Battle Lines

There is a future war coming. Its lines are being drawn ethnically and associatively; those who were loyal to the Americans, those against the Americans, and the majority who are ambivalent and will gravitate to the side with the most power at the moment. Iraq is a corrupt place, no matter who is in charge. What we in America would consider corruption is merely the price of business. We hear rumors of corruption all the time but we have never been able to prove it within the organizations we advise. Loyalty is never bought but it can damn sure be rented.

Where ever Kurds are they are deeply rooted into the new government and now have a defacto state in the north of Iraq. When you cross into Kurdistan you cross into another country. The signs are different, the language is different, the people dress differently. It may be Iraq on the map but it is a different place. Our area is where the two cultures meet. A third culture, Persian, is also in the area. I knew I was seeing the fault lines the other day. In a meeting with the local Muktars, our Iraqi Battalion Commander had given everyone Chai and told them how he wanted to make the area a safe place for all people. His message was translated into Arabic, by an American interpreter, and into English by another terp for our benefit. He spoke in Kurdi. The Arabs all responded with “Inshallah” (God Willing). After his speech he opened the floor to problems. A Kurdish Muktar named Jazim immediately began to speak. His was a speech at first that then degenerated into a gripe session, followed by petitioning the Colonel to fix his town’s water problems. He began by saying that he was so happy that American forces were here. To which all the Kurds responded “Basha”, and then he thanked us for getting rid of the tyrant Saddam Hussein, “Basha”. Then he went on a list of things Saddam did, namely kill a lot of Kurds and force them off of their land in the area. The one caveat to all this is that the people who took over their land were in the room, the Arabs who were sitting quietly. Jazim’s welcoming of us was a way to say to the Arabs, that we, the Kurds, are in charge now and our big brothers, the Americans, are here to set things right. There is a sense of justice to what he is saying. But it occurred to me as the meeting pressed on that the Arabs said nothing. Arabs are never silent, they always talk. Unless they want to kill you, and even then they usually tell you. The Kurds went on for hours about water being bad, how they couldn’t farm without water so they had no choice but to smuggle, how the Iraqi DBE had taken their land to build border forts; 30 years ago. It went on and on but the Arabs said nothing. Meetings in the south or in our training that were all Arab looked exactly like this one in terms of what was being said. But it was what was unsaid that really stood out.

If I was a Sunni Arab who lives in that part of Iraq I would look around and notice that the President of Iraq is Kurdish, the local Police Chief, the mayor of (insert Big unnamed town here), and the Border patrol officers were all Kurdish, in an area that had an equal amount of Arabs. The Iraqi Army rarely made forays in this area; they left it to the Kurdish Peshmerga. An entire society based on Sunni Arab supremacy had been washed away. For my part I could not leave the Sunni Arab leaders with a bad impression of the local Americans. We can’t be seen as the willing conspirators with the Kurds but rather as fair and impartial arbitrators of justice. Our lives may depend on this. As the meeting ended and I said my piece I introduced myself to every Arab present in Arabic. You should have seen their demeanor and their posture change when I greeted them, asked where they were from, and how many sons they had. After a few tiring conversations where they warmed up to me I realized that this is why I’m here. I can’t say that little things like this have saved anybody’s life; but it sure can’t hurt.