Waiting for Mr. Bush

The kid had been following us for a while. I’d seen him out of the corner of my eye, but had taken little notice. I was too busy savoring the hot hustle of the only souq I’d been to in the Middle East that did not cater to tourists. There were no scorpions encased in a hard yellowish plastic to haggle over, no fake papyri with "ancient" symbols, not a single thin, flimsy overpriced kuffiya that any self-respecting Middle Eastern man would ever wrap around his head.

This souq -- the Kurds call it the bazaar -- in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil was purely for the people. The narrow streets were choked with endless shelves of Korean-faked Pantene shampoo, piles of purple plastic chairs and bars of Turkish Duru soap. Long strips of the gold-threaded Iranian cloth, which Kurdish women love so much, hung like great slabs of colorful beef as the sounds of the World Cup, which Kurdish men adore, reverberated through crowds of shoppers.

Finally, when we stopped at a crossroads to wait for our photographer colleague to take yet another shot, the boy got up his nerve. Cradling his shallow wooden box of homemade chewing gum in the crook of his arm, he tugged on the shirt of Abdel Salam, our slight Kurdish translator, and tilted his head upward.

"Are these Mr. Bush’s people?" he asked politely.

Abdel Salam looked at me and translated, the characteristic Kurdish warmth dancing at the corner of his eyes. God, I thought, are we that obvious? I looked at my friend squatting over her canvas camera bag in her pink Oxford-cloth shirt and Eddie Bauer khakis, her light hair pulled into a messy ponytail. I knew there was no use lying. I looked at him and sighed.

"Unfortunately, we are." Abdel Salam translated. The boy’s eyes lit up. He responded with what I guessed was the Kurdish equivalent of "cooool."

Waiting in Limbo

Across northern Iraq this summer, from the searing cities on the low plains to the cool refuge of rocky mountain villages, all talk was of possible war. It hung in the air like cigarette smoke in a Cairo club, slowly but surely permeating every conversation, interview and casual meeting.

Ten-year-olds were waiting for the arrival of Mr. Bush’s people, aware only of the hope of change they may bring. But adults, who understand the destructive potential of any U.S. president’s people, discussed how to support desperately desired political change in Iraq, while maintaining the safe autonomous position that they had come to enjoy in the past decade under the watchful eye of U.S. and British planes over the northern no-fly zone.

The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state and are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East behind Arabs, Persians and Turks -- all of whom have oppressed the Kurds at one time or another. In addition, they have been squeezed -- to death -- over the past 30 years between ruthless U.S. pursuit of its own regional interests, and the Baath government’s murderous intent to bend all of its people to submission one way or another.

The past 10 years had been a respite for the Kurds from the Iraqi regime’s oppression. The central government pulled out all government presence from much of the Kurdish area in 1991, leaving them to govern themselves -- which is what they had been asking for all along.

Only in 1991, the Kurds were left to deal with the devastation of nearly 30 years of war and purposeful government neglect. More than 4,000 villages and towns had been destroyed -- flattened by bombs and bulldozers during the Iran-Iraq war, the Anfal genocide campaign and the uprising. The communication, water, sanitation, transportation and electrical infrastructure were in tatters. Hundreds of thousands of land mines dotted the Turkish and Iranian borders and an equal number of people were homeless and displaced.