'They haven't lived through Saddam'

At the Labour Party conference:

Labour's leadership has seen off calls for an early pull-out of troops from Iraq, winning a conference vote on the issue by a margin of four to one.
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The call for Mr Blair to set an early date for withdrawing the troops was defeated by 86% to 14%.

From one of the speeches:

[F]ormer Iraqi exile, Shanaz [Rashid], backed Mr Blair's handling of the war and called on Labour conference to support the British troops guarding "freedom" in Iraq.

"I beseech you to understand what it means to be free," she urged in an emotional address. "It is your soldiers, your sailors and your airmen who have laid down their lives, their humanity, to give us the freedom to give me my dream."

There's more on that speech here:

The woman who helped swing the vote at the Labour conference over pulling troops out of Iraq today accused party members of naivety about the situation in the country.

Shanaz Rashid – whose husband is a minister in the interim Iraqi government – was earlier given a standing ovation when she made an emotional appeal not to pull troops out.

Close to tears, she told party activists that many friends had perished under Saddam Hussein and she had kissed the ground with joy on arriving back at Baghdad after the war.
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"But for the great majority of Iraqis WMD was never the issue. We don't understand the criticism of your Prime Minister. All we wanted was to be free."

She added: "I appeal to you all... to help us build a new democratic federal Iraq that would respect the lives of human beings."

Asked later if she considered Labour members naive about the situation for Iraqis, she said: "Yes I do think so. They don't know the reality of their lives.

"They haven't lived through Saddam. They don't know what we've been through.

"It is not fair of them to ask the British Government to withdraw their forces before completing their mission.

"They are going to harm the Iraqi people more. They are going to cause more deaths.

"If they are concerned about the Iraqi children they should not be asking the British Government to leave them alone at the mercy of others."

Another delegate:

TA officer Ivor Morgan, who has served in Iraq, said he found it deeply offensive when Labour party members referred to [the] armed forces as "occupiers" when they were liberators.

What he said (as heard by me on the radio) was:

I have never served in an army of occupation, only an army of liberation.