The new government is installed in Iraq, and what do the new President’s home boys immediately do?
In Mosul, al-Yawer’s hometown, crowds swept into the streets to celebrate the news, cheering and firing weapons in the air. American soldiers there appealed for calm.
I don’t know. Every time I read something like this, that quote from P. J. O’Rourke keeps coming back to me:
Six days after the liberation of Kuwait the Kuwaitis were still celebrating outside the U.S. embassy, firing every available weapon in the air, including the .50-caliber dual-mount machineguns on the Saudi and Qatari personnel carriers. It’s one thing to get plinked on the head by a falling pistol bullet, but a .50-caliber slug plummeting from the sky at terminal velocity could go right through you to the soles of your feet. One American marine told me that sixteen people had been killed by “happy fire” so far, but a U.S. Army officer said it was more like a hundred and fifty. All the press corps’ telephone and television satellite up-links were on the roof of the Hilton and rounds were beginning to land up there. One bullet came down between the feet of ABC executive Neil Patterson, who started handing out helmets and battle gear to everybody on the ABC payroll. The most dangerous thing I did during the entire war was cook spaghetti sauce on a camp stove on the Hilton roof without wearing my flak jacket.
Finally, one of the ABC satellite technicians — a Brit and a veteran of the Special Air Services — could stand it no more and leaned over the roof parapet and bellowed at the trigger-crazed Kuwaiti merrymakers, “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT! PUT THOSE FUCKING GUNS AWAY AND GO GET A MOP AND A BROOM AND CLEAN THIS COUNTRY UP!“
(P.J. O’Rourke, Give War A Chance, pp. 231-232)