Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Deborah Amos: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East

Hi everyone. Good evening. My name is Heather Gainon behalf of Harvard Bookstore and the Joan Schoenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University. I'm thrilled to welcome each tonight's event with Deborah Amos. She's here with us tonight to discuss her new book, A Clips of the Sunnis, Power, Exile, and Epival in the Middle East. Tonight's talk is one of many wonderful events at Harvard Bookstore's hosting this spring. This month alone, we're hosting events with a likes of Elaine Scary, Life of Pies, Yan Martel, Christopher McDougall, Jacqueline Windspier, Mark Kerlansky, Eau Wilson, David Remnick, Bill McKibbin, and if you can believe it, many, many more. You can find all of these events listed already online at Harvard.com. You can find out more about our events on Twitter, on Facebook, or you can pick up a plain old events flyer, which you'll find on the information desk. After the talk tonight, Ms. Amos will answer questions from the audience and we'll follow that with a book signing right here at this table. You'll find copies of a clip to the Sunnis at the registers. Of course, you have my personal thanks for buying your books from Harvard Bookstore and for attending events like this one. Your

participation supports not only the existence of this author event series, but of a landmark and independent bookstore. I'd like to remind everyone that right now is a perfect time to switch off or silence yourself. If you haven't done so already. So this evening, on behalf of Harvard Bookstore and the Jones Shore and Steen Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, I'm very pleased to welcome Deborah Amos. She's here tonight to discuss her latest book, A Clips of the Sunnis, Power, exile, and upheaval in the Middle East. A Clips of the Sunnis traces the forced migration of the Sunnis from Iraq after the start of the Iraq War. Deborah Amos explains what their departure and their resentment means for the future of the country and for the Middle East as a whole. Book has received tons of glowing reviews, publisher's weekly rights, quote, the weight and complexity of the Iraqi problem is on full display and Deborah Amos' book with shreds of hope pushing through the layers like scrub and the desert. One of my favorite reviews of the book is when you'll find actually on the back jacket of your book from Bill Moyers. He writes, memo to President Obama. Take this book with

you to Camp David for the weekend. Then insist your foreign policy and national security teams read it and then schedule a time to test them for their retention. The reporting here contains the seeds of our future and Iraq and the Middle East. Deborah Amos, as I'm sure everyone here knows, covers Iraq for NPR. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning morning edition, all things considered in weekend edition. She has previously worked on award-winning award-winning documentaries and television news programs, including Nightline, Role News Tonight, and Frontline. The same as as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has won numerous awards, including the Alfred DuPont Columbia Award and Breakthrough Award, and received widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. She's the author of Lines in the Sand, Desert Storm, and the remaking of the Arab world, and it's spent time here back in the early 90s, as an even fellow at Harvard University. It is now back in Cambridge as the goldsmith fellow at Shornstein Center. We are honored to have her here with us tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Deborah Amos. Thank you, and thanks to many for turning out for a talk about Iraq, which

has become the Forgotten War, replaced Afghanistan, and when people remind me that I actually wrote a book that said the remaking of the Arab world, I know I had to write another one. I didn't exactly get that right, but I do appreciate all of you turning up tonight. I want to tell you that I am a storyteller. By profession, of course, I'm a journalist, but I work in one of the most complex regions on the planet, and after covering it for more than two decades, I know how complicated it is, and how hard it is to understand, and I know that a lot of people, and I suspect some of you here tonight approach a book about the Middle East with a little bit of anxiety. It's too hard. It's too complex. They just kill each other. How can I ever understand? And I thought a lot about that when I was writing this book, and so what I wanted to do was I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to tell about people's lives, and convince you that these

people are just like you. They have the same aspirations, the same goals, the same values, the same hopes for the kids, and by doing so that you would get a sense of the story that I was trying to tell about Iraq, not a journalistic story, but a narrative story. I want to start tonight by explaining my choice of title. I've gotten so used to it that I don't think about it much anymore, but I know for a lot of Americans the eclipse of the Sunnis is a little puzzling. Is that a little play on words? The cover is an Arab man, and you know that because he has a headdress on, and so that is how most American readers look at that cover in that book and understand what I'm trying to say. For my Middle Eastern friends and Middle Eastern readers, the book jacket, and the title is as Frank as a slap in the face. I talked to Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians,

