[Welcome National Review readers. For those of you coming in from the Redzone side, I invite you to check out my latest NRO piece, here. Thanks]
Dear Lisa --
The sharp ripping sound erupted somewhere close to the hotel. Automatic weapon fire, I thought, flashing back to Baghdad, where the same noise was--and still is--a constant part of city life. Perhaps it's just a wedding. But it was 9 a.m., and besides, everyone knows that the Hauwza--the religious establishment in Najaf--has outlawed the casualty-producing custom of celebrating nuptials by firing guns into the sky.
A few hours later, we got the news. On the street just behind the funduk, four masked men in a Toyota emptied their AKs into a parked car, killing a police colonel from Zubair, who had come to Basra for medical treatment. The assassins are unknown, as is their motive, although rumors have it the murder had something to do with "smuggling."
"Summer is coming," an Iraqi man grunted in the hotel lobby. "The Wahhabi have been quiet for awhile, but we are expecting their return with the hot weather."
One reason why, two days earlier, security was tight for the opening of the new meeting chambers for Basra Province's Mahjaless Mahafalla--or Governing Council. Cops, soldiers, private bodyguards, Iraqi men in strange uniforms (how many security agencies does Iraq have nowadays?), everyone milling in front of the newly-refurbished building. Layla and I passed through the armed gauntlet and found ourselves in a high-ceiling, narrow room, lined with plum-colored wood paneling and filled almost completely with a conference table, around which sat numerous GC members and representatives from Iraqi media. Pressed against the walls were additional sahafee and officials from the British and American consulates. (I should add for clarification sake, that the U.S. has a small diplomatic presence in Basra.)
So here it was, I thought, the august halls of democracy. And looking at the elected officials, the cameras, the suited flaks hovering at the margins of the room, it seemed to me this resembled any grassroots council you find might across the U.S., right down to the dreadful artwork decorating the chamber walls...
...except for one not-inconsiderable detail: all the Iraqi females in the room were bound in religiously-mandated fabric prisons. Including one woman who approached me to say hello, her voice emanating from behind a shroud completely covering her face--with a shock I realized it was Haifa Malij Jaafir, who had evidently dispensed with the narrow viewing slit in her abiya in favor of head-to-foot black. (She's a sweetheart, Haifa is, asking me when I was going to return to the Union for another conversation, but I tell ya, I still can't get used to talking to someone whose voice issues, oracle-like, from behind a veil.) Anyway, by now I'm on a nod-and-press-a-hand-to-the-chest basis with a number of GC members, and since Layla knows the rest of the bunch, I spent a profitable afternoon renewing contacts and congratulating one and all on their new digs.
In truth, I don't know what to make of the Mahjaless Mahafalla. Yes, many of the 41 members are alarmingly inexperienced with democracy, in the pocket of the religious parties and possibly corrupt--but they are a legislation born from a (more or less) free election, the first in this city's history. "Think of where Germany and Japan were two years after World War II--Iraq today is further along the road to democracy," a Public Administration Adviser from the British Embassy crooned. And despite one's natural tendency to become cynical in dysfunctional Iraq, I think she's right.
Still mulling over the relationship between democracy, the Middle East and the liberation of Iraq, I returned to my hotel room and turned on the TV, planning to do some writing while accompanied by Arab music videos (I've develop an addiction for those damn things). Instead, I discovered that, by weird coincidence, Dubai-based Channel One was airing "Rudy: the Rudolph Giuliani Story." Work was impossible now. It wasn't the homesick-inducing views of New York that seized my attention; no, rather, it was the dateline of the movie's opening scene: September 10, 2001.
I don't remember what I did that day. I do remember what we did two days before, when, on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon we walked down to Battery Park and looked out at the Statue of Liberty. Afterward, we strolled north along the Hudson, and I recall gazing up at the World Trade Center, marveling at the way the buildings reflected the late summer sun with a magnificent silver gleam. I don't care what the critics say, the Twin Towers really are beautiful, I thought. A beautiful part of my city.
Ten minutes into the movie, the real-life footage began: the gaping hole in the north tower; fire erupting from the south; smoke streaming from the largest skyscraper fires in history; people on the upper floors waving white distress flags; the downward plunge of the south tower into its foundations; avalanche-like billows of white debris pouring down Vesey Street and over the spire of St. Paul's Church as the north collapsed...and for a moment, I was no longer in my hotel room, but back in New York, on the roof of our building, once again witnessing the horrible, the unimaginable, the obscene.
Upsetting, yes; but somewhat eerie, too, to watch these scenes replayed in Iraq. For, of course, the reason I was even in this Basran hotel room--the reason America and Britain forces invaded Iraq, drawing thousands of people, including myself, into this country--was the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11. Strange, too, were the words I remember the real Mayor Giuliani expressing that day--especially his awful, emotionally wrenching statement that the "loss of life today will be more than any of us can bear"--given Arabic subtitles. Did Iraqis watching this show--say, my friendly hotel staff--identify with the mayor, or with the terrorists who humbled the Great Satan? Did they cheer the law and order sheriff or the Robin Hood of the Middle East?
I can't say for sure, of course, but knowing Iraqis, my money's on Rudy. The people here desperately need--and deserve--law and order, a sense that justice can prevail against malevolent powers stalking their nation. The idea that a single man can galvanize a society to stand up to Ali Baba, be they mobsters or terrorists, and survive--unlike, it seems, the police colonel from Zubair--can only bring hope to these demoralized and suffering people. "We need leaders," a Iraqi journalist said to me over dinner last week. "But where can we find them in such a society?"
Hollywood being Hollywood, Rudy's war on crime (the same war that cleaned our block of the heroin gang that had ruled it for years) was depicted with a montage of cops rousting the homeless and squeegie men and prostitutes, scored by a ominous soundtrack that evoked thoughts of fascist thugs crushing the spirit of democracy. I had to laugh. Here in Iraq, real fascist thugs--and not the imaginings of hysterical lefists--seek to crush the spirit of democracy. Here in Iraq--where serving as a policeman is the most dangerous job in the world--people can only pray for a force that is incorruptible, efficient and effective against Saddamite psychos and bloody-thirsty jihadists. They wouldn't call a man like Giuliani a "fascist," and they certainly would not call police officers "pigs." And that's not just because they're Muslims.
Yours from the land where patriot acts, civil liberties and the war on crime are one and the same.
June 9-12
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