The Scribe

The Blackwater incident in Baghdad, 2007: excerpts from an interview with Jeremy Scahill 9/19/07

Jeremy Scahill, author of the definitive book on Blackwater, has been back on the interview circuit thanks to the most recent incident in Iraq in which Blackwater employees fired into a crowd and killed at least 20 Iraqi civilians.  What follows is a series of excerpts from a half hour interview with Scahill about Blackwater on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show.

For more background on Blackwater, its connections with the religious right, its development and growth, here’s an earlier interview with Scahill about his research and his book.

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1996: Clinton and privatization

I don’t think that Blackwater saw a demand for the outsourcing of military work as much as they did for supporting the military through training.  The Clinton administration was very much on board with the privatization agenda that began in full force during the George H.W. Bush administration.  The moment Blackwater jumped into this world of military outsourcing is in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. 

After 9/11

When the CIA and other intelligence agencies began deploying inside Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there after 9/11, they put out a call to all of their former special operators to try to come up with independent contractors.  Eric Prince’s men at Blackwater were contracted by the CIA on a covert contract, a black contract. This sent a small team of former Special Forces operators inside Afghanistan where they were positioned near the Pakistan border and to my knowledge that’s the first time we see Blackwater crossing the line from being a training company to actually providing soldiers of fortune for hire to the US government. 

…There’s a number of problems…  Increasingly many members of Congress, most notably those on the oversight and intelligence committees have a problem with using these private sector forces.  We’ve seen dramatically over the past six years of this “war on terror” an almost total lack of oversight of the conduct of these individuals.  And they’re incredibly expensive.  They’re paid much more than regular duty soldiers.  And as we now see in Iraq, they’re not held accountable when they commit crimes and it has a significant blowback effect on the US military. 

Blackwater’s presence in Iraq

There’s about 180,000 private contractors in Iraq, and the vast majority of those are not armed contractors like those who work for Blackwater.  They cook food, they drive trucks, they do laundry. Blackwater has approximately 1,000 operatives deployed in Iraq – at least that’s what the company says.  The primary function of the Blackwater forces in Iraq is to keep alive the senior officials of the US occupation.

What’s of enormous symbolic importance to what’s happening right now is that Blackwater isn’t just some company that the Iraqis are trying to kick out.  Iraq is essentially saying, “We want expelled from our country the men who are guarding Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who protect Condoleezza Rice when she visits, who protect every US Congressional delegation when they come into Iraq.”  They are essentially saying, “We want to remove the official mercenary force of the US government.”  This is an enormous problem for the State Department right now.

Why Blackwater is protecting US officials

Two reasons.  One is the official version and then one is the accurate version!  The official version is that you have to free up every single soldier to do the actual fighting of the war.  So when it comes to executive protection or force protection, you farm that out to the private sector.  The theory behind it is that will allow the military to do the actual fighting of the war.  In fact, during the 1991 Gulf war, Dick Cheney, as defense secretary, was a major supporter of expanding the civilian presence in the war zone to cook food for the troops, to do the laundry, drive trucks, etc., based on that notion – that we’re going to be able to maximize the force that comes out of our military.  …I think there’s never been a study of the cost effectiveness of this, and also there are not effective legal mechanisms in place to hold those private sector forces accountable as there is with US troops when they commit a crime.  The oversight problem here is tremendous.  I really think it cuts across party lines.  A lot of traditional conservatives are really outraged at this system.  But what we’ve seen the Bush administration do is to take that now logistical support and actually turn it into armed combatants that are hired privately.  That’s where some really muddy waters emerge.  Blackwater’s forces have been regularly engaged in firefights with Iraqis.  Civilians have been killed over the past four years.  And Blackwater is just one of 180 mercenary companies operating in Iraq right now.  This is a system very much out of control.

The other version?  The Bush administration has clearly used these private forces as a back door way of doubling the size of the US occupation force in Iraq.  It also provides the administration with a great deal of political expediency.  The deaths of these contractors go uncounted in the official death toll and we know that more than a thousand contractors have died in Iraq, because their families have applied for federal death benefits with the US government.  …US taxpayers end up paying death benefits to the families of some eligible contractors.  But those thousand or so whose families have been approved for death benefits don’t represent the total number of contractors.  The vast majority of contractors working for the US government in Iraq are indeed not American citizens. 

Why don’t the armed forces just recruit more troops?

There’s a number of reasons why the military is struggling in Iraq right now.  General David Petraeus himself, as well as Ambassador Ryan Crocker, said very clearly that without the private sector involvement in the war, the occupation would be untenable.  I think a lot of people are disillusioned.  They don’t support the war.  This is a tremendously unpopular war.  And so you don’t have people rushing to join the military now.  Also, and I think actually this is the central point, this administration failed to build the coalition so-called of “willing nations” to go into Iraq.  So what they did was to build the coalition of billing corporations.  It raises a lot of questions about the democratic process in this country.  Because if you’re essentially purchasing forces to fight a country’s war, what does that say about what should be the most serious task that a government could undertake, the waging of a war? 

…You have about 165,000 to 175,000 official US troops.  And then there’s approximately 180,o00 private contractors.  Of those, we don’t know how many are engaged in armed security activities, but we believe it could be as high as 70,000, according to sources in the US intelligence committee in the House. 

What really happened in Iraq the other day when so many civilians were killed?

Blackwater has been involved with a number of these incidents and their narrative is often the exact same story, “We were engaged in defensive operations.  We were fired upon.  We returned fire.  We followed the rules of engagement.  We were heroically defending American lives.”  It’s pretty clear that Blackwater’s version of events, which is that all of those killed were insurgents involved in an attack on Blackwater, is not true.  We’ve seen footage of the hospitals with victims talking about it.  People who had been shot numerous times who tell a very similar story about Blackwater contractors simply opening fire and indiscriminately shooting at people.  We now hear this incredibly disturbing news that when the firefight began, a woman and an infant were among the dead in a car that Blackwater’s forces fired on.

Playing devil’s advocate:  why would the fire indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians, including women and children?  Did the car ignore a stop order that their personnel gave, acting like a suicide bomber?

I think what we’ve seen is a pattern of recklessness on the part of these private contractors when they’re defending officials.  This is not a new story.  Often times Iraqis are driving.  They don’t know what the “rules of engagement” of the private contractors are. They think they’re simply driving from point A to point B in their city.  They veer too close to a Blackwater convoy.  Blackwater decides, “We perceive a threat so we’re going to open fire.”  And in this case, according to the Iraqis, they killed a couple of and their infant.  I think the major problem here is that this is not at all a defensive operation that Blackwater’s engaged in.  They’re at the vanguard of occupying the country and when the Iraqis are driving their cars down the street and fail to stop because Blackwater wants them to, and then Blackwater lights them up and kills a child with her parents, I think this is an enormous problem.

The issue of Iraqi sovereignty

This is going to be the first real test of whether there is any degree of autonomy for the Iraqi government or sovereignty.  …When the Bush administration sent Paul Bremer into Baghdad, one of the orders that he issued was called “Order 17.”  Basically, that granted a sweeping immunity to all private contractors operating in Iraq.  It said the Iraqi justice system was not allowed to go after them or prosecute them.  The Iraqis dispute the validity of that right now.  They say the Iraqi courts should have the ability to prosecute any criminal activity committed by private individuals inside their country.

Is Order 17 still valid?

I heard from a contact in Baghdad this morning that one of the senior officials of the supreme court of the country is saying that Blackwater should be prosecuted in Iraqi courts, and that in fact the Iraqi legal system should have jurisdiction over this incident that took place on Sunday.  So the Iraqis seem to be saying very clearly that Order 17 is not on the books anymore.  This is no longer the Coalition Provisional Authority.  It also seems like Condoleezza Rice is putting tremendous pressure on Maliki’s government to step back on this issue.  I think she’s trying to send a message that the State Department is going to investigate it.  What’s amazing here is that for four years this has not been a major story in the Iraqi press itself.  Now it’s front-page stuff. Every Iraqi knows the name “Blackwater” now.

Many Iraqis, especially in early stages of the occupation – and it probably held true up until a week ago – believed that these private security contractors were Israeli intelligence officials from the Mossad, a very commonly held belief in Iraq because of the garb they dress in and the way they drive around the country.  Oftentimes they wear khaki pseudo-uniforms.  They’re not clean-shaven, as many soldiers are.  They wear wraparound Ray-Ban sunglasses.  Some of them have goatees.  They’re very, very pumped up, tattooed individuals.  It’s the essence of a sort of cartoonish Rambo running around Iraq.  Blackwater has the reputation among other private security companies as being the cowboys of the war zone.  Now I think Iraqis are realizing that these aren’t Israeli intelligence operatives.  This is a whole other segment of the occupation and many people didn’t necessarily know who they were.   Now they very much know who there are!

[They were believed by some to be] Central Intelligence agency, CIA people.  In fact there’s an indication that when the four Blackwater men were ambushed in Fallujah in March of 2004, the people who attacked them believed they were actually attacking a CIA convoy and didn’t know they were private security forces. 

Why aren’t these killings murder?  They’re not soldiers, not in combat…

There is a law on the books in the US that would provide for individuals who are private security contractors in Iraq to be tried in US civilian courts.  It’s a law passed in 2000 called “The Military Territorial Jurisdiction Act.”  Basically what that says is that if a contractor working on behalf of the US government commits a crime in a foreign war zone, the US justice system can bring an indictment against that individual, bring them back to the US, and try them in federal court.  That hasn’t happened yet in the case of any US contractors.  It has happened, twice, in the case of non-armed contractors in Iraq where they have been brought back to the US and prosecuted.  But those were not for any crimes against Iraqis.  One is a KBR employee who is alleged to have stabbed a co-working in the kitchen; and the other is a man who pled guilty to possession of child pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib.  But this is an important question.  And in fact the Iraqis are saying that this is criminal activity and have labeled Blackwater’s actions in the past “murder.” So the Iraqis clearly want to prosecute them in the country.  But normally, when a contractor is accused of a crime by the Iraqis, the company that employs that individual sneaks them out of the country so they can avoid prosecution. 

