place as the start of the war trying to get UDay and Qusay. This palace was their porn, hunting, murder lodge. In fact out back there is small man hole grate that only goes down abut 10 feet I am told that is where they used to put people. Do I do not know if that was true or not but it would not surprise me one. Bit.

But form my daily life her. It is alot like office space. If you have not seen teh movie watch it is very funny. Also typical.

remember
"freedom is not free it is paid for in blood by those with the courage to defend it."