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=> Chaldeans have finally outdone the Assyrians in jingoistic foolishness

Chaldeans have finally outdone the Assyrians in jingoistic foolishness
Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Thursday, June 24 2004, 6:37:32 (CEST)
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San Diego Chaldeans Thank God for Bush

Courtesy of the San Diego Union-Tribune
20 June 2004
By Alex Roth

(ZNDA: San Diego) Jalal Elia, an Iraqi expatriate who lives in El Cajon, was trying to explain why the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos might be fake.

Something about the pictures looks staged, he said. Are those really U.S. soldiers humiliating naked Iraqi inmates? Are those really Iraqi inmates with hoods over their heads? He, for one, needed more convincing before he would condemn the conduct of the U.S. military.

"I don't think those pictures were taken in Iraq," the liquor-store owner said while standing in his tie and blue blazer outside the Crystal Ballroom, an El Cajon club for Chaldeans.

Many Americans are appalled by the now-infamous pictures of U.S. soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners. But the reaction to the photos – and, for that matter, to everything else related to the Iraq war – has been more complicated among the Chaldeans, an Iraqi group that has a larger presence in San Diego than anywhere else in the United States except Detroit.

No other group in this area was more vocal in supporting the U.S.-led invasion than the Chaldeans, whose estimated population of 25,000 makes them by far the largest group of Iraqis in San Diego County. And because Chaldeans are a long-persecuted Christian minority in Iraq, few other groups are more emotionally invested in the success of the U.S. military venture there.

As a result, even as national polls show declining support for the invasion and as some analysts worry about a Vietnam-style quagmire, many Chaldeans remain distinctly positive about the decision to go to war – and extremely reluctant to criticize the U.S. military.

Many are convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Some argue, quite passionately, that the Al-Jazeera television station should be banned in the United States because of what they perceive as anti-American bias.

As for the Abu Ghraib abuse pictures, perhaps they were concocted on a computer to embarrass President Bush, one man theorized. Perhaps, another suggested, the U.S. military faked the pictures as a brilliant method of scaring Iraqi insurgents into behaving themselves.

"I myself, I think it was all phony, all fabricated by our troops to discourage the thugs from uprising," said Farouk Gewarges, a Chaldean who owns an insurance business in El Cajon.

In some respects, the Chaldean community in San Diego has come to resemble the Cuban community in Miami. Each group's hatred of a foreign dictator exerts a unifying communal force – and produces a particularly fervent brand of American patriotism.

At a Chaldean social club in El Cajon last week, as men ate hummus, played cards and chain-smoked despite the presence of a large No Smoking sign, Wisam Hamika said Iraq was "1,000 percent better off" now than under Hussein.

"George Bush is God's gift to the Iraqi people," said Hamika, 44, who manages the Chaldean-Assyrian Social Club. "I really believe that without George Bush, only God could have removed Saddam Hussein."

Asked recently whether he was troubled that the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks failed to uncover a link between Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist plot, Raymond Barno, a Chaldean activist who lives in El Cajon, said no, "because at least we stopped the murder of thousands of people and mass graves."

Hamika's club, as well as the Crystal Ballroom several blocks away, is more crowded than ever these days, a testament to the mushrooming Chaldean population in San Diego County, particularly the El Cajon area. Their population dwarfs the number of Muslim Iraqis in San Diego, of whom there are only a few thousand.
Many Chaldeans move here from Detroit, where their population exceeds 100,000, in search of a climate more like home. Others come from Iraq via Mexico, seeking political asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border at Tijuana.

Many of the newcomers had successful businesses in Detroit or in Iraq and have had similar success in San Diego. By some estimates, Chaldeans own more than 600 liquor stores and convenience stories in San Diego County.

As the environment in Iraq has grown more dangerous in recent months, San Diego's Chaldean population has become increasingly concerned about relatives in the war zone, where Chaldeans find themselves targeted by pro-Hussein insurgents who see them as U.S. sympathizers.

