In Closing: Matthew McAllester Speech

Matthew McAllester M.A. '02 Photo by Rob Carlin

The following speech was given by Matthew McAllester M.A. ¹02, the UN correspondent for Newsday, as part of the Higgins School of Humanities Fall 2003 lecture Series. In March 2003, while covering the war in Iraq for Newsday, McAllester and several other journalists and an aid worker were arrested by the Iraqi government and held in Abu Grabe prison, just outside of Baghdad.

(Editor's note: Every effort has been made to ensure correct spelling of foreign names and places. Any spelling errors are the result of transcription and not the fault of the speaker.)

Ginger Vaughan:

It's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight and to introduce our guest speaker. This event is presented to you by the Higgins School of Humanities and the Klein Distinguished Professorship. Tonight's lecture is especially appropriate for a Klein lecture, for when Andrea and Peter Klein endowed the Klein Chair, they were interested in encouraging the whole process of mentoring and sought to foster it throughout Clark. We usually take mentoring to mean the professor mentoring the student, but very often at Clark, the student mentors the professor. And that is the case with our speaker tonight, whose passions for good writing and for making his reader feel the plight of the oppressed and the besieged have taught me about the world beyond the privileged walls of academia.

Matt McAllester was raised in Edinburgh and attended the University of Sussex, in England, where he earned a B.A. He came to Clark in 1992 as a student in our master's program in English. At least he said this was his intent at the time was to write a thesis on English Renaissance literature, and he served as a teaching assistant in my introductory Shakespeare class. He prepared his own lectures on "Measure for Measure," and he may be interested to know that I still borrow that material when I teach "Measure" today. The summer after Matt finished his coursework, he took an internship at Newsday. His performance was so outstanding that the editors offered him a full-time job. He began by covering local news on Long Island, and in two years, he was part of a team of reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA flight 800. Before long, Matt McAllester was named to Newsday's Middle Eastern bureau. Based in Jerusalem, he traveled to the Balkans to cover the war in Kosovo. He later wrote a book about the ethnic violence he saw in the city of Pec, "Beyond the Mountains of the Damned," which was published in 2001 and served as his thesis for his 2002 master's degree. Soon after that, Matt traveled to Afghanistan to cover the war there, and in late winter of this year, his attention turned to Iraq. As many of you know, while the war was still being fought last March, Matt, along with three other reporters and a peace worker, were held in Baghdad's notorious Abu Grabe prison for eight days. Since the spring, Matt has been based in London as Newsday's UN correspondent, but he has returned to Iraq frequently and is completing a book for Harper Collins titled "Saddam's Prison: Journeys to a Troubled Freedom." Tonight, he will share his reflections on the war, its aftermath and U.S. efforts to reconstruct a government in Iraq.

Matt McAllester:

I first went to Iraq in May 2001, a time before the events of September the 11th, when Saddam Hussein looked pretty secure as president of his country. Like all journalists, I was accompanied throughout my trip by a government minder who reported back to the intelligence services of what I asked and where I went. All interviews were conducted in his presence. This was absolutely standard for journalists in Iraq during Saddam's time. We had no freedom to report properly, and more importantly, the people we were allowed to speak to were scared to death to say anything that didn't conform with the government's positions. That essentially meant that none of us could ever report what was really going on in Iraq. We could give impressions about how oppressive the regime was, but we could never describe the brutality simply because we were never allowed to see it. When Saddam fell from power in April we were at last able to look at how Iraq's people had lived and died during the last 35 years. In the rush to assess how the American led administration in Iraq is or is not succeeding in putting the country back together, this hidden history of Iraq is being passed over a little too quickly for my liking. I don't think we can begin to understand Iraq's present or its possible futures without looking carefully at its past. So, for a while, I'd like to talk a little about what Iraq turns out to have been really like under Saddam.