I believe that if the Iraqi government is a sovereign government, Nouri al-Maliki should have the right to say they should be thrown out.  That’s the big issue here:  Maliki mistakenly thought he was the prime minister of Iraq, apparently, because the Blackwater men haven’t gone anywhere and he’s ordered them out of the country. 

Is that because as long as Maliki welcomes the American military there, the US military has the right to hire its own subcontractors which is what Blackwater is?

That’s not accurate!  Blackwater is not working for the US military in Iraq.  Blackwater has an $800m contract with the US State Department.  …There’s a functional difference.  And there is actually a legal distinction.  One of the loopholes in that law that I cited is that it’s written so that any forces working on behalf of the US military… Blackwater is working on behalf of the US State Department.  The crisis here now for the US is that Maliki has essentially said that Ryan Crocker’s personal bodyguards need to leave the country immediately.

Blackwater landed its first big contract during the Clinton administration.  Would Hillary Clinton be likely to scale back or possibly eradicate the Blackwater contract if elected?

Some of the Democrats may try to seize on this incident – and particularly because Blackwater is a very prominent backer of Republican causes and the Bush administration campaigned specifically to try to make this into a partisan issue.  But the fact is that Hillary Clinton’s husband was very supportive of this same agenda.  While Blackwater definitely has a partisan agenda, in terms of the personal politics of its executive, this system isn’t going anywhere any time soon.  It was the Clinton administration that originally gave Blackwater permission to push its goods and services to all agencies of the federal government.  There’s been tremendous bipartisan support for the privatization of the US war machine over the past 15 years.  Certainly the Clintons were at the heart of it for a solid eight years in the White House.

Other contractors in Iraq ridicule Blackwater as “cowboys”

That description fits of the companies operating in Iraq!  It’s no surprise that people working for a competitor of Blackwater would want to characterize them in that way.  But an interesting experience I’ve had over the past several months is traveling around the country.  I did about 35 cities.  And I met many, many US soldiers who had just come back from Iraq.  They are so disgusted with the conduct of Blackwater.   They told me stories about how these Blackwater operatives make their lives incredibly difficult in Iraq because they go into a village, they shoot at cars that come too close to them, and the US soldiers have been trying to create good relations with the Iraqis there.  The Iraqis don’t understand who these individuals are and then they carry out revenge attacks against official US soldiers.  It creates a morale problem among the official US troops because the troops are getting paid significantly less than these guys.  They see them running around looking like cowboys or “rock stars,” as one soldier told me.  And nothing happens to them when they commit a crime.  There have been 64 courts martial of soldiers in Iraq for murder-related charges alone.  Not a single charge has been brought against any mercenary.

What about those other private contractors?  Aegis, for instance?

Aegis?  While I call Blackwater the most powerful mercenary army, it’s by no means the biggest mercenary force operating in the world.  It simply has the closest proximity to the throne of the administration in the US.  Aegis is a massive firm, set up by an infamous British mercenary named Tim Spicer.  They have what’s called “the mother-lode contract” in Iraq.  They run a privatized green zone within the Green Zone where they coordinate the activities of all the other mercenary companies, and they also engage in private intelligence services.  There’s another British company that’s active in Iraq called Armor Group which has operations in 38 countries around the world.  What we’ve really seen happen out of the Iraq war is the explosion of the private security industry to the point where you now have some companies operating in the world that have the fire power to take out some small national militaries. 

How does Petraeus relate to all this? 

Petraeus himself has talked glowingly about the contractors.  In fact, General Petraeus himself has been guarded at times by contracted security.  Right now in Iraq, three US generals are being protected by private security. 

That license renewal problem:  no other private contractor company has been denied license renewal

That story was broken by the Washington Post a couple of months ago.  Steve Fainaru, who’s an excellent foreign correspondent for the Washington Post has been digging into this world of private military intelligence in Iraq.  Blackwater, of the past eight or nine months, has been involved in a number of incidents that have created serious tensions between Washington and Baghdad.  The first happened on Christmas Eve inside the Green Zone where an off-duty Blackwater contractor was allegedly drunk and shot and killed the bodyguard for the Shiite Vice President of Iraq, Adel Abdul Mahdi.  The Iraqis have called that a murder and they told Condoleezza that they were trying to keep it under wraps because if Iraqis found out that a bodyguard for the vice president was murdered and that the company the bodyguard worked for whisked him out of Iraq so he could avoid prosecution, that they would be outraged.  Then we have, this past May back-to-back days over a 48-hour period, Blackwater operatives engaging in firefights in the streets of Baghdad outside of the Interior Ministry that actually drew in Iraqi and US forces into a gun battle.  A civilian driver is alleged to have been killed in that incident as well.  Then you have this incident this past Sunday when as many as 20 people may have been killed.  I think the Iraqi government now is saying that there have been at least 7 deadly incidents involving Blackwater killing civilians.  It does seem now that they are specifically targeting Blackwater.  I’m actually surprised at how forceful the Iraqi government is being on this issue. …I really had the sense that they’d have to back down after than initial phone call from Condoleezza Rice, but that does not seem to be the case.

What is Blackwater being paid?

Blackwater’s contract in Iraq to date has won the company about $800m.  It began with an initial $27m no-bid contract to guard Paul Bremer in 2003.  It’s been renewed a number of times and expanded.  Nearing a billion dollars at this point for “services” in Iraq.

If you’re a top-tier Blackwater operator, meaning that you have a background in Special Operations, you can get $650 a day.  At times the rate has been $1,000 or more.  If you’re a former Colombian soldier hired by Blackwater to work in Iraq, you were told you’d be paid $34 a day.  US troops in Iraq can make anywhere from $35,000 to $45,000 with additional bonuses a year, if you’re a rank-and-file soldier.  If you go up into Special Forces ranks, you get closer to $70,000 ballpark.  Clearly these guys are getting paid a lot more than every level of the US military.

Tom Ricks on the Petraeus-Crocker hearings

Tom Ricks talks with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air on 9/12/07 about the Petraeus-Crocker hearings in Congress, September 10-11, 2207

Terry Gross:   Where are we headed now in Iraq?  What are the possible exit strategies?  We’ve invited the Washington Post military correspondent, Tom Ricks, to analyze the last two days of Congressional testimony by General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq.  We’ve asked Ricks to compare their conclusions with other interpretations of current developments in Iraq.  Ricks has made several trips to Iraq and is the author of the best-selling book, “Fiasco,” which examines how false conclusions were used to lead us into the war and how the occupation was mishandled.  …Tom Ricks, welcome back to Fresh Air!  What are some of the major bullet points that you took away from the last two days of hearings?

Tom Ricks:  I don’t think we got the big policy divide that a lot of people expected.  But I think we may have gotten something equally significant which was a mood shift, a tone shift.  No one is talking about Iraq as a success story anymore.  No one is talking about it as some place that’s going to become a “beacon of democracy that will transform the Middle East.”  What we got in these hearings on Monday and Tuesday was a description from Bush administration officials of Iraq as a place teetering on the edge of disaster, where we have very few options and where we have to really cross our fingers and hope for the best.  Essentially, they’ve thrown the war to the dissenters.  General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are both people who were very skeptical of the way this thing was conducted for the last few years.  And now these people are saying, “Okay, you’ve given this thing to us, let’s see what we can do.” 

TG:  What did you find most interesting about the questions that members of Congress did or did not ask? 

TR:  I thought the two hearings were distinctly different.  The Monday hearing, which was a huge joint session of the House Foreign Affairs committee and the House Armed Services committee was kind of chaotic, sprawling, and circus-like during the first day of these much-anticipated hearings.  The second day was much more focused.  You had two Senate committees operating separately so senators had much more time to speak.  Their questions were much more focused, and especially I thought the Senate focused on the issue of time much more than the House did.  How long are we going to be in Iraq?  This was asked in a variety of ways by a number of senators and it’s really striking that Petraeus simply would not answer that question.  He simply wasn’t going to answer it.  Partly, I think, because as he said he had no good idea.  Partly, I think, because he and Crocker came in determined not to make promises that they felt they couldn’t keep.  And they fault the US officials who superseded them for making promises that they couldn’t keep, for writing checks that bounced!  And I think they didn’t want to have to come back in six months for the next scheduled assessment in March and have a lot of explanations about why their promises couldn’t be kept.  Instead, they simply wouldn’t make them.

TG:  I’m sure you’ve probably read this article.  The New York Times, to measure in an alternative way how things are going in Iraq, sent reporters into Iraq to visit 20 neighborhoods in Baghdad and surrounding areas and visited them repeatedly over time.  Let me just read some of the things that were reported in this article.  “Iraq’s mixed neighborhoods are sliding towards extinction – ethnically-mixed, that is.  During the troop increase, Shiite militias have continued to drive out Sunnis in at least 7 neighborhoods of Baghdad.  The Mahdi army, loyal to the radical cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, is turning into what many describe as a shadow government while desperate Sunnis have come to rely almost exclusively on American troops for their protection….”  In Huriya, there’s been a Shiite takeover.  The Sunnis mosques there are empty, burned, and broken.  And Sunni militants were driven out of Dora and into a place called Saydia where they began attacking Shiites.  After Dora became peaceful, Saydia descended into chaos… So what the Times reports is a picture in which, because of all this ethnic fighting, some neighborhoods become safe because one ethnic group is driven out so there’s no more ethnic fighting there.  But the ethnic group driven out goes into another neighborhood that descends into chaos. 

TR: I thought that was good reporting.  It was a good article.  And it really captured the feel of Baghdad today.  One of the things that really struck me on my last visit there was that just because a neighborhood is quiet doesn’t mean it’s good.  Sometimes a neighborhood is quiet because it’s been ethnically cleansed and there are no longer contending militias.  That’s what’s happened, I’m told, in many neighborhoods where US forces have gone in and successfully cleaned out Sunni extremist militias and Shiite extremist militias have simply fallen in behind them.  And so you are seeing “clearing and holding,” which is the US approach, but the holding is not being done by Iraqi security forces, it’s being done by militias.  And in some ways we’re fighting on both sides of a civil war.  An Anbar province, we have empowered the Sunni militias.  In Baghdad, we have effectively empowered the Shiite militias and Baghdad increasingly becomes an ethnically-cleansed city, dominated by the Shiites.  It may be the prelude to a full-blown civil war. 

