With Faiza in Boston

My life has been fairly crazy. I flew up to Boston for the weekend so I could both meet Iraqi blog queen Faiza (who’s been at this training course in southern Vermont) and visit my son, who’s in Boston for the summer. I decided to take my youngest, Lorna, who’s 20. Old enough to help me drive up to Dulles airport from Charlottesville, not old enough to drive a rental car in New England. Oh well.
Our United flight from Dulles to Boston got brought down in Philly for a couple of hours due to “mechanical problems”. Oh well.
After we arrived I dropped the daughter with the son, then ways behind schedule made the drive over to Brattleboro. I found New England bathing in an unaccustomedly steamy sauna of heat.
Anyway, meeting Faiza was a breath of fresh air. She drove back to Boston/Cambridge with me and we talked all the way. We have a lot in common, stretching back a long time. Politically, and family-wise. We each have three young-adult kids. She’s just about the most animated veiled woman I’ve ever encountered.
(A lot of westerners– many of whom, I suspect, have never met a veiled woman– think that wearing a veil somehow “makes” a woman into a timid, submissive doormat. Far from it! For many Muslim Arab women whom I know, wearing a veil enables them to go out and participate in the public sphere. And many of them do so in a very self-confident, outspoken manner. Faiza is one of those.)
“Knowing” someone through her or his blog is a funny thing. Certainly, Faiza’s writing on her blog is very intimate, and gives you the feeling you really know her fairly well. And then you meet her… Wow!
I was interested mainly to learn more about her view of the situation in her country, and of what it is possible to do there, politically, in today’s horrible circumstances.
I was so happy to find that she hadn’t lost hope– at all. Though she didn’t underestimate at all, either, the ghastliness of the circumstances in most of Iraq.
Faiza talked a bit about her involvement with Adnan Pachachi’s list of candidates in the run-up to the January 30th election. Apparently, they asked her to run, and she was ready to do so. But then Pachachi dropped out at the last minute– after the US authorities started pressuring the heads of all the lists to commit to NOT pressing for any deadline for a US force withdrawal. Refusing to bow to that pressure was, she thought, quite the right thing to do.
She expressed at some point her disappointment (or worse) with the people in the Iraqi “government” that did emerge from the elections. She stressed that most of them were recently returned exiles, who’d come back to Iraq with the occupation, and who didn’t seem to know much or care much about the networks of people that had long existed inside the country. We talked a bit about Ibrahim Jaafari, comparing him with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Her view, in general, was that while both of them seemed at one level to be decent, worthy people, still “they were participating in politics in the wrong way, at the wrong time.” (This is, certainly, very much my own view re Mahmoud Abbas. I was interested to hear that she made this exact same analysis of Jaafari.)
Faiza seemed very confident that her disappointment (and worse) in the current Iraqi “government” has become very widely shared throughout Iraq. “My dear! Thibngs were horrible in Iraq in the months after the election. Just horrible! And all the politicans could do in those months was sit around and argue over who gets which ministry. No-one was thinking of helping the people, at all!”

So, given the growing disillusionment with the “government”, she was hopeful that the next election there, which is scheduled for the end of the year, could bring some real change. Iraqis, she said, had become much smarter and more discriminating in their approach to political affairs, and more determined to rally round the central goal of ending the occupation.
For her part, she said she’s planning to go back to Baghdad as soon as she can, to resume her work with non-governmental groups there. “There are whole networks of people there whom we can work with,” she said.
She said her visit to the US had been a little hard at times, seeing so many people here just sitting around insouciantly enjoying themselves while her own country is– as a direct result of US policies there– living through truly hellish days. But still, she felt that the course she’s been taking– at the pro-peace “School for International Training” in Brattleboro– had helped to open her eyes. For example, she has been in a course with people from many, many different wartorn parts of the world. “One day, they asked us all to draw a conceptual ‘map’ of our different conflicts… and the main feature that was the same on each of the maps we produced was the involvement of the US government in stoking the conflict.”
Also, “They showed us how to analyze the steps that are needed to de-escalate a conflict, if wea want to build peace. And everything the US has done in Iraq has been the direct opposite of that. It’s become clear to me that they’ve been trying to stir up the conflicts inside the country, rather than help help solve them… Before I came to the course, I wasn’t sure whether US policy in Iraq was the result of ignorance, or mismanagement, or what. Now it seems clear to me that stirring up the internal problems there has been part of the plan.”
Read Faiza’s own descriptions of what she’s been learning on her course, on her own blog. For example, here.
She said she put her main trust in two things: the passage of time, which will enable more and more people to see the truth about what’s really going on– and God’s continuing concern for people’s wellbeing. She seemed to have a straightforward and strong religious faith.
I asked her what she thought the main thing is, that people in the US can do to help Iraqis these days. She was quite clear. “Work in your own political system, to change the policy and achieve a speedy troop from Iraq!” she urged.
Sunday afternoon we made a quick visit to one of the Harvard University Art Museums– where we each picked up a copy of a great new book about the looting of the Baghdad Museum. Then I drove her back to B’boro for the concluding week of her course there.
Next week, she’s going to be in DC, where she’s hoping to be able to go to some actual meetings with Senators and members of Congress. Mary Trotochaud of the Friends Committee on National Legislation is going to be handling her schedule there for the first half of the week. If you want to try to get with Faiza, contact Mary.