About three weeks ago in a town called Hille, just over an hour south of Baghdad, I met an ordinary Iraqi family who were living in the run-down house that they've lived in for years. They welcomed me in and we sat cross-legged on the floor in their living room, and I noticed that the walls of the room were lined with old photographs of young men. The mother of the household gave birth to nine sons. She lost one in the Iran-Iraq war, which would be tragedy enough for most mothers. And then one day in March 1991, she lost five more. It was after the first Gulf war and the Shia and the Kurdish populations of Iraq had risen against Saddam, encouraged by the first Presiden Bush's asking "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." But Bush then decided that the American and allied forces would not prevent Saddam's military from quashing the rebellion. It seems that Bush preferred the known quantity of Saddam to the unknown possible alternatives. And so in a matter of days, with the Iraqi military crushing these rebellions, the uprising was over.

Saddam then decided to teach his people a lesson for the betrayal. One afternoon in mid-March Mishita (sp.) was serving a later lunch of rice and a sauce for those of her large brood who happened to be around. Her son Musa Mohammed Musheve (sp.) was taking a shower. Shadig (sp.) was on the roof where he kept his bird coop, where he doted over these birds. The four brothers were all in their twenties and thirties and they'd just come back from fighting in the disastrous war in Kuwait.

Outside in the street, which was a flat stretch of earth covered in garbage and rutted with thin canals of sewage which filled the air with the constant stench of human waste, eight year old Achmed (sp.) was playing marbles with his friends from the neighborhood. He crouched down in his jeans and his blue-and-white striped shirt and rolled his marbles toward those of his friends. The jeans were hand-me-downs from another brother, Saddam, the name written on the inside of the denim by a tailor who'd once repaired it. This was common at the time, to call your son Saddam, and Mishita and her husband had once loved their president, like so many Iraqis during the boom years of the 1970s, that they'd named one of their sons after him. But by now, the Shia of Iraq, including Mishita's valley had long since changed their minds about their leader.

A red Nissan bus pulled up outside the house at about half-past three in the afternoon. Wearing khaki uniforms, local officials from the ruling Bath party and special security‹which was Saddam's elite security agency‹stepped from the front door of the bus. Some of them wore kathias (sp.) wrapped around their heads, the sort of Arab head scarves that Yassar Arafat often wears. And so, you could only see their eyes through these scarves. They carried kalashnikov rifles, which they fired into the air. Already inside the bus were 40 people, already blindfolded and with their eyes tied behind their backs.

"Please help me," he screamed, as one of the men grabbed him. He was only eight, but I've seen a family photograph and he looks older in it. He was quite a bulky guy, and his brothers said he was a fast runner and had some trophies from school for his efforts. His father was a butcher, and his brothers said he was big because he'd inherited his father's musculature. He had a longish face and a strong chin, thick dark hair.

One of the men kicked Mishita in her belly, and she fell back, winded and unable to move.

"We're only taking him for interrogation‹questions and answers‹and then he'll be back," the special security man told her.

Other men had burst into the house. At gunpoint, they seized Musha (sp.), Muhammed, Farig (sp.) and Shadig. Another brother, Achel was also there. He was 11. He pleaded with the men that he was just a kid and they, true to the random spirit of this lesson Saddam was teaching his people, let him go. While they were in the house, the men in khaki smashed up the refrigerator, the freezer, the four televisions. They stole all the money and gold jewelry they could find, jewelry given to the brides of the brothers on their wedding day. They took away a couple of cassette recorders, they did their best to smash up the furniture, the ragged couches and chairs.

Three other brothers, the surviving brothers, were away at the time, with a sister or a relative. And two weeks earlier their father had died of natural causes, so he was saved those minutes of seeing five of his sons becoming part of Saddam's vast lesson to his people.

His widow, Mishita lay in the garbage outside the house and watched the red bus drive away with her boys. Blood rose to her mouth from some internal damage caused by the kick to her belly. To this day, every two weeks or so, her insides release a little blood and her mouth tastes as it did the last day she saw Achmed and his brothers.