TG:  Yet are we claiming these areas as success stories?

TR:  Yes!  Because they look quiet at the moment.  This is something that really terrifies the Shiite government in Baghdad – their sense that we don’t fully understand what we’re doing  They’re very worried about us cozying up with the Sunni militias, the Sunni tribes, in Anbar province and now elsewhere.  As one Iraqi politician said recently, “Baby crocodiles are cute but you can’t keep an adult crocodile in the house.”  They’re worried that what we’re doing, by allowing these militias to exist and actually giving them badges effectively, is growing a lot of baby crocodiles as we head toward the door and then after we’ve left, the Baghdad government is going to have to deal with them. 

TG:  A related thing that you’ve written about is granting amnesty to insurgents so that we can work with them.    You’ve described it as “a variety of handshake agreements with Iraqi insurgents and militia groups, sometimes resulting in the release of fighters who were detained originally for attacking coalition forces.”  You describe this as a “don’t ask, don’t tell pardon system.” 

TR:  Yes. It’s being presented as a great success story.  And it is good to see former insurgents coming over to the American side.  The question I’ve heard some people in the US military ask is, “Are they shifting allegiance or are we?”  Are we simply changing our tune and saying people we used to declare enemies, people are opposed to the government in Baghdad, we’re now saying that we don’t care about that.  As long as you won’t fight us in your neighborhood, that’s cool.  The analogy  might be the LAPD deciding on its own to go into south central LA and hand out badges to the Crips without telling the mayor of Los Angeles.  And saying, “Oh yes, south central LA is quiet.  The Crips are now the police force down there.”  And the mayor is saying, “What are you doing?!”  That’s the situation you have in Iraq right now.

TG:  …There have been questions raised about General Petraeus’s independence or lack of independence from President Bush.  There’s that now famous MoveOn ad that was headlined, “General Betrayus” in which he was described as cooking the books for the White House.  Jon Stewart last night on “The Daily Show” showed General Petraeus saying the same things that President Bush had said as if to show that Petraeus was repeating what Bush wanted said.  What’s your assessment of how independent General Petraeus is?

TR:  I have to say I was appalled by the MoveOn ad.  I’ve known General Petraeus a long time and I’ll probably be criticized for denouncing the ad.  I thought it was unfair and not accurate.  I think General Petraeus is a good soldier in a very difficult position.  It was striking to me that every time Republican politicians on the Hill tried to take advantage of the MoveOn ad by denouncing it, he ignored that.  He simply was not going to wade into partisan waters for either party.  This morning I was looking at something else online that had a headline, “Petraeus:  The Paris Hilton of generals.”  The attacks on his integrity, on his person, I don’t think are really where the debate should be going right now.  I don’t think he’s really carrying water for the White House as much as the White  House has just tossed the whole thing to him and said, “You do it.”  Partly because he has the credibility.  But to try to tear him down personally – it bothers me and it worries me.  I don’t think it’s where the debate really should go.  It’s not the best way for this country to proceed. Iraq is a really horrible, terrible mess.  And he senses that, I think.  And is trying to present it in a non-partisan way.  To attack him for that bothers me.

TG:  When you say that he has credibility, what are his accomplishments so far in the war in Iraq that give him the credibility?   

TR:  He’s on his third tour in Iraq.  The first tour was quite successful.  He commanded the 101st Airborne division during the invasion of Iraq.  And then in the first year of occupation in northern Iraq.  I remember being up in Mosul and being struck at how different his operation felt from other divisions.  I wrote about this in “Fiasco.”  The 101st stood out for taking a very difficult situation – Mosul was a tinderbox because it had tens of thousands of Kurdish fighters and also a lot of former Baathist party members and Saddam Hussein loyalists.  Remember, this is where Saddam’s sons went to hide when they were on the run.  He kept Mosul quiet.  He operated quite artfully and he posited some rules that are enforced now nationally under him such as, “Don’t do anything that creates more enemies than it stops.”  And another one of his rules was, “We are on a very short fuse here.  We don’t have a lot of time.  Let’s try and do things now rather than later because eventually we’ll be perceived as an occupation force.”  It would have been had General Petraeus been able to apply those things nationally in the spring of 2004 rather than the spring of 2007.  But it took three or four years for the Bush administration and top military officials to say, “You know, what we’re doing here isn’t working.”  And effectively, they said, “Okay, General Petraeus, if you’re so smart, you do it.”  And it really was the dissidents who were given control of policy.  Ambassador Crocker comes out of the State Department arabists who were kind of declared public enemies by the Bush administration early on.  These were the people who supposedly pursued the failed policies that led to 9/11.  Suddenly the Bush administration is listening to arabists like Ambassador Crocker again.  Ambassador Crocker invoked Beirut several times and the decline of Lebanon several times in the course of the hearings, calling on his background and the decades he has spent in the Middle East.  So suddenly experts are in vogue again.  An arabist expert and General Petraeus, a counter-insurgency expert.  These were the people who were swept aside by ideologues in the Bush administration early on.  To attack these people, who I think are trying to talk about it in a mature and knowledgeable fashion, is really unproductive right now.

TG:  …What are General Petraeus’s goals now? 

TR:  What he is trying to do – and there’s no real sign of its succeeding so far – is to conduct military operations in such a way as to lead to political reconciliation in Iraq.  It sounds very abstract but to put it in concrete terms a fighter for Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, know what he’s fighting for.  A soldier in the Iraqi army is better trained and better equipped but lacks the core motivation that the militia man has.  He doesn’t quite know what he’s fighting for frequently.  He doesn’t even know if there’s going to be an Iraqi government or really an Iraqi army a year from now.  Until you have the political situation straightened out, all that military strength is kind of a body without a brain.  There’s no central direction to it.  What he’s trying to do is figure out a way to get an Iraq stable enough to get us out.  I’d say that probably in his heart of hearts he knows it’s a minority chance.  But effectively what he and Crocker were saying in these hearings over the last couple of days was, “Look, we don’t think this is great.  But we don’t see any better alternatives.  If you guys do speak up now…”  And I think that’s why they essentially won these hearings and the Democrats lost them – to put it in partisan terms.  The Democrats weren’t able to mount a credible alternative.  They kind of floundered around and said, “Okay, fine, see you in six months.”

TG:  When President Bush announced the surge in January, he said that the goal was political stability in Baghdad.  Some people are saying that the emphasis has shifted now that there’s more stability in Diyala province and Anbar.  Those are the places the Bush administration is holding up as success stories.  But critics are also saying these places have nothing to do with the surge.  What’s your take on that?

TR:  I think it’s a pretty credible take.  The shift in the tribes began well before the surge began.  But, as I said, the shift in the tribes I think needs a lot more examination because it’s not clear quite who’s shifting – whether the tribes are shifting or the US is shifting.  This whole “bottom up” thing also has been inadequately examined.  I’d hoped the hearings would get more into that.  There’s a couple of problems with that.

TG:  Bottom up thing?

TR:  This is the notion of bottom-up reconciliation which is how the Bush administration during the past several months as quietly been giving up on the Baghdad government.  For years we emphasized the central government, build the government in Baghdad and then somehow we’d see that across the rest of the country and hold the country together.  For the last couple of months, the Bush administration has talked a lot about “local reconciliation” at the village, town and provincial levels  thinking that somehow it will bubble up through the system and eventually lead to political reconciliation in Baghdad.  The first problem with that is that it’s not clear how long that takes, but it probably is many years.  The second problem with it is that it might actually help tear the country apart.  One suspicion I had, listening to the hearings of the last couple of days,  was that we are tiptoeing towards a policy of breaking up Iraq.  When you emphasize bottom-up reconciliation, you empower the local level.  When you empower the local level, you undercut the central government.  There are strong pressures in Iraq towards breaking up the country and power at the local level might mean effectively just pushing it towards three, four, or even five or six chunks.  A Sunni-dominated area.  A Shi’a-dominated area.  A Kurdish-dominated area.  An ethnically-cleansed Baghdad which is essentially Shiite.  You may get more than three parts though because there already is fighting in the south among three different Shiite factions.  They might wind up controlling different chunks of the south as well.  So I think in these deals with the devil that we’re making, like a lot of things in Iraq, they look kind of appetizing in the short term but may carry very difficult long-term consequences. 

TG:  Well, there are some Democrats, including Joe Biden, who favor what they call a “soft partition” of Iraq.  What is that?

TR:  Soft partition is – okay, we’re not going to actually break up the country and sell off the parts, but we will have powerful regional control and weaker central control.  This is described as a kind of federalist approach.  I think that’s kind of what we may be backsliding toward.  One of the comments you heard a lot of out of Petraeus and Crocker of the past few days was “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems.”  On the one hand that’s very honest, saying, “Look – we’re not smart enough or local enough to know where this is going and control the flow of it. “  On the other hand, it’s a little bit of a smokescreen because it says, “I can’t tell you where things are going, but see.”  I was struck when Petraeus was finally asked about events in the south, which I think are quite troubling, he put a very smiley face on it and he said, “Oh, yeah, you have factional fighting down south, couple of provincial governors assassinated lately, but these are Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems!”  Assassination and factional fighting?  I’m not sure that’s a solution.  But he seemed to think it was – that essentially things in the south will sort themselves out.

TG:  The British recently withdrew a lot of their troops from Iraq and only have what you describe as a token presence left.  What’s your view of the partial withdrawal and the way it happened?

TR:  The first significance is that a key ally of the US essentially is finished in Iraq.  They are no longer having an effect on the south.  The 5500 troops they have remaining are on the outskirts of Basra and are not really relevant to where southern Iraq is going.  Southern Iraq is now subject to fairly vicious infighting among three different Shiite factions.  This is not about sectarian divisions.  They’re all Shiite.  It’s certainly not about Al Qaeda which is not present down there.  It’s really about oil and the enormous oil revenues from the export business out of Basra.  It’s odd to look at the south and worrisome to look at the south.  As one official said recently, “If you want to know what Baghdad looks like next year, look at Basra now.”  And I say “odd” because the British and General Petraeus are presenting this as a solution.  But it doesn’t look like a solution for Iraqis, it just looks like a way for us to bug out.  And let the fighting continue. 

