“Ah, the freedom. Look, we have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom, the hash-smoking freedom. I don’t know what to do with all this freedom. ”
— Akeel, a twenty-six-year-old Baghdad resident on life in the new Iraq
That’s the quote from which Christian Parenti takes the title of his new book of on-the-ground reporting from Iraq. I’m about a third of the way through it, and so far, I would recommend it unambiguously to anyone who wants to get a sense of what’s actually happening there, without the various CNN/Fox/DoD filters.