!Leaving Iraq --- agk's diary 30 July 2024 @ 21:58 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 drinking horchata on the patio of Nuevo Vallarta --- Almost two years ago my coworker invited me to her house for arabic coffee. A year ago she was badly hurt in a car accident. Now she's returning to work. I saw her after a manditory training us nurses had to do. I finally went to her house for coffee! We always liked each other. We both had unusual lives in the past, but live pretty ordinary lives now. I knew her husband was killed before she left Iraq, but didn't know how extraordinary a life she lived. She knew when I was a young woman I was tortured and interrogated for leadership in anti- imperialist protest in George W. Bush's post-9/11 USA, but not much else. I'll call her Yasmin for the sake of this diary entry. That isn't her name. Yasmin's father held a diplomatic position in Iraq. She liked Saddam Hussein. Her family, a Jewish Iraqi family, knew him, of course. She liked his government's work to develop the country doing things like import substitution. She liked the lack of militant sectarianism, and subsidies that kept everyday life affordable for everyone. She was patriotic during the '80s, when her country was a tool of mine in the awful war with Iran. She still reflexively distrusts all things Iran. She loved traveling. Her favorite place was Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where her dad worked in the Iraqi embassy. They lived there three years in the '70s. Of course she met Tito, and of course she was impressed by him. She loved the city. She was delighted by Kosovo in the mountains and Croatia by the seaside. Other capitols were memorable, too. Amsterdam, Baku, Beiruit (she loved Beiruit almost as much as Sarajevo), Paris. She really disliked London. It's her least favorite place in the world. In Baghdad, her family lived near the airport. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was a relatively frequent visitor in the late '70s and '80s, probably til the PLO was forced out of Lebanon and Jordan into exile in North Africa. She met the compradore King Hussein of Jordan. She didn't think much of him. I can't remember everyone she met, but when she saw shock or surprise on my face, she said, "Of course!" I sat at her kitchen table with her, drinking sweet hot black tea with cardamon pods, eating nuts, a little pile next to me of teas and snacks from her sister in Egypt she pushed on me. Cookies, sage, chopped licorice root. Yasmin told me the formula that finally cleared my daughter's endless wet RSV cough when she was tiny: something like anise, thyme, and black pepper, with honey. She asked if I have high blood pressure before giving me the ziploc of licorice root, then jumped up to move blankets and show me the damage her cat's done to her furniture. Yasmin is highly-educated. She worked as a struct- ural or civil engineer, evaluating the safety of construction and major structural renovation of urban structures and infrastructure. We talked about troubles, terrorism, instability. I hadn't heard about the 1991 coup attempt from the mostly-Shia "marsh Arabs" in southern Iraq. Some- thing like 20,000 of them ended up in a camp in the desert of Saudi Arabia (odd place to house Shia!), receiving an allowence but disallowed from leaving the camp or participating in Saudi society. The camp closed in 2004, after the US invasion of Iraq, and those 5,500 remaining were repatriated. The rest had left, many for the US, Canada, etc. Yasmin thought repatriation in 2004 was one of the factors (along with releasing prisoners and perm- anently unemploying former officers in the armed forces) that led to ultimately to Da'esh. She said wherever my country goes it sows sect- arianism. Under Saddam there was no racism, in Baghdad where she lived, at least, between Sunni and Shia, or between Jews, Christians, Muslims. I didn't think to ask her about Kurds, long used by my country as a base from which to observe and threaten destabilization if Saddam's oil policy got too independent. After the 2003 US invasion, though, I've seen the maps. Mixed Baghdad was ethnically cleansed and reconstituted as more segregated than Chicago. The US put a Shia minority in control and fanned sect- arianism so they'd be loyal to the US because they needed its protection in light of the resentment the US promoted in the wider society. Her family lived near the airport. Her husband and boys lived with her, not sure about her parents. In 2003 my country secured the airport early on. The US wages war by bombing places without air forces or effective anti-aircraft defenses, so it always secures airports as quickly as possible. It became clear as US soldiers expanded their peri- meter and searched homes in her neighborhood, that she should not work for the Iraqi government any- more. She could find her door kicked down, her family held on the floor at gunpoint, her and her husband separated from each other and their child- ren, whisked off to different black sites in Poland or Romania, interrogated. Yasmin heated tapwater in a little pot with a long wooden