TG:  It sounds like the British also withdrew a lot of their forces because they were under siege. 

TR:  Yes, and they still are.  I’ve been told that the British are getting mortar or rocket fire on their base every night, and when they have pulled out of other areas, it’s been under fire,  that their bases have been looted almost immediately upon their departure and they’ve been fired at as they move out.  This is what they call “transfer of security control to local forces”!  If that’s the future for US forces, it’s going to be very hard watching.  And this really points toward something Petraeus was hinting at without really talking about it during the hearings. The key moment is going to be in the spring and summer of next year when US forces necessarily start drawing down because there are no replacement forces for these surge forces.  That means areas where the US is now present – in force – are going to be turned over to Iraqi troops.  Without Americans present, how will Iraqi troops behave?  Will they behave like Shiite militias?  Or will they act like an arm of the national government?  Well, what if there isn’t really a national government for them to be the arm of?  What if they are really directed by Shiite factional sectarian leaders?  So it’s going to be really interesting to watch how ’08 unfolds in the areas that American forces leave.  And we’re going to be pulling out those five surge brigades all next spring and summer.  That’s what Petraeus ratified.  Supposedly that’s what the president is going to talk about in his address on national TV.  And an Iraqi unit that has American advisors present might operate in a move even-handed way than the same unit without Americans around.  So it’s going to be really interesting to see how those Iraqi forces behave. 

TG:  President Bush predicted that if we withdrew from Iraq, that Iran or Al Qaeda would take over.  There have been skirmishes in the north of Iraq between Iraq and Iran.  Iran has been upping its rhetoric.  I wonder what you see keeping an eye on Iran about the possibilities there for conflict? 

TR:  Two things.  First, in terms of President Bush’s rhetoric,  one of the things that was striking and much commented on in the hearings was the departures in the rhetoric of Petraeus and Crocker from the White House line.  Jon Stewart made fun of how Bush and Petraeus used similar phrases.  But what I think was more significant was what Petraeus and Crocker didn’t say.  They didn’t cast Iraq as part of the larger war on terror.  It was only when John McCain really pushed them, reminded them of presidential rhetoric, that they got in line with national policy.  Nor did they say that, if we leave, Iran and Al Qaeda will take over.  Which is what the president has said.  Rather they said the country will essentially descend into a cauldron of chaos, fragments, and factional fighting.  They said those are the real drivers in Iraq, not these outside enemies.  That said, Petraeus especially brought up Iran a lot.  He said one of the biggest shocks to him in his third tour in Iraq is the influence Iran is having.  I think they are very worried at how Iran is present not only in helping Shiite militias but also inside the Iraqi government that we created and ostensibly are supposed to be cooperating with. 

TG:  What role is Iran playing inside the Iraqi government that we helped create?

TR:  Well, especially you hear about the Ministry of the Interior which controls the police forces.  The national police, which the commission run by General Jones on Iraqi security focused on, essentially have been described as a giant government-supported Shiite death squad.  I’d say Iran has more influence over them than the US does.  Iran has been very effective in its operations in Iraq thus far.  On the other hand, Iran has been hubristic in the way the US has as well.  It’s funny, actually, Ambassador Crocker casting about for straws of hope said at one point in the hearings that he hoped Iran would overplay its hand in Iraq and that’s kind of what we’re counting on.  That eventually they’ll step on so many Iraqi toes that they’ll trigger the xenophobia that seems to be part of Iraqi culture and the Arab nationalism that’s also very present in Iraq.  And that eventually Iraqis, who are cooperating with the Iranians, would revert back to type and reject the Iranian ties. 

TG:  Do you think there’s a possibility for more armed conflict between Iran and Iraq? 

TR:  In this part of the world I think you can bet on violence and fighting, especially where Iraq is at.  I’m kind of in a somber mood this morning coming out of these hearings.  It’s quite striking that the best argument that could be mounted for the US staying in Iraq was not anything to do with democracy or liberation or ending terrorism in the Middle East.  It was, “Hey, if we leave you will have a humanitarian disaster of monumental and catastrophic proportions and perhaps a regional war.”  And as Senator James Webb quietly pointed out, “Hey, that’s what the opponents of invasion were saying before you guys invaded!  We were predicting this was going to happen!” And so now, the antiwar arguments of 2002-2003 have become the last defense of the American presence in Iraq.  It’s quite sad.

TG:  Ramadan begins in a couple of days.  What will you be watching for?   

TR:  Every year that we’ve been there, the holy month of Ramadan has brought a sharp spike in violence.  And much more than anything said at the hearings, I think the real test of the current US approach will be whether we see another one of those spikes. The intriguing part of this is that we’ve gone from late fall Ramadans when the weather is much cooler to a late summer Ramadan now for the first time because it moves forward in the calendar about four weeks each year.  So this is going to be a tougher Ramadan in the past.  In Ramadan, observant Muslims don’t eat or drink or smoke from sun-up to sundown.  The longer the day, the harder it is to make that observance and the more tempers fray.  I remember living in Kabul, Afghanistan, during a summer Ramadan.  It was striking to me how many arguments you’d see breaking out among people on the street.  Also, because you can’t eat during the day, people stay up at night to eat and so as the month progresses, they’re tired, they’re sleepless, and they’re cranky.  So you  can get a mixture of casual violence just from people being irritable combined with an increase in Muslim consciousness, especially a couple of nights in the month when people go into the mosque at night to observe key moments and then emerge from the mosque in the morning kind of fired up.

TG:  According to the GAO report, the Iraqis have only met three of eighteen Congressionally mandated benchmarks.  President Bush has evaluated the situation a little differently, a little more positively.  Do you have benchmarks that you’re measure the progress in Iraq with?

TR:  Yes.  I think the only benchmark that really matters is Iraqi civilian deaths with a parenthesis after it:  with Iraqi internal displacements or refugees leaving the country.  That really tells you the bottom line situation.  Iraqi civilian deaths continue to be extraordinarily high while [inaudible] as laid out by Petraeus and Crocker are extraordinarily low.  If you listen to them closely, really what they’re saying is, “We hope to get back the level of violence of early 2005.”  That is certainly not utopia!  Early 2005, I remember in Iraq, was the Hobbesian state – all against all.  It was terrible.  So they’re not holding out anything particularly hopeful.  It’s a rather bleak vision.  But that’s what they’re saying.  That’s what we’re trying to get to.

TG:  You say that your benchmark is how many Iraqi civilians are dying, and you’re also very concerned about how many American soldiers are dying…

TR:  …but.  But American soldiers dying is not of progress or the lack of it.  If you want no American soldiers to die, all you need to do is pull them back on the US bases.  Which is what the US military  posture was in early 2005.  They were on these big bases; they were isolated from the population.  It was striking to me how little they knew about what was happening on the streets of Baghdad when I went to visit them on these bases.  The larger thing on benchmarks – as I was listening to the hearings during the last couple of days, I kept on thinking about a line from Groucho Marx, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” The Bush administration presented the surge in terms of benchmarks.  They said, “We’re going to try to meet these benchmarks.”  When the benchmarks weren’t met, they said, “Oh, don’t pay attention to those stupid benchmarks.”  Again and again, the Bush administration has kind of laid down markers and then, when they weren’t met, walked away from them.  Going back to, “Oh, there is no insurgency.”  And then it was, “It’s just a few dead-enders. And when we capture Saddam Hussein, it’ll disappear.”  Then, “As they stand up, we’ll stand down.” None of these things have been met and they simply move on to a new standard.  And when the standard’s not met, they say it was the wrong standard.  “You’re so 2005!”  Or “2006” if you’re talking about benchmarks.  Now it’s “bottom-up reconciliation.”  As a couple of senators pointed out, “Okay, if 6 months from now bottom-up reconciliation doesn’t pan out,  you’ll probably come out with some other new line about what we’re trying to do out there.”  I was struck by that phrase, “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems.”  Which is probably way of saying, “Let’s stand back and groove on the rubble!”

TG:  President Bush will probably hand over the war to his successor.  And the next president will have to deal with it.  Do you get the impression that the Bush administration is playing for time now, knowing that things are very unlikely to resolve before this presidency ends?

TR:  Very much so.  This is really becoming the next president’s war.  That was ratified by these hearings.  The US Congress heard Petraeus and Crocker present a plan for essentially staying in Iraq until  2010 and beyond.  And while they questioned some of those impulses about timing, they never really mounted any attempt to present an alternative or stop that.  So yes, what you saw was the Bush administration giving at least a yellow light – and I think a green light – to  proceed to January 2009 pretty much as they are now.

TG:  We’ve been talking about Iraq and what happens next – what General Petraeus is saying, what President Bush is saying.  Are there exit strategies that you’ve been hearing from alternate places that you think are interesting and have possibilities that America should be considering?

TR:  Well, there are four basic strategies available to us.  I was a bit surprised there wasn’t more discussion of them in the two days of hearings.  Especially in the Senate hearing where the senators have longer times to raise questions.  Basically what you saw was ratification of “stay the  course.”  That’s one strategy.  A second one would be a total pullout.  That was discussed in terms raised by Petraeus and Crocker to denounce it and say it would lead to a humanitarian disaster.  The third strategy would be soft partition, or a partition breaking up the country in some form.  There were hints of that, but it really wasn’t pursued.  In the fourth – which is something I think we may ultimately wind up with and I think deserves more discussion – is falling back to some form of containment.  Not leaving the country altogether, but standing back and, as one soldier once said to me, “letting them have the civil war they seem so much to want to have.”  None of these are particularly appealing strategies.  Containment, the strategy I think we’re going to wind up with, has huge problems attached to it. It’s something we need to be really careful about endorsing.  Because the downsides are enormous. 

TG:  Wait!  You’re talking about containment – “standing back and letting them have the civil war they seem to want” – being about preventing that from spreading to other parts of the region?

