Hope vs. Experience in Iraq

In search of reasons for optimism in war-torn Baghdad.

I've spent a lot of the last week trying to find a guarantor so I can make a trip to Ramadi and the towns along the Euphrates where "Operation River Blitz" has been taking place. That means I've spent much of my time hanging out at the local Council of Iraqi Tribes office. I met Monday with a sheikh from Haditha (it's somewhere out there, at least for the time being) who managed to slip the cordon and pull an end around, traveling a circuitous route to Tikrit before making his way to Baghdad. No one wants to take me, they just keep talking about it being too dangerous for westerners and how those cities are going to look like Falluja pretty soon.

"They've destroyed at least 10 mosques," the sheikh says, chewing on his prayer beads. "Why would you want to go there? There's no way I could keep you safe."

The country seems to be sectioning off inexorably -- while western Iraq moves further into a pattern of jihadism and criminal resistance, the south is asking Who needs Baghdad?" That's a question I've been posing for some time -- the oil is in the north and the south, the capital is just full of heretics and kefirs and too many goddamned Americans.

But maybe there's hope. My lawyer and I went to see Ibrahim Jaafari, a former medical doctor, the leader of the Dawa Party, and a good possibility for prime minister, if the government is formed.

Jaafari is learning to talk to the press but still likes to play up the humble guy bit. He says he was even reluctant to move into the manse in the Green Zone he now occupies, which belonged to one of Saddam's former ministers, complete with man-made waterfall and virtually next door to the US embassy. Not far from Jaafari's house, some joker has put up a sign by the side of the road, apparently to boost troop morale, at least three feet high, that reads "What have you done to help the Iraqi people today?"

Hiba, my translator-cum-lawyer, was thrilled that Jaafari's secretary wasn't wearing a hijab—perhaps there is some hope on that front. Anyway, Hiba is still smarting from an interview we did a couple weeks, ago when Adel Abdul Mehdi, the current finance minister and a former PM candidate, wouldn't even shake her hand and assured us "80 percent of Iraqis want Islamic law." Hiba had even worn a low-cut shirt in hopes of offending Jaafari should he prove as reactionary.

Jaafari also clearly enjoyed keeping US Ambassador -- and soon-to-be US intelligence chief -- John Negroponte waiting outside his office while he showed me what he was reading. (Negroponte, by the way, is working on a lovely goatee and looks like he needs sleep worse than I do.) Spread on his desk were hefty tomes, including Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History", Dick Nixon's "After the Peace" and Bill Clinton's "My Life." He had a bunch of passages underlined in "My Life" dealing with Nelson Mandela and said he thought that after the whole Monica Lewinski thing comes out, the book just becomes self-serving and long-winded. Anyway, one of the profs at my alma mater puts it all in perspective, including Jaafari's possible past as a terrorist.

Somewhere close by there was a large explosion.

"It's a little early for the 12 o'clock ordnance disposal," I say to one of Jaafari's foreign security guards, who responded by glancing nervously at his watch.

"Uh… yeah."

Jaafari explained that making sharia the basis of personal status law in the country was a way to protect religious freedom, which was quashed under Saddam. Buoyed by that experience, Hiba and I extricated ourselves from the bowels of the Green Zone and went to visit the Baghdad Music and Ballet School to look for more reasons to be optimistic.

Despite the looting and burning of the school after the war, it's running again, thanks to donations from the outside. (The school now has two harpsichords but no harpsichord students.) I felt guilty talking to the students, remembering how my mother had to drive me, bitching the whole way, to piano lessons every week. Light explosions rattle the doors of the school, which has the misfortune of being far too close to an American base and an Iraqi army recruiting center that was on Wednesday the site of yet another car bomb.

"If everyone thinks that Iraq will be not good, then I think it will be better than before, with us, with the new generation, that could make it better," said Zuhail Ahmed, a 14-year-old piano student. "My biggest dream is to go to the Royal College of Music in London and to study there and then return to Iraq and play in the symphony orchestra."

Concern that the school might come under the same fundamentalist pressures that have forced musicians and performing artists in Basra to practice underground? Just in case, Iraq's real president/oracle, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, has been consulted.

"We have some players in the Iraqi national symphony who are Islamic, and they asked Sistani, and he told them the music is good for the people," said Majid Musa, a trumpet player at the school.

Wow. We've got religious freedom. We've got the ballet school. We've got a man who wants to be Mandela. We've even got a more screwed up form of reality television than FOX could cook up. Please W., can the soldiers go home now? I don't actually really see them doing much other than closing off streetsafter the bombs go off.

What do you think?

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2005/03/baghdad_journal11.html