eclipse of the Sunnis make them wins. They ask why would I choose such provocative title? In fact, a friend at the Syrian embassy who helped arrange the visas that I needed to go to Damascus was worried that he was going to lose his job when government officials found out that that was the name of my book, that somehow he would be held responsible. There is a deep cultural divide and the way that we understand that title, Americans, and Middle Easterners. And there's a reason for that. And that's because for centuries, Sunnis were the majority population in the Middle East. They are in Saudi Arabia, they are with Palestinians, they are in Turkey, Jordan's Syria Gulf, across the Gulf and in Egypt. It's Shiite Muslims who are the minorities in the Middle East. You can find them in Saudi Arabia, ironically they are in the places where the oil is. There's a handful in Syria. There are none in Jordan, and there are a fair

amount in Lebanon, but only in Iraq are Shiites, the majority, an aggrieved majority, ruled by Sunnis for centuries, and angry about that fact. So the story that I'm trying to tell, despite this title, isn't really about religion, but it's about power. That's the meaning of the eclipse of the Sunnis. And by choosing that title, I wanted to highlight what's been missing from this narrative that we've all had about the war in Iraq. It's mostly about the surge. In fact, it's mostly about us. I wanted to tell a different story. I wanted to tell a story about the parts of this conflict that have been either overlooked or misunderstood, because in 2003, when the US Army invaded Iraq, what they did was for the first time they overthrew Saddam and powered Arab Shiites, and they swept aside a political order across the Middle East, not just in Iraq, but across

the Middle East. And what's happened since that time is this Sunni Shia divide that is so prevalent in Iraq has crossed across the region, and it's become part of the social fabric everywhere that I would go. And I also wrote about that in this book. As I said, this is not about religion. It's about power. And it's about a power vacuum that was created when an American army toppled a Sunni tyrant. And in the rest of the region, there's been turmoil ever since. Now, it was the Iraqi civilians who paid the highest price for what happened. They've been paying it all along, paying it in the three decades of Saddam's power. But as I went around the region interviewing Iraqi refugees, almost everybody had a story of kidnapping, of rape, of torture, of extortion. These were death threats that forced them to leave. And what they did is they headed for the border, sometimes with a packet of their papers on the car seat, kids in the back,

anything that they could put in the back of the car, because they knew they were going to leave. They just didn't know for how long. And one of the things that I quote in the book is a very poignant blogging. There was a lot of blogging early on in Iraq. And this is a blogger who talks about the day that he had to decide to leave the country and he writes. One of my friends keeps berating me about how I should love this country, the land of my ancestors, where I was born and raised, how I should be grateful and return to the place that gave me everything. I always tell them the same thing. Iraq, as you and I knew it, it's lost. What's left of it? I don't want. By 2007, Iraqis were fleeing the country at a rate of 2 to 4,000 a day. And Damascus, you could feel it. People coming into the city. It was traffic jams in the capital of Syria, as people were fleeing Iraq. One in six had become a refugee or had become

displaced. If you think about that in American numbers, it would have been 50 million men, women, and children in America. That's the equivalent of the population that left Iraq. And here is a statistic that's also been overlooked. 60% of those refugees are Sunni Arabs. Another 15% are Iraqi Christians. In the mix, you have Mandians, Yazidis, secular Shiites, there were Kurds, people who lived in mixed marriages, but the refugees, all of them, what they reflect is this unresolved sectarian divide in Iraq. It's a power divide in Iraq. And many of them have not gone back. And it's not so much because Iraq is unsafe. Although in some neighborhoods it is, it's a whole lot better than it was in 2007. But safety is not really the issue. The problem is that there's no political space for them today in Iraq. And to have no political space means you have no future in a

country like Iraq. The Sunnis are, in fact, in contact with the relatives back home every day. These people are deeply insecure. They're largely excluded from power at every level. And what they're waiting for is this Shiite dominated government to show signs of political reconciliation. And at the same time, these refugees continue to raise fundamental questions about Iraq's identity. Now, for all of them, there's plenty of reasons not to go back. Sunnis, as I said, they're waiting for a place in the country. Those who work for the Americans, who worked as translators, they're waiting for a time when the death lists aren't in operation anymore. Even today, to have worked for the American military, can still be a death sentence in Iraq. Secular exiles are waiting to be absolutely sure that this country doesn't turn into a theocracy. Couples in mixed marriages, they really don't feel that they can go home because it's not safe

for a Sunni to be married to a Shiite or vice versa. Many of these people have been kicked out of their homes by the militias. This is one of the tactics that happened in 2007 where Sunnis in particular were moved out of their houses and Shiites were moved in. And so now, even if you wanted to go home, there's no way you can move back into your old neighborhood. If you lived in a mixed neighborhood, it is now unmixed. And there's another family living in your home, and it would take the army to get them out. But more important, it would take the police to get you in, and the police to stay there with you to make sure that you were safe. There's more than a million homes in Baghdad that are still in dispute. And it's mostly because Baghdad's neighborhoods are now unmixed. It's possible to be the wrong kind of Muslim in Baghdad. So, so many of these exiles feared that this country has been transformed in a place that they don't even recognize. They're waiting to see if Iraq has been restored or if it's been erased. The other thing about the refugees is there's no

