Speaking a different language - but we've got the Phrasealator
James Meek outside Diwaniya
Monday March 31, 2003
The Guardian
Yesterday afternoon a man in glasses and a large helmet stood by a ditch in Iraq, trying to communicate with a group of farmers. David Cooper's first language is Irish Gaelic. His second and main language is American English. Unfortunately, the only language the farmers spoke was Iraqi Arabic.
The object of discussion was an ancient, dust-clogged, diesel-powered water pump which the farmers wanted to start, with the help of the US marines, who control the roadside area east of the town of Diwaniya where the farmers have their fields.
The pump lies under the very guns of the marines, hunkered down in foxholes behind a high sand wall, scanning the landscape for signs of the elusive, intangible, incomprehensible enemy.
Cooper, a major in the military's civil affairs department, didn't have an interpreter, exactly. He had a handheld black plastic device the size of an eggbox called a Phrasealator.
Users run a stylus down a series of menus on a screen, pick a phrase in English, touch the line, and the Phrasealator squawks the equivalent in Arabic.
The machine lacks elementary social skills. It only covers a handful of situations, such as crowd control, law and order and emergencies. If you want to tell someone to get out of their car slowly or not to be frightened, it's great.
If you have to talk to farmers in rural Iraq about intimate details of their lives, families, crops and horticultural needs, and understand what they say back, it's useless, and while Major Cooper, a reservist who normally works for Sun Microsystems, oozed goodwill, he wasn't taking an active part in the dialogue about the pump.
The marines have brought the whole encyclopaedia of military technology with them to Iraq. From aircraft to x-ray machines, they have a myriad ways to kill, heal wounded, survey, spy, reconnoitre, communicate with each other, shell, defend, attack, enfilade. They have brought all the machines and all the skilled people trained to use them.
The equipment necessary to talk to Iraqis, understand their problems and respond to their needs, however, seems to have been left on the quayside in California.
Maj Cooper and his colleague, Major Mark Stainbrook, are part of a tiny number of civil affairs officers attached to the marines. Neither speaks Arabic, and their interpreter has poor English.
Even before Saturday's suicide bomb attack on US troops, the response of marines towards Iraqi civilians has been characterised by fear, suspicion and mistrust. While there is no sign of ill-treatment of civilians, there has been little attempt to actively make friends in Iraqi communities, to carry out foot patrols in villages to assure locals that the US is providing security, or to systemise the movement of Iraqi civilians across US-held territory.
Any fire on the marines has characteristically been met with overwhelming firepower in return, often involving artillery, air strikes by helicopters and the marines' own F-18 fighters. While there are genuine attacks by Iraqi irregulars on marines' convoys, it is impossible to verify whether all the "attacks" are genuine, and the light casualties and low loss of vehicles strongly suggest that some "ambushes" are simply civilians being shot at by jumpy marines.
Down at the pump yester day, the civil affairs men and the farmers were originally talking at cross purposes. Maj Stainbrook thought they wanted the water to drink. In fact they wanted to pump thousands of litres into irrigation channels to feed their thirsty fields of barley and melons. As ever when cultures clash, the conversation was full of non sequiturs.
"We are going to get a battery to start the pump. Do you have containers?" Maj Stainbrook said.
"We would like to cooperate with you to save us from this tyrant," said Khaled Juwad, one of the farmers.
"We're trying," said Maj Stainbrook, chewing flat bread the farmers had brought. "It may take a while."
US batteries were brought, but they still wouldn't do the job. The civil affairs people sent for a Humvee. As he left, Maj Stainbrook said: "They need to tell everyone never to approach US troops at night, and if they approach in daytime, not to come too close, and try to get someone to come to them, because it's dangerous."
Half an hour later, the American batteries, luck and the engineering skill of the farmers got the pump going with a roar and a puff of black smoke and water from one of the tributaries of the Euphrates gushed into the irrigation system.
If the farmers spoke the truth, and were not simply saying what they thought the marines wanted to hear, the resistance to the US-British invasion is, in this area at least, marginal and largely forced, and a more subtle, less civilian-fearful approach by the military, with less emphasis on firepower and more on getting local people on side, might deliver Saddam loyalists on a plate.
The centre of resistance, according to Juwad, was a paramilitary organisation called the Golden Troop of the Jerusalem Army, made up largely of local people forced to fight at gunpoint by army officers who had come into Diwaniya - a town under Iraqi control - from Baghdad before the invasion.
"They came here three days before you guys arrived and the shooting started," said Juwad, who normally lives in Diwaniya but fled to a small house on his farm when the fighting broke out. His family is still in the town.
Members of the Golden Troop had attacked a US convoy near their farm, Juwad added, but had fled immediately and scattered.
An hour's walk along the irrigation ditches, past the fields of green barley, through the red mud, with plovers flying overhead, led to the tent of Juwad's uncle, Abu Hamid.
Sticking in the ground outside was an old pole with a tattered piece of white sacking lashed to it, the universal Iraqi flag of these parts, the please-don't-shoot flag of "We surrender".
To demonstrate life in Saddam's Iraq, Abu Hamid kneeled down on the ground, as if sleeping, then jumped up again with his eyes and mouth wide open, staring in fright, then kneeled again. He repeated the sequence several times.
"This is how people sleep now," he said. "They are not secure."
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