Edward Said’s monumental work Orientalism is deeply critical of Western representations of the East as being more in fulfillment of Western conceptions of what the East should be than any sort of depiction of what it is.  The East, in other words, is not given an opportunity to represent itself, it is made in the West into an alternative construction, one that plays into Western dreams and fears and downplays or ignores the voices of the East.  Nowhere is this truer than in today’s Iraq.

 Iraq, it seems, is a country defined by American benchmarks that relate to the American troop presence.  That’s the media projection, that’s what the discussions in the political circles relate to.  This may be terribly important to the United States, because it determines the length and nature of its presence, to the Arab world, because it is used to show the failure of the Iraq mission, to Europe, which is eager to move beyond the Iraq issue.  The only ones left out are the Iraqi people, who are not on this ride. In conversations with residents of Baghdad or Suleymania, Sunni or Shi’a, Arab or Kurd, you don’t hear much about provincial elections laws, or de-Baathification, or how many Iraqi soldiers were trained today.  Nobody cares, in short, about George Bush’s benchmarks.

What do Iraqis care about?  On this I can speak with some authority, having been here about a month now and living in middle class homes rather than hotels.  I get 4 hours a sleep at night because it is 90 degrees in the evening and when the power goes out, the generator cannot produce the electricity necessary to run an air conditioner.  I aim to get a bit more sleep in the daytime when we get two hours of power in the afternoon, but sometimes it cuts off here and there for about ten minutes and then it’s so hot, sleep is impossible.  I get a shower about three times a week, because the water supply is sporadic, it arrives twice a week for an hour and you have to send it up to a tank on the roof and then be very sparing in using it, you have about 30 gallons for a family for three days, after all.  So what do I want right now?  I want electricity, and I want water.   It’s hard to care much about soldiers in the streets when this is how you live. 

The problem is not so much that this goes unrecognized, but rather that it is continually viewed through the narrow prism of American interests.  We need to restore “basic services” to Sadr City to give legitimacy to the Iraqi military presence, which gives the Iraqi government credibility, which lets America reduce its footprint.  Of course, the Sadr City residents don’t want potable water because it might get rid of the Americans or enhance Iraqi credibility, they want potable water because they are God damned sick of dysentery.  Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t seem like much the point of Iraq these days, to do something good for its people.  That’s just the rhetoric, the mask underlying the power politics of international forces far more influential.  The Arabs say we Iraqis want our independence, the Americans say we Iraqis want our freedom, everyone decides how we are doing according to benchmarks on these issues.  Come on over and talk to us, and we’ll sing a different song.  We just want to sleep.

As a case in point, about two days ago, there was a demonstration here in Suleymania to protest a law concerning provincial elections (specifically, as applied to Kirkuk), and in it was a microcosm for everything that I think is wrong with Iraq today.  First of all, even in the Kurdish region, where the issue of Kirkuk burns most brightly, it was hard to find anything approaching passion.  Clearly ask the Kurds and they care about this, and think their government is taking the right position vis a vis the central government.  A few people mention this in coffee shops, or at dinner, but really, it was a rather marginal thing in their lives, a matter to discuss over a game of dominoes more than anything else.  Certainly nobody I knew cared enough to actually want to attend a demonstration, particularly since the demonstration was really nothing more than supporting the position of the Kurdish leadership.  Who demonstrates to tell their politicians they are doing a good job?

But in the media, this was important, a “benchmark” of our progress, success was central to the “mission.”  On television and the news, we were inundated with this over and over, an impasse in the Parliament that nobody cared about, a Kurdish demonstration nobody in Suleymania much wanted to attend.  But nobody mentioned that part.  They mentioned the thousands in the streets of Kurdish cities mounting a protest, demanding the return of Kirkuk.  This was important, CNN reminded us repeatedly, it threatens civil war if not resolved.

