Posters of him are everywhere in the Shia areas, alongside the faces of his father and father-in-law, who both rose to the rank of Grand Ayatollah. They appear on the upper corners of this poster. His father was murdered by Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who oppressed the Shia.
Iraq has always been divided between the minority Sunni and the majority Shia, two sects of Islam with more similarities than differences, but enough differences to create centuries of bloodshed. Check out the BBC for a good summary of the differences between Sunni and Shia. Since the beginnings of Islam the Sunni have been in charge, and every subsequent colonizer or national government has kept the Sunnis on top. Everyone, that is, until the Coalition established democratic elections and suddenly the majority got to rule.
Muqtada Al-Sadr popped onto the American radar during the Coalition occupation. He criticized the U.S.-led occupation and in response, the Coalition closed down his newspaper. Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army then rose up in revolt. The Coalition tried to arrest al-Sadr, which led to a protracted battle with heavy losses on both sides. Al-Sadr remained a free man.
This bloody victory made Al-Sadr’s reputation. He soon controlled large areas of Iraq and killed off many of his opponents and forced many Sunnis to become refugees. He also installed his version of Sharia law. Alcohol vendors and other “undesirables” were frequently executed. On the other hand, his organization distributed food and rebuilt infrastructure.
Al-Sadr also played the political game. His party did so well that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, shown on the lower right of this photo, had to form a coalition with him. Al-Sadr’s greatest personal triumph came when Saddam Hussein was executed, a scene that appears next to al-Maliki in this poster. It seems to say, “Vote for us, we got rid of Saddam.”Below is another al-Sadr poster, with the man himself on the right. The faceless figure in the center could either be the Imam Ali or Mohammad. The Imam Ali is often shown with his face depicted, and even the Prophet Mohammad is sometimes depicted in Shia art. The periodic flare-ups of indignation against depictions of Mohammad are mostly a Sunni phenomenon.
Traveling in Iraq, I’ve been constantly confronted with posters of a man with Iraqi and Western blood on his hands, a symbol of the ongoing sectarian divide. Sadr’s organization claims it has renounced violence, but with the ongoing clashes between Sunni and Shia I find that hard to believe.
Don’t miss the rest of my series, “Destination: Iraq,” chronicling my 17-day journey across this strife-ridden country in search of adventure, archaeology, and AK-47s.
We heard our first gunshots a week into our trip. We were resting after a long drive in our Baghdad hotel when shots crackled through the night. Anyone who was sleeping immediately got up. Nothing wakes you up quicker than gunshots in Iraq.
Insurgency? Sectarian violence? No, a wedding taking place in front of the hotel.
Iraqis like firing in the air when they’re celebrating – when their team scores a goal, when someone returns from the Hajj, when someone gets married, or just because they’re happy. It used to freak the hell out of the American soldiers.
When we got outside we found a crowd of guys dancing to a brass band while women stood to one side and clapped. A few of the younger girls danced with each other. The men were all dressed in Western styles, as were some of the women. Other women, especially the older ones, wore the abaya, a loose cloak of black cloth covering everything except the face and hands, which some women cover as well.
The appearance of a crowd of Westerners didn’t slow down the wedding at all. Most people kept on dancing like we weren’t even there. Some came up to say hello. One guy stuck his phone in front of my face and showed me a photo of himself in uniform next to some American soldiers. “Friend! Friend!” he shouted over the music.
Soon the bride and groom went up to their room and the party broke up. We went to our rooms too. We had another long, dusty drive the next day.
Heat and dust. Way too much heat and dust on this trip. And I went in October.
Iraq is a big country and its best sights are spread out over hundreds of miles, so we did a lot of driving. We went the length of the nation, from Basra in the swampy south to Kurdistan in the mountainous north. Much of our time, however, was in the vast desert in the middle.
Driving is easy thanks to an excellent highway system built by Saddam Hussein. It’s been well maintained ever since. The absence of potholes would put many U.S. state highways to shame. Despite the good roads, travel is a lot slower than in peaceful countries because of the numerous checkpoints. Concrete blast walls line the roads where watchtowers and armored personnel carriers keep a close eye out for terrorists. Sometimes the guards waved us through, sometimes they held us up, once for as long as two hours.