TR: Yeah.  There was a good study recently by a new think tank, the Center for a New American Security, that essentially argued for this.  It’s especially worth paying attention to because it kind of speaks for national-security Democrats, I think.  And so it’s likely to be the policy at least seriously considered by any Democratic administration in  2009.  Essentially it said, “Let’s fall back.  Let’s re-deploy and get out of combat in Iraq but not leave the country altogether.  Let’s pursue a negative strategy, not the quote unquote positive goals of the Bush administration – of “liberation and democracy.”  Negative goals.  Essentially three no’s.  What we want to do is have No genocide in Iraq, No safe havens for Al Qaeda, and No regional war.  That’s far less ambitious than the Bush administration goals but still a prescription for a pretty difficult and long presence in Iraq.  How do you prevent genocide?  How do you prevent the war from spreading across the region and spilling over across Iraq’s borders?  How do you prevent safe havens for Al Qaeda?  All of those require a lot of American troops, a lot of American money, and they’re going to result in the deaths of American troops for many years.  I mention it because this was hardly discussed at all in the hearings but I think it’s the policy that I think, ironically, we’re going to wind up with in two years. 

TG:  You’ve presented several pretty unappealing alternatives! 

TR:  This is why I thought Senator Obama’s comments were particularly interesting because he got to the bottom line pretty quickly.  He said, “There are no good options left.”  And I think that’s really where the debate should begin at this point.  Any policy option you put in front of me, it’s pretty easy to show that the downsides, the risks, are far greater than the potential benefits.  But that’s true of every single policy.  There are no good solutions.  There are only bad solutions.  What we need to do as a nation is discuss what is the least bad solution available.

TG:  Tom, when are you going back to Iraq?

TR:  Next month. 

TG:  I hope to talk to you when you get back…

"Hocus Potus": Interview with Malcolm MacPherson

NPR interview with Malcolm Pherson, August, 2007

NPR:  Events and decisions made in the early months of the American occupation of Iraq are getting far more scrutiny than they did at the time.  The lack of planning for the occupation, the failure to control looting, and decisions to disband the Iraqi army and purge Baath party members from the government are now seen by many as major contributors to the four years of chaos and violence that have followed.  …Malcolm MacPherson covered the early occupation for Time magazine, and when he returned to the US, he wrote a satiric novel based on his experiences.  He shelved the book for three years until it seemed to him that the country was ready to reexamine the period.  MacPherson is a former Marine who was a foreign correspondent for Newsweek for 12 years and has written 12 other books of fiction and non-fiction.  …Malcolm MacPherson, this novel that you’ve written, “Hocus Potus,” is set in Iraq and begins with the absurd circumstance of some Americans and Iraqis traveling on a C-130, a huge military transport plane.  They’re flying all over Iraq and discover that there’s this massive cargo on pallets underneath tarps.  We discover that the cargo is not food, it’s not weapons, it’s stacks and stacks of American currency – 17 tons of it!  Where did this image come from?

Malcolm MacPherson:  It came from my own experience which was when I flew up from Kuwait. I was flying from Kuwait to Baghdad.  And I was sitting across from this soldier who was all festooned in Mylar and helmet and a machine gun and whatnot.  I asked him at one point, “What are you doing here?”  He said, “Guarding cargo.”  Of course, my ears went right up.  I said, “Well, what’s the cargo?”  And he said, “It’s 17 tons of $20 bills.”  It was at that instant I knew I had a book because frankly, for the rest of the flight, I was absolutely consumed with the notion of how can I steal this money!  What else would you think about if you were in a C-130 with $75 million!  Underneath you, on the land, there was absolutely no law that pertained to any civilian.  Probably there was a military law but I wasn’t in the military.  It really captivated me and I knew at that instant that there was a book in this. 

NPR:  To maybe belabor the obvious, why was the US flying in 17 tons of $2o bills? 

MM:  I suppose it was to pay off somebody or some group of people.  I can’t imagine that it was for any other reason.  Because the Saddam dinars were pretty worthless at that point, the only currency that held any sway would have been dollars – I would guess that.  But nobody was informing me, believe me! 

NPR:  The center of the American occupation was the Green Zone, this enclave that was isolated by blast-proof walls in which high American officials and operatives for private contractors worked.  What were some of the physical characteristics of the Green Zone that really caught your eye?      

MM:  Well, there were no blast zones at that point.  They put those up later or were installing them as I left.  You had to have some kind of a… I used my Virginia drivers’ license to get in and out of the Green Zone.  It was that easy. 

NPR:  So it wasn’t so secure at the time?

MM:  Well, there was no need to have it that secure because the day I got there, actually, was the first… we were driving in from the airport and a jeep went up in the air on the other side of the road between downtown and the Green Zone and it was blown up.  It was the first one to be blown up by the first roadside bomb.  It was very, very easy going in a way.  I think I was shot at once that I knew.  The other part of it was that there was a sense of adventure.  We would go into town every night.  We’d leave the Green Zone, go across the river, we’d go out to a restaurant – of the few that were open there were a couple of good ones.  We’d sit outside and we’d get a bottle of Suntory whiskey and sit around and talk.  I was living at the Republican palace at that point.  I was living upstairs in one of Saddam’s bedrooms with about ten other guys and 8 trillion mosquitoes and it was very hot.  And then I finally got a slot in one of the containers in back by the swimming pool which was air-conditioned and quite nice.

NPR:  You’re talking about a shipping container that’s been converted to a living space?   

MM:  Quite right. 

NPR:  It was standard quarters in the area.

MM:  At that point it was.  They had an air conditioner and a little shower and it was really quite nice!  It was very cozy! 

NPR:  Clearly there were images and thoughts that you brought back with you that made their way into the novel.  Tell us something about your reporting in Iraq.  What were some of the things you focused on and wrote about?      

MM:  My assignment for Time was to get my nose under the tent at the Republican palace, which I did. 

NPR:  That was being used then for what?

MM:  It was being used as headquarters of the reconstruction effort.  It was where Jay Garner had set up his group.

NPR:  Jay Garner is the general who went over before Bremer to head the reconstruction, right?

MM:  That’s correct.  And it was now being used by Bremer and his people.  It was growing like topsy.  There were trailers being built on the surrounding grounds, trying to house as many people there as they could.  So the entire Green Zone was forming up as a place.  While I was there they bombed or had rocketed the hotel where most of the people were staying from the reconstruction effort.  They knew they couldn’t stay in a high-rise.  So they decided to do what they could do by getting as many buildings around the Republican palace as they could. 

NPR:  So you had this sprawling kind of American and foreign community of government people and contractors and military people.  What did you spend your day doing?  Did people talk to you?

MM:  Oh sure!  I was talking to everybody from Bernie Kerik, the former police chief of New York City who was sent over to start their police department, to the head of USAID.  I became very friendly with General Garner who was a great guy.  I went all over the country with him from up in Kurdistan – the town of Erbil – down to Basra.  And we went to Hilla.  At that point … even down in Hilla I was talking to a cleric, a Shiite cleric, and he said he knew where to find weapons of mass destruction.  The next day I went off into the wilderness trying to find these weapons of mass destruction and, of course, didn’t! 

NPR:  Did he tell just you?  Or did he tell the American government officials?

MM:  He told General Garner and he told a State Department guy who was there translating.  And one of the generals who was in charge of that area.  I asked them what they were going to do about it and they didn’t indicate too much.  I found that, in terms of weapons of mass destruction, there weren’t any.  I certainly hadn’t found any, but that was no big deal.  I went back to the palace that night and I ran into the Defense Intelligence guy.  He looked at me and he said, “Well, I could have told you!  They don’t exist!  Just get over it!”  And I still thought they were there!

NPR:  So in the three weeks you were there the officials inside the tent, so to speak, in the Republican palace, had already concluded there would be no discoveries of weapons of mass destruction?

MM:  Yes. 

NPR:  And yet Bremer and others remained obsessed with finding them? 

MM:  Well, I think they couldn’t admit there were none at that point.  Hope did spring eternal!  But what they were hearing from the intelligence people was what I had heard:  “Get over it! You’re not going to find any!”

NPR:  You said your assignment was to get your nose under the tent in the Republican palace where the US occupation officials were established.  What struck you in those three weeks while you were on the inside?  What struck you as odd?

MM:  More than anything it was the lack of consensus, of the idea that we were doing something there that had been thought out prior to the arrival.  It was all very ad hoc and on the back of envelopes and scratched up on chalkboards and whatnot.  And there were a lot of meetings of people trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.  These were the big picture guys, too.  It wasn’t just the sort of tactical stuff, the little details.  It was just very confused.  A lot of what I thought was a great deal of trial and error – “Let’s see if we can get this thing to work or not.” 

NPR:  What about the Iraqi characters in your book?  You write a lot about Americans.  Some are honest but misguided.  Some are ambitious.  Some are clueless.  What did you want to tell us about the Iraqis from the characters in your book? 

MM:  I think I wanted to tell people that what I saw among Iraqis was how they really were very pleased and excited, actually, about having the Americans come in and get rid of Saddam.  And how quickly that changed.  One night I heard that the great football legend in Iraq, a guy named Amo Baba had been thrown in jail.  We went over there to the stadium where these guys were being held by the American army.  They didn’t have a clue where Amo Baba was.  We looked around and we finally found him.  He was with an older man who had had a heart attack and was in very bad shape.  We managed to get Amo Baba out.  He went to Amman, to Jordan.  He left the country.  I found that these guys were very excited – a lot of the people were very excited – about what they were seeing happen to their country.  And it just really turned bad quickly. 

NPR:  You said you and a bunch of journalists got this football star out of jail?

MM:  No.  It was the Defense Intelligence guy and myself who went over there.  He had all kinds of clearances and badges and what not.   So the Army guy over there said, “Sure, take him with you if you want.” 

NPR:  This is an interesting moment.  Why was this soccer star arrested by, I assume, the US military?

MM:  Yes.  He didn’t know.  They came in the middle of the night.  They broke down his door.  They accused him of some sort of complicity in something.  He was with his wife.  The other man was with his wife.  They were terrified.  They had the restraints put on them.  They were put in a Humvee and taken off to the soccer stadium.  Kind of ironic…  But he never knew.  He had no idea why he’d been picked up.  They never charged him with anything, of course. And there he was.  So he got out – we got him out.  He left the country.