In May of this year, the family found some of their missing brothers. They were buried along with 2,700 others in a field about ten miles north of Hille. There was not much left of them except their bones and their clothes. One of the surviving brothers, Mohammed‹the guy whose former name was Saddam, he changed his name‹helped to organize the digging, which I watched. And just as Saddam's killers had used a digger to carve out the trenches into which they then pushed their victims before shooting them and then covering them with earth again, now the families of the dead had brought a digger to the site to unearth the remains of their loved ones.

The huge machine scooped out the earth, turning slightly and tipping out the contents onto the ground. With each load, four of five bundles of bones and clothes would spew onto the ground. Volunteers scrambled to pick out the remains with their bare hands, trying to discern which ribs went with which skulls and which shirts. Cradling the dead, they would tip them into transparent plastic bags and another volunteer would reach in to search for identification cards, rings or anything that might give them a clue to the identity of the dead‹because there was no flesh; it was just bones and clothes. Beyond the digging site were clusters of these bags sitting in the sun, hundreds and hundreds of them, glinting dully in the sunlight.

One day Mohammed came across a small pile of bones as he was digging. He recognized the shirt and jeans that his brother Achmed had been wearing on the day he was taken. Inside the jeans was his own former name‹Saddam‹still visible on the spot where the tailor had written it so many years before. Mohammed found three more of his brothers in the mass grave. Shadig's body is still missing.

The farmer and his family who owned the land witnessed the killings and had to keep quiet about it for over a decade. He described to me the buses of men, women and children arriving every day for about a month. Men in khaki took the people, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, off the buses and pushed them into the trenches. Then the shots would ring out. This happened three times a day, in shifts‹nine o'clock, two o'clock, five o'clock.

Late last month, I came across some photographs of the killings actually happening and it was just as the farmer described. Men in khaki were wearing distashes, the kind of long cotton robe men in Iraq wear and they had kathias wrapped around their heads to hide their identities. In one picture, three of them surrounded what seems to be three men, one boy and a woman in a black abaya (?). And they're lying curled up in the bottom of the trench with their hands bound with plastic. It looks like they're still alive in the picture because there's no blood to be seen, and one of the men is stretching out his fingers in a sort of pointless effort to live that never really leaves some people, even as they know they're about to die and have no power to help themselves.

In another picture there are six people, again in a trench, and two of them are still clearly alive. They're sitting on their knees, their heads bowed, and they look more at peace with what's about to happen to them than the man with the stretched fingers. People have different reactions to death. Two other snaps suggest they're badly taken photographs, these, they look like they're some sort of vacation snaps‹Two others suggest that the act has already been done. This time the victims are not in a trench but are on some flat piece of ground. There's a different hue to the blackness of one woman's abaya, suggesting the blood that was seeping from her back and next to her lies a little boy under the age of ten with a red blotch spreading out in the whiteness of his distash. And preening themselves behind the bodies are four men. Two of them are pointing at the dead bodies, two of them are giving the "V" for victory sign to the camera.

This was Saddam and his henchmen teaching the Iraqi people the price of dissent. It was not enough for him to kill those involved with the uprising. He had to make Iraqis‹all Iraqis, whatever their age or gender‹understand how he would deal with them if they ever made trouble again.

And I came across, actually this same family gave me a video compact disk, a sort of primitive DVD, of a film that the Iraqi army seems to have made of a hazing ritual for new recruits, and in it, you have a line of men who are the new recruits. [They] line up, and one by one they come forward and lie on their backs on the parade ground and put their feet through what appear to be leather loops dangling from a stick that's held by two other men. After that another man, who's dressed rather like me at the moment, with a very large stick starts beating with all his might the soles of their feet, and they scream "I love my country, I love Saddam Hussein." And the point of this seems to be "Understand the suffering you'll have to endure and the suffering you're expected to inflict on behalf of your president."

I've got a little first-hand experience of the violence of the regime myself, which, believe me, wasn't planned. During the war, I was arrested, as Ginger said, as were three photographers and an American peace activist by the intelligence service. We were never told why, but it was clear that they suspected us of being spies. They took as to Abu Grabe prison on the outskirts of Baghdad and held us there in solitary confinement for eight days. We weren't physically hurt and they let us go about a week before the regime collapsed. We were extremely lucky, and the experiences there left me with a bit of a sense of responsibility to those who were not so fortunate, the roughly 300,000 Iraqis killed by their own government and my fellow Iraqi prisoners.

