Wintry Mix

The wintry mix hardened in the night and crunched as I moved. The dog made sure that I had the opportunity to understand that. He does not visit as much as I would like, and our rhythms are not coordinated. He licked my face just after two, insistent that he had a special mission for me.

If I had a yard, or even just a fence around my patio, I would have just grogged from my bed and cast him out into the darkness. But there is no fence, and a world of interesting smells locked in the wintry mix of frozen slush and crusted snow, and if I let him go off on his own I would never see him againout we went to share the night.

Security was sleeping in his sedan by the rear entrance to the parking lot, engine running. The dog was courteous enough to be expedient in his discharge of hisduty. I was back in my bed in ten minutes or so, but awake. I looked up, and then looked right and left. The dog bounded into the bed and nestled against me. He had no problems going back to sleep, and in the end, I was able to emulate him perhaps an hour or more before the alarm went off.

This called for a long walk, so that I could get about my business without that look of wounded longing. I brewed some coffee and poured a cup of the strong rough stuff as the pot was a quarter full. I shrugged on a flannel shirt to wear under my down jacket. I found a hat, and gloves, and a pack of smokes, a lighter, platic bags to be a good nieghbor and the leash and two doggie-treats in case we found something to eat cast aside in the crusted snow.

I left the mobile phone behind. There was no one to call at this hour, and if anyone was trying to get me they were entitled to leave a message, no charge. As we emerged into the chill I noticed the wind had picked up, westerly, and that Security had woken up and moved his car. I was encouraged about his vigilance in the darkness.

Classical music was still playing on the radio, and I missed the beginning of the early BBC news. I wondered about the election as we slowly circumnavigated the vast bulk of Big Pink’s flanks, sniffing everything.

The dog took me zig-zag down the front of the building, then down the steep ramp to the garage, and up the steps to the tennis court and around the little picnic area. We criss-crossed the no-man’s land between the parking lot and the garden apartments and paralleled the line of hedges, sniffing all the way.

He balked at the straight approach to my unit, hoping against hope that I would take him across the street to the church where they run a soup-kitchen for the jobless. He had found some tantalizing morsels there before, frozen into the ground.  I am too smart for him now. We started a second lap around the building, but I had been prescient enough to bring my key, and invited him in through the front door into the lobby.

The Concierge was elsewhere, a jacket slung across the back of the chair. The building was not awake yet, or perhaps they were snug in their beds, listening to the results of the election.

When we got back into the unit, I gave him a biscuit and praised his accomplishments. The radio was coming up to the half-hour. Nine billion dollars are missing from the Iraqi treasury, according to US Government auditors, and they have written a scathing report on the matter. I don’t know why it was released when it was; but there seemed to be a grim satisfaction that there was something bad to report in the face of what appears to be a triumph of the human spirit.

There is great consternation that the summer-help and Holiday Hires that ran much of the Coalition Authority were incapable of managing the floodgates of aid money and oil revenues to the best practices of the accounting industry. Horrors! The reputation of the United States is once more flogged.

Thank goodness there is bad news to report, otherwise we might be encouraged to think that things might work out after all. I considered the end of war, the abrupt shift of authority, and the period of lawlessness between the abdication of one sovereign and the arrival of another. There were people waiting for that moment, and they capitalized on the opportunity. I thought about the reconstruction of nations held captive by tyrants for a decade or more, much less a half century, and shrugged. Stuff happens.

They tracked down the former Administrator, Ambassador Paul Bremmer, wherever he is relaxing at the moment. They asked him for his opinion. He was indignant, and I don’t blame him. There was a lot of stuff going on at the time. The people who were there were doing the best they could, and as far as I can tell, none of them got rich. I thought I heard about the Halliburton mess again, about charging the government for meals that the troops did not eat.

As if the government itself was not the second most wasteful thing, next to war itself.

Finally, attention turned to the elections. It was quite breathtaking. The voters defied the insurgents who said they would make the streets run with blood. They defied them in the Shia south, and the Kurdish north in numbers that shame the turn-out at election time in the democratic West. Perhaps 60% of those eligible came to the polls, and cast their votes, and dipped their fingers in purple ink to prove their participation.

They did it under mortar attack, and car bombs. It is a powerful demonstration of the power of the human spirit. The turnout in the Sunni Triangle was lower, as one might expect since bad men had threatened to follow voters home and decapitate their children. And still they voted, maybe 40% of them. That would be an excellent turn-out here in Arlington.

It came at a cost, of course. Over forty people died in the course of the day, though that includes nine suicide bombers, may their souls roast. Maybe a hundred people were wounded. The Pentagon had been expecting it to be a lot worse. It could be that the massive security measures (which cannot be sustained over the long haul) were a deterrent. And maybe the number of bad guys they have killed over the last few weeks has weakened the insurgents.

The two major Arabic-language satellite news channels, al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera, both covered the story of the day, which was not the violence, but the election. Al-Arabiya had an election news center built in their headquarters in Dubai, big time, and al-Jazeera ran accounts of the insurgent attacks in the ticker-tape banner at the bottom of the screen, rather than featuring it on the main picture.

Darkness gave some voters cover, and they ran to the polling centers, confident that the bad guys could not identify them. Counting the ballot will take a week. The United Iraqi Alliance, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s coalition is expected to do well, based on exit polls, as is the slate endorsed by interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi. But you know exit polls. They didn’t work here, so I don’t know.

I don’t know what it means just yet. The talking heads are yammering that the disenfranchisement of the Sunnis by their co-religionist insurgents will invalidate the results. That this election will lead only to domination and oppression by the majority Shia and the Kurds. They must have something ominous to say.

But even al-Jazeera recognizes that something heroic has happened here. A legitimate multi-party election was actually held in the Middle East. If the government that is formed to write a new constitution can pull that it off, then something epic has occurred.

I hope the government after this one, the first real one under an indigenous rule of law, tells us to get out. I think we will be happy to comply.

I looked at the dog, stretched out by my chair, halfway between me and the radio. He looked up with his liquid brown eyes, taking it in, and contemplating his next walk in the wintery mix.

He seems cautiously optimistic.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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