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November 17, 2003
Latest conspiracy theories
Some of the taxi cab drivers here are from Iraq. Actually, it's probably more than some, since according to one driver I had today, there are 800,000 Iraqis living in Tehran (remember, there are at least 12 million people here, so that's probably reasonable.)
He could speak broken English, so I took the opportunity to talk with him. He liked Hussein, because he was secular and didn't allow the Arab states to have influence in Iraq. But he recognizes that he's a minority and acknowledges that it's better that Saddam is gone. Before, he said, people used to just kill each other for no reason. Now the Americans keep things more "quiet." He thinks they need to stay or things will get worse again. But he had a few "asks" for me.
For one thing, he had just come back from Iraq. Most of the people there, he said, were very confused as to why we don't have Saddam. They have decided that we actually do know where he is, but we don't want to catch him because then we'd have to leave. "Why do we want to stay?" I asked him. "For oil" Of couse, he said. You see, he said, there's a pipeline directly from Basra to Israel and the Americans are sending 3 million gallons of oil to Israel every day. "Jedi?" I said (that means "really?")
Another question he said people had was why we killed Saddam's sons. Why didn't we keep them alive and get good information from them, for instance on the location of chemical weapons and of course, their father? He said people have decided that we killed them because we already had all the information we needed, from spies like Tariq Aziz.
I'm sure the American authorities know these and many other rumors. I wonder how they address them.
Also today, in visiting with Mrs. Mallou (see other entry) and another environmentalist, I was privy to another long-standing conspiracy theory. They believe that there was some foreign policy reason why the Islamic Revolution happened, and that in fact, it may have been directed by the Americans themselves. Again, it bears repeating that many people here, whether educated or not, have a fatalistic, victimlike sense of the world, in which they have little or no control over any fate except their own personal one. It makes me wonder sometimes how they can muster the strength to work in non-governmental organizations if they feel so much is "other-directed."
Posted by MJF at November 17, 2003 05:31 PM