precedent for this middle-class population. Mostly from Baghdad, they are the teachers, the doctors, the engineers, the civil servants, the entrepreneurs. These are the people that the country's future depends on to rebuild. I often say that these are the people who would be contributing to national public radio if they lived here. Without reconciliation, they're not going back. Even if it means that they live in destitution outside the country in many of them are. So, this is the political science part of the book. This is the part that I want to tell you. So, you understand the stories that are in the book because you need some background to see why some of these people left and why they're not going home. I wanted to write about how people deal with exile and how they deal with the chaos of war, something that we really know very little about. So, I included a heavy dose of food, sex, and television. I wrote about exile television producers and prostitutes. There was a time in my career where I

thought those were the same professions. If there's any television producers in the room, I'm sorry. Because I wanted to put humor in the book. People don't live without humor, not even in exile. And some of them are making the very best of a bad situation. So, I'm going to share some of those stories with you tonight and I want to start with the Christian population. And it's mostly because they were the first ones. That was the first group to be run out of Iraq. They were a little less than 3% of the population before the war. But Christians don't have militias. It's a small community, an ancient community. In Northern Iraq is the first Christian empire. And so, they have deep, deep roots in this country. But the problem was that as Iraq fell into chaos and older identities took over the population, it meant that Islamist radicals targeted Christians and they did so because for them, simply being Christian meant that they were aligned with the West. And of course, it didn't help that Christian missionaries came in

with those first American tanks. And it convinced some of those Islamists, especially those with al-Qaeda, that the Christians were on the side of the West and thus had to be eliminated. So, it was in 2004 that the first string of bombings across the country happened in the churches. And Christians left because they were a wealthier community. They also had a welcome around the region because there are Christian populations in Syria, in Jordan, and in Lebanon. So, they had homes to go to. They also thought it turned out erroneously that they would have a shot at resettlement, that they believed what al-Qaeda believed, that they were aligned with the West and that they would be taken to Europe as top of the list of refugees. But it turned out that that wasn't true. And they waited for a long, long time. Many of them are still waiting now. But I wanted to tell you the story of the Archbishop of Mosul. And I tell the story because it is so telling about the kinds of choices that Christians had to make as the country fell apart. Mosul was a place that many Christians went when they got run on a

Baghdad and they went there because there's a very well-established Christian community in Mosul. But they were caught in the middle of some very bad politics. Al-Qaeda had set up shop there and it was a fight for who was going to control the territory of Mosul. And so this is a story that happens in 2006. The Chaldean Catholic Archbishop, Paolo Farha Rahu, was abducted after leading the prayers at church of the Holy Spirit. Three people, with him at the time, a driver and two guards were killed by the kidnappers. And the defenseless Archbishop was bundled into the trunk of a car. Remarkably, in the dark, alone for probably the last time until his death, the 65-year-old Archbishop managed to get out his last cell phone call. He was determined to deliver a final message to his congregation, instructions that would ensure that he would never be released alive. He begged them not to pay any ransom for his life. He knew for

a bitter experience how futile such payoffs were. Archbishop Rahu had been making them for years. As not clear, when he began to hand over the arms he collected on Sunday at Sunday mass to the Sunni militant insurgents who managed his congregation, the details emerged only after his death. The men who came said that they were with al-Qaeda and they demanded protection money. It's a tax as old as Islam levied on Christians and Jews, but in the modern context of Mosul it was administered like a mafia shakedown. The Archbishop paid for protection he didn't get. The militants continued to kidnap priests, demanded thousands of dollars in ransom and victimized the community, even as the Christians of Mosul continued to pay. The payments were financing the militants that were killing them. Christians were digging into their life savings and sweetening the money pot with thousands more dollars in international donations. The Archbishop must have been convinced that if he didn't pay the violence would have been much worse. Now even today the Christians of Mosul are

under attack just in the past couple of weeks leading up to the election. Hundreds of them fled because violence was directed at them and even the Pope spoke out about it and called on the Iraqi government to protect them. It is unlikely I believe that many of the Christians who are in exile will ever go home. The community has gotten smaller and smaller. The Europeans are finally taking in Christians to the exclusion of Muslims in Germany and Sweden and France. They've pledged to take 10,000 Iraqis. So if you're a refugee in Syria you have a chance of being resettled and it's possible that the Christians of Iraq like the Jews once of Iraq will dwindle to such a small community that that particular part of Iraq's diversity may disappear altogether. The next topic that I wanted to tackle was probably the hardest of all and that was the subject of Iraqi prostitution. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of women who became

