Do the Iraqis hate American soldiers?
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| Sun, 08-15-2004 - 5:18pm |
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Posted on Sun, Aug. 15, 2004
Witnessing war from the front
For 3½ weeks, soldiers shared their joys, humor and often frightening mission
By LEE HILL KAVANAUGH
The Kansas City Star
Editor's note: Lee Hill Kavanaugh made two trips to cover the war in Iraq for The Kansas City Star, the first in October of last year and again in March and April of this year. Here are some of her observations from her first visit.
After 27 hours of travel it has come to this: I am sitting on cargo netting known as sling seats in a darkened military airplane about to experience a “spiral†landing.
The only light comes from the full moon shining in through a porthole. Occasionally, an eerie glow from a wrist watch pokes the darkness as someone checks the time. All lights are off so that the eyes of insurgents with shoulder-fired missiles won't see us despite what their ears may tell them as we pass.
Two hours earlier, before we left the Kuwait military base known as Camp Victory, our “flight attendant†— an airman in a green jumpsuit — briefed the dozen of us on this swoop landing into Baghdad International Airport.
“We will swing two slow passes around the airport then drop like a roller coaster into a downward spiral. Use the puke bag if you must. Do not leave your DNA on my plane,†says the airman. And then as if an afterthought: “These guys have performed this hundreds of times.
“If we encounter enemy fire we will take evasive action, so hold on tight. … Oh, yeah, have fun.â€
Fun? A year ago I would never have imagined myself here, a middle-aged mom carrying a Kevlar helmet and a 16-pound bullet-resistant vest with ceramic plates, sitting next to 20-somethings with M-16 rifles casually slung over their shoulders like metal backpacks.
The plane lurches forward and begins its descent.The spiral landing ends in less than a minute, my stomach contents stay intact and we are soon disgorged from the end of this C-130. Under the yellow glare of portable lights, I dig through the mountain of duffle bags until I find mine.
Two building-sized tents house troops coming and going at the airport. At the intake tent, dozens of soldiers sprawl on brown folding chairs and on the ground. The area is littered with old meal-ready-to-eat trash, some magazines with glossy-looking women on their covers and a few well-read Gun and Ammo magazines. A big-screen television plays Jay Leno.
Every face I see is tired and weary. Some faces look like they've seen too much.
It isn't long until my convoy arrives: three Humvees with four soldiers each wearing desert camouflage uniforms, with handguns dangling from their hips and M-16s in their hands.
“Good evening, ma'am,†says one sergeant. “How was your flight?â€
His words are so polite it seems surreal. This is a war zone, not the Ritz. The soldiers ask if I have body armor. They suit me up, strapping my bullet-resistant vest down tight. In the process, my fuzzy curls are snarfed up into the fabric fastener on the vest. Soon, four soldiers are struggling to untangle my hair, being polite enough not to mention that Baghdad and long hair aren't compatible.
Next is a 10-minute ride to their base, an old Iraqi oil building outside the relative safety of the Green Zone.
“We'll drive fast,†says one soldier. “If we take fire, we'll drive faster. We won't stop to engage. If we encounter an IED,†the look on my face tells him to explain, “an improvised explosive device, we will still keep going. Unless we flip over. Then we'll try to assist you if we can. If we can't, stay where you're at and backup will arrive. Try not to panic.â€
He stops and watches me. My head keeps nodding yes long after his words are finished.
It's obvious I'm scared speechless.
“We're the best that the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division has, ma'am. You're safe with us.â€
In the weeks to come, I'll find these men and women seemed to be a cut above others I've met. Or perhaps living in a war zone, people become more than they are because of the fiery trials they must endure, and the clarity of vision that comes when you realize what is truly important.
***
It's 3 a.m when I meet the colonel of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, Russ D. Gold. At 46, he looks very much like a young Robert De Niro.
His mouth grins, but his eyes give away how weary he really is. Later, I will learn he'd lost a soldier that day. For every death, all e-mail and telephones are shut down for 24 hours to ensure that the deceased soldier's family learns first about the death from the military, not from a phone call from a neighbor down the street.
