Archives » Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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Larry Kaplow
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Jan 21, 2009 05:00 PM
Last summer when Barack Obama made his only visit to Iraq, he met one
of Iraq's most influential and colorful sheiks. Sheik Ali Hatim watched
the inauguration last night and remembered telling Obama that his
schedule for pulling troops from Iraq was too fast and could leave the
country again in chaos. "I don't want you to stay forever but fix what
you messed up," he says he told the then presumptive Democratic
nominee. "We will not abandon you," he remembers Obama telling him. The
sheik's answer: "We will see."
The sheik was among the Sunni tribal leaders who turned against Al
Qaida, one of the pivotal points of the war. He and many of his peers
in the now calm Anbar province see the American forces as protection
against what they consider an Iranian-backed Shiite government and
Islamist Sunnis. Speaking in his marbled, terracotta-tiled office in
Baghdad, he gestured to a photo of himself shaking Obama's hand
displayed next to an ornamental U.S. Marine sword. No fan of former
President George W. Bush, who he believes paved the way for an Islamist
resurgence in Iraq, he's withholding a conclusion on Obama.
"Politicians are driven by remote control," he says, apparently
referring to U.S. policies and institutions. "But as a person he is
good."
Sheik Ali, 38, charismatic in his red and white checked headscarf,
surrounded by statuettes and photos of notable desert forefathers and
usually smoking through a filter, is always a good interview and had
other wry observations on Tuesday's big event: "You implement your
democracy but we don't have it here," he said. He rightly noted that
Obama's address, which he saw on Arabic channels with translation, was
aimed at an American audience more worried about the economy than Iraq.
He didn't find the opulence of the event inappropriate. "If Bush was my
president and was leaving office, I would have a big party, too." And
he noticed the hobbled Vice President, saying, "When Dick Cheney was
leading his big companies he was running on two legs, now he leaves in
a wheelchair."
But the Sheik, who owns an extensive library of Hollywood movies on DVD
and managed to work a Will Smith character into an analysis of the
upcoming Iraqi elections, took a distanced view of the American
transfer of power. "American politics are just like a movie. Each
character plays a role. The hero. The villain. Bush has played the
villain well. . . [but] there will not be a big change."
After the inauguration, the Sheik viewed "Saw V." He recommends it.
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