Mario and Bani

Last Wednesday I dropped friend Jim off at his house. We get together every week to just hang out, and it's one of the highlights of a seven day cycle. Last April, Jim and I helped celebrate the liberation of Iraq with tasty lamb, vegetable salad and soda pop with jubilant Iraqi immigrants who live just a few doors down. That happy day they held up the Stars and Stripes and an Iraqi standard, enthusiastically mugging for the TV crews.

That evening I noticed swarthy men sitting outside talking, roughly at the same house in Jim's neighborhood where the expatriates and on a whim walked up and said "hello". I have always found my Arab brethren to be hospitable and soon I was drinking hot, sweet tea on a pleasant summer night.

Two of the men spoke flawless English, and while others in the group tinkered with installing a satellite dish, I asked them how their families were doing in Iraq. Bani and Mario told me their families were doing very well, in their native country.

It turns out that these young lions had just returned from Iraq after completing a contract as translators. They worked with the US military while there. I asked them what they thought of conditions in Iraq.

Bani, the most talkative, told me unequivocably that the violence was to be traced to foreigners and poor, uneducated youth. In his eyes, the militias are the product of young men being whipped into a murderous frenzy by clerics like Sadr who prey upon their ignorance.

This is a remarkable thing, since many of the rabid left who seem to have the ear of at least the European intelligentsia are declaring that the violence in Iraq is the revolution, man! Far from a popular uprising against the occupiers, Bani and Mario agreed it is a handful of troublemakers.

I asked about Abu Ghraib. I told them that I thought what the soldiers did was awful, but wondered just how big a deal the average Iraqi made of it. Bani's take was that it was no big deal in light of the big picture. In fact, he once asked one of the interrogators he provided translation for why he wasn't rougher on the men he had picked up for questioning. Bani told them that Saddam was much more brutal, and that there was a good deal of room between what they were doing and the crimes of the fallen regime. The interrogator told Bani that "We are not Saddam".

This last bit is a particularly telling anecdote. Far from Saddam's torture chambers being reopened under U.S. management as Ted Kennedy stated, it would appear that it is understood at least by Bani's employer that we have a moral obligation to keep a safe distance from the sins of those they deposed. I'm not the least bit surprised by this, though. Our troops are never as bad as the mainstream media seem to believe.

Tim McNabb