MSNBC: Iraqi Vice

Dec. 22 issue - The trip from Ali's village to Baghdad takes an hour and a half by bus. As soon as he arrives, the 21-year-old Iraqi heads straight to Abu Abdullah's, just off Sadoun Street in an alley with a number instead of a name. "I don't have a wife," he says. "I don't have enough money to get married. So I come here." At Abu Abdullah's, $1.50 buys 15 minutes alone with a woman. The room is a cell with only a curtain for a door, and Ali complains that Abu Abdullah's women should bathe more often. But the young man says it's still a big improvement from Saddam Hussein's day. Back then, he says, the only establishment for a poor boy like himself was at a Gypsy settlement on the capital's western outskirts. "But now there are plenty of places." He grins. "Now we have freedom."

Before the invasion, Iraq was one of the world's most tightly controlled societies. Only a few specially licensed stores could sell alcohol, and in recent years drinking was banned outright in restaurants and hotels. A committee in the Ministry of Culture kept a strict watch against even mildly naughty movies, magazines and films. Convicted prostitutes could be beheaded. Hard-core drug abuse was virtually unknown--if you didn't count certain members of Saddam's immediate family and their close friends. Now Iraqis like Ali are making up for what they've missed--and many other Iraqis, young and old, are blaming America. "Some people say the spread of such things is designed to weaken our society," says Col. Daoud Selman, a police chief in one of Baghdad's roughest districts. "Every day we hear it from people on the street. Not just the religious people, but ordinary ones, too."

Iraqis call it "the bad side of freedom." The problems go far beyond Baghdad's tailgate liquor bazaars, where wildcat shopkeepers peddle booze from the backs of cars, or the arrays of skin magazines on full display at the teeming Bab-i-Sharji market in the heart of town. The worry isn't only the growing number of visibly intoxicated people around the market, or the pharmacopeia of pills that are readily available there without prescription. What bothers many Iraqis, apparently even some of those who make their living from the sin industry, is the question of where Iraq is headed.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3706289/


Looks like the war brought freedom after all, eh?

. . From the article:

"Nothing the police are likely to do, anyway. The regime's vice laws remain on the books, but they're rarely enforced. "Immediately after the war, we started raids and arresting prostitutes and pimps," says Lt. Col. Omar Zahid, a top cop in Abu Abdullah's district. "But the American MPs made us release them. After that, the whores and pimps understood they had nothing to fear."

/snip/

well gee - all them young murikan boys over there - go figure !!