Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist (18 page)

“I can understand why they wanted Khomeini back, but I can’t understand why he would take innocent civilians hostage.”

Uncle Tariq smiled, “It is very simple. He needed someone to blame. The Ayatollah is not stupid. He needed something to bring quick cohesion to the masses and knew that hatred is the super glue of passions. By focusing on the Americans and taking them hostage, he threw gasoline on the passion of the government, of the Iranian students and the military and brought the whole country together.”

“What’s going to happen?” I asked.

“It’s far from over. Taoism teaches that, “For every force there is a counterforce.” America will get even.

“Will we try to take it back?” I asked.

“I don’t know. That’s what’s so terrible about violence, it always rebounds on itself. And there are always more ramifications than anyone can think about, even the spiritual Ayatollah. What I hear is that Saddam is going to try to take advantage of the new government in Iran because the Ayatollah has put into prison all the former generals and pilots and Saddam is going to try to capture their oil fields.”

“Doesn’t he have enough problems here?” I asked.

“He does, but Saddam is an opportunist and he has a strong Soviet supported army. If he can do it quick, he just might win and double our country’s wealth.”

“And if he doesn’t?” I asked.

“Then we will be in for a long war. Iran and Iraq have always fought you know. The Iranians are Shi-ites and Iraqis have a majority of Shi-ites but are governed by Sunnis. The Persians and the Mesopotamians have never been able to get along.”

“Now you’re really confusing me. If you don’t get along with the westerners and you don’t get along with the east and you don’t get along with the Middle East, whom do you get along with?”

Uncle Tariq pulled a videotape from the shelf and handed it to me.

Lawrence of Arabia?

“Yes, Peter O’Toole, it won several Academy awards. Watch this movie and then we’ll talk some more. It will show you in a crude way, why the Arabs can never be governed by the West. And, that the various Arab tribes can never get along with each other.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s just part of our make-up.”

“Uncle Tariq are you going to tell me about my mother before I leave?”

“What would you like to know?” he answered.

“Why you and she are so different.”

A painful expression came to his face and it looked as if he was going to cry.

“We are not so different.”

“From my perspective you are. Sonda told me that you were very close with her and now you don’t even speak.”

“She had to make a choice and she made it.”

“Do you mean leaving Iraq for America?”

“No, it’s much deeper than that. I left Iraq and went to America, many people leave and go to your universities.”

“Is it because she didn’t come back?”

“No, child….please another time.”

“Then, what, what did she do that was so awful?”

“Your mother is not an awful person and I hesitate to say anything to you, because I don’t want to change your opinion of her. Can’t we just leave it that she made a choice?”

“I still don’t understand, is it that she chose to become a Christian, a Republican, an American citizen? Is that it?”

He became very irritated, “knotting it all together, you will not understand.”

“Please let me try,” I pleaded.

He looked away and started slowly. “Your mother had been given to another man, and she disgraced your grandmother and grandfather by falling in love with an American.”

I began putting it all together. “Certainly, you couldn’t expect her to marry someone she didn’t love.”

“This is what I was afraid of; you are too young to understand. The Muslim religion is different, there are things that you just do not do! A child should never disgrace parents. It is a damnable sin! And the way that she did it killed my father.”

“Marrying an American?”

“No, becoming pregnant out of wedlock to an American! She humiliated our whole family!” He blurted out, “I’m sorry.”

He was talking about me. I knew that I was a honeymoon baby….but their anniversary was only 2 weeks after my birthday. They must have adjusted the anniversary date for my benefit.

Uncle Tariq continued, “When Islee told my father, rather than face the ridicule of the village, he hung himself in his bedroom. I found him. I was just a boy of 16,” he started to cry. “Your mother killed him! Was it so important to move to America that you would murder your own father?” I asked her. “She left before the funeral and I never saw her again.”

