Freedom, as America has defined it for Iraq

From Ali Allawi's new book The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, published by Yale University Press:

Restrictions on personal freedoms were swept away, but this was not much use if a simple travel request to one of the coalition partner countries was to be routinely rejected. Iraqis were now free, but apparently not good enough to be allowed into these countries. "Iraqis could travel anywhere as long as it was to Jordan!" as the refrain went. Newspapers could write what they wanted, and they did, including outright lies, slander and calumnies, and rumour-mongering. The millions of Iraqi exiles from the Saddam era were now joined by hundreds of thousands fleeing the violence, or who simply could not abide life in the new order. It now seemed that the Ba'ath Party was not simply a small coterie that sat upon a repressive system of control. It had hundreds of thousands of adherents, sympathisers, fellow-travellers and beneficiaries of its largesse. A repressive and corrupt government was replaced by an equally chaotic, if not more corrupt, administration.

The lot of the average citizen when dealing with officialdom was still subject to the whims and bigotries of the bureaucrat. But access was far more daunting. Ministries had huge throngs milling outside, often in ferocious heat or engulfed in dust clouds, while people awaited their turn to be individually screened. What used to take hours to achieve now took days, if not weeks. And this in a climate of anxiety and stress, as a suicide bomber might mingle in the crowds, or a car packed with explosives might detonate while waiting in line in front of one governmental department or another. Everywhere, there was cynicism mixed with disgust at the litany of broken promises made by the government. The abysmal level of services during the Saddam era began to look positively rosy in light of the appalling shortfalls in electricity, water, sanitation and policing services. The overthrow of the dictatorship was decidedly a mixed blessing. Ultimately, it depended on who you were.