If you wanted to get depressed on the day after Christmas, you could always read Washington Post foreign correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer’s account of her deep guilt about escaping Iraq for a new posting in Egypt and trying to get her dog out of country ahead of poor Iraqi refugees whose lives were ruined by American occupation. Every Westerner in the story seems to be an Ugly American, and even as Knickmeyer recalled her return to Baghdad in October, the much quieter streets weren’t grounds for optimism: "our bureau seemed more than ever a medium-security prison....It seemed the silence of a dead city."
This is nothing new for Knickmeyer, who has a talent for talking down good news.
Any reader can get involved in the compassionate details of the story, that Knickmeyer had been haunted by a scene in war-torn Liberia, when the favored few escaped, one with a blue poodle, as a woman complained that some dogs were treated better than humans. You can also be haunted by her story of her dog Wiley being scared by bombs and how they buried in their garden a human elbow that landed in the yard. But about 22 paragraphs in, as she chronicles leaving the country a year ago and putting her dog on a plane to Oklahoma in October, notice how the reporter’s distaste for privileged white Westerners and her opposition to the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq sneaks into the storyline:
A "Mad Max" array of mostly white, mostly Western security contractors pulled up to the airport in waves of armored SUVs, some with sirens wailing. Their gunners squatted in the open backs. Sunglasses blanked out their expressions. They were the "trunk monkeys" -- security contractor parlance for the gunmen who ride in the back of convoys, aiming their weapons at the Iraqi civilians on the road. Other gunmen poked their heads out the hatches of steel-plated trucks.
The vehicles offloaded mercenaries rotating out of Iraq on their six-week break. Many of the contractors lugged dog kennels. Guard dogs and sniffer dogs that had done their time in Iraq were headed home.
There was a bark, and a scream. A German shepherd had snapped at a young Iraqi woman standing in line. The woman fell back into the arms of her friends. A contractor tugged the dog's leash and spoke sharply to it. He didn't look at the gasping Iraqi woman or speak to her.
Another contractor stepped out of his vehicle, his half-eaten breakfast in a foam container. Smiling, he crouched down and handed his leftovers to a little boy waiting in line. For most Westerners, their trips in and out of the airport would be their only chance to interact with an Iraqi family not at gunpoint.
Puzzled, the boy's middle-class mother took the box of leftovers from the boy, to be polite. She looked at the carton of milk with it. She shrugged, bemused at the ways of Westerners here, and at why he thought her family needed food.
"BLACKWATER? BLACKWATER?" an American woman bellowed at the head of the line. And Blackwater employees moved forward, showed their IDs and moved up the line.
As the Westerners jumped the line, an Iraqi businessman with teeth mottled by tobacco pulled out his Iraqi national ID card, known as his "genzia." He joked to the people around him in the line.
"Hey, I've got an ID!" he said. "Doesn't this count?"
Apparently not. All Westerners working in Iraq have some form of security clearance and IDs that give them access in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Most Iraqis don't.
Other Iraqi men pulled out their national ID cards. They wiggled the cards about. They asked each other rhetorical questions about whose country it was.
They were just kidding. After four years of occupation, with Americans banning Iraqis from base swimming pools and shunting them to separate portable toilets, Iraqis knew all too well whose country it was.
As morning wore on, I could see only two other Westerners still in the line, right ahead of me. They were graying American contractors, chatting with each other, comparing the rigors of child-support laws in various U.S. states.
The line had all but stopped moving, owing to so many Westerners cutting in. Rules ought to apply to everyone, the two contractors said. It wasn't right, they said.
My heroes, I thought. My child-support-evading heroes.
I had spent 21 months in Baghdad. I stayed in line. My plane left. I had to get a later flight.
* * *
Finally, in October, I went back to Baghdad to bring out Wiley. My cousins in Oklahoma had agreed to take her, and it seemed the best option.
Back in Baghdad after 10 months away, our bureau seemed more than ever a medium-security prison. Almost all of our Iraqi staffers had moved in. Traveling to and from work had become too dangerous. At night they slept 10 or more to a room.
Baghdad was much quieter. I was there 48 hours and heard only one boom that could have been a bomb, no gunfire, and only one or two of the military and mercenary helicopters that used to fly over our place.
It seemed the silence of a dead city. Blast walls encased entire districts, sarcophagi for dead neighborhoods.
Iraqi staffers made uncharacteristic jokes about smuggling themselves out in my suitcases -- only this time, hiding in my dog kennel and flying cargo to Oklahoma with Wiley. They were normally incredibly stoical and must have been miserable to expose themselves that way.
But hiding in suitcases was about the only way Iraqis could make it to the United States. The Bush administration had promised to take in more Iraqi refugees over the last year. But the week I was in Baghdad, it announced how many Iraqis it had managed to allow in: 1,600.
Syria, which had taken in hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, announced that same week new visa restrictions for them. More than ever, Iraqis had nowhere to run.
But Knickmeyer noted the airport trip was easy, and nearly everyone followed the rules. The story has a less-than-happy ending, since Knickmeyer’s dog Wiley disappeared after it found a new home in Oklahoma.