exile turned to prostitution to survive. Almost every war brings prostitution. It's not a big surprise that this happens. What was shocking in Damascus was that girls as young as 12 were forced into the trade by their families and as strangers at my sound in a conservative society it would be mothers and fathers that would make the deal for them and brothers who would be there when right before the deal was consummated and these families would live off their girl children. It was something called survival sex and they did live off the proceeds. Officially refugees are not allowed to work. That is true in the Middle East it's also true in refugees first get here but they had moved to societies that were poor themselves. In Syria the unemployment figures were 25 percent so to allow refugees to work would have actually been not terribly

welcome among the Syrian population. So it forced people into the black and the gray economies and particularly women. The other fact that's noteworthy is about one-quarter of all the refugees in Syria are female-headed households. It was the men who were killed in large numbers and they fled with their kids with no other way to support them. They had no marketable skills. They had nothing and so to keep themselves alive many of them engaged in prostitution and I met a woman it took me a long time to do it but I met a woman named Uneur and Uneur had been a government secretary. She was in a mixed marriage she was a soonie married to a Shiite. She lived in a mixed neighborhood a place called Dura and one day she opened the door and she saw a very tall figure in an Abaya black scarf and it turned out it was a man and he threw acid on her and her boy and the next day she got the letter that said you know leave your

or die and her husband left her he was a Shiite he went back to his family's home and she and two kids drove to Damascus and set up shop for the duration and Uneur was very open with me. She decided that she would tell me about what her life was like and one night she suggested that I come with her that I come with her to one of the Iraqi nightclubs and she would pass me off as in a Iraqi prostitute. Now I usually don't travel with the sort of clothes that one needs to actually pass oneself off as an Iraqi prostitute so I had to just assume that it was dark enough where I was and if I sat in the back it would be okay but I'm nor decided that what I didn't have in cleavage I could make up in mascara so she said look here's what you do you know you just have to look like an Iraqi and so that just required a lot of makeup that I had so one of my fondest memories of this evening was to go into the ladies room with

everybody else in that stance that we all do you know a little sort of over the mirror and meet a bunch of women who I knew by the end of that night we're going to have to sell their bodies middle-class ladies nice ladies but they were dressed for the occasion and I write a whole chapter about them because I was utterly captivated by them I will never dance until I get so drunk said a woman in a pink stretch jumpsuit with clear plastic shoulder straps that kept the tight fabric in place she was bent toward the mirror in the ladies room applying eyeliner next to a line of Iraqi women in the same pose it was an utterly familiar female ritual women gathering in front of a public bathroom mirror it could have been anywhere but for the outfits of tight fabric silver spandex revealing tactile soft full-breast served up for inspection clinging garments over ample roundback sides long skirts slit to the thigh bellies

exposed gleaming black hair high-heeled boots young faces round bodies one last look enough eyeliner another pad of powder anxiety also filled the room because of the deals that would have to be conducted later in the evening as we all prepared for the night ahead the Iraqi women chatted they traded names in phone numbers they flipped open cell phones and showed pictures of their young children lingering together in this comfortable female place homesick and preparing to live off their bodies the evening ends that night with a woman who I meet in the bathroom who's a journalist just like me she was threatened her two kids were in Baghdad she was sending the proceeds back to them and there is a moment in the night where I'm all the way in the back and people are getting rather drunk and I'm getting way too many kisses on the head and too many proposals and the only place I can figure out to be safe is on the dance floor which is way up in the front where the lights are and this woman sees me up

there and we dance we dance together for the whole night because in this atmosphere women dance with women and men dance with men because anything else is a business transaction so you spend the night separate and she was my savior and my helpmate by the way I don't speak Arabic and so I was passed off as a Ukrainian while it was there and people seemed to accept that it was a fine fine thing but I left that evening wondering as as everybody has to wonder what you would do in those situations how you would support children if you had no other way to do it these were women that were not that much different than me in a very very very very terrible situation the last quarterly US government report on Iraq states that 1.9 million Iraqis are still in exile and there's been no widespread returns there's also a figure of two million Iraqis that are still displaced in the country these are people who cannot go back to their homes who are living in displacement camps

