THE BUTCHERS OF BAGHDAD or how not to hang a man

 I don’t care to address the wisdom of invading Iraq and executing Saddam Hussein. I think I will leave that to the eminently qualified knuckleheads who have made such a fine job of completely botching it at every phase of the campaign.

I just want to take a minute to illustrate the superiority of Internet journalism, where people who actually know something have the opportunity to step in and contribute the expertise gained from a lifetime of actually doing things, as opposed to the deep thinkers who are hired right out of journalism school, and who spend the rest of their lives opining about things they know nothing about.

Managing people is not so different from managing donkeys. You wouldn’t hitch some donkeys to a wagon and tell them, “Pull this wagon to Dodge City.” They will end up eating grass, having sex and sleeping. No, you send somebody with the donkeys, and he directs them to Dodge City.

People who majored in government and then went to work in Washington have no concept of what it means to direct workers. They never even managed a 7/11, and journalists even less.

One job I had was managing an industrial bakery, and you can’t turn your back on workers, because the minute you sit down, they will sit down.

One night I got a call from an irate citizen who happened to see one of my drivers dump a whole load of bread on the sidewalk because he didn’t want to return to the bakery with it.

I wrote down the location and walked over to one of the assistant managers. “John,” I said, “take two men in a truck and pick up the bread from the sidewalk.” I gave him the paper with the location.

A little while later, I saw him again. “I thought I told you to go to 33rd Street and Tenth Avenue and pick up the bread from the sidewalk.”

“Oh, it’s OK,” he casually allowed. “I sent Tony and Eduardo with a truck. They should be there now.”

I screamed, “What? You didn’t go with them? Don’t you understand? Tony’s an alcoholic and Eduardo’s a moron. They’re never going to pick up the bread!”

I ran out and took another truck and I drove down to 33rd Street and Tenth Avenue. Sure enough, there was bread all over the sidewalk, and Tony and Eduardo were nowhere to be found.

I called Tony on my cell phone. “Where the fuck are you,” I screamed.

“We’re on Sixth Avenue.”

“Well, what the fuck are you doing on Sixth Avenue? I’m here looking for you monkeys and there’s bread all over the sidewalk!”

“We couldn’t find a place to park.”

“Well, get your fucking asses over here now and pick up the bread, you moron!”

A little while later they arrived in the bakery van. Eduardo said, “You want a beer?”

Bad as these guys were, at least they were Americans. Arabs are ten times worse. Trying to get them to do something is ten times worse. Adjacent to this bakery where I worked was a garage that the boss had leased to an Egyptian named Zizou, and he rented out hot dog carts to Arab shish kebob peddlers who sold the food to office workers in midtown. Unfortunately for me, part of my job was to make sure they kept a respectable sidewalk so that the city inspectors wouldn’t hit us with sanitation summonses.

It was here that I developed a grudging respect for Saddam Hussein’s draconian methods for keeping order. If you didn’t stay on top of them every hour, the sidewalk quickly came to resemble a war zone, with garbage dumpsters overflowing onto the sidewalk from every imaginable kind of filth, machine parts and enough butane gas cannisters to blow up the George Washington Bridge. When I walked inside the place, it was a pandemonium of grease, debris, chicken parts, stopped-up drains, you name it. These guys were solidly packed with huge, hard hands, and they worked all day with huge knives for chopping up the chicken. These guys were a lot harder to control than my guys, who were relatively peaceable Latin Americans and low-end Americans. The Arabs, with their big knives and greasy moustaches were like wildcats. When they fought with each other they screamed like hysterical maniacs and you never knew how far they would go.

Put Anderson Cooper in the middle of this shit!

The point I am trying to illustrate is, you don’t just give these guys a rope and tell them “Go hang Saddam Hussein.” You send along a responsible person to supervise them. Somebody who says, “No cameras, no cell phones and no talking. We’re taking a man’s life here, so be respectful.” And then you stand there and make sure that they do it.

But like I say, the people who run this government have no work experience, and the so-called reporters, even less.

Bush told the Iraqis, “Execute Saddam Hussein,” but he didn’t send anybody to supervise them. You would think he would have learned something from the pictures that leaked out of Abu Ghraib, but not this guy!

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Posted on 1/3/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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