Over the next 10 years I spent at least one vacation a year in Iraq. My mother and father seemed to resign themselves to my new found independence which included a formal conversion to Islam. During those years I watched my cousin Islee blossom from a teenager into a woman and as she got older the emotional years between us became fewer and we became closer still.

It was interesting for me to be able to experience the events of the 1980’s from both an American and an Iraqi perspective. My uncle was never bashful about sharing his views which were surprisingly objective. Islee didn’t seem to care and my aunt listened, but seldom voiced an opinion. Together we watched the effects of Saddam Hussein’s, Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s administrations on the people of Iraq and America. My uncle was right about the Iraq and Iran war. Iraq tried to win the war quickly and almost did, until the Ayatollah freed the military generals and pilots from the jails and prisons. I was very surprised that after being jailed they still would want to fight for him, but my uncle wasn’t surprised at all, saying, “All Muslims are willing to leave their blood in the soil of their country. They are not fighting for the Ayatollah, who is but a man; they are fighting for Allah and Iran which is their heritage.”

The Iranians dusted off their American military equipment, bought spare parts and munitions on the black market and brought in specialists to maintain and repair these machines of destruction. Within a month the Iraqis were facing a superior Iranian Air Force with F-4 fighter jets and American trained pilots dropping modern day weaponry on their oil fields and refineries. The Iraqis last generation Soviet MIG fighter jets were no match for the newer American equipment. The Ayatollah also proved himself to be quite the diplomat, convincing his Syrian ally to shut down a major oil pipeline that flowed through Syria, strangling a major artery that pumped the lifeblood out of Iraq without letting the oxygen rich blood (cash) return. And the war turned ugly for Iraq. Soon the Iranians were invading Iraqi soil with what the Ayatollah called holy waves of humanity and Saddam was trying to negotiate peace, but Iran now had the upper hand and would have none. The war went on for nearly a decade and Iraq resorted to the use of chemical weapons to keep from being overrun. The effects of war devastated the Iraqi economy and cut their oil production by nearly two-thirds. Every Iraqi citizen, including my uncle and his family, felt the drain of wealth from their country as their standard of living continued to decline; food became scarce, energy costs soared and even some of the basic necessities of life like electricity, telephones and water, were often interrupted by the surgical bombings that were never far away, sounding like thunderstorms with first the thunder, then the flashes of lightning on the horizon. What really surprised me, but not my uncle, was that America actually allied themselves and supplied aid and weapons to Saddam Hussein. The results of their aid helped Saddam maintain power by crushing insurrections with brutal executions. “Birds of a feather,” my uncle explained. “They both care only about money and making more of it. Follow the investments of your American leaders and you will find the trail of their alliances.”

When the Iran and Iraq war ended, Saddam Hussein did something that was even more surprising to me, he invaded Kuwait.

“Kuwait is low hanging fruit,” commented my uncle. “He knows that they do not have a strong army and there will be little resistance. He’s after their great oil wealth that will heal the wounds from the war with Iran. And all he has to do is to look to the Koran and point out that Kuwait rightfully belongs to Iraq.”

“Does the Koran say that?” I asked.

“It says anything he can get a cleric to agree it says. And clerics become quite agreeable when they are looking down the barrel of an AK-47.”

“But Kuwait is a major oil supplier to the United States,” I answered. “Certainly he didn’t believe that America would just sit back and let this happen.”

“He doesn’t think the United States will do anything; Hussein isn’t that bright, but if they do he has already committed, and with a bully like Saddam, he can never back down.”

“What will he do when we come with our weapons? Will he withdraw? If he couldn’t win a war with Iran, he can’t possibly believe that he can win a war with us.”

“That word retreat is not in the vocabulary of a dictator like Hussein.”

Just as I predicted, the United States sent armed forces and air operations, code named Desert Storm and drove the Iraqis from Kuwait. Saddam’s short lived alliance with the United States was over and he was now at war with the most powerful nation in the world.