Gold had just finished writing a condolence letter to that soldier's family. Something he does for each death, insisting on writing it himself because it is the last thing he can do for his soldier. But each letter he writes takes a piece of him with it, he'll tell me later. Out here, his soldiers become his sons and daughters. He shares their joy, their humor, their frustrations; he bears the crushing grief of their deaths.
He invites me to see everything his soldiers do, to ride with them whether it's a bomb-sweeping mission or visiting a village about to get flushable toilets. I tell him that I want the freedom to write about anything I see, good or bad.
We stare at each other for a few seconds after the word “bad.â€
He's leery of my enthusiasm. I also know he's watching me very closely to see what my agenda will be.
“Every reporter has an agenda, don't they?†he'll ask me later.
The embedded journalist program with the military is probably one of the best ideas the higher-ups ever conceived. Journalists get a glimpse into the world of the soldier. And soldiers too, get to meet reporters as human beings, not as stereotypes.
At first, these Kansas soldiers are shy and uncomfortable around me, but after a few days, they begin asking me questions.
“What do they think of us back home, ma'am?†one soldier asks. “Do they hate us?â€
He's so young. I can hear in his voice that he's sincere. I'm saddened because I fear that the average person probably doesn't think about these soldiers any more than the few seconds on Iraq that run across the local television news. It's not hate; it's apathy. I don't tell him that the court trial of a California murder is dominating the TV news, with soldier deaths in Iraq dropping to third or fourth place in news importance.
The soldiers want to know how the Chiefs are doing, what the weather's like in Kansas City, what movies are on. One soldier tells me that the news the armed forces see on television is always spun toward uplifting stories.“But I know there have been protests about us,†he says, quietly. I assure him that people I've interviewed who protested the war were never against the soldiers. But it's hard for him to separate the two issues. Especially out here, where soldiers cannot trust Iraqi civilians; friend and foe look the same. Another asks if I have any old newspapers with me. He's delighted with a stack of week-old papers crumpled inside my bag.
My first ride-along is with the bomb squad as it looks for IEDs. I meet my escorts: four soldiers who all chew tobacco and who all carry their own water bottles to hold their brown spittle. They're funny, serious, disciplined and not afraid to tell me there are times they're scared, too.
We drive through traffic. Buildings are riddled with bullet holes. I see bombed-out sections of the highway. Some Iraqi drivers glare at us as we cut in front of them or force them to stay behind us. But many more Iraqi drivers smile and wave.
We pass by a marketplace where makeshift pens house goats, chickens and sheep, grazing and waiting to be slaughtered on the spot for someone's supper. All the time as these soldiers talk, their experienced eyes look for the out-of-place, the soda pop can upright in the middle of the road, a flowerpot sitting on the edge of the highway.
We pass little shops and churches, cafes and automobile repair shops, gasoline stations, computer stores and the Baghdad University of Agriculture. Every few feet I see a donkey pulling a small cart. A brown dust permeates everything. Traffic stalls at checkpoints where American soldiers in dark sunglasses look inside cars, minivans, buses and trucks, then wave the vehicles on.
They hold up a hand in greeting as we pass by them. We drive by fast: when you're a soldier in a Humvee, you never stop in traffic. An idling Humvee full of soldiers is a juicy target for a sniper.
We hear over the radio that another squad found an IED. One soldier looks at me as he says that we had just passed by that same spot of road. For the first time, I understand how quickly death could come from a bomb.
The next day, I ride with the psy-op teams, soldiers who conduct what's called psychological operations, befriending local families. These soldiers know the children in the villages around Baghdad the best. They bring them volleyballs and coloring books that explain in Arabic to stay away from strange looking objects on the ground and to tell the soldiers about them. (It is mostly children who find the unexploded ordnance.)
Often, it's the children who tell soldiers where a weapons cache is.
I attend the opening of a reconditioned kindergarten in Abu Ghraib that had been so full of bombs under Saddam Hussein's reign that it took weeks of careful cleaning by the military to reclaim this building for the children. Several children cry at the sight of soldiers in full body armor. I make them laugh when I wave at them with my braids. I have to stop myself from scooping up a crying little girl who looks just like my daughter in the United States.
