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

So this evening, on behalf of Harvard Book Store in the Jones-Shornstein Center on the press, politics, and public policy at Harvard University, I am 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 force migration of the Sunnis from Iraq after the start of the Iraq War. Deborah Amos explains what they're 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, publishers weekly writes, quote, the weight and complexity of the Iraqi problem is on full display in Deborah Amos's 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 attention. The reporting here contains the seeds of our future in Iraq and the Middle East.

Deborah Amos, as I'm sure everyone here knows, covers Iraq for MPR. Her reports can be heard on MPR's award-winning morning edition, all things considered in week-end edition. She has previously worked on award-winning documentaries and television news programs including Nightline, World News Tonight, and Frontline. The same is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has won numerous awards, including the Alfred Dupont Columbia Award and a Breakthrough Award, and received widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. She is the author of Lines in the Sand, Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World, and has spent time here back in the early 90s as a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, and she is now back in Cambridge as the Goldsmith Fellow at the Shornstein Center. We are honored to have her here with us tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Deborah Amos. Thank you, and thanks so 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 and 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 talk 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 in 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, Syria, 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 U.S. 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 then 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 him 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 in children in America.

That's the equivalent of the population that left Iraq. And here is a statistic that's also been overlooked. Sixty percent of those refugees are Sunni Arabs. Another 15 percent 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 their 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. Many exiles, as I said, they're waiting for a place in the country. Those who work for the Americans, who work 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 in to 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 Sunni's 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. And 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 and 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 that 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 an exile. 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 the year they believed what al-Qaeda believed, that they were aligned with the West, and that they would be taken to Europe as the top of the list of refugees. But it turned out that that wasn't true when 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 out of Baghdad, and they went there because there is 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, Palo Farjah Raho, was abducted after leading the prayers at church of the Holy Spirit. Three people, with them 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 from bitter experience how futile such payoffs were, Archbishop Raho had been making them for years.

It's not clear when he began to hand over the alms he collected at Sunday Mass to the SUNY militant insurgents who menaced 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 victimize 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 about it and called on the Iraqi government to protect them. It is unlikely, I believe, that many of the Christians who were 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. And maybe even thousands of women who became exiled 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 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 when refugees first get here. But they had moved to societies that were poor themselves. In Syria, the unemployment figures were 25%. 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 Umnor. And Umnor had been a government secretary. She was in a mixed marriage. She was a Sunni 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 Anabaya, 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 here 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 Umnor 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 an 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 Umnor 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, um, were going to have to sell their bodies, um, middle class ladies, um, nice ladies.

But they were dressed for the occasion. And I write a whole chapter about them, um, because I was utterly captivated by them. I will never dance until I get so drunk, said a woman in a pink, stretched 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 round back 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 pound 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 and 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 seem to accept that. It was a fine thing. But I left that evening wondering 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. But these were women that were not that much different than me in a very, very, very, very terrible situation. The last quarterly U.S. 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 2 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 percent of them are now back where they should be. Now this 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 on it. And it's an indicator of the health and stability and viability of Iraq, 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 percent 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 cameras, 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 will 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. 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 was also terrible trafficking in women through the militias. The Shia militias would do it, the Sunni militias would do it. It was a way to make money. 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 society has them. 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 I mean, think about it. The horror of Babylon is from Babylon, from Iraq. So the first, in the Code of Hammarabi, I actually went and looked this up. The Code of Hammarabi actually asks for a prostitute can inherit.

So it was the first codification of laws. So it was a recognized profession in Baghdad before it was Baghdad. So as I said, prostitution was not the surprise for me. 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. Well, think back to the Iran or Iraq war. In Sunni Shia terms, the Iranians are Shias and Saddam, and they clashed. Saddam's backers were the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians. And so that was a bit of a Sunni Shia fight, although it wasn't on a religious basis yet again, 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 this 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 are the politics going to be? Are they going to be upon the Iranians? Are they going to have the same kind of politics as the Iranians? And do you remember early on, the king of Jordan, Abdullah, talked about the Shia crescent at, there's no Shias in Jordan, 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 it would be Iran, Iraq, Hezbollah, they'd be encircled, and these majority Sunnis would be eclipsed. And that's what it's about, of this one poll, this Arab nationalist poll, 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.

In some states it is internal, in Lebanon it was certainly internal because Hezbollah, which is a Shia organization, and becoming the majority in the country in a sectarian system, was felt pretty good about having somebody else in the Arab world who would look favorably upon them, might ally with them. So they were feeling their oaths, 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 outraged by the Americans, toppling a Sunni leader, and empowering Shias. So 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 Jehadi groups who were going to Iraq and learning urban warfare in the best school on the planet. This is a question about the elections, and what we had in this election is political splintering, but the list that won, Iatalawi, was seen as a secular nationalist Iraqi.

And there's some irony in this list, and if I go too far into the weed, somebody stop me and say, you're doing that middle east thing where I don't understand. 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 it in Baghdad, but they went to Damascus, and they went to Jordan, and they campaigned there because those people can vote. And a quarter of a million exiles across the world voted, 42,000 in Syria, 30,000 in Jordan, 19,000 in the United States, 30,000 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, okay, if he does well, 91 seats, okay, maybe he can form a government and 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 play some very interesting games, and no one won outright. You need 164 seats to win outright, and then rule. And so they all have to make coalitions. The Supreme Court ruled, oh, I am going to detail by, I'm just teasing. The Supreme Court ruled that you can make the alliance after the election. So if Maliki can gather together enough votes, 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 we're in a very delicate moment right now, in Iraq, a very delicate moment, I think, in how this all turns out.