I returned to Iraq two weeks after the war and watched as volunteers dug up 13 bodies that were buried in a very shallow grave just outside a section of this vast prison complex in which I was held. Ten of these men were the Iraqis who were held on my prison block, a former inmate who was there told me. The putrid bodies clothed in the same blue-and-white striped pajamas and plastic flip-flops that we had worn in prison were the guys that I used to see every day. Some of them would clean out my cell, depending on who was on clean-up duty. So, let me tell you one example of how they were treated before they died.

The sound I heard this night made me think that the guards who play pool throughout the night in a room at the end of the cell block were having a play fight, or at worst an argument over whatever the local rules might be at Abu Grabe. The clicking of the pool balls had stopped. Shoes that usually padded or snapped down the concrete hallway running between the two rows of cells were rushing this time, several pairs of shoes or boots. There was shouting as well. A body fell to the ground and there was now a single voice from the shouting coming from the level where I lay on the cold floor of my cell‹I had two blankets, one for lying on and one to cover myself. That voice was different from the others. It wasn't that it was quieter, because the man was calling out almost as loudly as the others in this group. But it came from a throat completely contracted by fear. And it seemed to be about two or three yards away from me.

I recognized one of the other voices, I'm sure. It belonged to a guard who had broad shoulders and wore wire-rimmed glasses, and he walked in smallish steps with his feet pointing out slightly because of his large girth. He had been there when we'd checked into the prison a couple of days earlier, and he'd searched the pockets of my black fleece, pulling the drawstring tight around my waist for no apparent reason other than to be aggressive. He'd stood beside me as I stripped to my boxer shorts and put on my pajamas. And somehow in our new universe of dark stars, he appeared as one of the blackest, and ever since I'd avoided eye contact with him whenever he walked past my cell door. He had a loud voice normally, barked commands angrily to the Iraqi prisoners, and his was a sort of nonchalant aggression, as if he just didn't care.

But now, this time, his voice was unrestrained, it was furious, and it came in a new rhythm alternating with another sound.

In the early 1990s, when I was living in New York, I saw two men rush out of a warehouse building one afternoon on the quiet streets of SoHo with baseball bats to beat up a man who looked as if he was a drug addict, certainly they thought so. The man had been clumsily trying to break into a car, and the sound of bats against his gangly body has always stayed with me. That was the sound that I was hearing now, alternating with the shouts of the heavy-set guard. The prisoner was on the ground and he was being beaten with something that wasn't a fist or a boot. One of my friends who was in prison actually did watch it and said it was a stick. There was a shout, and then that slightly resonant sound of flesh and bone giving way to something very hard that was moving very fast. And then another shout from the guard, and then another blow. It went on and on.

Voices mingled, but it sounded like the other guards were perhaps trying to persuade the big guard to ease up on the prisoner a little. But I don't know, my Iraqi isn't good enough. Perhaps they were egging him on because the beating didn't stop, nor did the yelps coming from the tightened throat of the man on the ground.

I had a flourescent light on in my cell 24 hours a day, and I was plainly visible to the men in the corridor. There was a door with no solidity to it, just bars. I didn't want to be seen watching. As soon as I sensed the violence beginning, I turned onto my left side and laid motionless, staring at the painted marine blue strip that ran around the base of the cinderblock walls of my cell.

Now, journalists are meant to bear witness, that's rather the point of our job. We watch and record, and tell other people what we've seen, perhaps, in the hope that an account of what we're witnessing can eke away at badness. But I turned away and chose not to see a thing.

Eventually the beating stopped and the man was dumped into his cell. The big guard seemed to have exhausted his fury. The lock I heard, as I always did, when the iron bars of the prisoners' cell doors closed. Then a click of his padlock confirmed that this guy would not be leaving his six-foot by 10-foot room that night. With each breath, he made a sort of crying sound. Sometimes he broke that rhythm to exhale his pain with more force, and the otherwise violent block filled up with what I wondered might be the man's last gasps.