Over the next six months, Saddam’s conflict with the United States showed the American people many negative points about Iraq and painted a horrible, unfair picture of the general Muslim population. This was the first time that Americans caught up to the rest of the world on the brutality of Saddam. Iraq was now associated with terms such as Scud Missiles and chemical warfare and even the term WMD was being bantered about. There was so much general outrage that the American people wanted the administration to continue their assault into Baghdad and force Hussein from power. My uncle had mixed feelings on the subject.

“It would be wonderful to remove Hussein, but what will they do? Will they allow us to elect our own government or will we just be puppets of the United States. A puppet government will not work here; it has to be a government of clerics, representing the major religions of our country. What do you think? Do you think we are all going to become Southern Baptists? It has to be our own choosing. It is the only thing that will work.”

From conversations with my uncle, I was amazed that during Desert Storm, even though bombs were falling on Baghdad, amidst the screaming of sirens and anti-aircraft artillery, the general Iraqi population went about their daily business. Their ideals centered on spiritual outcomes and not the outcomes of two brutal political administrations trying to annihilate each other. Death was just another part of life and suffering a part of resurrection.

The history lesson I learned during that period of my life was from experience and not the newspaper. My uncle’s commentary made it even more real for me.

But I have gotten ahead of myself with my story. Let me return to my college years so that you can see how my academic growth accompanied my spiritual growth and confirmed my belief that all was not right with this world.

.

When I finished school in England and returned to the states, I was terribly confused about my future and direction for my life. I kept in contact with my uncle’s family through weekly letters, phone calls and at least one visit a year. I considered moving to the Middle East and continuing my studies in India or Israel, but my parents pushed me to apply to all the prestigious colleges in the United States and cajoled me until I was accepted at Duke, the University of Pennsylvania and Virginia Tech. With a 1594 SAT score and my diversified education, including being fluent in 3 languages (thanks to Uncle Tariq), I could have gone anywhere, and I chose Virginia Tech. The reason that I chose Tech was its Hillcrest honors community, a small society within the college that housed the brightest, most diverse technical students that I had ever met. It was a refreshing Mecca of independent, nonjudgmental intellectuals who were willing to explore any avenue of thinking. I had also heard that Tech’s bio-chemical engineering department was working through a grant from the FDA on a genetic screening program to pre-screen inherent diseases. Because this research would be entirely new and on the cutting edge of technology, I wanted to be a part of it.

At Tech I had a double major of physics and biochemical engineering and as part of Hillcrest, we had the added benefits of our own dormitory, our own honors advisers and a group of diverse intellectuals from every culture around the world. It was not unusual for us to spend entire nights talking about Taoism or Buddhism or Islam or Star Trek or whatever. There was also a large society of Jewish kids who joined in the fray, which completed my perspective. Very quickly I found a covey of friends and became very close to my two resident advisors Bob Bolden and Susan Griffin. Bob was 6 feet 3 inches tall with curly brown, shoulder length hair. He had a scruffy goatee and always wore Hard Rock Café T-shirts from the most obscure places in the world. His dad owned a helicopter business and picked up a T-shirt everywhere he traveled. The standing joke in Hillcrest was, “Hey Bob, I love that T-shirt from that place I know you’ve never been.” Susan was a tiny 5 foot 4 inch vegetarian, with blonde straggly hair that was overrun with split-ends. She was very homely with a large, crooked nose and a sharp chin with a few whiskers which would allow her to double for the witch from the
Wizard of Oz
.

Bob and Susan were seasoned veterans of Hillcrest. They laughed at my freshman idealism and my thoughts of political Utopia. Bob was as liberal as Susan was conservative. One of our favorite topics was the Palestinian situation in Israel.

“I think we should give them the State of New Jersey,” said Susan sitting in the lounge with her baggy red gym shorts exposing legs that hadn’t been shaved in at least a month and her breasts hanging loosely under her orange and maroon Virginia Tech t-shirt.”

“What is a Palestinian?” asked Mallory Hamilton a dark haired sophomore from across the room. “I think it is a made-up term.”