Ali and I talked politics late into the night again. A little about Ali: He left a village near Kut after the 1991 uprising and ended up in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. A Catholic relief group sponsored him to get to San Diego. From a poor family; his mother is illiterate; he put himself through school and got his master’s from American University in Washington D.C. He worked with CNN and ABC during the invasion and then briefly with the CPA. He joined our office and was assigned to my team working with Baghdad’s government. His tribe is historically Shia, but he considers himself Sufi—followers can interpret Islam in a very personal way; some sects have a strong ‘folk’ orientation, others, like Ali, merely approach religion as a personal expression of one’s faith. After years in the States he’s very proud of his dual nationality- and dual identity. He is a member of two worlds and yet of neither. He travels down to visit his family- it’s a short drive out of Baghdad- and he tells me he has trouble relating to all of his old friends. We often suggest bars in Georgetown that we’d rather be in if we had a choice of not being in the office. He’s very assertive and I’m always fascinated to see how Iraqis react to him. Force of personality is such a significant component of this place and this culture. We play a very delicate game of status and try to read each other’s cues when we interact at our meetings. I once made him shift places while we were at a Council meeting- I wanted him to sit between myself and another officer I needed him to translate for- it read as a demotion for him. Unintentional, but I can’t say that I was completely unaware of the implications. We continually refine our routine. It’s not ‘Good Cop/Bad Cop’ but it’s something like that. I know when to let him do things ‘the Iraqi way.’ I’m continually reminded of that scene in The Boiler Room. ‘Act as if.’ We’ve ended up in the offices of people that by rights we probably shouldn’t be talking to. There’s always some turf war going on. State Department, IRMO, USAID, the different military echelons: Force, Corps, Division, Brigades, etc. Some people act as if they are unsure who the real insurgents are. And then there’s the UN and its various contractors. I was given the cold shoulder last week for wearing a military uniform into the wrong meeting (like I had a lot of choice) and then I received a frantic phone call from the same UN election supervisor trying to arrange a 20-ton forklift at the last minute to help deliver election supplies. Of course the US Army was able to help. This isn’t specifically a dig on the UN as a world body (no comment on the John Bolton nomination) but a comment on the larger disconnect between the various bureaucracies that are trying – with varying success – to cooperate on this whole reconstruction operation. We’re not quite as organized as the Department of Homeland Security. But it’s on nights when I’m sitting out on a picnic table, wedged between my small trailer and a twelve-foot wall of sandbags, that Ali brings me back to what’s really going on here. Part of his heritage that he retains is the ‘long-view’; the sense of history; the deeper understanding of the difference between the transitory and the enduring. Competing forces have been unleashed here; many are violent and dangerous and destructive. But other forces, more subtle in their manifestation but no less provocative and powerful in their shaping of human affairs are flowing entwined with these fierce currents contending to bring us into countless possible futures.
As an Arab, Ali would never consider himself ‘optimistic’- what God has written will come to pass no matter what man may believe – “but,” he adds “as an American, I am allowed…to be hopeful…”