NPR:  How did you and this Defense Intelligence agency official know that he didn’t belong there?  That he wasn’t complicit in terrorism or insurgency? 

MM:  Well, one thing that we supposed was -– and it was a supposition, the question is a good one – we knew that Amo had been on the national team and a couple of years before he had been playing down in Kuwait, I believe, or maybe Saudi Arabia.  He had muffed a goal that was pretty easy.  When he came back, Ude, who was head of the soccer program for Iraq, Ude being the son of Saddam, made Amo do laps in the sewage treatment tank in Baghdad.  Everybody knew that Amo Baba was not a supporter of Saddam Hussein.  He hated him.  He just had to keep his head down to stay alive. 

NPR:  There is an Amo Baba who is a soccer star in your book and I think you tell the story of him having been forced to swim in a sewer.  That’s all true.

MM:  Yes, it is. 

“From Baghdad, this is Jamie Tarabay”

Excerpts from an interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, August 23, 2007

Terry Gross:  Before we talk about some of your experiences of reporting from Iraq, I’d like your general overall picture of what’s going on now.  A National Intelligence Estimate is released today.  What are your impressions of how power sharing is going in the Iraqi government? 

Jamie Tarabay:  Just before I left, I interviewed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and he’d just announced a new alliance.   Basically, it only involved the people he already had on his side – the Kurdish leadership, and his political party, and another very powerful Shi’a political party.  But it didn’t include the people who are loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric, and it didn’t include any Sunnis.  This is something that’s always been a problem.  He hasn’t been able to form a consensus with the main parties whenever it’s been an issue to push legislation through – these benchmarks that the US administration has like the review of de-Baathification laws, the laws against people who belonged to Saddam’s old Baath party, the distribution of the oil revenues, the changes to the constitution.  These are all things that have to go through Parliament.  Parliament always gets accused, of being slow, of being absent, of being incapable.  Even the first reading of a bill hasn’t gotten to the floor.  But that’s because it’s stuck in the upper echelons of the cabinet, with the Presidency Council which involved Maliki, the president, Talibani, who’s a Kurd, and the vice president … who’s a Sunni.   Because they can’t agree.  There’s no movement.  Nouri al-Maliki has been in the job for more than a year now and he still hasn’t been able to move anything forward. That’s one of the things that’s going to come up in this report. 

TG:  Is this just reflective of larger historical distrust between the ethnic groups that these three men represent?

JT:  Absolutely!  When people ask me to describe what it’s like in Iraq right now, the manifestation of it on the ground is the sectarian killings, the displacement.  But ultimately you have people who weren’t allowed to hate each other for more that 30 years.  You weren’t allowed to have an opinion about anybody.  You had to do what you were told or you were in trouble.  And that’s really what’s going on now – this eruption of everything that has been festering all of this time.  The Shiites, who were oppressed under Saddam, they’ve always been the majority but they’ve been the oppressed majority.  Now they’re in charge and they don’t really want to share with the Sunnis who enjoyed everything that they didn’t get to have while Saddam was in power.  They feel like “it’s our time now and we need to take care of ourselves and you Sunnis want to cooperate with us fine but it you don’t then too bad for you – we really just want to continue on our path now because it’s our time.” 

TG:  What are your observations of whether the surge in American troops has diminished the amount of sectarian violence in Iraq?

JT:  In Baghdad, in particular, it’s been a stopgap of sorts.  Flooding the capital with troops has stopped militias from overrunning neighborhoods.  But they’re still there.  We still get daily figures from our people at the morgue.  We still get daily figures from people we know at the Interior Ministry – the discovery of bodies dumped in different parts of the capital, the execution-style killings, all signatures of sectarian violence.  That is still going on, but not to the extent that it was before the surge.  But the question now is, what happens when they leave?  These troops in their numbers can’t be there forever. That’s what everyone talks about.  There has to be political progress to match the military gains on the ground.  That isn’t happening. 

TG:  I’d like to play an excerpt from one of the reports for NPR, a really incredible report about somebody you’ve worked with at the NPR bureau in Baghdad.  This is somebody whose father was kidnapped.  You did a story about his father’s kidnapping.  First tell us how his father was kidnapped.

JT:  Abdullah’s father, Arif, was driving his other brother to work like he did every day and they were stopped at a junction.  At least two cars stopped them.  Men got out, grabbed his father, left his brother in the middle of the street, and then they just took off. That happens all the time. 

TG:  In this excerpt of the report, Abdullah’s phone keeps ringing from the family who want to know what’s going on.  He’s telling them, “Don’t call until we get more information…”

JT [reporting]:  Then his mobile phone rang.  The caller ID said it was his father.  Abdullah recorded the call. 

Abdullah:  I picked up the phone and there was a man talking.  Out of shock, I thought it was my father.  I was calling “Father, is that you?” It turned out to be the guy who was negotiating from the kidnappers’ side. 

JT:  The caller asked Abdullah if he was related to the man they were holding. Abdullah said it was his father, that he was sick, diabetic, and old. 

Abdullah:  I started begging them, almost in tears, “Please, don’t hurt him!  He’s my father.  He’s an old man. He hasn’t done anything!”

JT:   The kidnapper responded, “We know.”  Then he asked Abdullah whether his father was precious to him.  Abdullah said, “Yes.”  The kidnapper said, “I want money.”  He asked for “10 notebooks. “  A notebook, as it’s called on the street, is $10,000 American.  In other words, $100,000 for Abdullah’s father.  The UN says kidnappings have become the way for armed groups in Iraq to finance their activities.  Abdullah told the man on the phone he didn’t have that kind of
money. 

Abdullah:  He said, well, you need to decide.  It’s your father.  Your father told us, “My boys love me, and they will do anything.”

JT:  The kidnapper said he would call again later that day and hung up.  Abdullah telephoned his family, relatives, and tribe for help in raising the money.  The kidnapper called back at 3 in the afternoon.  He said he wanted the money that same day.  Abdullah told him that was impossible. 

Abdullah:  And he starts telling me that, you know, “If you don’t cooperate with us and do as we told you, you know what will happen to your father.  We will torture him.  I’ll crush his head and I’ll send it to you as a gift.” 

JT:  Abdullah pleaded with the kidnapper to let him speak with his father.  After more threats, there was silence.  And then Arif’s voice came over the line.   Arif told Abdullah he was being treated well but he sounded weak.  Then his kidnappers were back on the line demanding money.  They negotiated and the ransom came down a bit.  Abdullah felt he needed to be strong.  His whole family was depending on him. 

Abdullah:  I had to do it because nobody wanted to do it.  My uncle said, after he heard the conversation, “It’s my brother but I would have broken down.  I couldn’t deal with these people.”

JT:  Abdullah managed through his family and loans to raise enough money to satisfy the kidnappers.  The man called the next day, told Abdullah to wear a long Arab tunic, wrap a kafiya around his neck, and bring the money to a drop-off point.  Against the objections of his family, Abdullah agreed.  He forbade anyone to follow him.  It was raining when the man called Abdullah again and gave him directions.   Abdullah followed his instructions to a large traffic circle.

Abdullah:  And then I waited there.  And he told me to cross the street on the other side and to put the money between some blocks set up there.  There was a space for two or three inches to drop it.  “Drop it and then go home.”  And then what?  While I was talking to him, the phone just died. 

JT:  In all the panic and worry, Abdullah had forgotten to do a simple thing – recharge his mobile phone.  It was the last time Abdullah would hear from the kidnapper.  And he’s heard nothing from his father.  Abdullah dialed his father’s cell every day.  And every time he gets the same message:  the cell phone is switched off. 

TG:  That’s an excerpt from Jamie Tarabay’s report about one of her colleagues in NPR’s Baghdad bureau whose father was kidnapped.  So, Jamie, Abdullah gave the kidnappers the money but his father was never released?

JT:  This was one of the hardest things to accept.  When Abdullah came to me and said, “I want you to do a story.”  And literally what it meant was that if you really want to go public with this and you’re acknowledging that you’ve given up hope of your father ever coming back.  He said yes.  His dad was such a point of reference for me especially.  He was very educated…

TG:   You knew his father? 

JT:  I’d never met him, but every time a question of some historical significance or a person I didn’t know about, I say, “What does your dad say?”  “Will you ask your father what he knows about this person?” or “What happened at this point in Iraqi history?”  So he was a personal point of reference for me.  Hearing his voice – and he sounded so weak.  This happens all the time.  You’ve got people who go missing and nobody knows what happens to them.  Abdullah went to the morgue every day for weeks and there he met people who’d been going to the morgue for months just to see if they could find their loved ones.   When someone is kidnapped, it’s the cruelest way of torturing not just the person who has to obviously endure unimaginable hardship but everybody around them.  The family, relatives, people that they work with.  A wider circle gets affected by something like this. 

TG:   And then the thought that the kidnappers aren’t even playing by the rules. If there are any rules for kidnapping.  But the rules for kidnapping usually are if you do come through with the money you get the person back.  But it sounds like it’s fairly standard now in Iraq that you’ll pay the money and your loved one still is not released.

JT:  Right.  One of the last stories I just did before I left how it’s really just turned into a way for people to make money because they can’t get a job.  One of the Interior Ministry officials I spoke with said, “You just need 3 to 4 guys and a car and you’ve got a kidnapping ring.”  A lot of people who go missing, who are kidnapped and who have people to pay for them, they are killed in the end most likely because of who they are, whether Shiite or Sunni.  And they’ve been kidnapped by someone who’s a sectarian or a sectarian group that’s taken them.  So there’s never any hope.  One of my colleagues did a story about how today in Iraq to die naturally is considered a blessing because there are so many people who are taken by the violence – in suicide bombing attacks, in drive-by shootings, in sectarian killings, in kidnappings – that they don’t have the opportunity to grieve.  They can’t mourn.  They can’t have a funeral.  And so when someone dies naturally from old age or sickness they’re right in front of you and you can go through that process.  The whole entire country is seized by PTSD because they haven’t had an opportunity to mourn yet.  That’s just one of the thing about living there are that everyone has to deal with. 

