Back to Iraq. I was brought up on movies as a child. Many good American movies helped shape my mentality. The good sheriff who would not run away from trouble in 'High Noon' made me stand my ground quietly when a Scottish thug wanted to cut a sleeping sweet African lad who had no business wanting to be in the British Army and who many thought it manly to pee on his bed and cost him $20 a time to replace in the sixties. Rudolph slept right through the incident whilst nearly fifty young squaddies pretended to be asleep. I talked the thug out of it for his sake and for Rudolph’s and for my own so that he went next door and fought someone of his own mentality. 'Shane' taught me a thing or two about honor and of course was an indictment of American values at the same time. Ruthless Gunslinger has a softer side and has a feeling of enough is enough. Palance dressed all in black was the more evil and the soft, stupid Europeans just were not on the same planet. Trying to homestead amongst ruthless cattlemen. 'Lonesome Dove' was a pretty truthful reminder that American Law in the Wild West was just as able to steal cattle and horses when able to get away with it and there are still some who administer law in exactly the same mindset. The Wall of Mexico might have saved a few Mexican lives in those days rather that just stopping immigration. Guess what guys, if you keep your neighbors poor while you grow obesely rich then you might need to have a good alarm system. Personally I have always been in much the same boat as my neighbors and there is not an example of two nations so widely different as USA and Mexico in Europe? Maybe time to share a little more. Less Lear Jets and Humvees and less greed and more sharing of resources might mean not having to fear the next French Revolution someday? Walls wont keep out starving people. Feed them for goodness sake and yours?
'Casablanca' is a favorite movie of mine. Again it shows a ruthless American with a crooked gaming hall and no scruples in business but who ultimately has a heart of gold. We see his dark side and his good side. We see a time when America was truly considered the unfettered land of the free. WHAT HAS HAPPENED?
At that time France was occupied and so was most of Europe. Casablanca was the most Western Port to aim for to try and escape Nazi oppression and occupation. I beg Americans to watch and watch the movie again if you never have before. Take in and accept its implications. One point that stands out in that Victor the French resistance man is determined by the occupiers to be a traitor and a terrorist? Now guess what, Victor would think that the Casablanca Chief of Police in Free French territory is more likely to be the one that the 'Free French' judge to be the terrorist and the traitor and the collaborator? The young French girl who goes with a German Officer and who cries with self disgust at her behavior at the singing of the French Anthem was the collaborator who would have been ’tarred and feathered’ just like the ones who work for the American Military in this story I shall attach to this article? On the British island of Guernsey where my family hail from there were collaborators. There were German children born that still live there. There will be American children born in Iraq and they won’t all make it over here. Accept that some will be as a result of rape if the mothers were allowed to live or survived to live. Come on get real. I was in the military for nine years. No one in the UK talks of ‘supporting the military’ like you guys do. That kind of patriotism smacks of ‘rape them guys we will still back you’, and had actually happened in Haditha. Go Figure. For that reason alone I know where Obama is coming from in his recent words about wearing the badge. You actually undermine it if it is overdone? Perhaps all business suits should have an “Old Glory’ embroidered to save time adorning for congress and business? Reminds me of the Jews having to wear the star?
Patriotism should be in the heart not just on the lapel. Equally Christianity should be in the heart and not be the business of carrying the bible or claiming to ‘talk to God’ whenever interviewed?
Patriotism is in reverse mode right now for sure as being unable to tell the King about his invisible suit of clothes has led to many wrong decisions. Unfortunately America is divorced from World opinion by the media not printing it and so it only the few who venture abroad by Internet and such like who even understand that there is another way of looking at insurgency and seeing the sovereign right to object and to fight occupation to the death in some cases? WE would fight occupation to the death and Brits knew how close it was when we backed up Poland when Hitler invaded and occupied. We stood up to the might of the German War Machine and paid a very heavy price as did the whole of Europe. I wonder if the flattening of London and of French towns and German cities is the reason that going to war over oil seems stupid to European Nations and why Britain turned against Blair? Do you know that some have remarked to me that the Nazi’s did not even destroy French Cathedrals as mercilessly as America destroys Iraqi Mosques?
Finally, if you have never experienced occupation and foreign tanks in your home city and lack the imagination to understand what that does to the manhood of that nation then stop and think a bit. I fret that too many can't even commiserate with the family of the woman in Phoenix Airport without being on the side of oppression just over making a scene so I don’t expect to get too far in my desire for a bigger heart and a bigger desire to set free an occupied nation. Don’t go along with this ‘winning the war’. we are not at war with Iraqi’s and every time they object to being dominated does not mean we are justified in bombing them.
Watch Casablanca and use your imagination to understand how it would be to be French with the Germans flaunting their might. Watch for the moment the French sing their anthem and think of a similar scene where YOU are oppressed and occupied and controlled and want your own culture back even with its faults.
Here is the story of one Iraqi who if you are honest and if the shoe was on the other foot you would see as a real ‘traitor’ and NOT the many who stand up to American presence in their capital and even to those willing to strap on a bomb for their ’cause’? We call them ’insurgents’, in Casablanca the Germans call them ’traitors’ for wanting Free France. Are they traitors for wanting Free Iraq? Get Real Folks?
In Life of Lies, Iraqis Conceal Work for U.S.
BAGHDAD, Oct. 6 — For Hamed, a forklift driver at an American military base, life has become a series of disguises.
He has been a cabdriver, a man who does not understand English, and most recently, a laundry worker. None of these identities were true, but all were necessary to hide his ties to the United States.