only about 25% of them are now back where they should be now the shifting population is a huge loss to Iraq it's a vast problem to these neighboring countries it's a collective tragedy for every single one of them that's caught up in it and it's an indicator of the health and stability and viability of a rock as well as the Middle East because most of this exile population they actually haven't sought resettlement if you look at the numbers of those who have signed up at UNHCR it's only about 10% of the whole population so they are waiting they are waiting in these countries across the border waiting for some indication that they're welcome home what's so interesting about them is that they've formed a virtual Iraq on the borders they keep in touch with family and friends through web camera just through instant messaging they watch satellite television from Iraq all day long they haven't exactly left the country they're just not quite present and so this is a crisis that is invisible

to us but very visible to Iraq I believe that there can be no stability in the country without political reconciliation and when there is political reconciliation how well know that there is is that the refugees will finally go home they're in daily contact waiting for word if the moment is right if the elections the most recent elections has provided some space for the possibility of power sharing between Sunnis and Shiites Iraqis are waiting for the answer to that question the whole region is waiting for an answer to that question thank you very much and as we said now questions sir you think that Muslims don't have double standards just like us there are in some places I was at a place where women actually had a little

bit more control of their fate there are other clubs in Damascus where for example you are 17 years old and you are in deep danger in Baghdad and your parents agree to a marriage to a man you really don't know you arrive in Damascus and you discover that what he really wants is to sell you and you really can't do a whole lot about it he's I suppose you would call him your pimp a pimp and that happens a lot there's all there was also terrible trafficking in women through the militias the the the Shia militias would do it the Sunni militias would do it it was a way to make money you know not only were they stealing cars and dealing in drugs but they were also dealing in trafficking children and trafficking women all over the region let me just say

a couple of words about double standards because every every society has them but Syria is a secular society and in fact under Saddam so is Iraq prostitution happens in Lebanon there's no part in the way you know it's the oldest profession for a reason and and I mean think about it the horror of Babylon is from Babylon from Iraq so the first in the Code of Hammurabi I actually went look this up the Code of Hammurabi actually asks for a prostitute can can inherit so it was the first codification of laws so it was a recognized profession in Baghdad before it was Baghdad so not as I said prostitution was not the surprise for me there was this there was a desperation in why women who should have never been in that position who should but nevertheless it was a tragedy for them it's the child

prostitution that's the even more horrifying outcome of what's happened in the war I suppose they get them to work and they take them home I suppose you could say that sir well think back to the Iran-Iraq war in Sunni Shia terms the Iranians or Shia's and Saddam and they clashed Saddam's backers were the Saudis the Egyptians the Jordanians and so that was a you know that was a bit of a Sunni Shia fight although it wasn't on the religious basis yet yet again it's you know these are old empires fighting each other what you take Saddam out of that mix and the Sunni power say wait a minute we just lost the guy who's on the border with the Persians and what is the state going to be I don't think

it's going to be a Sunni power ever again and if it's not it unbalances the region what what are their politics going to be are they going to be upon other Iranians are they going to have the same kind of politics as the Iranians if you remember early on the King of Jordan Abdullah talked about the Shia Crescent at there's no Shia's and Jordan to he'd have to invent them to be worried about them but what he was talking about is this fear of this Iranian hegemony in the region that you know it would be Iran Iraq Hezbollah they'd be encircled and the these majority Sunnis would be eclipsed and that's what it's about of this what of this one pole you know this Arab nationalist pole and replacing it with we're not sure yet it's not clear what Iraq's going to be yet and it's not clear today what Iraq's going to be internally know internally it does not it's well in some states it is

internal you know in Lebanon it was certainly internal because Hezbollah which is a Shia organization and you know becoming the majority in the country in a sectarian system was it was you know felt pretty good about having somebody else in the Arab world who who would look favorably upon them might might you know ally with them so they were feeling their roots and the second thing that happened in Lebanon is there were plenty of Sunnis who left the country to go fight in Iraq because they were they were outraged by the Americans toppling a Sunni leader and empowering Shia's so so they thought they saw their Lebanese fight their Sunni Shia fight in Lebanon all of a sudden go region wide and these guys decided to join up with the roving jihadi groups who were going to Iraq and and learning urban warfare in the best school on the

planet and then you I said a question if you could talk a little bit about the elections and my understanding of that the allowed list was perceived at least a little more secular in some of the other ones and so what does that mean for the direction of future and how do these refugees perceive the new the change of leadership that's a very important question and okay this is a question about the elections and what we had in this election is political splintering but the the the list that won the out of Lawi was seen as a secular nationalist Iraqi and there's some irony in in in this list and if I if I go too far to the weed somebody stop me and say you're doing that Middle East thing where I don't understand um Alawi is a secular Shiite who gathered up Sunnis he's their standard bearer but he got all the Sunnis behind him and they ran a very good

