Category: Iraq-2006-Q1

Our delightful and multi-talented friend C, who is also the son of long-time family friends, is an ER doc with the US military who recently deployed to Iraq. What follows is most of his account of Christmas in the ER in the Baghdad Green Zone. My deep thanks to you, C., for letting me share this beautiful and heart-rending piece of writing. I pray to God you stay safe. ~HC

Christmas was not peaceful here in Baghdad… By 10 am the slightly desparate sound of Medivac requests crackled from the radio, followed by the drum of rotors passing over the hospital and landing at our helipad. The wounded came in three and four at a time. Just as one group were sent up to surgery another would land on our doorstep. One felt drained physically by the end of the day, sapped from the emotional toll of so much pain on Christmas, rather than the actual exertion of repeated resuscitations. The work is exhilarating and terrible at the same time and I do not know how to respond to the excitement and dread we all feel upon
hearing the radio call: “three litter urgent, 4 minutes out.” It takes several hours for the true impact of the experience to sink in. The wounded begin to blur in my
memory, and even the next morning I cannot easily remember exactly who had what injury and when I saw them. We are at war, make no mistake about that.
Everyday young men (and women) place body armor on and patrol the streets and suburbs of this sprawling city. Helmets are strapped on, ballistic glasses and earplugs in place. They look very much like modern day samurai preparing for battle. They drive, or walk knowing that someone in their unit will stumble across an explosive at some point during the day. Hopefully they will recognize and defuse it. Perhaps it will go off and no one but the hapless triggerman will be injured. Or, maybe, a friend with whom they just shared a joke or memory or cigarette will have his body torn by shrapnel, legs amputated, or life quickly ended in a flash. Imagine that a part of your daily routine and you begin to understand exactly what sort of strain these soldiers are under. Yet they are remarkably free of the tortured doubt and dread that you would believe all to harbor. Each brings to the anticipation of violence a fatalistic humor that defuses the greatest threat in this conflic t: fear. There will be some difficult homecomings, I imagine. The ramifications of what they have seen and done will not end for many years.
One soldier in particular sticks in my mind. He came into our trauma room, his body torn, but his will to live powerfully strong. His lips were deathly pale as he struggled to speak to me. I could never make out the words. I placed a tube in his throat to help him breath as we placed him in a chemically induced sleep. We put lines deep into his body and wrapped him tightly in a sheet. With blood, saline and oxygen, his skin turned soft pink and his face look calm. His blood pressure and pulse improved and we quickly pushed him up to the operating room. I was proud of my team and how quickly they were able to stabilize this young soldier. I spoke to his commander who looked so young himself. “If you get them in here alive, I promise we can save them,” I told his unit.
He died on the operating table before the end of the hour. Too much damage. Nothing could have been done. Christmas day in Iraq. It is New Years. The Iraqi celebrate by firing Kalishnikov’s into the sky. Occasionally the deeper thump of a 50 cal or some equivalent can be heard. Traces streak up as the city celbrates a new year. Miraculously, no one is yet injured. I think one bad holiday is enough. Tonight we will just celebrate quietly and think of everyone at home. Have a safe and peaceful New Year.

Regular JWN readers are probably aware that I have a couple of fairly serious disagreements with Juan Cole; and it occurs to me that I probably spend a disproportionate amount of space on this blog criticizing his views. I have always tried to do so in a way that expresses the huge admiration in which I have always held his scholarship and his strong stand in support of academic and human freedoms.
But I was made aware yet again today of the truly massive contribution Juan makes to the wellbeing of the world, day after day after day, simply by virtue of the dedication and levelheadedness with which he sticks to trying to understand what’s going on in Iraq and to sharing that understanding with the English-speaking public through his blog.
I am constantly amazed at how much, truly excellent work he produces there! It makes me tired just to think of how many hours he must spend at it each day. Any of you JWN readers who writes a blog must also know how much just darn’ hard work this businss entails.
Today, one commenter on Juan’s blog suggested that the CIA should simply be dismantled so the world could rely on what Juan tells us, instead… Not such a bad idea. What certainly is true is that by reading and digesting into English a wide variety of Arabic-language sources on Iraq, and then by making those digests/analyses available in a timely fashion on a no-cost open source, Juan is providing an amazing service that you cannot find anywhere else.
Today, I didn’t have time to read Al-Hayat till fairly late in the day. Reading Juan’s blog got me up to speed, showed me which articles to look at… I used to find the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s daily “Iraqi Press Monitor” was a helpful supplementary source. But that operation, which no doubt has a hefty budget and a large number of staff members, has produced nothing at all since December 20! (Back in the good old days, of course, there was the CIA’s open-source translation service, FBIS, freely available in all US Government depositary libraries. But that got axed. Now the US government has a subscription-only service called “World News Connection” which promises its potential paying readers that, “New information is added within 24-72 hours from the time of original publication or broadcast”. Thanks, but no thanks.)
So anyway, I want to express some special New Year’s good wishes to my colleague and friend Juan Cole. We may have our disagreements, and they are over serious matters. But that fact does nothing at all to dim the admiration I have for you, Juan. In this business, you really are the gold standard. A healthy and long life to you!