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 100,000. 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's the most delicate relationship that you have as a foreign correspondent. 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 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 meld, 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 meld, 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 Iraqi man to go and pick her up. There had to be like four or five other phone calls, so she would trust to come with him. In some ways, I learn 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 does 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, I don't know, maybe it would. Maybe you'd have another way to bring in all that information, 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 watermelon in the bathtub. And 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 finally, I said to my translator, what is that? And he said, oh, that's, for the first time ever in Syria, we have mortgages. You can actually borrow money to buy a house. I said, but I don't get the watermelon and the bathtub and 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 taxicat where to go, and then we have to have somebody to help us. But 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 way that you speak, there's two kinds of Arabic, there's something called Fusah, which is kind of like Latin. It's what the newspapers are written in, and everybody understands that. Then there's a street dialect that is different in every country, and Egyptian often can't understand a Moroccan. It's almost impossible to understand. Even close, that close, Iraq and Syria, it sometimes is very hard. The words are completely different for the same things. In the beginning, when the Iraqis first arrived, the Syrian thought, who are these people? We've known about Iraqis forever. The borders have been closed. We haven't seen them in 25 years, and they're crude, and they don't say, thank you, when I would ask Iraqis, Syrians say, you don't say thank you.

They said, it's implied. It's implied in that sense. Oh. I'll tell you where it really was a problem. It's one aspect that she doesn't talk about, because she probably doesn't know about it. In a system, and in any economy where oil has been the major production, this happens across the Middle East. Private industry doesn't thrive, because it really can't compete. 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 package of food that every Iraqi gets and reduce it, and people are wailing over there, because even people who are wealthy go get it, because the government gives it to them. 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 it's a cultural thing. You give it to me.

Get on with it. And so that's been a big problem now. In an economy where the government is the employer, and she is who have come to power, if a Shia runs a ministry, 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 about jobs. You could stop the sectarian problem by simply having private enterprise, so that people could have alternatives to work, because otherwise you've got to be in the police, you've got to be in the army, or you've got to have a government contract. That's it. There's just not enough. 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 Shia's. And so where is it that you start in this big cube that is the problem of Iraq? More Shia's were in the bathist party than Sunnis, because the country is 60 percent

of 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 bathists to be, you know, top administrators. But every school principal had to be a bathist. And so you can imagine that there were more schools in the Shia districts, because there is more Shia's. So that was always the case that Shia's were bathists. Shia's were communists more than Sunnis, because they were the people who did the worst economically. 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 Communists, because they were pretty powerful in Iraq.

And so a lot of the exiles in the Saddam time were Shia's, about 5 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 communists 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. And moral, 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 work for us? It's gotten a whole lot better than it was. We've taken in many more. There's been a program, the late Senator Kennedy spearheaded that effort to set a quota of 5,000, that's out of the, you know, resettlement, the refugee population. 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 leave people behind. You know, 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 $300 every month. They went down to, you know, Western Union and they sent them the money. And when he finally got to California, he lived with Juan Estrada. And Juan's family said, what are you doing with these Arabs in our house? And when he had to choose between his family and his Iraqi translator, he chose the Iraqi translator. He moved out, bought a new house, and, you know, they're, well, here's the irony of the story one more time, Ali and his wife are now living in Juan Estrada's house because

Juan'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 Juan and, you know, calls him on the computer and saying, are you safe? Are you safe? When are you coming back? It's a, it's a remarkable story. But, you know, and, and perhaps, you know, you might think it's a little excessive about his response, feeling of responsibility, but people felt that strongly about their translators. They did. 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, allow a spokeswoman, Maysoon Damluji, is all over the press, if you look. And they're really trying to bring more women in, because there's a quota.

There, you know, there's assigned 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 about Kirkuk, 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 women who are illiterate, you know, don't take any crap from their husbands. They, you know, they, they don't, they're tough in ways that I don't see that in the region. That's for, I don't know, and I don't know 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, yeah, I read those stories too. I read those stories too. And it just seemed like a ridiculous waste of 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 if 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 Zanaib, and you'll find most of the Shia's there, and most of the Shia's are there, because it's a very ancient shrine there. In fact, it goes back to the original split between Sunnis and Shia's.

It's 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 Shia's have been going there, you know, forever. And so you find Iranians there, but now Iraqi Shia's live in 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 further out. You go from 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 what I call the odd couples. Two guys living in a house, I would make her, he's a Sunni, the other guys at Painter, he's a Shia. They're both watching Iraqi television when I come in. They both sound exactly the same about 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, as 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 going to do it, there's no cops around. So I, you know, I need to be with my people against those other people. And then Damascus it all goes away, goes away in Jordan too. So it gets dialed the other way. That's the strangest 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'd join, don't know, but for them it's a little easier, because you do actually know. There's something called a rocker-see, a Lebanese sage called democracy without Democrats. Iraqis have learned how it works.

And the Saudi 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 6,000 candidates in this election. You almost needed the 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 the Gaza vote, you know, two competing parties, the Islamist, Hamas, and the secularist, Fata. Fata 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 Saudi is the most Islamist of all the parties, they got it, 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 going to win, 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 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 you're 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 you need to build from the bottom, not from the top. But Iraq went right to the top, you know, and so there's elections have turned out to be their senses. We votes for their sectarian candidate. This election was a little bit different, because there was this allowable Sunni coalition. But if they don't get anything, if they get tricked, then it's never going to happen again. Everybody's going to go right back to, I vote for my guy, because 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 forget about 50 years, we're talking about longer. 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 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 sewers and start a new school, and those things are finally happening in Iraq, 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 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 you know, you can look at Turkey. Turkey works. And that's a border. 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 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 bear of secularism. But there are parts of that region that are quite secular. Absolutely.

Thank you. Thank you.