Yass Alkafaji is a Northeastern Illinois University accounting professor and an ÈmigrÈ from Iraq. Professor Alkafaji went to Baghdad in January as the director of finance for the Ministry of Higher Education of the Coalition Provisional Authority. In this Chicago Tribune (free subscription required) interview, he relates what it’s like on the ground in Baghdad. Read the entire interview, but here are a few highlights:
Alkafaji recently left Baghdad during one of the bloodiest months of the U.S. occupation. We shared chai lattes at a Starbucks in Sauganash to discuss what he saw and heard while he was there. We thought he would be full of tales of violence in Sadr City, mutilations in Fallujah and bombings in Basra. But, oddly enough, he said that while he was there, he hardly noticed these events that made headlines all over the world.
Q. You were in Iraq during some of the worst anti-American violence of the occupation. How did that affect your work?
A. I did not notice it. Even though I was in the middle of it, I was apart from it. It was not something we thought about on a daily basis. We got briefings, and we’d hear people saying things here and there. Sometimes I would receive calls from my wife, and she was telling me what was happening in the green zone, where I was living, but I didn’t know it. Or we would be working in the middle of the day at our computers and we would hear explosions, boom boom, and we would simply look up and go back to work.
Q. What is your take on the mood of the Iraqi people?
A. They are thankful to the U.S. for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and they are content that the military needs to be there. But after that, they are divided between how long should the U.S. military stay and whether they are doing a good job or not. The U.S. military presence is very visible, and they [the soldiers] are really scared, so their posture is very offensive. They see Iraqis, and they put guns in your face. They move in convoys, and they tell people to get away from them. When the convoys are in a traffic jam in the middle of Baghdad, that is the most dangerous thing. So they shout at people to get out of the way, and they drive up on the sidewalk of some stores. That creates a lot of hard feelings for the Iraqis.
Q. What about the economic and employment situation with ordinary Iraqis?
A. Most of the people are not informed of what the U.S. is doing because they don’t see the visible improvement of their livelihood, especially those who don’t have a government job . . . I think there is still a lot of confusion about who is the good Iraqi and who is the bad Iraqi. I think [the U.S.] has shown to the rest of the world that we are really ignorant when it comes to dealing with other cultures. We have a great military power, but when it comes to building nations we have no idea. You can see the tension in the clashes between the British and Americans in the palace. The Americans will say `do this or do that’ and the British will just be shaking their head. But the British have a much longer history in the Middle East, and they know how to deal with the Arab mentality. They feel very marginalized.
Q. Depending on how people want to spin it, they characterize the recent violence as a few bad apples or a popular uprising. How do you see it?
A. Surveys show about 70 percent of the Iraqi people accept that there is a need for the American military to be in Iraq, otherwise it will be chaotic and there will be no security on the ground. Of course, if you talk to someone in Sadr City with a first-grade education, they will say otherwise. One day I was waiting seven hours to try to leave the compound to try to see my sister. We had some thugs from the Sadr group demonstrating 15 feet away saying, “We want the U.S. out.” So I said, “OK, the U.S. is out and then what next? Who is going to control the country?” They don’t think about the implications of what they say.
Hat tip to Daniel Drezner for the link to this interesting interview.