handle on the glass-top stove in her little two-bedroom apartment. Her younger son was asleep in his room after a long night of work rolling out the fix to the CrowdStrike catastrophe that took down the world's Windows computers. She added the finely-ground coffee, put it back on the heat, and poured us cups with pretty foam on top. A thought I had was how much work there is for a civil or structural engineer during a defensive war against a US intent on ending your country's inde- pendent existence. Was there time, facilities, and money to try to follow professional engineering standards, to rebuild bombed bridges, municipal buildings, power and communications infrastructure? Was there a time in the war when Iraq was trying, under the bombs, to repair what my country destroy- ed? I'll ask next time we have coffee. She quit her job and approached the airport and the Americans to ask for work. She got a job, I'm not sure what, but not an engineering job. I think she might have been a translator, in an office, not on the battlefield. Again, I'll ask. There are gaps every time someone tells their life story. I remember reading how thoroughly my country banjaxed Iraq's considerable infrastructure, and how the US brought in very highly-paid engineers from firms like Halliburton who weren't familiar with the turbines in Iraq's dams, the soil types its bridge piers rested on, or the pumps, pipes, and settling ponds of its water and sewerage treat- ment. Iraq was full of engineers. It had a grain or concrete silo loading a ship on its money, for goodness sakes! Who puts infrastructure on money? But my country hired no Iraqi engineers. We paid our Halliburton contractors unaccounted, unaudited giant bales of 100USD bills shrink- wrapped and flown in on pallets. Our wars are opportunities for this kind of wild west money laundering, grift, graft, overpayment, and legal- ized corruption. Contractors built bridges to no- where, fixed nothing. Yasmin worked as a translator or something. She talked about US officers she used to joke with at her job at the airport. One, a Marine officer, put her down all the time. She always replied, "I will one day live in your country." It was inevitable anti-occupation forces would eventually invade her house and kill her husband, and she would flee with her sons to Jordan. If you are highly educated, she told me, it's dangerous to be in Iraq under US occupation. The Americans will kidnap and interrogate you, or anti-US militants will kill you. Everybody likes the uneducated, hires them, arms them, but no one trusts educated professionals. After she fled with her boys to Jordan, she tried to find a final destination where she could enjoy a lifestyle anything like the one she'd always had, where her boys could become highly educated. In Jordan she was not allowed to work. I think she said there were legal or customary restrictions on women's dress or travel she found odious. It took a long time, but she ended up in Kentucky because she was sponsored by one of the officers she joked with when she worked at the airport. For twelve years now she's lived in one small city, worked in dietary serving food in a mental hospital cafeteria, and tutored special-needs kids in math in the public school system. Her son who lives with her works in IT. The older one's a physician. Why is the world as it is? Why was her country destroyed? Why is she in exile, afraid to ever go back for fear she will be killed? We talked about these questions. I said it's hard to sort out the irrational fear of being killed from the realistic fear security services rarely take cards out of their Rolodexes. I told about how I slowly overcame my fear in the eleven years following my torture and interrogation. She does some conspiracy thinking. She brought up freemasonry. I demonstrated disinterest in that line of inquiry. I told her things are radically changing in west Asia, ultimately for the better, I think. Hashd fighters joined the resistance axis. They're harrying Israel and US bases with Iran's support. She showed disinterest in that. Israel disgusts and horrifies her, but she cannot trust Iran to do good. She has visited her sister in Egypt, but in our country has only been in Kentucky and the national capitol city, Washington, DC. Her boys are grown. She wants to be a cosmopolitan woman of the whole world again, like when she was a child. She put out feelers for any job that will let her spend the rest of her life in the world's capitols. The only employer to express interest was the CIA. I cautioned her about them. I said they use confidential informants to feed them country and situation reports. They use those to keep open the option to destabilize countries and overthrow governments. She said she doesn't want to be part of that. We spent the rest of the visit batting around ideas of what she could do to get back to traveling the world. The coffee was gone. I had to get home to my family. I had no good ideas. Now I've thought of some to discuss next time. She walked me down the steps, and drove too fast ahead of me til I was out of her apartment complex and on a road I know.