Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation

Preface

Why are you going to China? —One of my roommates, when I told her I was going to study in Beirut Preface In February 2003 I left the University of Michigan to spend my ‹nal semester at the American University of Beirut. I went to Beirut for various reasons, including a desire to locate distant relations (my maternal grandparents are ‹rst-generation Lebanese immigrants). I also wanted to be somewhere I could go skiing. But most of all I wanted to be in a place where American students feared to tread, where they didn’t even think to go. I like proving to people that their preconceptions are misconceptions . When I was an intern for the Associated Press in Detroit, I walked the entirety of Eight Mile Road, the roughand -ready border between Detroit and the suburbs. One side of the road was thick with urban rot; the other was edged with tidy tree-lined streets and single-family homes. My mother warned that I was going to get mugged, or worse. My entire walk took place after dark, but all I found were people. They were the people who worked in the strip clubs or hit the bars after a hard day at an auto plant. They were the people who lived along the main thoroughfare. I didn’t end up dead because I was a white boy walking around north Detroit. I ended up hanging out with the people I found there. With war in Iraq almost a certainty, Beirut seemed like an especially good place to break down barriers. I found an apart- ment two blocks from the Mediterranean, not far from the parking lot that had once been the U.S. embassy. (The embassy was blown up twice in the 1980s before they moved it to a forti‹ed compound in the suburbs.) Before long I was marching with Lebanese students and a handful of internationals to protest the American invasion of Iraq. We marched in solidarity with the Lebanese demonstrators, holding signs identifying ourselves as American: the Lebanese police were too afraid to turn tear gas and water cannons on internationals. We voiced our disgust. The day the bombing began in Baghdad, students blocked the doors to all the classrooms, though most of us had already decided to skip class and attend a march to the British embassy. After the march ended I stayed with the kids hurling rocks through the embassy windows, dodging tear gas, ‹re hoses, and ri›e butts. I was amazed. Here they were, expressing the outrage so many of my peers and I feel, but in a manner we would never dare. My friends in Beirut often asked me, “You are an American who opposes the war. But what are you really doing about it?” “I’m writing about what I see here,” I would say. “I’m telling people in America what people outside America are saying. And I’m reassuring people here that everyone in America hasn’t gone nuts.” But it happened over and over again. I was sitting in a bar in Beirut the night the war started, with Mira and Rania, two friends who always took me to task for being American. My French was less than perfect; my Arabic was nonexistent. Here I was, a kid from the Midwest in the Mideast, just hanging out. They knew how I felt toward my government , they knew that I didn’t hold the same prejudices and misconceptions as many Americans, and so we usually didn’t get stuck on questions of motivation, or on questions of blame. But on that night it was all too much. Rania started crying. “Why would they do this? Why do Americans want to make war?” Maybe it was just machismo. Maybe it was because the disx PREFACE tance between Beirut and Baghdad is less than that between Detroit and New York. I decided to go to Baghdad. I was in the position to do it, so why not? It was considerably less of a sacri‹ce than many of my compatriots were being asked to make. It suddenly became entirely real to me that a large part of the story of my generation was unfolding not too far to the east. At the very least, I could bear witness. “I’m going to Baghdad,” I told Rania. I don’t remember now if those words stopped the tears...