Somehow nobody in the West ever seems to understand how easy it is to force people out onto the streets, particularly if there is an issue about which they are indifferent, or, in this case, generally supportive if distracted by more pressing matters.  Whether it’s Sudanese and teddy bears, or Iraqis and the Kuwait invasion, the Western media takes these matters rather seriously when large numbers appear, and seem to assume it is a reflection of real street sentiment. 

It’s not England, for heaven’s sake.  I am here, I saw what happened.  The president of the university calls up the Deans, and asks where he might see them during the demonstration.  The Deans call up the Associate Deans, let them know they’ll be waiting for them at a particular place.  And so on down the line.  Government offices are closed, and workers are arranged to march together at a particular time and place.  Nobody actually issues any threats, as they did in Saddamist Iraq, probably nobody comes to beat you up afterwards, as they did in Saddamist Iraq, but the pressure proves irresistible.  So most without legitimate excuses do what they’ve always done in Iraq, they show up, for about 45 minutes and make sure they shake enough hands and talk to enough people to demonstrate credibly that they were there to deal with any questions afterwards.  Then they slip away, to gripe about the fact that the night before the demonstration, nobody slept more than 3 hours because it was brutally hot and the power shut off at 4 am.  The remainder of the demonstrators who stay around are party apparatchiks, those guys couldn’t tell you what Article 24 of the Provincial Elections Law (the subject of their placards) even said.  From what I could tell from conversations, all they knew was Baghdad wanted to bring the Kurds back to the place they were in Saddam’s time, and they wouldn’t stand for it.

So the fuss comes, and the fuss will go, and a benchmark probably achieved, and progress declared by some, disputed by others.  But the ultimate point is that Iraqis will be no better off than they were before it all started, and Iraq’s real needs, as determined by its people, will go unaddressed.  Because what Iraq needs is a plan to deal with this awful infrastructure and a disastrous economic policy that are making the lives of its people nothing short of miserable.  Misery runs aplenty here, south and north, and I have yet to meet anyone between the ages of 18-35 who doesn’t want to leave.  And believe me, it’s not because of Kirkuk.  It’s because the infrastructure is the same now as it was following the invasion from the perspective of an ordinary person.  I realize that Americans quite rightly feel that they’ve spent a fortune on rebuilding Iraq, and that it is time for Iraqis to finance their own reconstruction.  What Americans should realize, however, is that your average joe hasn’t seen anything by way of improvement in the basic services.  Water is scarce, electricity the same as it was, nothing has much changed. 

Ask most Iraqis, and the solution to all of this is simple. Clamp down on corruption, turn on the oil spigots, and pass out more money, more pensions, more services, and all will be well.  They do seem to know that this causes inflationary pressure, they just had a salary increase, prices just went up, but they aren’t sure why that is.  They assume it was either government manipulated, so there wouldn’t be another request for more money, or that the government didn’t intervene to prevent the price rise, as they must in America or why aren’t the price problems the same over there?  The idea that you can’t just pay people more with the same level of productivity and expect anything to change doesn’t seem to occur to most.  And it is certainly a comment on Iraqi education that law professors, political science professors and judges all employ this sort of reasoning, that I am pretty sure were beaten out of me in high school. 

The same might be said of redirecting misused government funds.  Yes it is an embarrassment that the Kurdish Regional Government alone has 43 ministers.  Yes it is ridiculous that those ministers, and Iraqi national ministers, and Kurdish Regional Parliament Members, and Iraqi Parliament Members, make around $10,000 a month each, in a country where my brother in law as a successful young engineer makes $850 a month.  Yes the fact that each of them, even Ministers who have been in office for a few months, earn a pension at the full salary FOR LIFE, and yes the fact that the Kurds have 400 ex ministers now adds up to one heck of a waste of money to benefit barely qualified party hacks, most of whom I wouldn’t invite to speak at a conference, let alone head a portfolio.  But clean all that up, and there’s still a problem.

HAH