The guard ambled back and spoke to him, asking him questions. The man continued to whine with his agony and the guard walked away.

And then, after another while, two guards came back, and I wondered whether one of them was the man who'd once appeared at my cell door to ask in English, "Medicine?" There were more questions and this time the prisoner responded. The cell door opened and there was more talking. And then the door locked again, and the two men walked away. I don't know how long the man's noises filled the cells‹time just disappeared and I didn't have a watch. Eventually silence came back that night to the cells, to the whole block. And in the morning, much to everyone's relief I'm sure, the man was alive.

Sometime over next few days, I came to see the big guard, the man who'd almost beaten this prisoner to death, as a source of some comfort. Over the past months, being in Iraq during the war, I'd unfortunately turned into a solid smoker. And in Abu Grabe a cigarette‹it was just like the movies‹a cigarette became a companion, a comfort, an amazing luxury, and you'd do anything for one, to take the boredom away.

The big guard was also a smoker, and one day, I heard my next-door neighbor, my next-door prisoner, Molly Bingham, who is a photographer, successfully plead a cigarette from him. "Beautiful?" he asked, out of my sight, and I assumed he was asking Molly what she thought of his looks.

When he walked past, I asked for his cigarette also, and the man held out a pack of extra-long, super-thin white cigarettes, that should really have been dangling from the fingers of a bejeweled beauty in an early James Bond film. These were the beautiful things that the guard had referred to. And I thanked him with all the warmth I could generate.

"No problem," said the man in a gentle voice, in English, smiling. Abu Grabe and Saddam's Iraq did things like that, making you turn away from torture and then forming a tiny alliance, or reliance, on the torturer. In the second-by-second struggle to survive, I found that I could only hesitatingly betray the very essence of human solidarity, and a deposit of guilt could be made on my soul. It was the sort of deposit, I'm afraid, that's also weighing on the souls of many Iraqis now. Fear of that magnitude just does unwholesome things to you.

I'm going to talk a little bit more about that fear if you don't mind. And again, you've caught me drawing from my own experiences‹I'm only using it as a sort of way into what the Iraqis must have felt every day for 35 years. I was there for eight days, which is paltry in comparison. This little bit is from the book. It's about my first day in prison.

Fear kept me pointlessly awake and alert, pointless because no amount of protective animal instinct could do me any good. Fear is one of the most useful things to have in a danger zone, I've learned in the past. It had often made me run away, hide, alter my tone of voice. But it's only useful if you have somewhere to run to, somewhere to hide, if it operates in an environment where there are choices and some degree of freedom. In a prison, whether it be a building or a country, fear is just a constant, painful reminder that you have no choices. People with terminal illnesses speak of the boredom of pain, pain that is no longer doing its duty of alerting the human body to danger, but only to its disintegration. My fear was like that: unwanted, relentless, useless, and completely boring.

I tried to calm myself by looking around the cell and imposing order onto my strangled thoughts, trying to take the force out of the fear of the future by cold observation of the present.

"The cell is light blue," I told myself. "It has a strip of darker, sea-blue paint around the bottom of the cinderblocks." They're going to use electricity on me.

"My walls are 14 cinderblocks high. There is glass in the upper pane of my window, but not in the lower."

They are going to rip my fingernails out.

So, I forced myself to stand up. I put one bare foot in front of the other and measured out the length and breadth of the cell and then lay down again. "My cell is 10 foot by six foot. If I lie across it like this, it is not as comfortable as if I were lying lengthwise. This way my feet are scrunched up against the wall. On the other hand, I can't be bothered moving. Besides, the guards told me to sleep this way.

"There's a dust ball about 18 inches away from my nose. I can't be bothered blowing it. I wonder how long this bottled water will last and whether I'll need it, at all. I will read the label: From Tigers, the mesa potion rivers where the history and civilization learned humanity, writing and reading since oldest era."

