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| March 26, 2007 | George Packer | Betrayed |
From The New Yorker
Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic
spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly
young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically
that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute
Iraq’s smallest minority. I came across them in every city: the young
man in Mosul who loved Metallica and signed up to be a translator at a
U.S. Army base; the DVD salesman in Najaf whose plans to study medicine
were crushed by Baath Party favoritism, and who offered his services to
the first American Humvee that entered his city. They had learned
English from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to
the BBC. Before the war, their only chance at a normal life was to flee
the country—a nearly impossible feat. Their future in Saddam’s Iraq
was, as the Metallica fan in Mosul put it, “a one-way road leading to
nothing.” I thought of them as oddballs, like misunderstood high-school
students whose isolation ends when they go off to college. In a similar
way, the four years of the war created intense friendships, but they
were forged through collective disappointment. The arc from hope to
betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the
lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and
protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the
larger history of defeat. >> Read the full story
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| November 27, 2006 | George Packer | Save Whomever We Can |
| October 9, 2006 | George Packer | Keep Out |
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