Meets

The referendum is a couple of weeks away. Voters are going to go to the polls to vote yes or no on the constitution. There are going to be about 1400 polling sites in Baghdad. Since the Sunnis boycotted last time, a lot of sites were shut down at the last minute in Sunni neighborhoods. The city of Baghdad is primarily Shia, while the outskirts are primarily Sunni. The proposed list of sites for the referendum just came out and it’s going to be similar to January's list. A lot of Sunni leaders from the outskirts, already ticked off that they got shut out of key government positions because of their boycott, have been coming to the army trying to get us to add more polling sites to their neighborhoods. Some want to make sure they get to vote 'no' but some want to make sure they don't get shut out of political game again. But the army isn't picking the sites or really has anything to do with the elections other than to make sure they go off as safely as possible. I deal with the IECI and I got some of their leaders to get together with some of these aggrieved Sunnis. One thing the army can do is set up meetings. It’s amazing how much you can influence in this country just by getting the right people in a room together. By now I’ve gotten used to the passion and rapid escalation of emotion that Iraqis display when debating, but this meeting was pretty intense. What also has taken a while to get used to is the emphasis of process over product in the culture. After all was said and done, there was no addition of new sites. The colonel that was there with me was all pissed off that after three hours of shouting, they hadn’t added one new site. There are a lot of pissed off colonels in this country right now. The generals have bought into the part about us distancing ourselves from what the sovereign Iraqi government does, and accepting that if the Iraqi people want something done their way, we’ve got to let them do it. But colonels still get blamed for everything that goes wrong. I thought the meeting went quite well. They got to argue about polling sites. I find I use the term ‘legitimating’ a lot. Another grad school word. I believe that each side got to legitimate their concerns by addressing them. After the meeting all the Iraqis I talked to said it was a productive meeting. The colonel’s report read a lot different than mine. I condescendingly told him that ‘democracy is a process, not an object. Sir.’ There is a tone that superior officers use- that is very similar to a mother using a child’s first, middle and last name when scolding them. They call you by your rank. ‘Well, Captain, blah blah blah…’ Nothing he said was very intelligent so it’s not worth reiterating. I got a report today that one of the leaders I brought to the meeting was killed today. I wonder why. It’s always the good guys that get it. Funny guy. We made fun of the sheikh from Abu Ghraib, in that wordless way that you share a joke with someone that you can’t understand. The sheikh went on and on about how in January there weren’t enough pencils at the polling sites. Even in Arabic, I can tell when someone’s taken the meeting towards the Realm of Irrelevance. This guy kept rolling his eyes and I had to keep a straight face to the sheikh. I never really feel like I know what these guy’s lives are really like, but I don’t like finding out they’re dead. I don’t know how this referendum is going to go, or what the constitution is exactly going to solve, but maybe I’ve stopped thinking in those terms. I’m just here to help the process along.