I witness several historical meetings of the fledgling steps of democracy, as a district advisory council meets. Col. Gold and his soldiers not only taught the townspeople in their area of Baghdad what democracy is, but they also organized the people into representatives, taught them how to debate without ending up in blows, taught them about voting and following a majority's decision — all topics that Americans don't think twice about, but these people had never experienced in their lifetime.
I'm awed when I learn too that no one told the soldiers how to do this: Their orders were to just figure out how to do it and execute it. I don't remember any college classes that could teach me how to do that.
After a few days in Baghdad the sound of gunfire doesn't scare me, until the day I learn that the Humvee I was just in was being shot at. I had no idea that was happening. Soldiers can't allow themselves to be lulled into the complacency that my untrained self slips easily into.
A few nights later after supper, the mortars are so close that each explosion shakes the walls of our building, sending white dust from the ceiling and giving me fear like I've never known before. Until I look at the soldiers around me. They had run to their posts and were alert but calm. This is a common occurrence in their lives. Later, they will show me a photo of a portable toilet that the insurgents blew up with a rocket-propelled grenade.
They joke with me that the Iraqi bad guys are bad shots, dark humor especially when everyone knows sometimes they do get off a lucky shot.
***
Col. Gold surprises me one morning by telling me that Sheik Dari in Abu Ghraib called him earlier asking to meet with me. I met the sheik at the kindergarten opening. You have to go, Gold says. You never turn down a sheik.
In the interview, Dari, who speaks excellent English, tells me the people of Abu Ghraib view Americans as a blessing, that so many good things were happening because of their support. He also tells me that some American soldiers are too rough when they pull a driver out of his truck, or when they raid a house looking for weapons.
Strangely, he didn't mention anything about the atrocities at the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison that shook the world, which was just a stone's throw from where we were standing.
As I am leaving his office in Abu Ghraib with my convoy of soldiers around me, an elderly woman wearing an abaya — a black robe — stares hard at me. I smile and say hello, but her expression does not soften.
She is a widow, a soldier tells me. There is no mistaking the look of hatred in her eyes.
But I also meet with some Iraqi moms, one of the highlights of my visit. After sharing photos of our children, we share nursing stories and toilet training issues of our toddlers. There is much laughing and giggling, especially because we have a male translator whose face grows red with each discussion. I ask these moms what they think of the American soldiers who zoom up and down their streets. Are they frightened of them? Do they want them to leave?
Their responses surprise me. The women embrace the security that the soldiers are giving them. They view the security as a gift they've never had before. One mother tells me there is controversy in her neighborhood about following the teachings of the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who preaches that Iraqis should fight the Americans. She says he is too violent, that her neighbors only listen to him out of respect for his father, who was assassinated by Saddam Hussein years earlier.
Another mother tells me she cries whenever an American soldier is killed or hurt. She remembers what it was like with Hussein. His government wanted to arrest her, she says, because she asked about some relatives who had disappeared. In Hussein's world, if you even asked, it could mean your death.
The women laugh at my braided hair as it sticks out between the straps of my Kevlar helmet. One mother brazenly tells me that she, too, wears her hair in braids.
I extended my four-day visit to Iraq for 3½ weeks, writing about these soldiers and their world.
But I feel guilty as I tell the soldiers it's time for me to go home to my toddler and husband. I know they miss their children and spouses so terribly, but they have months to survive before they will see them again. I also know that like a gruesome lottery, some of these soldiers will never see their families again.
I'm driven back to the Baghdad airport with most of the same soldiers who picked me up almost a month earlier. I thank them for what they're doing.
And I pray again: this time for their safety all the way back to Kansas.
As I step aboard the C-130 that will fly me back to the safe sands of Kuwait, the airman in the green jumpsuit briefs his passengers again. But this time he asks if anyone has a problem with sharing the plane with human remains.
In five minutes, two black body bags are gently carried into the plane, the unmistakable form of a human being in each bag.
Two soldiers going home, too.
But I can't tell their story. I don't know who they are or what happened. I can only imagine, their young faces, the swift but deadly bomb or sniper shot or car crash in the crazy chaotic traffic.
I realize over the roar of the C-130 how different I am, changed by the servicemen and women I've met.
It was an honor to meet them.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm
"Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.