Blast walls, like the one shown above, aren’t just for checkpoints. They’re everywhere – in front of government buildings, schools, gas stations, mosques and dividing Sunni from Shia neighborhoods. Security is a constant issue here and you’re never allowed to forget it.
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Our tour leader told us that “sometimes” we’d have a police escort. “Sometimes” turned into “most of the time.” We usually had a different group of cops each day and it was luck of the draw whether they’d be friendly or aloof. The annoying thing about them was how they often got in the way of my interacting with regular Iraqis. People tend to treat you differently when have an armed escort. There were a couple of times, though, when I was really, really grateful for their presence.
We started out with ten travelers, six of whom only stayed for nine days while I and the rest stayed for the full 16. Because of a scheduling mixup I had an extra day alone in Baghdad at the end. That led to some weirdness I’ll get to later. My companions came from all over – Canada, the UK, Norway, Spain; we even had a couple of Americans. One kept saying he was from Canada, and while I generally have a problem with Americans pretending to be Canadians, I let it slide in this situation.
There were no women. This was both good and bad. It’s interesting to travel in the Middle East with women because they get to speak to a lot more local women and thus have a very different experience. I traveled in Syria with a woman and it was fun comparing notes at the end of the day. We had two completely different trips. The presence of a woman does tend to complicate things in Muslim countries, though.
We were all seasoned travelers and nobody appeared particularly nervous, although we all got uncomfortable at times and dealt with it in different ways. One middle-aged guy was really gung-ho, like he regretted never being in the army and was trying to compensate. Once when we got out of the bus to visit a mosque in the tension-laden city of Mosul he told us to, “Lock and load, boys.”
Gag.
Everyone had read up on Iraq and had their own special interests in archaeology, politics, or religion. All except for Mr. Gung-ho, who knew almost nothing and cared even less. He was just there for the bragging rights.
One guy was a doctor who fortunately never had to use his emergency room skills, and another was a programmer with a talent for photography. He has an awesome travel photo collection online. My roommate was a 68-year-old Norwegian engineer who groaned every time he looked at the electric wiring. He kept taking photos of dodgy fuse boxes and substations so he could give a lecture to his coworkers when he got home. He’s also an accomplished sailor who took small boats across the Indian Ocean and far north of the Arctic Circle. If I’m doing stuff that cool 25 years from now I’ll consider myself a success.
The Iraqis treated us with a mixture of wariness, curiosity, and friendliness. In “My War,” Colby Buzzell’s excellent memoir of his time with the U.S. Army in 2003-4, he noted that “[the women] would stare at us but as soon as you made eye contact, they would look away. The Iraqi men were a little different. They stare too, but don’t look away, and if you wave, which is something they never initiate, they wave back, nervously.”
Things have changed a bit since then. The women still look away, except for a few younger ones who will hold your gaze and smile for a tantalizing moment. The men have chilled out much more. They rarely wave first, but when you wave or say salaam alaykum most burst into a smile and return your greeting. In the frequent traffic jams the folks in the next car would often roll down their windows and start a conversation.
The general impression I got from a lot of Iraqis was that they wanted us to understand that we were welcome.
Another thing Buzzell noted was that every time he went on patrol he’d come back with his pockets stuffed with gifts. This happened to us too. Possibly my weirdest experience in Iraq was one night at a restaurant along a highway. It consisted of one huge dining room serving up quick dinners for hungry motorists. The crowd was mostly truck drivers, busloads full of pilgrims, and a weightlifting team loading up on carbs.
The TV was playing “Black Hawk Down.” A bunch of the Iraqis were really getting into it and I got sucked in too. It’s a damn good movie, after all. I don’t know if the Iraqis found it ironic to be watching an American war movie in the middle of Iraq, but I sure did. I kept waiting for them to cheer when any of the American soldiers got tagged. That never happened.
