Press Action ::: My Iraqi Week

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

My Iraqi Week

("Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me,” Uncle Sam Screams In Pain)

By Micah Holmquist

It is too bad how some people are sore winners.

One of this country’s great public servants, Bob Kerrey, has told me the story of how he thought the Vietnamese people would thank him for slaughtering some of them. “They were living in a war zone,” he told me in the summer of 2001. “Is that so much better than death?” It broke Kerrey’s heart to find out that they didn’t share this logic, even though none of them were dead.

I felt the same way back in 1968 when Chuck Barris and I helped Mexico take care of those pesky students. We expected love and free beer and enchiladas for our insistence. Instead nobody would thank us. Nobody even thanked Chuck for his television programs.

Perhaps it is just part of human nature to believe that good deeds will be rewarded. We here in America are moral people who believe appreciation to our fellow humans is our debt to the Creator. Unfortunately we often make the mistake of thinking others feel the same way.

The Iraqis once showed so much promise. Give them a nickel and they would dance for you. Offer a glimmer of hope that the end of the war we’ve been waging on them for over a decade might be near and they treated you as liberators. At least that’s what we thought. I don’t understand Arabic or know anyone who does.

I first visited Iraq back on April 9 of last year so I could help tear down the statue of Saddam and coordinate the celebration. Those were good times and I will always treasure the memories in my heart. As I left Iraq that day to go on a speaking tour in America about how the media has the gall to report bad things in Iraq, I said goodbye to an Iraqi man I had hired to carry around my luggage. Although he said nothing, I knew deep down in my heart that he appreciated America.

When I returned to Iraq this week I looked for that man in Baghdad but he was obviously hiding from me in order to tell me how much he didn’t thank me for whatever he bought with the 50-cent piece I paid him for his adequate assistance.

Displaying what Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, esteemed former Ambassador to Finland and recently named Chairman of the American Red Cross, calls the “amazing and unique ‘can-do spirit’ [of] America,” I didn’t let his poor attitude get in the way of hiring another individual to do the same task. Only this time I said he would get 35 cents.

I came across a strange celebration while strolling through Baghdad. “The terrorists must have been defeated,” I told myself before joining in the festivities. I found myself chanting, “Down with the USA!” At first I quite reasonably assumed that this had a perfectly decent pro-American meaning in Arabic, but my doubts began to increase as I saw an American flag being burned, a crime that will get you arrested in the decent part of the world. The flag was clearly in good shape and in no need of being retired, so I figured they must have been making a statement that I did not agree with. Appalled, I stood up for America by scolding them only to be viciously beaten within an inch of my life. I would have died if not for my quick wit. “If you treat all visitors this way,” I screamed, “your tourism industry will never pick up.” Stunned, the Iraqis left me knowing they had heard the truth.

I proceeded to call my old colleague Bill O’Reilly to relay him the details of the inappropriate actions I had just witnessed. O’Reilly was cordial and said he would do a Talking Points on this. I stressed the need to call them “morons,” which he did Wednesday night without giving me credit or even any cool Factor swag. The only good things I can say is that O’Reilly is correct and has better manners than Iraqis.

Having safely relayed my outrage to a responsible celebrity journalist, I decided to do a rare thing. Just out of interest, I went to look for an explanation for the actions and sentiments of these Iraqis. First off was a visit with, perhaps done over the phone, with Anne Penketh of a publication called The Independent. Penketh told me that she would soon report that a public opinion poll of Iraqis commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Authority shows that Iraqis aren’t too happy with coalition forces in their country. Only two percent of them view the forces of liberation as liberators and 55% said they would feel safer when the forces protecting them leave. (I implored Penketh not to publish this story. I told her the mission is going perfectly, but that the coalition doesn’t need any more bad news so soon after the death of President Ronald Reagan, but unfortunately she went ahead on Thursday with a story entitled “Poll reveals hostility to US and support for rebel cleric.")

What could be upsetting the Iraqis and clouding their judgment? Could it be prison abuses or casualties? Clearly America and its allies have the right to kill, both intentionally and unintentionally, in pursuit of whatever exactly our goal is at the moment, so these Iraqis are operating based on a warped set of values. But that said, is there anything to their causes of complaint?

To prove that the answer was no, I decided to go investigating.

First up on my list of places to see for myself was the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, where a few unprecedented bad things were photographed some time ago thus allowing them to be exploited endlessly by those who don’t realize that stuff happens. (This would be like if something had happened to the U.S. a few years ago and people were still using it to justify all sorts of things, like killing people.) From outside of the prison, however, there was not a single sign of abuse and the prison isn’t all that big. Many state parks are bigger, and they receive far less attention.

As I traveled through Iraq, I also failed to see any U.S. soldiers shooting an Iraqi. I suppose this might have happened but maybe it didn’t. I did see injured Iraqis, but who knows what the cause is? Maybe our forces really didn’t kill and injure thousands of Iraqis. Why is it that nobody considers that possibility? You certainly don’t hear about these alleged deaths and injuries much in the mainstream media. Same with homeless children. Sure there’s a lot of them, but for all I know they don’t have homes anymore and, unlike their parents, these kids are still alive.

I will end with one very important fact that came out during my visit. The terrorists beheaded American Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia. If this isn’t proof that our cause is just and we are justified in doing whatever we do, nothing is.

Micah Holmquist, editor of Irregular Thoughts and Links, is a Cadillac, Mich.-based writer.

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