campaign not only did they run in Baghdad but they went to Damascus and they went to Jordan and they can't pay there because those people can vote and a quarter of a million exiles across the world voted forty two thousand in Syria thirty thousand in Jordan nineteen thousand in the United States thirty thousand in Sweden people voted and they voted for Alawi because so many of them are Sunni and they saw Alawi as their way back in can't you know okay if he does well ninety ninety one seats okay maybe he can form a government and you know the Sunnis can get back in the game well here's the problem if you hold the reins of power as mr. Maliki does you can place in very interesting games and and no one won outright you need 164 seats to win outright and then and then rule and so they all have to make coalitions the Supreme Court ruled I am going to detail by the Supreme Court rule that you can make the

alliance after the election so if Maliki can gather together enough votes he can he can be the first one to try to form that government and Alawi could lose everything and then one wonders what happens at that moment if the Sunnis say wait a minute we voted we won we didn't get to form the government do they go back to other ways to try to come to power and and we're in a very delicate moment right now in Iraq a very delicate moment I think in how this all turns out the United States we are it took a long time it took a long time for the Bush administration to even acknowledge that it was happening but at this point

there are 33,000 here and there's about 12,000 13,000 that come each year so we now are the country that's taking the most every year Sweden though has a hundred thousand and we also have a separate program for translators that one is going a little slower than it should but we have finally stepped up that's probably the best way to talk about it we have finally stepped up it is and the UNHCR is doing it and the Europeans are now they pledged to take 10,000 this year so that's really something it's the most delicate relationship that you have as a foreign correspondent you know I wish I spoke Arabic but it would have taken a couple of years to do it and so

I never stopped to do it I learned Islam instead so that I would have a cultural understanding about why people say what they say and and you know I know a lot about that you choose your translators very carefully you end up I mean it's kind of like a marriage a mind-milled because they have to know what you want to know and you have to trust their translations and you have to trust that they won't add it on you as it's coming in but I have some excellent excellent translators that I really really trust men and women because if you're going to hang out with prostitutes you don't take a mail you know you can't although it came to a moment where I did and it's because I wanted to have a meeting with her much later in the process and it was tricky to send an a rocky man to go and pick her up there there had to be like four or five other phone calls so she would trust to come with him in some ways I learned a lot

from it I mean yes of course I wish I spoke Arabic but when you are with someone all day long as you do with a translator you're always you know what is that sign mean what was in the paper this morning what's up with your family there's so many things that you learn that wouldn't come to you if if I don't know maybe it would maybe you'd have another way to bring in all that information but but I find that I get so much out of those translators I mean there was a moment in Damascus where there was a big billboard and I saw it everywhere and it was a picture of a living room a bathtub and a water melon in the bathtub and there was no there was no script on it so even if I'd spoken Arabic I wouldn't know what it was and it was an ad for a bank and I saw it and finally I said in my translator what is that and he said oh that's

we are for the first time ever in Syria we have mortgages you can actually borrow money to to buy a house I said but I don't get the watermelon in the bathtub in the living room he said the point of that is that you can do whatever you want if you own your house yeah lots of Iraqis know a little bit of English they know as much English as I know Arabic we can order our food we can tell our taxic at where to go and then we have to have somebody to help us but you know people do try here's what's very interesting about Iraqi Arabic versus Syrian Arabic it's sometimes my Syrian translator won't be able to understand what an Iraqi is saying because the the way that you speak this there's you know there's two kinds of Arabic there's something called fusah which is kind of like Latin it's

what the newscaster in it's what the newspapers are written and and everybody understands that then there's a street dialect that is is different in every country an Egyptian often can't understand a Moroccan it's almost impossible to understand and so even close that close Iraq and Syria it sometimes is very hard the words are completely different for the same things and so in the beginning when the Iraqis first arrived the Syrians thought who are these people you know we've known about Iraqis forever the borders been closed we haven't seen them in 25 years and their their crude and they don't say thank you when I would ask Iraqis seriously you don't say thank you they said it's implied it's implied in that sense I know Naomi Klein but not yeah and I'll tell you we're really was a problem it was and and it's one aspect that

she doesn't talk about because she probably didn't know about it in a system and in in any economy where oil has been the the the major production this happens across the Middle East private industry doesn't thrive because it really can't compete and the government does everything and that actually makes people think in a certain way only this week for the first time is Iraq going to take the the package of food that every Iraqi gets and reduce it and people are well and over there because even people who are wealthy go get it because the government gives it to them and it's a it's a very key way of thinking and so it's part of the reason that Iraqis have such a bad time when they come here because they it's a cultural thing you know you you give it to me yeah you know get you know get on with it and and so that's been a big problem now in a in an economy where the government is the employer and you