I got around to reading Juan Cole and a couple of pieces from today’s Al-Hayat– but a little late, today. The Hayat articles (as indicated by Juan) had noted that the Shiite mega-list, the United Iraqi Alliance, has decided to anoint SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim as al-marja’iyyeh as-siyasiyyeh for the list, in return for which SCIRI will drop its insistence on Adel Abdul-Mahdi being prime minister.
Marja’iyeh siyasiyyeh, that is, a “political marja’iyyeh“, is a concept I’ve never come across before. (If anyone else out there has come across it before, please, please elucidate for us in a comment.) Among pious Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere, a marja’ is a religious source of inspiration and object of emulation. In Iraqi Shiism, the marja’iyyeh is a collective noun used to describe both the institution of a collectively exercized marja’-dom and its current most elevated representative, currently Ayatollah Sistani. The adjective “political” added to that indicates that this new role is thought of as one of religio-political guidance, perhaps standing above that of the elected leadership.
Not, I would have thought, a terribly democratic notion?
In this article in today’s Hayat, A SCIRI spokesman is quoted as saying that, “the Alliance will be running the state administration for the next four years, and this necessitates that there be a political marja’iyyeh for all the sides (atraf) both inside the Alliance and outside it to resolve the big problems.”
Well, that doesn’t tell us much about this new position, either. It is, of course, entirely possible that the position of “marja’iyyeh siyasiyyeh” might be a a mere consolation prize, given to Hakim if he has actually already lost out in his battle to have SCIRI and its views dominating the policies of the new government. We have yet to see. But certainly, the analysis that Reidar Visser had done over the past ten days, as shown in the body and comments sections of this JWN post, indicated that SCIRI was not nearly as strong within the UIA as Hakim liked to present it as being, while supporters of Moqtada Sadr were stronger in the UIA than most westerners seemed to understand.
It is quite probable that the jockeying for position among the different trends within the UIA has not been resolved yet. (And of course, the final results of the elections haven’t been announced yet, either.)
I think the outcome of the intra-UIA power struggle will be very important for the course Iraq takes over the coming months and years. Thus far, I see the two poles of the main struggle being occupied by Hakim and Sadr, with the current PM, Ibrahim Jaafari straddling somewhere between them. (If any JWN readers can explain the situation even better than this, please do tell us in the comments!)
Hakim and Sadr seem to favor very different approaches to building a nationwide governing coalition. Hakim seems to favor one that is built on pursuing a strong relationship with PUK leader Jalal Talabani. Those two men both favor the radical dismemberment of the Iraqi state and its breakup into “super-regions” endowed with so many powers that if they retain any lasting links with each other at all those would be only the links of a confederation, rather than a federation. Hakim has also seemed quite happy to go along with Talabani’s insistence on bringing the laregly discredited former US-appointed PM Iyad Allawi into a new coalition.
Moqtada Sadr differs from Hakim in all these respects. He seems to have much more of an Iraqi-nationalist sensibility than Hakim does, and has very consistently worked on maintaining and strengthening his links with nationalist (i.e. anti-US) activists inside the Sunni community. His Iraqi-nationalist sensibility seems to have two strands to it: an antipathy for radical dismemberment of the state, and a strong opposition to the US presence and influence. The first of those strands probably makes him very wary of the two big, and very secession-minded Kurdish parties. The second strand fuels his distrust of Allawi. (It was Allawi’s administration, remember, that worked with the Americans to launch vicious anti-Sadrist military operations in both April and August 2004.)
It is not clear to me whether a united UIA might have a chance of forming a governing coalition without the Kurds, but with the nationalist Sunnis and a few other small parties. The biggest hurdle in government formation is the requirement that the parliament muster a 2/3 majority to name the President. That would require 180 votes. Up to now, Talabani has acted as though keeping the “presidency” that he’s occupied since last spring is his right in the next government, as well. (Indeed, he and Hakim were recently reported as reaching an agreement that the presidency’s powers would even be increased!) But it strikes me that Talabani isn’t necessarily a shoo-in for president. If the UIA can really act as a smart and united bloc, they could surely start a nice little bidding war among several different candidates for the presidency… And/or, they could take some steps to cut back the presidency’s presently bloated powers… It does seem very bizarre and anti-democratic that a small ethnic minority like the Kurds would be able to dominate a position in the central state administration that is more powerful than that of the prime minister.
… Well, no doubt we’ll find out much more about all this within the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.