It made me laugh for about two seconds.

I read it again and then moved on to another message on the bottle. "One third water passes through our bodies a year. Beware of the water you drink." There was nothing else to read. Already, I longed for a book that I could disappear into. I have to be cursed with an inability to memorize things well, but there was a Shakespeare sonnet I'd sunk into my brain a year ago, and surely if I really tried, I could dig it up.

Ten more lines to go, but I couldn't get any further. "I'd learned this poem only a year ago," I thought, "how could I have forgotten it so quickly."

"I'm going to die," I thought, "What does it matter?" That kind of fear, which I'd certainly never experienced before, nurtures betrayal, destroys trust, sense of self, memory and even truth. I had it for eight days, and I haven't quite stopped having its problematic influences on my at time, but the Iraqi people had it for 35 years. All of them, and they're only beginning to recover from their trauma.

So, that's a little indication of what Iraq was really like under Saddam, stories that I and no other journalists could tell even on our visits to Iraq. I've been to some unsavory spots in the past, over the years, including the horrible totalitarian state of Burma, but it didn't even come close to Saddam's Iraq in terms of total oppression. And that's why, when I stood on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on one of the first nights of the war and watched American bombs erupt as they hit Saddam's palace complex across the Tigris, I felt absolutely elated. And that's why I, even though I never could and never would show it in my news reports, personally supported the war. And I have rather different reasons for supporting the war than President Bush of Prime Minister Blair, who've never been to Iraq, but of course were willing to wage war against it.

I believe in the justness of wars that liberate entire nations from dictatorships. It was right to wage war in Kosovo, for example, and it was right to go to war in Iraq. In both wars, the American-led coalitions did kill thousands of civilians in bombing campaigns. But, and I hate to say it, that's a price worth paying for the same sort of oppression and murder that Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein wielded over their people for so many years, the stuff that I've just been describing, which frankly is just the tip of the iceberg.

For what it's worth, the family of Achmed Al Asali, the eight-year-old boy who was taken away and whose brother found him in a mass grave, told me that while they'd like to see the man they call Big Bush, the first President Bush, put in a cell with Saddam Hussein for abandoning them after 1991, they think that, and this is from one of the brothers, "Little Bush is gifted from GodŠ"

That of course is not a sentiment shared by all Iraqis in the postwar era, as you know. It's not an entirely happy story there at the moment. You all know, I'm sure, that Iraqis feel incredibly frustrated with the lack of security and electricity at the moment, something they didn't have to deal with in the Saddam era, despite all the other hardships. And these are only the two things that most infuriate them about the occupying forces. They ask, "How can such powerful nations not manage to keep the peace and keep their air conditioners working in the 120-degree heat of summer?" It gets up to 130 sometimes, which is unbelievable.

But smaller things sometimes can speak just as clearly about the American forces' rather too frequent lack of sensitivity to the people they now rule. It rather surprised me, for example, to learn after the war that the American administration was renovating Abu Grabe prison, the one that I was in, and had started using it again as a detention center. Now, there's simply no place in Iraq that more symbolizes the terror of the regime than this vast prison. People used sort of drive by, and the prison would be over there and they would be looking that way, so they wouldn't have to look at it. Thousands of people lost their lives there. There's an Iraqi saying about Abu Grabe: To enter is to be lost, to come out is to be reborn.

On Aug. 1, I took an Army tour with some other journalists of the renovated part of the prison. It was coming along. Two blocks were newly painted in beige and cream and many of the cells were furnished with bunk beds and mattresses, pillows, wastepaper bins and red plastic wash basins‹a lot better than it was under Saddam, of course. Ceiling fans waited motionlessly for the electricity that would come in about two weeks. Power and water would allow the Americans to move indoors the roughly 400 prisoners who were then being held nearby in a prison camp behind barbed wire in tents under the sun.

We walked past these prisoners. We weren't allowed to interview them, but suddenly they started shouting out and sort of waving to us. "Why are we staying here?" they shouted. "What's the story? They just picked us up from our houses. Come on, rescue us. We've been here for two months. We've got to burn down this camp," they shouted.

