When Iraq loses someone like this man, it loses the support from millions of moderates. Democracy in Iraq loses the longer we give them their people reasons to doubt our interest in bringing real self-control to them. America is viewed as occupiers not liberators now.

Baghdad blast claims intellectual ally of U.S.
Thu Apr 29, 9:40 AM ET

By Evan Osnos Tribune foreign correspondent

When war arrived, 70-year-old professor Gailan Ramiz set out to protect the small, refined world he cherished.

Tall, reedy and avuncular, with a fondness for tweed jackets, he built a brick wall around his prized possession, the elegant but timeworn 1930s-era yellow-brick home he shared with his wife and their decades' collection of books from Princeton, Harvard and Oxford, where he studied, and Baghdad University, where he taught political science.

Then the respected political scientist nurtured his intellectual treasure--democracy--penning opinion articles that were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein, meeting with foreign journalists and heralding the dream, as Ramiz wrote in the International Herald Tribune a year ago, of an Iraq "whose democratic values and institutions would be a shining example to the entire Middle East."

This week, the chaotic and brutal world outside finally reached him.

While he sat with his wife and their daughter in their stately, high-ceilinged drawing room Monday, an explosion tore through his home, reducing most of it to rubble. Ramiz was killed, pulling one more member from Baghdad's once-hopeful ranks of moderate thinkers and leaving a bitter legacy for relatives who say their faith in America has worn thin. His wife was injured.

U.S. soldiers had come to investigate a tip that munitions were being produced in a perfume factory that rented the rear of the basement of Ramiz' house. U.S. officials still do not know what caused the blast, which left two Americans dead and eight wounded. But a U.S. official in Washington told The Associated Press that it was believed to be accidental, an ignition of poorly stored flammable chemicals.

Another AP report suggested the troops might have been lured there on a false tip. But military authorities in Baghdad say they have no evidence that Ramiz knew what was thought to be unfolding in his basement.

For the professor, it was the catastrophic end to a year of diminishing hope that mirrored in many ways the feelings of the city and nation he spent a lifetime analyzing.

By the next day, all that remained of Ramiz's rarified world were mounds of broken bricks and scorched furniture, mixed with torn, yellowed pages of international law journals and volumes of Russian history. The house's facade, with its delicate wood arches, had survived, but a bloody scarf lay on the spot where the family was sitting at the time of the blast.

Children scampered over torn books and rooted through the ruins for anything of value. Relatives said the jewelry, gold and silver were taken before anyone thought to protect them.

Nervous-looking soldiers

Three U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicles arrived Tuesday afternoon with a tow truck to remove the charred hulls of three Humvees, now swarmed by looting children.

For the nervous-looking soldiers who fanned into the street, this was the site of a tragic and mysterious incident. The two Americans who died were members of the Iraq Survey Group, a government team that is searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, an unnamed defense official told the AP.

Soldiers stood with their guns at the ready as one ordered relatives to get out of the house so the Humvees could be hauled from the rubble. Ramiz's father-in-law, Qassim Murad, in a rumpled black suit, rose from a bench by the front door of the ruined house and walked away, sobbing.

"This is democracy? Democracy sounds like that?" spat Jamaal Qassim, an electrical engineer and Ramiz's brother-in-law, as the Bradleys rumbled to a halt.

"Look, we are afraid of them, and they are afraid of us," Qassim said of the soldiers. "We do not hate the Americans, but we hate the policy of Mr. Bush. I see the young soldiers with their baby faces, and sometimes I feel sorry for them."

Engineers, professors and other professionals, many of Ramiz's relatives are just the sort of middle-class moderates who the U.S.-led coalition has looked to for a bedrock of support. But these family members say the U.S. military and civilian authority has failed them. The last straw, they said, was that no one from the coalition had come to talk to them about the deaths or the destruction of the house.

"In the beginning, when the Americans arrived, we were not happy and not unhappy," said Murad, who studied English in London a half-century ago. "But day after day, they take lives, and do nothing for us."

In the moments after the blast, local teenagers and young men flocked to the burning building shouting "God is greater," celebrating and taunting the U.S. soldiers evacuating their wounded. In the dark logic of Iraq, their joy at the Americans' loss outweighed the fact that an esteemed professor had been killed, said Nabil Emad, a 27-year-old neighbor, who said he was among those posing for television cameras.

"I couldn't control my emotion," he said in English. "When you see the people on television killed in Fallujah, that is the power of the United States. We know that something is more powerful than the United States, so we are happy. I have to say, `God is greater.'"

For Ramiz, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had crystallized the lifelong hope of modern political freedom in Iraq. In addition to Baghdad, he had taught in Malaysia and Jordan and served 10 years as director of research in the Foreign Ministry.

When American tanks rolled into Baghdad, he hid in the cellar of his home and prayed that the regime had fallen, he wrote. On the day that Hussein's statue came down in Firdaus Square, he screamed himself hoarse with the crowds of cheering men, women and children.

Favorite of journalists

"The sociological foundation of political power that will sustain democracy exists in Arab culture," he told CNN less than a week after the fall of Baghdad. "If the Americans are true liberators, they should not mind if people tell them `go' after liberation is done. But the Iraqi people, I think, are realistic enough, and they expect that American troops [will be] in Iraq for a temporary basis."

Witty and articulate, he fast became a favorite of foreign journalists groping for keen-eyed analysis of a confusing country. But as the months passed, Ramiz winced at what he considered American failings in Iraq.

"Life has become negative," he told the Christian Science Monitor in September.

As violence erupted this month, Ramiz apparently grew more despondent. He lamented to journalists that pursuing the militant cleric Moqtada Sadr had only elevated Sadr in the eyes of Iraqis who otherwise would ignore him, and that the Marines' move to surround Fallujah may have been an overreaction to the deaths of four U.S. contractors in the city.

In his last days, he seemed to believe that the situation was spinning beyond control.

"All of this has triggered outrage against the Americans," he said last week to a reporter from U.S. News and World Report. Iraqis were alienated. They were dissatisfied. And they had yet to glimpse a sovereign government.

The last two weeks of violence, he said, "was the straw that broke the camel's back."



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