To top it all off, he would go out of his way to assert that his own policy, which he properly justified in the first place as a better way to protect American interests than the alternative favored by the realists, also bore the stamp of the Reaganite version of Wilsonian idealism:
This conflict will take many turns, with setbacks on the course to victory. Through it all, our confidence comes from one unshakable belief: We believe in Ronald Reagan’s words that "the future belongs to the free."
"When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. And their governments should listen to their hopes."
"We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systematically break them."
"A possible explanation of the great velocity achieved by the new antiwar movement was that, like the respectable critique immediately preceding it, the radical opposition was following the lead of European opinion. In this instance, encouragement and reinforcement came from the almost incredible degree of hostility to America that erupted in the wake of 9/11 all over the European continent, and most blatantly in France and Germany, and that gathered even more steam in the run-up to the battle of Iraq. If demonstrations and public-opinion polls could be believed, huge numbers of Europeans loathed the United States so deeply that they were unwilling to side with it even against one of the most tyrannical and murderous despots on earth."
"... the chairman of the Syrian Arab Writers Associations was speaking for hordes of his "brothers" in declaring shortly after 9/11 that
When the twin towers collapsed . . . I felt deep within me like someone delivered from the grave; I that I was being carried in the air above the corpse of the mythological symbol of arrogant American imperialist power. . . . My lungs filled with air, and I breathed in relief, as I had never breathed before.
If this was how the Arab/Muslim world largely felt about 9/11, what could have been expected from that world when the United States picked itself up off the ground—Ground Zero, to be exact—and began fighting back? What could have been expected is precisely what happened: another furious outburst of anti-Americanism. Only this time the outbursts were infused not by jubilation but by the desperate hope that the United States would somehow be humiliated. This hope was soon extinguished by the quick defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but it was immediately rekindled by the way Saddam Hussein was standing up against America. Saddam had killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iran, and countless Arabs in his own country and Kuwait. Obviously, however, to his Arab and Muslim "brothers" this was completely canceled out by his defiance of the United States.
Was there, perhaps, an element of the same twisted sentiment in the willingness of millions upon millions of Europeans to lend de-facto aid and comfort to this monster? Of course, the claim was that most such people were neither pro-Saddam nor anti-American: all they wanted was to "give peace a chance." But this claim was belied by the slogans, the body language, the speeches, and the manifestos of the "peace" party. Though hatred of America may not have been universal among opponents of American military action, it was obviously very widespread and very deep. And though other considerations (pacifist sentiment, concern about civilian casualties, contempt for George Bush, faith in the UN, etc.) were at work, these factors had no trouble coexisting harmoniously with extreme hostility to the United States."
"...but what about the people of Iraq? Most supporters of the invasion—myself included—had predicted that we would be greeted there with flowers and cheers; yet our troops encountered car bombs and hatred. Nevertheless, and contrary to the impression created by the media, survey after survey demonstrated that the vast majority of Iraqis did welcome us, and were happy to be liberated from the murderous tyranny under which they had lived for so long under Saddam Hussein. The hatred and the car bombs came from the same breed of jihadists who had attacked us on 9/11, and who, unlike the skeptics in our own country, were afraid that we were actually succeeding in democratizing Iraq. Indeed, this was the very warning sent by the terrorist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the remnants of al Qaeda still hunkered down in the caves of Afghanistan: "Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse thereafter ."
"There was... a very good chance that a clearing of the ground, and a sowing of the seeds out of which new political, economic, and social conditions could grow, would gradually give rise to correlative religious pressures from within. Such pressures would take the form of an ultimately irresistible demand on theologians and clerics to find warrants in the Quran and the sharia under which it would be possible to remain a good Muslim while enjoying the blessings of decent government, and even of political and economic liberty. In this way a course might finally be set toward the reform and modernization of the Islamic religion itself."
"...As for John Kerry, in order to win the nomination, he had to disavow the vote he had cast authorizing the President to use force against Saddam Hussein."
"Among the lies through which Bush supposedly misled John Kerry and everyone else was that there might have been some connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. Now, even those of us who believed in such a connection were willing to admit that the evidence was not (yet) definitive; but this was a far cry from denying that there was any basis for it at all.10 So far a cry, that according to the reports that would be issued both by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission in the summer of 2004 (and contrary to how their conclusions would be interpreted in the media), al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam."