TG:  …Tell us the kidnapping-related story about what happened when you were interviewing the Iraqi president, Jalal al Talabani.

JT:  Well, I’d gone to President Talabani’s house.  He was hosting some political talks.  Actually, I went with Abdullah.  I’d gotten dressed as a Shiite woman – the long cloak thing and I wrapped by head in a scarf.  But when I got inside I took my scarf off.  Talabani saw me and started laughing.  “You look half-and-half…” And when I went to talk to him, he was just sitting there in the corner and a man in a suit came and whispered in his ear.  He started laughing.  I asked, “What so funny?”  And he said, “Oh, he reckons you could get $100,000!”  I said, “Oh.”  A part of me was saying, “You mean just $100,000?”

TG:  Kidnappers could demand $100,000 for you.  That’s what you’d be worth!

JT:  Exactly.  That’s one of the dangers of being a foreign in Baghdad.  You do feel a bit like a walking ATM machine.  Half the time when people recognize that you’re a foreigner, they recognize that you’d be valuable, you have a street value.  You could be pinched by someone who could sell you down the chain to someone who’d eventually put you on TV in an orange jumpsuit.  Literally people get taken by criminal gangs who sell people for a profit.  It goes on and on…

TG:  So what do you do to prevent that from happening?  You must be hyper-aware of that when you’re reporting in Iraq. 

JT:  I think “hyper-aware” is definitely the way I would describe my state of mind when I’m there.   You’re very aware of everything around you.  You’re at your most exposed when you’re on the street, when you’re in the car, when you’re moving.  You could come up to a fake checkpoint – one of these illegal checkpoints that are manned by men in police uniforms who may be police but also are militia.  Right now they’re interchangeable.  They could see that you’re a foreigner.  They can stop you.  They could radio ahead or phone the guy in the next checkpoint and say, “There’s a foreign in this car.  Grab him.”  You could be stopped in a traffic jam…  I’m very aware anyway when I’m driving around, having people look into the car.  You can do anything.  You can wrap your head in a scarf.  You can wear sunglasses.  You can sit in the back.  You can put your head down.  And one of the things you have to always do – you’re not allowed to look around you, you’re not allowed to engage in eye contact.

TG:  Is that because you’re a woman?

JT:  Yes. An Arab woman looks straight ahead.  So if you’re looking out the window, engaging people, they’re like, “What’s up with that!” 

TG:  That’s a real problem if your job is to observe.

JT:  Exactly.  I always feel I lose ten years off my life when I’m driving around in the car in Baghdad.  It’s a nightmare.

TG:  Can you drive yourself? 

JT:  No.  I have a driver.  In 2003, I did take the wheel a couple of times.  That was a lot of fun for me.  But I raised so many eyebrows doing it.  There are still Iraqi women who do drive.  But not as many as used to.  That last vestige of independence – and they had to give it away. 

TG:  How much do you rely on your Iraqi staff at the NPR bureau to go out into the streets and bring back information? 

JT:   I couldn’t do my job without them.  They are our eyes and ears.  Even without any of their own reporting, the mere fact that they are Iraqis living in Baghdad and what happens to them personally is a reflection of the changes happening in the capital and what it’s like to be an Iraqi living in Baghdad.  They tell me so much more that I ever need to know from any official about what it really is like.  I went on a walk around the market with General Petraeus once.  He does the same thing where he goes – he has tea, he buys fruit, he buys things from the different shops, he says “hello” to everyone.  Following in his wake, you hear people don’t have electricity, we haven’t had electricity for six days.  I talk to the company commander of the area and he says, “But they have four hours of electricity!”  But then they have 2o hours of no electricity!  You’ve got to be able to balance that out.  And saying “four hours of electricity” like it’s something fabulous after five years.  What you have to do, if you’re supplying the neighborhood with generators because they still can’t have that electricity capacity, what does that about the “progress” that’s going on on the ground. 

TG:  I was reading in the New York Times that some of the electric grid is controlled by militias! 

JT:  This is all part of the political power plays that are going on right now.  I did a story on the Interior Ministry and how it is literally just a battleground for all the political parties.  Everybody wants the ability to control the ministry that used to have a file on every person in the country, the ability to monitor everyone, to control where everyone is and who they are.  That whole sense of the lack of security.  The thing that I ended up saying in my story was that they all have their militias in the police so, at the end of the day when the Americans leave, there are going to be 300,000 militia men on the road, on the street with guns, not 300,000 policemen.  They’re not interesting in policing the capital or the country, to take care of everyone.  They’re interested in looking after their own.  That’s really what the situation is like now over there.

TG:  Is there a particular militia that’s controlling the neighborhood you’re living in in Baghdad right now?

JT:  No.  We have private security!  [laughs]

TG:  That’s the best answer I could get from you! 

JT [laughing]:  I can’t say any more than that!

TG:  Why can’t you say any more than that?

JT:  It would compromise not only my safety but the safety of the people I live with, our situation, our neighbors.   Security really is the greatest concern for anyone who lives in Baghdad these days.

TG:  And as journalists, particularly western journalists, you’re really targets.

JT:  Absolutely.  Absolutely.

TG:  One of the big problems you face driving is IED’s, improvised explosive devices, which seem to be all over the roads, disguised in every kind of way.  There was another incredible report that you did for NPR about encountering a live IED.  Rather than me telling about it, let’s hear your report.  But let me just set it up.  The report was filed in March of this year.  It was a very close call for you.  You were traveling with a convoy of supply vehicles led by 1st Lt. Douglas MacGregor.  They had just finished delivering supplies to a newly built outpost in the village of Shakarat.  On the way back from that base, when you heard IED’s explode around you and lieutenant said you all had to be really cautious… you pick up the story from here:

JT [reporting]:  The soldiers say it’s hard to know what to look for.  Anything could be a weapon or a trigger.  A crinkled up mess of metal discarded by the side of the road.  The plastic bag fluttering on the trash heap.  Everything and everyone looks suspicious.  Even children.  MacGregor got news on his radio and turned to the gunner to warn him.  …

MacGregor:  Just stay down!  Stay down and watch your heads.  There’s rock throwers on the left.  Those little kids are waving, but …  Oh yeah!  Hey!  … Candy for the rock throwers!  Here!  Throw some! 

JT:  The convoy then rolled into a deserted part of the village.  The shops looked like mechanic garages that were all shuttered.  It was eerily vacant so close to the place where, earlier, children had played.  MacGregor pointed out a curious yellow trash can. 

[explosion]

JT:  The explosion showered metal and sand into the Humvee, leaving those inside coughing.  But the vehicle kept going.   MacGregor’s tone didn’t change.  He ordered the convoy to continue.  “Contact with an IED,” he called it.  The soldiers tried to inject some humor into the moment by counting how many IED’s each had encountered. 

Soldier:  That’s the trifecta!  Three in a row!  Hey, throw a peanut to these kids…

JT:  By the end of the journey, all vehicles in the convoy were still intact.  The gunner wondered outloud in jest if he’d been hit in the head.  Reminding him that things could have been much worse, MacGregor told him to quit whining.

TG:  …It must have taken incredible presence of mind and focus for you to keep your recoding machine on and to keep reporting as the explosion went on. 

JT:  Actually it’s still difficult for me to hear that.

TG:  Flashback?

JT:  I was just bracing...  I remember that.  Watching this thing go off in front of me.  The reverberation… your insides, in your diaphragm, boom! … reverberation inside your body.  You feel the force of it.  I remember bracing myself, waiting to be lacerated, waiting for the shrapnel to hit my face, to start shredding me.  Coughing up dust and feeling, Okay, okay, okay, I’m still in one piece and I can feel my fingers and okay, okay. And then I looked down and saw my recorder.  I always record in a Humvee.  I never turn it off.  That’s just one of the things I do.  Apart from the fact that you might get things like that, you also get the soldiers talking and it’s so important to open a window into their everyday thought.  There’s a lot of stuff that goes on inside a Humvee that it’s always worth for a journalist to report.   But the immediate aftermath of that was… okay!  That was an IED!  And feeling like you’ve gone through it.  You’ve passed it.  I think I was in shock afterwards.  I know I had a huge migraine.  But considering what’s happened to other people who’ve been in the same situation, I was incredibly lucky.

TG:  How close was the explosion to the Humvee?

JT:  It was right in front of us.  We were the lead vehicle.  It was just in front of the hood – the bonnet as I call it in Australia.  It happened right in front of us.

TG:  Okay.  So you realized you still had all your body parts.  You were alive.  And your cassette machine was on…

JT:  Digital recorder!

TG:  And then what?  Just in terms of the recording of the piece,  then what?  Did you start immediately talking to the men in the Humvee with you? 

JT:  I think because it was so… it was such a tense day – it was a very  tense morning, we’d already had two IED’s that, one was diffused, one was spotted, and this was the third one that went off and we were all very anxious to get back to base.  I actually had to file a piece for Morning Edition so I was just concentrating on meeting my deadline.

TG:  This wasn’t the piece?

JT:  I filed this for All Things Considered the same day in the end because I went back, I listened to it, I realized I had the explosion and the sound was good enough.  So I just filed a little “Reporter’s Notebook.”  So I went running back to the base when we got back and ringing my editor and saying, “Okay, okay, okay – I can still make the deadline!  I just got hit by an IED but I can still do it.”  And it was “What’s wrong with you!  It’s okay.  Calm down.”  You try to not think about the fact that you nearly died and just focus on what you do know – focus on your work and just carry on.  Afterwards I met with the lieutenant again who wanted to check up on me and make sure everything was okay.  He told me that he went back to the place and found literally the guy’s “nest” as he called it.  It was an abandoned building with a pile of bricks where he said the guy had obviously just sat there waiting for the convoy to come and set it off.

TG:  The remote control? 