have this you know she is who've come to power if a she runs a ministry you you can be sure that everybody down to the clerk and the drivers are all Shia and so when I said before that Iraq that Sunnis feel they don't have a place it's a bad jobs actually you could stop the sectarian problem by simply you know having private enterprise so that people could have alternatives to work because otherwise you got to be in the police you got to be in the army or you got to have a government contract that's it there's just not enough and they all talk about this that that could solve things if there could be you know but until you settle well it's such a domino until you settle the security but

then you have to settle the sectarian problem and then you have to settle the problem of Sunnis and she is and so where is it that you start in this big cube that is the problem of Iraq more she is we're in the Baptist party than Sunnis because the country is 60% Shia they were not at the very top and they weren't at the very top also in the military and they all had to be Baptist to be you know top administrators but every school principal had to be a Baptist and so you can imagine that there were more schools in the Shia districts because there is more she is so that was always the case that that she is were Baptist she is were communist more than Sunnis because they were the the people who did the worst economically they were they were the more backward group in Iraq and so for social equality the communist party

offered something to that group it's a very interesting history if you look at where their politics were and they got decimated when Saddam came to power because he went after the communist because they were pretty powerful in Iraq and so a lot of the exiles in the Saddam time were where she is about five million left the country and a lot of them were communists I would find them in Damascus all the time 70 people from 79 who left when they were 18 you know they'd been communist on the college campus in one day somebody said if you don't get out of here right now you're not going to survive and they would just drive to the border right then that is true immoral scandalous you know how do you ask anybody to ever work with us again if you don't protect people who

are under threat because they worked for us it's gotten a whole lot better than it was we've we've taken in many more there's been a program the late Senator Kennedy a spearhead of that effort to set a quota of five thousand that's out of the of the you know resettlement the refugee population it's a it's a different channel and in fact it was the military who pressed and pressed and pressed to get that to happen because they were outraged by the government in attention because their argument was these people they fight with us you know our doctrine is you don't you don't leave people behind you you know you you you bring everybody home and they got so close to these translators my last chapter is about a guy who worked for the California National Guard and he had to leave and for 18 months these California guys a dug in their pockets

and sent him three hundred dollars every month they went down to you know Western Union and they sent in the money and when he finally got to California he lived with Wana Strada and once family said what are you doing with these Arabs in our house and when he had to choose between his family and as a Iraqi translator he chose the Iraqi translator he moved out bought a new house and you know they're there well here's the irony of the story one more time Ali and his wife are now living in Wana Strada's house because one's in Baghdad and he's helping he feels so strongly about what he owes and he said we broke it we have to fix it that now it's it's Ali who's worried about one and you know calls him on the computer and saying are you safe or you say if what are you coming back it's a remarkable story but it you know and and perhaps you know you might think it's a little excessive about his responsibility but people felt that strongly about their translators they

did they had more power I'll do women first and and women went backwards and they knew it and the first Constitution in 2005 when family law went back to Islamic law they protested and we'll try to get that changed I don't know if they can the good

news is Ali's Spokeswoman may soon Demluji is all over the press if you look and they're really trying to bring more women in because there's a quota there there you know there's a sign seats for women and some of those men are now going to find that they just moved down the list because of where they're going to put the women do they get their power back it's really hard to tell and it's it's so not a priority for the parliament that is dealing with such crucial issues is what are we going to do back her cooc what are we going to do about the oil law are we going to be a federation I find that Iraqi women are not like any other women in the region you know that that the way that they lived under Saddam has made them feisty or tougher you know even even women who are illiterate you know don't take any crap from their husbands they you know they they don't they're they're tough in ways that I don't see that in the

region as for I don't know and on a specifically of gay Iraqi translators but I do know that gay Iraqis were having a terrible time about six months ago and human rights watch wrote about it and a lot of them went to Lebanon and are being resettled and are being put up at the top of the lists oh yes yeah yeah I read those stories too I read those stories too and it just seemed like a ridiculous ways to talent in my humble opinion but you know it seems like things are changing in the military it's a very you know conservative institution and it takes all of them I think it was up to Petraeus and if it was up to gates it would be done but there are still some commanders who are resistant and I think that they are either waiting for them to retire they're

moving it slowly as slowly as they think it's necessary all kinds of things happen there's two main neighborhoods one is called set of and you'll find most of the she is there and most of the she is are there because it's a very ancient shrine there in fact it goes back to the original split between Sunnis and she is it it's a a shrine to the woman who brings Imam Hussein's head to Damascus when he's killed and the split happens and it's a beautiful place and and she has been going there you know forever and so you find Iranians there but now Iraqi she is living that neighborhood there's another neighborhood where you

