POLITICS
Iraq for Dummies
By Stump Connolly
Almost every morning these days, I open my email to find a friend has scanned
through the morning newspapers and political journals to send me the latest
left wing analysis of how George Bush has screwed up Iraq. A few hours later,
my mail arrives carrying a letter from my father with a clipping from a right
wing journal on how the critics are undermining democracy throughout the world.
In this great clash of opinions over what to do in Iraq, I always figured my two-cents would be worth just that. I’ve never been to Iraq. I don’t speak the language. I don’t get the religions (all eight of them), and I never really understood why we invaded in the first place. Up until a few years ago, I thought the most interesting thing about Iraq was that two-thirds of its borders are straight lines.
If I were younger, dumber and braver, I would have gone to Iraq as soon as the first bombs dropped – not as a Pentagon-designated “embed” on our side of the war, but as a guy in search of a better understanding of the country we were invading. Fortunately, two kids from Boston named Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann went in my place and they have returned to write an entertaining account of their journey in "Babylon by Bus.”
LeMoine and Neumann are not your typical world-traveling journalists. They earned their reportorial credentials selling “Yankees Suck!” T-shirts outside Fenway Park and, in the off-season, goofing off in various parts of the world. But they have an uncanny knack for getting into trouble, remarkable luck in getting out, and a savvy ghostwriter, Donovan Webster, to help make sense of it all.
Their adventure began just after their beloved Red Sox tanked in the 2003 playoffs with the Yankees. Distraught, they decided to go to Tel Aviv to celebrate New Year’s Eve and, since they were close, hop on over to Amman, Jordan, where they grabbed a bus into Baghdad. They arrived in January 2004 and spent their first night in a cheap hotel called the Al Rabei.
The next morning, they awoke to the sound of a car bomb explosion that killed 26 people and injured 100 more outside the gate to the American-controlled Green Zone, then wandered off to a street full of internet cafes to send emails home, buy bootlegged DVD’s and listen to Arab pop music. Making their way through the checkpoints at another Green Zone gate, they went looking for work at the Iraqi Assistance Center, where a guy listening to Bon Jovi on his headphones handed them a brochure for a Proctor & Gamble job fair.
LeMoine and Neumann split up to visit the assorted American agencies working with the new Coalition Provisional Authority run by Ambassador Paul Bremer. LeMoine’s first stop was the NGO assistance center where an army sergeant, who worked previously as a trainer at Starbucks in Seattle, was in charge of coordinating private aid agencies that wanted to establish services in Iraq. By nightfall, they were working as her two assistants.
For the next two and a half months, LeMoine and Neumann romped around Baghdad, moving in and out of the Green Zone in an ever-widening circle of journalists, soldiers, Halliburton contractors, hustlers, conmen, do-gooders and all the other types that attach themselves to a society in chaos. When not in the Green Zone, they were partying down with the contractors in hotel discos, popping Valium tabs from the local pharmacy, sampling hookahs in local cafes and drinking whiskey on their hotel balcony. Occasionally, when the government would let them, they even managed to do some good, finding a warehouse of used clothing Americans contributed to help the needy children of Iraq and traveling out into the deepest poverty pockets of Sadr City to distribute them.
The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson calls their book “a buddy trip inside the mess of a post-liberation Iraq . . . hilariously irreverent, very sad, and very real all at once.” With each turning page, you learn more about how well-meaning Americans can become trapped in bureaucratic malaise and how, in those first months after our troops entered Baghdad, the Bush administration bungled the occupation.
One heart-breaking story involves Heather Coyne and the Women for Women International’s attempt to establish a women’s center in the upscale Mansour section of Baghdad. After months of traipsing around by foot in flip-flops, jeans and T-shirts, LeMoine and Neumann are invited to the official opening ceremony. They leave the Green Zone in a convoy of three black Suburbans sandwiched between military Humvees. Two private security guards from Blackwater accompany each vehicle, with a designated shooter posted in the front passenger seat.
The convoy gets out and back into the Green Zone without incident, and the opening ceremony draws coverage from Salon magazine and The Washington Times. That night, an Iraqi hired by the center for security is found with his throat slit at the front entrance. The U.S. military makes a grand show of circling the perimeter every night to assure the center’s safety. As soon as they stop, hand grenades are tossed through the windows and the center is closed.
“It never really made much sense to us why anyone expected the women’s centers to succeed,” they write. “To the average Iraqi, an American-backed building for women, guarded by U.S. troops, looked like a place to steal and corrupt women.”
From the mouths of these self-proclaimed innocents come a few other simple truths:
* The United States army is not equipped to govern 28 million people in a country where we don’t speak the language or understand the culture.
* It probably was a bad idea to disband the Iraqi army – the only effective police force in the country -- and put 300,000 ex-soldiers on the streets with no pay and only an AK-47 to get by.
* And it wasn’t such a good idea either to purge all the Baathists – pretty much everybody who knew how things work -- in every state ministry from water and traffic to oil, interior and foreign affairs.
* You can’t establish rapport with the people when all your governmental offices are behind concrete barriers and concertina wire in a 3-mile square Green Zone in Baghdad, and the occupants are living in Saddam Hussein’s old palaces.
* If you want a nation to run smoothly, it might be a good idea to turn on the lights. Two years after the U.S. occupation, large portions of Baghdad still operate on only four hours of electricity a day.
* The atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison were more than a public relations blunder. Revelation that procedures were approved as far up as the White House counsel has permanently damaged America’s reputation throughout the Middle East.
“Babylon by Bus” is not a political screed. It’s more the tale of two guys on a joy ride through a war zone discovering, like Yossarian, that everything the U.S. military does has a Catch-22. Only in the final chapter do we learn that many of the most interesting characters they met along the way are now dead. So LeMoine and Neumann conclude with an apology:
“To the people of Iraq, we apologize for the reckless, unplanned, understaffed, corrupt, and wasteful way in which our country occupied and then failed at rebuilding your shattered nation. For every innocent mother or father, son or daughter, sister or brother, friend or family member who was killed, tortured, or injured by our country, we extend our deepest sympathy.”
Reading “Babylon by Bus” does not automatically lead to the conclusion that it is time for the U.S. to get out of Iraq. Undoing the mistakes the U.S. provisional government made has to be given the same urgency as the war that led to them. That means there will be many difficult choices ahead for whoever inherits this mess. But “stay the course” is not one of them.
