Secular Apostate

This, and from Time, no less…

Andalus Abdel-Rahim Hammadi, a Baghdad school-bus driver, has this much in common with John McCain: both men gambled on the U.S. military’s “surge” in Iraq long before it looked like a sure thing. If the Arizona Senator risked his presidential ambitions on it, the stakes for Hammadi were higher: his life and the lives of his wife and two young children. Last summer, as the final batch of 30,000 additional American troops requisitioned by General David Petraeus was arriving in Iraq, the bus driver and his family left their refuge in Syria to return home. It had been nearly two years since they fled their neighborhood, al-Dora, after al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists killed the wife and son of Hammadi’s brother. His friends and fellow refugees in Damascus warned him that Baghdad was still too dangerous, with dozens being killed daily in sectarian tit-for-tat attacks. But Hammadi, 46, was counting on the increased U.S. troop presence to calm things down. “Nobody can stand against the power of the American military,” he says. “I thought that once they increased their forces, the [terrorists] would not stand a chance…”

But for many Baghdadis, there is now a new anxiety: What happens when the Americans go? “If Petraeus leaves, or if he sends home 50,000 soldiers, will the peace survive? I don’t think so,” says Mithal Alussi, a secular member of parliament with a reputation for straight talking. For all the changes I see and hear, what remains unchanged from a year ago is the mood. My friends and colleagues all warn me against reading too much into the signs of progress. They point out that this is not the first time things have seemed to get a little better, only to turn bad again. They remind me of dashed hopes after the two general elections in 2005, after the death of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi and after any number of unkept promises by al-Maliki…

The Baghdadis caught between these [sectarian] extremes know that the only thing standing in the way of another sectarian conflagration is the U.S. military. This may explain why every Iraqi who offers me a view on American politics seems to be praying for a McCain victory.

Iraqis for McCain, Hamas for Obama.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.