Iraqi Intelligence

One thing that I have always enjoyed about being abroad is
that so often, you meet people from cultures all over the world. This reality
is enhanced here at our school since the near 1000 students are all from other
countries. I have been making friends from the U.K., Italy, Korea, Russia, and
even Iraq. It is actually concerning the last that I want to address today.
 
My friend Sam Allamy is Iraqi through and through, but he
and his fellow Iraqis here at CNU are essentially part of an innovative effort
to bring China to Iraq and visa versa. He was attending a university in Iraq
studying Turkish, but then applied for and received a full package scholarship
(tuition, room, and stipend) to CNU, so he and his companions accepted and have
been in China since. They all received their bachelor degrees and then in a
stroke of genius, or perhaps just common sense, they approached a China
petroleum company and basically pitched, "We're Iraqi, our country has oil, we
speak Chinese, you interested?" Needless to say, they were.
 
After just a summer's work, the company encouraged them to
return to school and get master's degrees, meanwhile holding their jobs until
they finished. So Sam is in his first semesters of a master's program here and
still lived in the dorms on campus, which is how I met him. He actually thought
that he already knew may, insisting that if not me, someone that looks exactly
like me was here two years ago. In any case that was a good segue to introduce
myself.
 
During our first discourses, I avoided overtly talking about
the war because since Sam is pretty popular around here I imagined that the
subject had been repeated to the point of monotony. However, that didn't keep
my American colleagues from broaching the subject. It was through their
questions that I actually learned that Sam, and many Iraqis, appreciated the
presence of the US Military in Iraq. He acknowledge that there are plenty of
factions and subterfuges that the Iraqi government left alone would not have
the capability of containing, and so US presence has been and is still
something of a necessity. Furthermore, he said that in order to institute long
lasting change (no easy feat since the people we are talking about inculcating
change into have been culturally established for thousands of years) he thinks
that it could potentially be another decade or two before their feet would be
firmly enough underneath them.
 
I do not intend my platform to be political in nature,
however, part of my commitment as Explorer Michael is to share then smaller
more discrete facets of culture that I encounter and without out doubt Sam has
provided the most refreshing out-of-media-context perspective I have had.