“Journalists Are Pimps For War, My Friends…”
June 12, 2008
Imagine a country where Americans are beloved, mini-mansions are springing up, and oil bubbles forth unaided. Denis Johnson reports from the new wheeler-dealer capital of the Middle East and asks, Is this the future of Iraq or just a desert mirage?…
They call it “The Other Iraq,” and all of them—the Kurdish representative Qubad Talabany in Washington; Kurdish Regional Government president Masoud Barzani and his nephew, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani; head of Foreign Relations Falah Mustafa Bakir; oil minister Ashti Hawrami; the man in a shop who won’t accept money from Americans in exchange for a kilo of apricots—want the news out: This is what Cheney-Bush wanted. That’s the news from here. This is free enterprise blooming—not “booming,” our driver Hameed insists carefully—in the mountains and desert of northern Iraq…
“It’s safe here, you can go anywhere”—by which they mean wherever you find yourself in this region the size of Maryland, you’ll be safe. But whether you can actually get through the checkpoints without papers from the Ministry of Security, that’s quite another matter. With its zealous and largely successful antiterrorist measures and its capitalist fever and as-yet-incomplete system of laws, the country serves up a blend of Orwellian, penitentiary-style security and Wild West laissez-faire: no speed limits, no driver’s insurance, no D.U.I. traps—there’s very little drinking and apparently zero drug abuse—loose regulations for firearms, and homesteaders’ rights to rural land; also—at least while the parliament wrestles with the question of government revenue—no taxes. Of any kind. But to board a plane leaving Erbil, passengers must pass two vehicle checkpoints, four electronic screenings and pat-downs, and a final bag-and-body search planeside. Among the ads on the airport terminal’s walls:
Khanzad American Village
“Welcome to Luxury”
American Village
The Most Exclusive Villas in KurdistanAnd the Kurds love Americans. Love, love. Investors swarm in from all over the globe, and foreigners are common in Erbil, but if you mention tentatively and apologetically that you’re American, a shopkeeper or café owner is likely to take you aside and grip your arm and address you with the passionate sincerity of a drunken uncle: “I speak not just for me but all of Kurdish people. Please bring your United States Army here forever. You are welcome, welcome. No, I will not accept your money today, please take these goods as my gift to America…”
It’s a land definitely on its way, but to what? “Basically,’’ Rambo says “the model is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates: oil-rich, almost entirely dependent on imported expertise, imported goods, imported workers. I wish I had a hand clicker to count the number of times each day I heard someone mention that place. That’s all you hear about. Dubai, Dubai, Dubai…’’
How much oil? Depending on who’s counting, Iraq as a whole has anywhere from 115 billion barrels of “proven” reserves down to half that much, which would indicate nothing’s really proven. A fifth of that or more lies in the Kurdish region. That puts Kurdistan’s reserves well ahead of the U.S.’s total reserves and equal to all of Asia’s. George Yacu, a Chaldean Christian Kurd who served as a technical adviser for Iraq’s national oil company for nearly 30 years, seems to find the question “how much” technically interesting but scientifically unanswerable, beyond his saying, “But nobody knows until they drill…”
We’ve been involved in the Middle East since 1945, exclusively because it’s where the oil is. Although the rhetoric, starting with Truman’s in 1946 down to Bush’s in today’s paper, has been rendered in apocalyptic terms—war between good and evil, the clash of civilizations—if the oil were to move miraculously someday to another point on the globe, so would our involvement. But the oil’s under Iraq, and according to George Yacu, 38 percent of it lies in the Kurdish region in natural reservoirs less than 3,000 meters below the surface, some as shallow as 600 meters down—easy to get to and easy to refine, compared with, say, the recent strike off the Brazilian coastline, which is under a mile of ocean and another mile of rock, or most of Canada’s reserves, which are mixed with sand…
And I’m thinking, Yes, this is the climax of the piece right here, affluent Kurds clowning around, the magazine’s going to love this entertaining stuff, so why does that make me feel like a pimp in a burgundy velvet suit? Who are these people who keep Al Qaeda from infiltrating their homeland while the U.S. Army scratches its head and watches the rest of Iraq fall to pieces? And why haven’t the New York Times and CNN taken notice? Here’s a guess, just one possibility: because journalists are pimps for war, my friends, in burgundy velvet suits. And that’s the news from here.
