OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Codetalkers: How to win friends & influence people in Iraq....

But the hospital ward I liked best was the pediatric ward. There were cute little babies! Totally cute. And the mothers and sisters and grandmothers and the entire extended female family of each baby's mother was there, drinking chai tea and having a picnic on the floor. The older woman had blue tattoo marks on their faces. Table clothes were spread on the floor and everyone had made themselves at home. Cute little babies. I loved the maternity ward.

Back at Al Asad airbase, I started chatting with a young Marine. "Where are you from?" I asked.

"Arizona. I'm a full-blood Navajo. And my wife's grandfather was a Codetalker during World War II." A Codetalker? Holy cow! And then it dawned on me. That's what we need here in Iraq! Not necessarily a Navajo native speaker but someone who could speak Arabic -- lots of someones who could speak Arabic, to be exact. Heck, we gots all these expensive weapons -- 100,000 different ways to blow people up. But can the average American soldier even speak to the average Iraqi on the street? Nope.

I propose a new program wherein every single soldier in Iraq is required to memorize 20 words of Arabic a week. "But, Jane, the Arabic grammar is really complicated." Yeah but so is a Howitzer. If they can learn to operate one of those bad boys, surely they can master basic Arabic. And knowing a few sentences in Arabic would be SO much more effective. And maybe cost one-thousandth of the price.

While we were at the hospital, one Iraqi man came up to our officer in charge and said, "My mother is here because she had a diabetic attack in the middle of the night and we couldn't get her to the hospital because of the curfew and now she is very very sick because she couldn't get here for medicine in time."

"If that ever happens again," said the major, "approach one of our Marines and ask for an escort. Tell them it is an emergency."

"But if I do that, they will shoot me."

"No they won't. I promise you. They won't."

Guess what? I finally made it off the C-130 and actually got to the dining facility with only seconds to spare. But unfortunately, all that food just fueled my already-intense case of "The Halls of Montezumas' Revenge" and I was then forced to go do "research" on what the airbase's sick-bay was like. Thank goodness for Imodium! But as I sat in the waiting room, I noticed that the medical staff had the movie "Frankenstein" playing. "Don't worry about that," joked the medical tech as we watched Dr. Frankenstein's hunchbacked assistant steal a brain from a surgical lab. "We only use this as our training film."

Meanwhile, back to my own brainstorm -- I think that having all the soldiers here learn Arabic would really help out. When I was in South Africa last month, I was told that the best way to remain safe in the villages and towns was to make friends with as many neighbors as possible. And if we learned the language, that would be a big safety help too. "They appreciate the effort you go through to learn Setswana, even if you only can say a few words." And that strategy of becoming safer by getting to know the locals can also prove true in Iraq. So. Let's start by having multilingual block parties in Baghdad, which, according to the Washington Post, is the most troubled region here and really could use a friendly neighborhood meet-and-greet.

To quote the Post, "'I honestly thought we were making a difference in Tikrit. Then we come back to [this] hellhole,' Marino said. 'That was a playground compared to Baghdad.' The American people don't fully realize what's going on, said Staff Sgt. Richard McClary, 27, a section leader from Buffalo. 'They just know back there what the higher-ups here tell them. But the higher-ups don't go anywhere, and actually they only go to the safe places, places with a little bit of gunfire,' he said. 'They don't ever [expletive] see what we see on the ground.'"

And with regard to our troops' burn-out in Baghdad, I also talked with a young West Point graduate stationed there -- one of the best and brightest of our younger generation of American military. "When my tour of duty here in Baghdad is up, I'm not going to re-enlist," he told me. "The West Point code states that one of its goals is 'To educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets . . . toward a lifetime of selfless service to the Nation.' To some this clearly means a lifetime of service as an officer in the Army. I disagree. I strongly believe that there are a myriad other ways in which to selflessly serve the Nation and the world." Has serving as a career Army officer stopped being a satisfying goal? If so, that's scary.

For all the money that they have spent on weaponry bling in the past seven years, Bush and Cheney might have done better to have just learned Arabic themselves, or, better still, stayed home and tried to make friends in America -- before villagers across the US come after them with pitchforks and torches because of the damage those two Frankensteins have done to America's military, America's Constitution and America's budget.

In Iraq, things are looking a lot better right now, thanks to the Marines and their house-by-house efforts to win hearts and minds -- and also because, according to my friend Stewart, "Anbar is doing well because of the Iraqis," who are really trying hard to make omelets out of badly broken eggs and also are sick of all the killing. If the "insurgents" think that the recent kidnapping of ten major sheiks is going to endear them to the Iraqi people, they are definitely drinking the Kool-Aid. Iraqis really seem to like their sheiks and do not take kindly to anyone who messes with them.

But for whatever the reason, things truly are looking up in Iraq. I mean seriously. But, geez Louise, I surely do hate to see Bush and Cheney take the credit for any successes over here -- not after our military has worked like dogs to pull all of their freaking chestnuts out of the fire. Please let us never forget that If it hadn't been for Bush and Cheney, we would never have been in this mess in the first place!

But perhaps I being too hard on Cheney and Bush. Perhaps they have finally seen the light and are finally starting to do a good job now? Apparently not. According to even Time Magazine, these two duds are STILL missing the boat. "George W. Bush has abdicated his control over the military mission and seems boggled by the political side of the Iraqi equation," sez Time. "He has lashed himself to the inept, unrepresentative government of Nouri al-Maliki but seems powerless to influence that government's actions. Bush's Iraq poster boys, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, are doing a wonderful job but lack the rank to make strategic regional policy. The Administration was so inept in dealing with Turkey that its designated mediator, retired General Joseph Ralston, recently quit in frustration. Bush's refusal to engage the Iranians has left a clear field for Russian mini-czar Vladimir Putin to move in and build an alliance. The Secretary of State is chasing an Israeli-Palestinian chimera at a moment when a burst of high-level U.S. diplomatic pressure might actually make a difference in Iraq. There are...hugs to be had, and [Bush is] not grabbing them."

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