find Sunnis primarily but a lot of times the neighborhoods are because of what you can afford to further out you go for Damascus the cheaper the rent is so there's another neighborhood that will be mixed the thing that I find the most interesting in Damascus is everybody mixes I've done more interviews with you know what I call the odd couples you know two guys living in in a house he's a I would make her he's a Sunni the other guys a painter he's a Shia they're both watching a racket television when I come in they both sound exactly the same about what what they're angry about and it doesn't seem to matter once they leave because once they leave you're back in a system you're back where the police are and institutions are and so you feel safe I mean part of what happens in chaos is somebody explained to me identity is on a dial and so all of a sudden it gets turned way over to the I'm tribal I'm sectarian I need protection who's gonna do it there's no cops around so

I you know I need to be with my people against those other people and in Damascus it all goes away goes away in Jordan too so it gets dial the other way it's a strange thing I suppose we do the same under the same kind of pressure I wonder what I'd be what you know what group I join don't know but for them it's a little easier because you do actually know well there's something called a Rocracy a Lebanese sage called democracy without Democrats a Rakes have learned how it works the solder people were incredibly clever in the

way that they ran their campaign in the way that they ran their candidates they didn't waste any votes in you know there were six thousand candidates in this election you all just needed to telephone book when you were in the voting booth and some parties would put three four candidates up and split the vote for those of you who remember what happened in in the Gaza vote there you know two competing parties the Islamist Hamas and the secularist Fata fought to did exactly this three four candidates for each post Hamas didn't do that one and so Fata split their own vote and Hamas won well the solderist the most Islamist of all the parties they got it that you know one candidate and they actually had a referendum in their neighborhoods on who that candidate would be before they even put them up on a list so they knew he was gonna win and and what and they're the king makers in this election right now and so what

they've proposed over the weekend is okay let's have a referendum for who our vote will go to which prime ministers candidate should we back and they're so they get this democracy thing they like it and they're and they're very good at it I read a piece that a professor from Lehigh University did and it was published by MIT and it's one of these very hard political science lots of numbers lots of equations but what he was doing is he was looking at how long a state in the Middle East had been under autocracy and then how long once it got out that it could become a democracy and he did everybody and held you know what the numbers were and as they moved towards democracy and his prediction with Iraq was 50 years 50 years because of 30 years of autocracy because of people who it's like having a democracy without Democrats you know people don't have any ways in their minds they know how to

do the mathematical game they know how to win an election but they don't know what they're supposed to do after that happens and what the responsibilities are and what it means to win that those kind of concepts are not exactly in their heads because they didn't grow up with them so how long does it take after your out of autocracy for people to understand that conceptually I mean there's a lot of people who work on grassroots democracy who say forget national elections don't do those first do them small because you need to understand the first election you'll vote for your tribal guy the second election you'll vote for the guy who got you a sewer you'll get that and and and and you need to build from the bottom not from the top but Iraq went right to the top you know and so those elections have turned out to be their their their a census everybody votes for their sectarian candidate this election was a little bit different because there was this allowee Sunni coalition but if they don't get anything if they get tricked then it's never gonna happen again everybody's gonna go right back to I vote for my guy

because he's he's he's you know he's my tribal guy or my sectarian guy that's why I say Iraq is in such a precarious position right now because this election needs to show people that you get something for voting and if it doesn't then you know forget about fifty years we're talking about longer because because process is process you know Iraq has the freest media by accident the freest media in the Middle East and I don't think that you can only look to your immediate neighbors to look at models there there are ways to learn these things and if you have for example if you live in a small town and you do have the freedom to fix the source and start a new school and those things are finally happening in Iraq there's there's enough movement on the ground where in fact in the last election they kicked out the people in Maliki's party who weren't doing anything Maliki won big nationally and and one badly locally

where his local guys were not delivering we're not delivering any services and they got punished by the voters so it's possible to learn those things it's possible without looking around and saying oh that's not how the Egyptians do it or that's you know you can look at Turkey Turkey works and that's a border Turkey was exactly based on the land of Afghanistan. Yeah. Iraq was a secular state I mean it was only in the last 10 years that Saddam got into his crazy religious phase before that it was a you know I'm telling you Iraqis drink Iraq like I've never seen even the religious ones so there's some of that residual secularism that's going on inside most Iraqis Syrians are are secular you know for the Middle East what secular means is yeah I can be religious on Fridays if I need to be but I'm not going to be annoyed

that you know you're not the same kind as I am that's really what secularism tends to mean in the Middle East a little bit more in Turkey because the military is the you know the standard bearer of secularism but there are parts of that region that are quite secular surprisingly thank you