|
|
Middle East Chronicles
Editor's note: From time to time, we will post essays and letters from Middle Eastern observers, including natives, U.S. military personnel, and Westerners in the Arab world. The author's views do not necessarily reflect the views of our editors. |
|
April 18, 2005
Letter 11 from Saudi Arabia
High noon at Chop Chop Square
by R.F. Burton
Private Papers
Last Friday I was invited to a beheading. Fortunately, it wasn't my own.
"They're going to chop one," Mohammed whispered, calling me on his mobile phone from a mosque in Deerah, "after noon prayer."
Renovated and remotely pleasant, Deerah resides deep in the black, clotted heart of old Riyadh. If anything approaches a tourist attraction in the Dead City, it would be Deerah. There you'll find a covered souk as colorful and picturesque as a Hollywood set, replete with cool, labyrinthine walkways redolent of spices, sandalwood, and rosewater. Old Arab men recline on piled Persian carpets, smoking hookahs and drinking tea, soft-selling everything from dusty chunks of frankincense and myrrh to coarse camel-hair saddlebags and scarred brass pots.
|
|
March 31, 2005
Letter 10 From Saudi Arabia
Driving Madness
by R.F. Burton
Private Papers
"R. F. Burton" is the pseudonym of an American who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for many years.
We were quietly discussing why women weren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, when Saleh—normally a polite, reticent young man—blurted out, "If my wife ever tells me she wants to drive, I swear to Allah, I'm going to take a gun and shoot her in the head!"
Then he stormed out of the office.
"What was that all about?" I asked.
|
|
March 11, 2005
Letter 9 from Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia's Non-Election
R. F. Burton
Private Papers
Like a migratory dune creeping across the unexplored Rub al Khali, democratic reform inches along in Saudi Arabia. The miracle is it moves at all, considering the royal family's stranglehold on the country.
There are many reasons why the elections held in February—touted by some as the birth of democracy in Saudi Arabia—were a travesty.
|
|
February 20, 2005
Letter 8 from Saudi Arabia
The Price of Honor
by R. F. Burton
Private Papers
Not long ago a young Saudi woman in Medina threw herself out of a taxi. Instead of driving to a negotiated destination, the taxi driver had changed course and headed for a secluded area. The young woman—convinced she was being kidnapped—leapt from the moving taxi, only to be struck by another car and killed. According to the Al-Watan newspaper, her proud father said, "My daughter acted courageously and that makes me happy." She had "risked her life in order to save her honor."
|
|
February 17, 2005
No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy
Part 2
by Craig Bernthal
Private Papers
Tim’s next stops were a field hospital in southern Iraq “where they patched me up as best they could,” and the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where after two weeks of medical attention and convalescence, he was somehow able to convince his doctor to let him go back to Iraq. “I was able to talk to the doctor, and you know, made a deal with him that if I was able to walk around the hospital for a day without crutches or any of that stuff that I could sign a waiver, that would say I would go back or whatever.”
|
|
February 16, 2005
No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy
Part 1
by Craig Bernthal
Private Papers
I spent the weekend of the Iraqi election in Huntington Beach, talking to my nephew, Tim Tardif. The last time I’d seen Tim was just before the invasion of Iraq. On a Thursday afternoon in January, 2003, I got a call from my sister, Cathy, saying that Tim, a Lance Corporal, was soon to leave for Iraq with the Marines, and that he and his fiancé, Alisha, had decided to get married that Saturday. Cathy and her husband Gil were flying out from Annapolis. Could we make it? My wife and I drove down from Fresno the next day. Alisha and her mother, Corliss, had set a logistical milestone in getting the ceremony and celebration together virtually overnight. Tim, who had bulked out of his dress uniform with weight lifting, borrowed a bigger one from a buddy. A few days later Tim was on a charter jet for Kuwait.
|
February 6, 2005
Aiding and Abetting the Enemy
The Media in Iraq
by LTC Tim Ryan
Private Papers
I've had about enough. I just read yet another distorted story from a major news organization about the "failures" in the war in Iraq. "The most trusted name in news" and a long list of others continue to misrepresent the scale of events in Iraq. Print and video journalists are covering only a small fraction of the events in Iraq and more often than not, the events they cover are only the bad ones. Many of the journalists making public assessments about the progress of the war in Iraq are unqualified to do so, given their training and experience. The inaccurate picture they paint has distorted the world view of the daily realities in Iraq. The result is a further erosion of international public support for the United States' efforts there, and a strengthening of the insurgents' resolve and recruiting efforts while weakening our own. Through their incomplete, uninformed and unbalanced reporting, many members of the media covering the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy.
|
|
January 27th, 2005
Letter #7 from Saudi Arabia
Bin Laden and Iraq
by R.F. Burton
Private Papers
Is Osama bin Laden irrelevant? It would be pretty to think so, but the destructive aftermath of his last two tapes argues bin Laden is still quarterbacking terrorist touchdowns in Saudi Arabia and beyond.
|
|
January 8th, 2005
Letter #6 from Saudi Arabia
The infamous muttawa
by R.F. Burton
Private Papers
On December 7, 2004, the United Nations sponsored an all-day forum on tolerance towards Muslims entitled, "Confronting Islamophobia: Education for Tolerance and Understanding." I wonder when, if ever, Secretary-General Kofi Annan will open a similar forum on tolerance towards Christians in Saudi Arabia, where, as the State Department reported in their 2003 annual report, "worshippers risk arrest, imprisonment, lashing, deportation and sometimes torture for engaging in religious activity that attracts official attention."
|
|
December 20, 2004
Letter #5 from Saudi Arabia
A weeklong Eid break
by R.F. Burton
Private Papers
The hollow-eyed zombies I bade farewell to at the end of Ramadan are reappearing at work. All smiles and kisses, they hug one another and wish humankind a Happy Eid. The metamorphosis is amazing. There's nothing like a vacation after a month of sleep deprivation and overeating to put the spring back in one's sandal.
Even though I already know, I ask each what he did over the weeklong Eid break. One went to Beirut, another to Cairo; a few flew to Dubai. But most of the Magic Kingdom's denizens fled to, of all places, Bahrain.
|
|
December 17, 2004
Civil Affairs Soldiers
Force Multipliers in Operation Iraqi Freedom
by Joseph Morrison Skelly
Private Papers
In military terminology, force multipliers are defined as assets that enhance an army’s effectiveness in combat. They include operational concepts such as tactical mobility, tactical surprise, information warfare and an efficient command and control system, as well as specialized units like military intelligence, signal battalions, aviation support, and civil affairs teams.
|
|
December 5, 2004
Letter #4 from Saudi Arabia
On Human Rights
by R. F. Burton
Private Papers
I wish I could report that human rights in the Magic Kingdom had risen to the status of African wild dogs, Longhorn fairy shrimps, or any other endangered species facing extinction.
|
|
|
|