Warda Yonan of El Cajon, who works as a Sycuan casino cashier, said her five siblings in Iraq are afraid to go outside at night. Her aunt, who lives near Mosul, keeps guns in her living room, bedroom and kitchen. The aunt's 12-year-old daughter has been learning to fire the weapons.

"Look at kids over here – they are playing at PlayStation," Yonan said. "But Iraqi kids, they learn how to use a gun."

To the extent that Chaldeans in San Diego are critical of the Bush administration, it concerns what they see as Bush's failure to come up with a better plan for stability after getting rid of Hussein.

Several criticized the administration for disbanding the Iraqi army. They said the decision left a security void and created disenchantment among thousands of Iraqi soldiers who weren't necessarily loyal to Hussein, but who suddenly found themselves out of work.

The view that the administration didn't properly prepare for a post-Hussein Iraq is shared by many Muslim Iraqis in San Diego. Imam Mohammad Alqazwini, a Shiite religious leader who lives in Mira Mesa, has been back to Iraq twice since Hussein's removal. He said he was stunned by the lack of security, especially at the border.

He entered the country from Syria, he said, and drove all the way to the central Iraqi city of Karbala without ever being scrutinized by U.S. forces.

"I didn't see any checkpoints," he said.

Although Alqazwini initially supported the invasion – Shiites also were persecuted by Hussein – he said he's beginning to wonder whether the Bush administration has a coherent strategy for making the country peaceful and democratic.

At least a few Chaldeans have much the same concerns. Yonan said her early enthusiasm for the war waned after her sister was blinded and her sister's two children killed by a U.S. bomb near Mosul.

Still, she firmly believes that if the insurgents would stop setting off bombs and shooting people, "The United States is going to fix things 100 percent."

Similar sentiments were voiced at the Chaldean-Assyrian club, an all-male environment where the menu includes shish kebab and the entertainment of choice is a card game akin to gin rummy.
At 9 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, a group of six men sat near the bar, eating, smoking, drinking beer and talking politics. They voiced support for Bush and his decision to invade Iraq.

Asked if they were upset that no weapons of mass destruction were found, several said that getting rid of Hussein was all the justification Bush needed. Mark Namou, who owns a liquor store, called Operation Iraqi Freedom "the best war this country ever fought."

Like the others, Hamika, the club manager, thinks Hussein had such weapons but hid them.

"Iraq is a country the size of California or Texas," he said. "Did they look everywhere? Did they look in the river?"

The six agreed that the photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were somewhat disturbing. Still, they said, whatever abuses the U.S. military inflicted on Iraqi prisoners can't compare with the tortures and executions inflicted by Hussein. What's more, the men declared flatly, any Iraqi prisoners who were humiliated or roughed up by U.S. soldiers probably did something to deserve it.

They blamed some of the problems in the region on the Al-Jazeera station, which they said fosters hatred and spreads false rumors. Some want the Qatar-based satellite channel banned in the United States.

Asked whether such a move would be inconsistent with the principles of democracy, Namou said, "Democracy says they can lie? That's not democracy, that's lying."

"Democracy has to be the right perspective, not the wrong perspective," added Fareed Allosh, a liquor-store owner.

At a nearby table, 71-year-old retired Kurdish interpreter Tinue Shad said he wasn't particularly bothered by the Abu Ghraib pictures because he is sure the snapshots are phony. Like Chaldeans, Kurds also were persecuted in Hussein's Iraq.

Shad, who said he was tortured by Iraqi police in the early 1960s, theorized that somebody created the photos to "defame" Bush and undermine the military effort. He said he finds it hard to imagine that U.S. soldiers ever would engage in such unseemly behavior.

U.S. soldiers are brave and honest, he said, with a mission to "liberate persons, not capture people and abuse them."

Rapping his knuckles on the table for emphasis, he declared in a thick accent, "I don't believe that American soldiers are so idiot as to do this."



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