So when someone he knew handed him a bag of dirty clothes last month, Hamed, a mild-mannered 33-year-old father of two, had no choice but to wash them.
“I said, ‘It’s my job,’ and I took them,” he said. He spoke on condition that his last name not be used out of fear for his and his family’s safety.
For the tens of thousands of Iraqis who work for the United States in Iraq, daily life is an elaborate balancing act of small, memorized untruths. Desperate for work of any kind when jobs are extremely hard to come by in Iraq, they do what they must, even though affiliation with the Americans makes them targets.
The Iraqis have stories for their scars, stories for nights away from home, stories for what they do outside their neighborhoods all day. Most often these stories are told to neighbors and acquaintances, though sometimes they are told to children as well, to ensure that the truth about a job stays strictly within the family.
In the early days, Hamed’s truth was not hard to hide. He drove around in a beat-up Toyota and slapped a plastic ‘taxi’ sign on top of it when he wanted to go to work at the base in the morning. Coming home was trickier. He needed to return to his neighborhood with a customer in the car to avoid suspicion.
As his neighborhood fell under the control of Sunni militants, fewer people wanted to go there, and once he spent more than two hours driving around looking for a fare. “What should I do?” he said. “My life is more important than the fuel.”
The real trouble began last fall. An envelope with two bullets was left outside his front gate. He said it contained a note: “Spy,” it read. “You will be killed.” A few days before, someone from his neighborhood had seen him leaving work at the base, a friend told him. He and his family left his home immediately.
He rented an apartment for his wife and children, and then traveled to Lebanon. There, he applied for refugee status, encouraged by an announcement by American officials that immigration quotas for Iraqis would be raised, but ran out of money after waiting months for his application to be processed. Unable to work in Lebanon legally, and faced with a choice of bringing his wife and children into poverty there, or living apart in Iraq, he decided to return to Iraq, forfeiting his application.
Now he lives on the third floor of a cheap motel in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad, away from his wife and children. He sleeps on a thin foam mattress and padlocks his door at night.
“My economic situation controls me,” he said. “I have nothing now.”
The squat, dingy, five-story motel is filled with Iraqis leading double or even triple lives. There are many varieties: Police officers who encountered trouble in their neighborhoods, interpreters for the American military, and laborers like Hamed. They pay $80 a month for a room.
Almost everyone there is someone else. Hamed shares his small room with his brother, who tells residents that he works in an electrical shop. Another resident, Felah, a 42-year-old former sports coach who works at the same American base as Hamed, says that he is a carpenter. He says he works for a company that makes desks for schools, a story he chose because he had some carpentry experience and could bluff if confronted.
Each detail of his life must match. He portrays a scar on his hand, from when he tried to free an American soldier whose leg was trapped under a forklift, as a wound from a wood sander.
His cover was threatened when an elderly resident asked him to repair a bed. Felah liked the man and handled the task well, but that only invited another request: Could he make a table? Busy with his job at the base managing an Iraqi work team, and not skilled enough in carpentry, Felah decided against taking the job, but could not tell the man. “I’m thinking to go buy this from a store, and tell him, ‘I made this for you,’” he said.
“Our life, it makes you laugh, but it’s a tragedy,” said Felah, a bowlegged Shiite man with a tired look, who has lost six close relatives, including a brother, to Sunni militants, and whose wife and children have been forbidden to see him by a bitterly sectarian father-in-law. “We feel that we are not telling the truth, but what can we do?”
Children can pose a problem. One couple trained a young son never to tell anyone about his father’s job at an American base north of Baghdad. A family friend, who knew about the job at the base and knew the son had been coached, tested him this summer, trying to break him down, the boy’s mother said. The friend asked the boy repeatedly where his father worked. The boy was distraught, but never revealed his father’s occupation, his mother said proudly.
Lies are required when trust breaks down, and even casual conversations with strangers can be dangerous. Ahmed, a 27-year-old interpreter for the American military, was riding back from work in the Green Zone on his motorcycle when men at a checkpoint in his neighborhood stopped him. They asked about his occupation. He replied that he fixed power generators, a story that was helped by his appearance: he had repaired his motorcycle before setting off, and grease was smeared on his hands and shirt.
The crisis, it seemed, was averted. But several days later, a group of men came to his house.
“They ask me, ‘If you repair generators, why don’t you work in your neighborhood?’” Ahmed said. Then, he said, “They gave me small generator to fix.”
Panic set in. Ahmed asked to be excused, saying he needed to go to a hardware store. He slipped away to the house of his friend, who coached him and told him what tools he needed.
“It’s very scary, but what can I do?” he said. “If I don’t do this, they will kill me.”
But after fiddling with the generator as his friend had instructed, he managed, miraculously, to fix the problem. The men left satisfied.
“I’m feeling happy because it looked I was saying the truth to these people,” he said.
No one has come back since.
Hamed has told the hotel resident that he must pay for the laundry service from now on, pretending to be a worker whose boss would not allow him to clean loads of clothes free. He has not seen his children in months. They live in the western Sunni outskirts of Baghdad; he lives on the east side of the city, where Shiites dominate. He calls them so they do not forget him.
Felah wants to live on the base, where he would be safe, but he said the military did not allow it. Soldiers come and go — from Kentucky, from Georgia — but Iraqi workers stay. Some of the Americans are fond of him. One gave him a watch. But no one has helped him emigrate.
“I feel myself as a lost person,” he said. “I have no family now. I have no home. Do you feel my difficult situation?”
