| Iraqi native still hopeful on Iraq, but fears U.S. may be stuck there for years |
| 2006-03-30 |
| By Jim Phillips |
| Athens NEWS Senior Writer |
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Two years ago, when Athens resident Semiramis "Sami" Huwe gave a local talk about her experiences as a U.S. military translator in her homeland of Iraq, she insisted that most Iraqis were glad to have U.S. troops invade and occupy the country.
Now, many bombings and insurgent attacks later, and with Iraq getting closer to full-scale civil war, Huwe says she still supports the U.S. mission to rebuild her homeland. She also admits, however, that it now seems troops may have to stay there much longer than many people had originally hoped.
"I don't believe most Iraqis want America to leave, because it would be a chaos," Huwe said Tuesday. "But the shortest period (to achieve stability) I would think is five years. I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong."
Huwe's sister, who just got back from Iraq in December, gave an even darker prognosis.
"The situation right now is chaos," acknowledged Mariana Samo. "And I don't see it getting -- I hate to admit it -- much better."
Both women have done contract work as translators for the U.S. Department of Defense, to help with interrogations of Iraqis. Huwe, who lives in Athens, worked in her home country in 2003, not long after the invasion, while Samo, who makes her home in California, got back recently from a 14-month stint in Iraq.
Both insist that much of the violence in Iraq is not homegrown, but is the result of outside agitators from Syria and Iran, who hire Iraqis to plant bombs or act as lookouts. This is easy, they said, because in Iraq's ravaged economy, work is scarce and money can buy a lot of assistance for terrorism.
Samo cited an Iraqi teacher she helped question, who had long been unable to get work, because the Iraqi ministry of education would not issue him the necessary clearance. She said during her time in Iraq she saw countless professional people out of work and desperately in need of income.
"So, they will just plant that IED (improvised explosive device) for $10," she said.
Huwe agreed that the bulk of the bombings and other attacks are instigated by outsiders.
"Most of it -- I would say 90 percent," she estimated, adding that she believes it was a mistake not to immediately shut down the borders into Iraq after the U.S. invasion.
This would appear to counter recent reporting from Iraq that suggests much of the recent violence -- including kidnappings and execution-style slayings in and around Baghdad -- are a result of score settling between native Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis. Various media reported earlier this week that for the first time the latest death count from such sectarian violence had exceeded deaths from insurgent attacks against the Iraqi and American military.
HUWE NOTED THAT, IRONICALLY, though work is scarce in Iraq, while she was there, the country was awash in American greenbacks, many apparently fresh from the mint.
"I have never seen so many American dollars in my life as I saw there," she recalled. "Some of them were brand-new notes!"
Both women were involved closely in questioning Iraqis for the U.S. military, and both said that prisoner abuse, like the notorious reports from Abu Ghraib prison, is not the norm.
"Iraqis would rather be detained by Americans than by Iraqis, because we treat them royally," Samo said. She called the abuses at Abu Ghraib "an isolated incident that happened -- it was unfortunate."
Huwe said that she did not see any abuse of prisoners, and would have intervened to stop it if she had. However, she added, she can understand to some extent why an interrogator might become abusive in an attempt to soften up a tough prisoner who was lying to his questioners.
"I'm not condoning it," she stressed. "But I'm saying, sometimes these things happen in war."
Huwe said she believes the majority of Iraqis do want a democratic, secular government, though she warned that the Iraqi version of democracy will probably be different from the American style.
Both women said the United States needs to more aggressively work to identify and eliminate the leaders of the insurgency, and to hand off more of the responsibility for policing Iraq to native forces.
"They need to give more power to the Iraqis themselves," Huwe said. "We need to equip them, and we need to train them."
Samo agreed, adding that in the short term this may require even greater U.S. troop commitment. "They need more forces, more security, and to get the Iraqis off their butts," she suggested. "We need to step up their training, and bring the forces together."
She noted that countless firms from the United States and elsewhere are poised to invest in the country, but won't do so until the violence is quelled. And while some parts of Iraq are essentially lawless at this point, Samo said, others, especially in the Kurdish north, are both peaceful and on the way to prosperity.
DESPITE THE serious problems facing the U.S. mission in Iraq, both Huwe and Samo said they still believe the invasion was worth launching, and hold out hope that, as President Bush suggests, things will get better with perseverance and less nay-saying at home.
"I really think the media is not doing justice to what (the U.S. forces) are doing over there," Huwe argued. "The media is not telling everything that's happening."
In a piece about how Western journalists are covering Iraq, the American Journalism Review recently chronicled the dangers of this assignment: "Despite all these efforts to keep them safe and working, journalists in Iraq say that many important stories remain out of reach." According to the article, National Public Radio reporter Deborah Amos "recalls a time before the rebellion turned ugly when journalists 'were free to roam the country... We could talk to anyone. There is simply no comparison to those halcyon days.'"
Another journalist quoted in the AJR story, Chris Cramer, managing director for CNN International, described Iraq as "the most dangerous place on God's earth. It is awful. There is something potentially alarming around every corner."
Samo said that if it weren't for her husband, who fears for her safety in Iraq, she would go back in a minute to keep helping out.
"We could do so much for that country," she said. "I still believe in our cause there, and I would go back again... The guys and women (in the U.S. forces), all of them over there, are my heroes." |
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