Heading for Baghdad: the psychological

I’m a coward, and Baghdad can be frightening.  I had a colleague on my second trip who thought the spiral landing of the small plane we were riding in was as good as a roller coaster.  She laughed all the way to the tarmac.  I thought it was as bad as a roller coaster.  No laughter or thrills for me.

That said, there is no point in being paralyzed by fear, because most minutes of the day in most places there is nothing to be frightened of.  No detonations, no gunfire, no rocket whines, no “big voice” telling you to take cover.  Life can be amazingly normal, even if everyone around you is carrying weapons.  You may as well enjoy it, especially in the cool of the winter.

I do.  It is a privilege to sit down to talk with people who are trying to rebuild their lives and their country after decades of repression and more than seven years of warfare.  Many of them are truly courageous.  Some have suffered terrible losses, either at Saddam Hussein’s hands or at our own.  What most people are looking for is deceptively simple:  normal lives.  They want security, shelter and food for their families, a decent job for themselves, education and health care for their kids.

But that is not what they talk about.  They talk about violence, unfairness, the lousy politicians, whether things were better under Saddam, who got hurt last night, what the latest rumor is, why the American Embassy won’t give them asylum in the U.S.  Among the politicians, there is the blame game:  things are bad because the Americans don’t understand Iraq, because Maliki is a sectarian, because the constitution is no good, because the Iranians control everything, because someone is helping Al Qaeda, because Tehran and Washington want it that way….

Listening to this for hours on end can be head spinning, but it is important not only to listen but to hear.  Their logic is not our logic, their obvious is not our obvious, their conclusions are not our conclusions.  Just because someone blames the Americans for everything bad that has happened since 2003 (and before 2003) doesn’t necessarily mean they want the Americans to leave right away.  Better they fix things on their way out.  America in this logic owes Iraq, not the other way around.  The conspiracy between Washington and Tehran–a constant of Iraqi discourse–seems obvious to them:  Maliki gets support from them both, as did the once-dominant Shia political party.  What more proof do you need?

So there is a real need to wipe one’s memory banks clean and listen carefully so as to hear what they are saying in the terms they are saying it in, even when it is offensive to Americans.  I’ve had Iraqis tell me that killing Americans is a good thing, and look at me as if they might take their own advice on the spot.  But before they got up from the table, they might be appealing for American assistance, hoping that we would rescue them from a desperate situation.

Few in Iraq admit to having emotional or mental problems–they often claim there is no PTSD, no paranoia, no schizophrenia, no mental illness of any sort.  Then when you hear the life stories, it is simply not believable.  Loss of relatives, loss of property, displacement from their homes, fear of telling even your own family that you work with the Americans, communities uprooted and physically obliterated.

I come home from just a visit a bit traumatized, wondering whether there is anything a mere mortal can do to make the situation any better.  The reality is that you can’t do a lot, but getting people to talk to each other, helping them to figure out what has caused such a profound disturbance to their lives and giving them an opportunity to figure out what to do to fix it is not nothing.  I always return relieved for my own safety and determined to try to do a bit more to help out.

Tomorrow:  the political