JT:  Yes.  So he actually went back.  He said that normally what they would do is that they would stop, they would do an incident report, they would survey the area and see if there was someone to go after.  But because we were in such a rush to get back to base, they didn’t do it.  So he went back afterwards and came and told me about it.  Just the idea that there was someone sitting there waiting for you to come past and wanting to blow you up!  That’s what they deal with every single day.  Several times a day. 

TG:  …What’s it like to get back on the road after that to continue your reporting? 

JT:  I didn’t want to go back to Diyala after that.  That was in March.  My last rotation in there… I try to do at least one embed every time in part just to break up the time I’m there, but also to get that perspective.  I didn’t do an embed when I went back in after Diyala.  But I did one the last time I was there.  I went to Amiriya in west Baghdad.  You are in more danger when you are in an embed, when you go off in a convoy, when you’re with the military because they’re targeted so by default you’re targeted.  You have to psych yourself up to go and do it every time.  I’m very apprehensive every time I do an embed.  You have to trust the guys you’re with.  You have to accept that they’re going to be… that they’re gong to take care of you.  Just being in Amiriya and being on a foot patrol and you’re carrying all of your equipment and wearing a bullet-proof vest which weighs something like 24 lbs. Or so.  You’re wearing a helmet that’s turned into hot metal because of the sun.  It’s like 100 degrees in the shade.  And suddenly you have to run 100 meters because the soldiers have spotted a sniper.  Running, running and thinking, Why am I doing this!  I have to psych myself up to do it, but when I do it, it’s okay, this is where I have to go.  You’re not very ambitious in what you want to achieve.  At the end of the day you just want to get back to the base.  You want to do your job.  You want to see if you’ve managed to record anything that’s worth putting together for a story.  But the ultimate objective is to come out of there in one piece. 

TG:  …You were talking about how there were sometimes four hours of electricity there.  What about water?  What about food?

JT:  Water gets trucked in.  Water tankers.  People have to wait for a truck to bring water into the neighborhood and they have to pay for it.  If you don’t have the means to pay…  Right now, especially in the summer, it gets so hot in Baghdad.  So if you don’t have electricity, you can’t work your air conditioning, you can’t work your fridge.  You’ve got so many kids, especially, who get sick.  There’s cholera.  There’s all sorts of illnesses that come from water…

TG:  Dysentery…

JT:  Absolutely.  But there’s so much going on that the way the water shortages show themselves is how sick the children get.  Just in my area, a man who lives a couple of houses down from me came up to me and asked me if I would see his baby.  He’s got a one-year-old who has some sort of heart failure and he can’t get treatment for him at the hospital that he goes to in Baghdad because they simply don’t have the doctors to do it.  Because there’s been such a brain drain in Iraq.  All of the doctors who have been threatened or have seen their colleagues killed have left.  The hospitals themselves are in a really bad state. Dirty sheets.  Dirty floors.  Some people just choose to die at home rather than go to the hospital because it’s so bad.  There’s other things.  If he’s a Shia, he doesn’t want to go to a hospital in an area that’s Sunni or that’s run by a Sunni group.  If he’s a Sunni, he doesn’t want to go to an area run by a Shia militia. So where do you go?

TG:  So hospitals are run by militias?

JT:  Absolutely!  The Ministry of Health is run by people who work for Muqtada al Sadr.  He, in his way, is trying to do what Hezbollah and Hamas have done by taking over the provision of essential services like health.  It’s actually quite telling that even the main hospital in Sadr City, which is his big stronghold, doesn’t even have the proper level of service and care that hospitals should have. 

TG:  It sounds like one of the reasons why doctors fled is that doctors have become targets?   Why are doctors targeted?

JT:  For any number of reasons.  Maybe they were members of the Baath party.  A lot of people were members of the Baath party to get a job.  I can tell you about situations in an emergency room where a guy’s got a gunshot wound and his friend comes in with him and he puts a gun to the doctor’s head and says, “If he dies, you die.”  Or emergency rooms are attacked after suicide bombings because they don’t want the bombing victims to survive.  Or they live in an area that has been targeted repeatedly by bombs and by sectarian militia.  It’s the same situation with universities.  Professors have gone.  There’s a long list of assassinations of university lecturers just because of Islamic fundamentalists killing them or sectarian-motivated attacks.  When people talk about a war, it’s just a very simplistic way of tidying it up into a bundle and saying, “This is one, big monolithic war.”  And it’s not like that at all.  It’s so complicated on so many levels.  There are layers and layers that I’m still trying to get my head around.  Every day I learn something new about how confusing it is to be in Iraq, to understand just the context of so many of these feuds.  You don’t understand why people are arguing, fighting, and killing, and why people are cooperating.  “… my enemy is my friend…”  The traditions in the place that has a civilization as ancient as Mesopotamia and just trying to get your head around it… it blows my mind! 

TG:  Your father is Lebanese.

JT:  Both my parents are. 

TG:  You grew up for part of your childhood in Lebanon.  You speak fluent Arabic.  That must really help you! 

JT:  It does.  Sometimes I don’t let on.  Sometimes it’s better for me just to hear. 

TG:  Overhear things people don’t know you can overhear.  What are some of the things you overhear that way?

JT:  Well, just when they’re talking about me.  It’s just little things.  Being a woman and working in an Arab environment is good and bad.  There are things that I rail against just because of the way they treat women.  For example, the Council of Ministers, where the cabinet meets, you go through all these security checks.  They make women go in the back of the building.  Okay.  It doesn’t matter who you are.  If you’re a woman you go in the back, you go out the back.  For me, this is something that just sets me off.  I remember having a huge hissyfit because I couldn’t go in with my translator.  They were talking about me.  They were saying, “What’s wrong with her?  She’s really up high, she’s really nervous!  Are all you women so emotional?”  They try to smack you down and put you in your place.  You’re a woman so you’re being emotional by complaining.

TG:  ...You’re just being neurotic...

JT:  But I’m sorry, no.  I wouldn’t even allow them to have to translate.  I’d just confront them directly.  I’d say, “No, I’m not.  I’m actually just a human being.  And you’re claiming that this is democracy?  So treat people in a democratic way!”

TG:  And then you go to the back door after that!

JT [laughing]:  Then I have to go… At the end of the day they can always play the security card.  “No, no.  It’s security.  You have to go to the back.”  It’s things like that.  When people realize I speak Arabic, they try and put me into a different role I guess, where if you’re interviewing a politician, and you’re speaking to him in English, it’s more of an equal standing.  But if you start speaking to him in Arabic… it’s not just being a female, it’s the way the Arab press is more of a mouthpiece than an independent observer.  So it’s “this is what you’re going to do” as opposed to “this is what we think we should do.” 

TG:  … a disadvantage to speak Arabic to the politicians?

JT:  Sometimes it is.  I use it in ways to break the ice.  But then I very strictly stick to speaking English for interviews just because they need to know they’re speaking to a foreign audience. 

TG:  What about people who aren’t in politics? People in neighborhoods…

JT:  Then it’s very easy.  It’s great.

TG:  To speak Arabic.

JT:  When I was in Amiriya, I walked into this house full of women and it was hilarious because the soldiers are standing outside sweating in the sun, and they’re like, “Get in, get in!  Come on and have coffee!”  And we sit and we talk and how things are going, and like “Yes, it’s good but wish they’d give us some electricity, get us some water.”  And they giggle when they see the American soldiers.  There was one who was just obsessed with the American soldiers…  Obviously I speak Arabic with a Lebanese accent.  They recognize that immediately.  You can tell when someone’s got an Egyptian accent and when someone’s got a Lebanese accent or a Gulfy accent, the way they speak.  I remember once someone – a guard for a compound and I was saying hello – and he said, “You’re from Lebanon.”  I said yes, and he said, “What part of Lebanon?” because he wanted to know if I was from the south, if I was Shiite.  And I said, “Well, it’s all Lebanon, isn’t it?”  And he went, “Yeah, yeah…”  It can be really tricking trying to figure out what you’re going to say, what you’re going to give, what you’re going to tell people about  yourself, and what you’re going to keep for yourself.

TG:  What years of your childhood did you spend in Lebanon?

JT:  The main chunk of time was when I was twelve till I was fifteen.  Three years.  But we’d gone there previously on visits when I was nine and when I was two.    So that was ’87 to ’90 when we lived there for three years. 

TG:  And Syria was bombing then…

JT:  Syria was bombing.  And then the Lebanese army started fighting with the falange.  We spent ten months in a bomb shelter.  It was crazy!

TG:  So you were twelve to fifteen during that period when you were spending a lot of nights in the bomb shelter.  And you didn’t know nearly what you do now about Middle East history and about politics in that region.  What was it like for you to be a child in the bomb shelter while Syria was bombing not really understanding what was going on?  Compare that to being in war now, understanding a lot of what’s going on because you’re there only to report about it.

JT:  It’s so weird just the way that the experience has affected me and my sisters, and how it manifested itself in the ways we all live now.  My eldest sister was, I guess, so scarred by it that she’s almost obsessed with keeping the family together.  She got married, but she’s ten minutes away.  Whatever we do, we all have to do it together.  So she’s very aware of having us all in one place.  Whereas I’ve just gone… taken myself to the other side of the world.  I guess for me … I never got it out of my system!  I had no control when I was a fourteen-year-old in a bomb shelter, being told to go downstairs and sit there and wait for the bombing to stop so I could go back upstairs again. I lost ten months of school.  And ten months of life, really.  Just kind of doing the same thing, day in and day out.  Going absolutely mental.  And I didn’t understand it.  You only get a snapshot of what’s going on because you are in a Christian village and in the part of Lebanon that is Christian you get one view of the story.  Even now – I went back there last year to do five weeks in the aftermath of the war with Israel – I felt that the entire time I was playing catch-up with what was going on.  Because I deliberately shut it out.  I didn’t want to talk about it.  I didn’t want to deal with it.  I didn’t want to confront it.  Because it was too personal.  I didn’t want to think about memories that were so difficult for me.  I didn’t want to have to go back to that time when I was really helpless and I didn’t know what was going on.  I have done other things since then where I’ve kind of been in the same situation.  But going back to Lebanon last year to do that story was really difficult.  But I did it I guess because I wanted to face it.  I’m all about not living in a comfort zone!

TG:  Apparently!