This is clearly wasn't part of the scheduled tour. Two soldiers strode over and told one of the prisoners to shut up, while another pulled out his handcuffs and threatened to arrest a friend of mine who'd taken photographs of the detainees. He told us that to take photographs was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and yet, just a few minutes later, another soldier was telling us that these men that we saw were not prisoners of war, just ordinary criminals. And therefore, as I was tempted to point out, they weren't covered by the same part of the Geneva Conventions as prisoners of war. And besides, even if they had been prisoners of war, it was not a violation of the Conventions to talk to journalists if the prisoners themselves wished to do so, and clearly they wanted to.

"I'm not going to talk law with you," barked the soldier who bore the handcuffs when I tried to discuss the matter.

But the soldiers did have, thankfully, was a genuine sensitivity about Abu Grabe's history. The execution section, they said, would remain untouched. It would remain as a memorial for the Iraqi people, and when an Iraqi government was in place, they could decide what to do with it‹and with the whole prison, for that matter. Of course, that might be years away.

The American soldiers in Iraq joined the military to fight America's enemies and are now spending their time building a country that is not their home. They're tired, scared, trained for war not peace, and everyone I spoke to wants to go home. They don't want to be policemen, and they don't want to be cultural ambassadors. They try to friendly with the Iraqis who come up to them on the street, but their officers tell them, understandably, not to accept cans of soda from kids in case they're Pepsi cans packed with explosives and blow up in their faces. It's not their choice, but the reality is that they, the soldiers, are the face of the United States in Iraq. And they are, for the most part, simply not trained for that job. Ordinary soldiers do not tend to have language skills or a wide understanding of the cultures of the countries they're going to invade. And sometimes‹and it's very frustrating‹they just make very easily avoidable mistakes. Here's an example.

Traffic seems to bring out these problems, and traffic in Baghdad is terrible. As I'm driving in Baghdad one day, I'm stuck behind a Hum-V, which is a very wide vehicle already. Poking out from either side of the rear of the vehicle were coils of barbed wire. Needless to say, parked cars had scratches all the way down the paint work as the vehicle drove past. Pedestrian after pedestrian failed to notice the wire and found their shirts snagged. I was just waiting for some kid to run past and have his eye gouged. It was very slow traffic, so I got out and I walked up to the soldiers and very politely said, "Excuse me, sir, but do you know you have barbed wire sticking out of the back of your vehicle." And the soldier in the passenger seat looked at me and said, "Yup."

I was fresh out of prison and I was a little bit tetchy at the time, and I sort of lost my temper a bit. I said, "You know, it's catching on people's clothes and scratching cars. Do you think that's the way to win friends with the Iraqi people?" And they just said nothing and drove on, and scraped another big line down the line of cars.

It was a small matter, but I really felt frustrated by it, because I wanted this war, and I wanted the British and the Americans to succeed in creating a prosperous and democratic Iraq. And then I wanted them to get out. I wanted the war so that 23 million people wouldn't have to live in the fear that I first encountered when I visited Iraq in 2001 and 2002 and then tasted even more strongly while in prison.

The American soldiers charged with rebuilding Iraq, I think, would have a much easier time of things if their presence in the country were built, in the eyes of Iraqis‹this isn't my opinion, it's their opinion‹on a lie. I've never met a single Iraqi, even those who wildly supported the American-led invasion, of whom there are many, who believe that the United States attacked Iraq because America, sitting thousands of miles away from Iraq, was afraid of Saddam's military capabilities or his alleged connection to terrorism. Although the defeat of Saddam was welcome to the vast majority of Iraqis, they felt that the invasion was based on an untruth, and that is simply in the way of getting off on the right footing, particularly with a population that is so isolated from the world and brought up on distrust and paranoia.

Iraqis‹it's impossible to overestimate how isolated and hermetically sealed they were from the rest of the world. All e-mail was monitored through the Ministry of Information. All phone lines were bugged. Everyone was a possible informant. It was an astonishing thing. And the impact of that on the Iraqi psyche is limitless.