After seeing American troops blast through Mogadishu, we headed out to our bus. On the way out, the owner of the restaurant came up to me with a smile, said “welcome,” and gave me a pack of chewing gum.
Who knows? Maybe he did the same thing when American soldiers were on his street instead of just his television.
Don’t miss the rest of my series, “Destination: Iraq,” chronicling my 17-day journey across this strife-ridden country in search of adventure, archaeology, and AK-47s.
Coming up next: “Moqata Al-Sadr Promotional Posters – Why Saddam’s Hanging Makes For Good Advertising!”
Who the hell would want to spend their vacation in Iraq?
Lots of people, if they knew the reality behind the media image.
Iraq is the cradle of civilization, with famous sites such as Babylon, Ur, and Uruk. It’s also home to stunning Islamic architecture, lively souks and a variety of terrain ranging from snowy mountains to marshland, along with way too much desert.
And then there are the people. Anyone who has traveled in the Middle East can attest to Arab hospitality. Get away from tourism hotspots like Egypt and parts of Morocco, and you’ll find the Arabs to be warm, welcoming, and always ready to sit down and chat. It seems the less visited the area, the more interested the locals are in meeting foreigners. Using this logic, I figured Iraq should be a pretty friendly place, besides the occasional terrorist, of course.
Because of security concerns, individual travel in Iraq is forbidden. Luckily, a few hardy adventure travel companies offer group tours. I chose Hinterland Travel, run by Geoff Hann, an old hand in the region who I interviewed a few years ago. He was running tours there even back in the days when a certain pot-bellied tyrant named Saddam was in power.
So I’m traveling in a war-torn region rife with sectarian violence under the care of a man I’d never met? Isn’t that a bit stupid? Car bombs, Al Qaeda, people being beheaded on Youtube videos, hello!
Yeah, yeah, I know. But there are 31 million people living in Iraq 365 days a year, so there’s got to be a lot more happening there than that. That’s what I signed up to see. I’ve been to so-called dangerous regions before – Palestine, Kurdistan, and Somaliland, to name a few – and every single one of them turned out to be less dangerous than TV wants us to believe. The media thrives on death. When the famine ended in Ethiopia, it dropped off the news. When the civil war ended in Colombia, it dropped off the news. And how often do you hear about Iraq when something isn’t blowing up?
The top photo showing a bunch of heavily armed guys is what you might expect from Iraq. But wait, they’re smiling, and those two foreigners with them aren’t getting capped! That’s part of life here – lots of guns and lots of smiles. To get even further away from the image the mass media rams down our throats, jump the cut to see another of my daily experiences in Iraq.This is the start of a new series, “Destination: Iraq,” chronicling my 17-day journey across this strife-ridden country in search of adventure, archaeology and AK-47s.
Coming up next: “A Run-in With The Iraqi Police!”
[Top photo by Rob Hammond. Bottom photo by Per Steffensen]
Conventional wisdom dictates that there are two ways to become an ambassador in the United States: become a friend or big-time donor of the President or work your way up through the ranks of the Foreign Service by not stepping on too many toes. But there are a handful of current and former ambassadors that aren’t always very diplomatic, and Ambassador Ed Peck is right at the top of that list.
I met Ambassador Peck in 2002, when he gave a lecture to a class I was in about the importance of dissent in the Foreign Service. I was impressed by how passionate and outspoken he was and more than a little surprised the State Department invited him to speak to us. The Hollywood native retired in 1989 after 37 years of government service, five years in the military and 32 years in the Foreign Service.
Peck served as the U.S. Ambassador to Mauritania, the Chief of Mission in Baghdad before we had an ambassador there, and deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism, among many other jobs. His overseas assignments also included stints in Sweden, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. He’s made a habit of speaking his mind and often says things that people don’t want to hear.Peck thinks that terrorists hate America because of what we’ve done, not who we are. And Peck, who is Jewish, has been an outspoken critic of Israeli conduct in the Occupied Territories. Peck now serves as a media commentator, runs a consulting business called Foreign Services International and occasionally dips his feet back into politics – in 2010, he was part of an aid flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
We caught up with Ambassador Peck recently to ask him how American can bolster its image in the Middle East, how the Foreign Service has changed over the years and what makes a good Ambassador.