"In the wake of the WMD issue, several others emerged that did even more to shake the confidence of some who had been enthusiastic supporters of the operation in Iraq. On top of the mounting number of American soldiers being killed as they were trying to bring security to Iraq, and on the heels of the horrendous episodes of the murder and desecration of the bodies of four American contractors in Falluja, came the revelation that Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib had been subjected to ugly mistreatment by their American captors."
"That the antiwar party would batten on all this—and would continue ignoring the enormous progress we had made in the reconstruction of Iraqi society—was only to be expected. It was also only natural for the Democrats to take as much political advantage of the setbacks as they could. But it was not necessarily to be expected that the Democrats would seize just as eagerly as the radicals upon every piece of bad news as another weapon in the war against the war. Nor was it necessarily to be expected that mainstream Democratic politicians would go so far off the intellectual and moral rails as to compare the harassment and humiliation of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib—none of whom, so far as anyone then knew, was even maimed, let alone killed—to the horrendous torturing and murdering that had gone on in that same prison under Saddam Hussein or, even more outlandishly, to the Soviet gulag in which many millions of prisoners died.
Yet this was what Edward M. Kennedy did on the floor of the Senate, where he declared that the torture chamber of Saddam Hussein had been reopened "under new management—U.S. management," and this was what Al Gore did when he accused Bush of "establishing an American gulag." Joining with the politicians was the main financial backer of the Democratic party’s presidential campaign, George Soros, who actually said that Abu Ghraib was even worse than the attack of 9/11. On the platform with Soros when he made this morally disgusting statement was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who let it go by without a peep of protest."
"The analogy is obviously not perfect, but the resemblances between the political battles of 1952 and those of 2004 are striking enough to help us in thinking about what a few moments ago I called the most decisive of all the questions now facing the United States. To frame the question in slightly different terms from the ones I originally used: what will happen if the Democrats behind John Kerry defeat George W. Bush in November? Will they follow through on their violent denunciations of Bush’s policy, or will they, like the Republicans of 1952 with respect to Korea, quietly forget their campaign promises of reliance on the UN and the Europeans, and continue on much the same course as Bush has followed in Iraq? And looking beyond Iraq itself, will they do unto the Bush Doctrine as the Republicans of 1952 did unto the Truman Doctrine? Will they treat Iraq as only one battle in the larger war—World War IV—into which 9/11 plunged us? Will they resolve to go on fighting that war with the strategy adumbrated by the Bush Doctrine, and for as long as it may take to win it?
From the way the Democrats have been acting and speaking, I fear that the answer is no. Nor was I reassured by the flamboyant display of hawkishness they put on at their national convention in July. Yet as a passionate supporter of the Bush Doctrine I pray that I am wrong about this. If John Kerry should become our next President, and he may, it would be a great calamity if he were to abandon the Bush Doctrine in favor of the law-enforcement approach through which we dealt so ineffectually with terrorism before 9/11, while leaving the rest to those weakest of reeds, the UN and the Europeans. No matter how he might dress up such a shift, it would—rightly—be interpreted by our enemies as a craven retreat, and dire consequences would ensue. Once again the despotisms of the Middle East would feel free to offer sanctuary and launching pads to Islamic terrorists; once again these terrorists would have the confidence to attack us—and this time on an infinitely greater scale than before.
If, however, the victorious Democrats were quietly to recognize that our salvation will come neither from the Europeans nor from the UN, and if they were to accept that the Bush Doctrine represents the only adequate response to the great threat that was literally brought home to us on 9/11, then our enemies would no longer be emboldened—certainly not to the extent they have recently been—by "our national discord over the war."
"Democracy and reform are on the Arab world’s agenda. It will be a long, uphill fight to bring change to those countries, but at least a process has begun. Liberals remain few and weak; the dictatorships are strong and the Islamist threat will discourage openness or innovation. Still, at least there are more people trying to move things in the right direction...thanks to George W. Bush."
"Now "our entire security as a nation"—including, to a greater extent than in 1947, our physical security—once more depends on whether we are ready and willing to accept and act upon the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history has yet again so squarely placed upon our shoulders. Are we ready? Are we willing? I think we are, but the jury is still out, and will not return a final verdict until well after the election of 2004"