But if the war, I think, had been fought on the grounds of human rights and moral obligation, Iraq and the United States would be less likely to be faced with a potential catastrophe of suspicion, violence and distrust in post-Saddam Iraq. First of all, the message would have been clear and consistent to the Iraqi people: We are coming to save you. Second, the invading powers might have made an effort, not only to plan a highly flexible war strategy, which they did, but also to plan a highly flexible peace strategy. They had months to do so and simply messed it up. It was not a priority. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's rather visionary proclamations about remaking the Middle East turned out to be in practice, just musings. He and his colleagues planned a brilliant war and neglected to plan properly for what came next.

The American occupation of Iraq was, the American and British occupation of Iraq, was and still could be an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate to the Arab and Muslim worlds that the United States is a beneficent power intent on bringing them freedom and prosperity. At no time or place have Americans and Arabs, other than in the United States itself, lived among each other in such numbers as now in Iraq. The Americans, I think, are generally squandering this chance.

Come back to the traffic, it often brings out the worst in the American troops. One morning in late July, I was stuck in a traffic jam for a few minutes while an American military convoy passed across the main road in Baghdad. People became impatient. We were standing there waiting in line for too long. Then one Iraqi driver honked his horn. Not a crime. And so the American soldier manning the machine gun on the final vehicle raised his left arm and gave all of the waiting drivers the middle finger. Even though the reuse of Abu Grabe, one Hum-V team's mindless coils of barbed wire and the middle finger of one soldier may be comparatively small mistakes compared to the poor policing, massive unemployment and power outages that really enrage so many Iraqis, and they may be minority moments, they are horribly damaging. Every young man, every young Iraqi man, who has his new shirt torn by the barbed wire or finds himself in Saddam's worst prison without being able to contact his family will find it rather hard to see himself as rescued by an act of military generosity.

It will cost, actually when I wrote this, they said it would cost tens of billions and, you know, hundreds of billions already since Bush's speech. We're pushing 200 billion, and so really I think it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but the postwar effort in Iraq must continue. It must improve, rapidly.

The alternative, pulling out of Iraq, is unthinkable. It's not really an alternative. Chaos would follow inside the country and I believe it would spread before long to neighboring countries, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and beyond. Simply, the world's stability is at stake here, and so there really is no choice now but to continue, no matter what brought about the justification for war.

People like Jill Clark understood that. I met Jill, a Canadian aid worker with the Christian Children's Fund in Baghdad. She was furious at the inadequacies of the administration in Iraq, particularly as it affected the lives of Iraqi children. I got the impression that she'd not been supportive of the war, but that's not what we were talking about when I interviewed her. We were talking about the rights, or lack of, of Iraqi children who were arrested and detained by coalition forces. She was as passionate about the well being and the future of Iraqis as any person I'd met, and she was intent on improving their lives, whatever the political reality on the ground.

I got an e-mail from Jill on Aug. 19. She wanted to know if I'd run the story in the paper about the juvenile detention issue, and I e-mailed her back that yes, my story had run in that day's paper and was online on the Web site where she could look for it. Two or three days passed, and I thought of Jill and I wondered why she hadn't e-mailed back. And then, I saw her name on the list of those who died on the afternoon of Aug. 19 at the UN headquarters in Baghdad. She must have gone there for a meeting, and the suicide bomber exploded a truck and devastated the building.

It's tragic that the UN bombing and the violence that continues in Iraq has led so many aid workers to leave Iraq. But even though Jill Clark and so many other good people died in that attack, their understanding, Jill's understanding of the reality in Iraq, is not even dented by the explosion. To abandon that country now would be a terrible injustice to its people and it would threaten the safety of us all.

Contact Information

Search

Clarknews Winter 2004

From information to knowledge PRA comes home Making the connection between research and real-world problems Captain Clark: Frank Tetreault '68 Newsbriefs Alumni News Sports Briefs In Closing In Memoriam In Regional Reviews