You joined the Foreign Service in 1957. What was your motivation?
In my junior year at UCLA, I was chosen to go on Project India, which sort of planted the seeds for the Peace Corps. We spent the summer of ’55 traveling all over India by bus and train to play basketball and volleyball and speak to students, argue, explain, drink lots of tea and participate in the building of dispensaries.
That trip changed my life. I came back and changed my major from forestry to business administration and decided I wanted to join the Foreign Service.
What was the selection process like in those days?
It was a one-day exam at that time. It had long been a three-day exam given only in Washington, D.C., and everyone traveled and stayed at their own expense. And at that time, if you got in, you had to pay to ship your own effects overseas and for your housing. So because of that financial proposition, the Foreign Service consisted of moneyed New England aristocracy. It was a group of snots basically.
By the time I came along, it was a one-day test given all around the world and shipping and housing were paid for. That’s how you got a bunch of peasants like me – people with no roman numerals after their names, born of immigrant parents and without family money. So I embarked on this career and enjoyed it enormously the whole time. Not every minute of every day, not every single boss I had but living and working overseas was, to me, a genuine reward even if it was unpleasant or unsafe or unhealthy or not very exciting.
And where did they send you?
When I first came into the Foreign Service, there was no bidding, you were just assigned to places. My first post was the Consulate General in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is no longer there and then I went to Tangier to learn Arabic, six hours a day, five days a week for 22 months. Then we spent two years in Tunis and in ’66 we went to Oran, Algeria. I was the principal officer of a four-person outpost consulate.
There were no other Americans for 300 miles in any direction. We were all by ourselves out there. They told me, ‘the reason you’re out there Ed, is if one day you don’t answer the phone, we’ll know Morocco has invaded.’
During the Six Days War in ’67, we had nine demonstrations against the consulate in the first five days of that war, which was, I’m told, a world record at that time. They never got in, it never became violent, but it scared the crap out of us.
Did they evacuate you?
Everyone else was evacuated on day five except me. I got into the consulate car, leaving everything else behind and drove through nine Algerian roadblocks to get to the embassy in Algiers, where diplomatic relations had been broken and what was left was known as an Interests Section, under the Swiss flag. All the dependents plus most of the employees were gone. Two months, my family rejoined me in Algiers, and four months later, I reopened the consulate in Oran and flew the only American flag in Algeria since consular relations had not been broken.
It was the only one-person post in the world and finally they hired my wife to act as my admin assistant, which was probably against regulations. We were there for roughly a year.
What was the starting salary when you joined?
I can tell you exactly what I was paid then: $5,200, a good salary. A condominium we own in D.C. now rents, monthly, for exactly that amount.
I worked for the Mobil oil company after graduation but I got fired for doing many of the things that got me into trouble at the State Department: telling people what I thought. Then I worked for Shell and quit to join the Foreign Service. I think I took a $400 pay cut to join. We rented a nice big one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, for $75 per month.
You were in the Foreign Service for 32 years and the military for five. How do you compare them?
There are similarities. You’re on duty 24 hours a day. You go where they send you and you do what they tell you to do. Those are the similarities. There is a much higher esprit de corps in the military. The Foreign Service is a very low-key organization. Very few people have any idea what the Foreign Service is or what it does. Some think it has something to do with the French Foreign Legion.
The only time any attention is paid to us is when there’s a catastrophe overseas, like the killing in Libya. Otherwise, Americans really don’t care very much, as long as other countries do things the way we want them to.
Also, unlike the military, the Foreign Service has no political clout like the military does. We’re impecunious, we have no political clout or domestic constituency, we have no uniforms and no one knows what we’re doing out in Bunga-Dunga or Puerto Banana or wherever the hell we are.
You don’t usually become an Ambassador by pissing people off though, do you?
I won a dissent award as a middle grade officer, and years later I did a study for The American Foreign Service Association. It turns out that people in the middle grades were more likely to be promoted if they had won a dissent award. And those who went on to become Ambassadors were much more likely to have won a dissent award. So if you do it the right way, persistently and with a sense of humor it doesn’t hurt you. But people knew that if I went to work for them, I’d tell them what I thought.
You spent most of your career in the Middle East. How do you improve our image in the Arab World?
We’ve repaired our ties with Germany and Japan so it can be done. People say Arabs and Jews have never lived in peace together. That is absolute horse crap. How would your relationship with your next-door neighbor change if you woke up one morning and found they’d moved their fence onto your property? If they dug up some plants and trees while doing it? Or especially if they moved their fence all the way to the next house and pushed you out.
And the President is extremely limited in what he can do, because he’s beholden to what his party thinks need to be done in order for him to be re-elected. So he’s not going to do anything to offend Israel because there is a very dedicated, powerful lobby. We like to tell people our way isn’t just the right way; it’s the only way. It’s called American exceptionalism. But by definition, you can’t impose democracy. It isn’t going to work.
I was asked by the BBC about the $1 billion American Embassy in Baghdad and I told them, ‘It’s not an Embassy, it’s a fortress, you can’t walk down to the market, you have to go in an armored car with helicopter gunships flying overhead.’ That’s not the Foreign Service I knew.
But you want the place you work to be safe, do you not? We’ve just had several embassies and consulates attacked around the world and the terrorism threat has magnified in a big way since your career ended.
We brought this on ourselves. The Swedish embassy doesn’t have to move. The Australian embassy doesn’t have to be boarded up and placed behind barbed wire. We brought this onto ourselves in terms of our relations with other countries by our own behavior. It’s focused in the Middle East because there we are violating all of our founding principles every day. Don’t we stand for freedom, justice and liberty all around the world? No. Only in some places.
Gaddafi had to go because he killed almost 1,000 Libyans who were engaged in an armed uprising to overthrow him, so he had to go. Netanyahu killed 1,400 Gazans in Gaza who weren’t armed and weren’t engaged in an armed uprising to overthrow his government and he used American guns, bombs, bullets, rockets, planes, napalm and white phosphorus bombs. But that’s OK isn’t it?
Let’s be clear. No one in his or her right mind, and there are people who will not qualify for inclusion, wants anything bad to happen to anyone in the Middle East. Not one Israeli, or Palestinian or American, or anyone else. But terrible things have, are and, I fear, will happen to all those groups unless and until the Occupation ends, and Palestinians live in peace and security with Israel as their neighbor.
Hold on, we can debate why there are threats out there against us, but the reality is that there is danger in representing the U.S. overseas. Don’t our diplomats deserve to be in secure facilities?
You can never permit a designer or architect to make decisions. Security people are trained to focus far more on security than on operational effectiveness, it’s all just security for security’s sake.
What did you love about the Foreign Service?
Travel, learning, listening, informing and explaining. I would go back in the Foreign Service tomorrow if they’d have me. I loved it; I treasured it. I thought it was an honorable job and I recommend that people join but it’s not the same Foreign Service life that I lived.
Residents of another ancient city, Petra in Jordan, appear to have taken advantage of desert water to support their civilization too. Jordanian and Dutch archaeologists have discovered that an area 15 kilometers east of the city used to be a large oasis. The ancients tapped into it with an extensive network of aqueducts, reservoirs and underground canals cut out of the rock to water their fields.
Petra, capital of the Nabatean Kingdom, was a major trading center in the deserts of what is now Jordan and grew rich off of trading luxury items such as frankincense and myrrh.
The Udhruh Archaeological Project, named after the site, has found evidence that the irrigation system dates back at least 2,000 years. The area was in use for several centuries and the team has also found what may be the best-preserved Roman fort in the world. You can take a virtual tour of that fort here. The tour will show you not only the fort, but also a Byzantine church and a satellite view of the entire site.