A Jour­nal edi­to­r­ial picks up on Gina Chon’s non-scoop front-page story yes­ter­day to crow that “Moq­tada packs it in.” Well, as I pointed out yes­ter­day, there was lit­tle in that story that was new, as Moq­tada al-Sadr seemed to be more clar­i­fy­ing ear­lier instruc­tions to his peo­ple than issu­ing new ones. He will still main­tain secret cells to attack U.S. troops, for instance.

And does the Jour­nal really want a kinder, gen­tler al-Sadr? Para­dox­i­cally, keep­ing him an angry, vio­lent out­sider will go a lot fur­ther toward advanc­ing the Jour­nal’s goals in Iraq than hav­ing him as a peace­ful polit­i­cal player. Because if he’s on the out­side, his unruly Mahdi Army will con­tinue to act like thugs, caus­ing Iraqis to resent them and cling to the Maliki gov­ern­ment (which the neo-cons at the Jour­nal like.)

Hav­ing him inside the process, while decreas­ing the vio­lence, gives him a chance to win at Maliki’s own game of pol­i­tics, how­ever. And if al-Sadr wins, does the Jour­nal think an Iraq dom­i­nated by Shi’ite nation­al­ists will be very friendly to U.S. inter­ests? Per­haps it does, but I cer­tainly don’t.

Like most Jour­nal edi­to­ri­als, this is a grunt from the rep­til­ian cor­tex, in line with the tri­umphal­ist bul­ly­ing so com­mon to that page.

This is great, and a wel­come respite from pol­i­tics. [Researchers have found the world’s old­est joke.](http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h_OczNQMGiWXoiyi7apguhKSQXWw)
“Some­thing which has never occurred since time immemo­r­ial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap,” goes the joke, which dates from 1900 B.C. and which orig­i­nated in what is now south­ern Iraq.

Now, I like a good fart joke as much as the next guy, but WTF? Does any­one actu­ally get that?

No mat­ter. Iraqi humor even today doesn’t quite trans­late into Eng­lish, a fact that often left me feel­ing damn con­fused over grue­some tales that my Iraqi friends found hilarious.

Many of mod­ern day Iraqi jokes deal with the Dulaimi tribe from Anbar and tend to focus on their per­ceived back­ward­ness and sheer yokelry. One I remem­bered went some­thing like, “A Dulaimi drove his cousin to Bagh­dad. His cousin sat behind the dri­ver so he could take over the wheel after he killed the first guy.” Much laugh­ter would then ensue, and no, I still don’t get it.

But the real genius of Iraqi humor was pok­ing fun at Sad­dam and mak­ing word plays. (Too bad puns don’t trans­late well.) ‘Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the sickly vice chair­man of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Com­mand Coun­cil who today may or may not be part of the neo-Ba’athist insur­gency (what’s left of it) often came in for humil­i­at­ing jokes. The craven yes-man was often pic­tured imper­son­at­ing a woman, for some reason.

Ancient humor was no dif­fer­ent, and mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal rulers have always been good for a laugh. Some of the ancient jokes the researchers found poked fun at Egypt­ian pharaohs.

“How do you enter­tain a bored pharaoh?” goes one. “Sail a boat­load of young women dressed only in fish­ing nets down the Nile — and urge the pharaoh to go fish­ing.“
Put your favorite Iraqi joke — not jokes *about* Iraqis, mind you — in the comments.

McCain and Sche­une­mann dur­ing the campaign

Kudos to TPM­Muck­raker for look­ing into [Randy Scheunemann’s record on Iraq](http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/mccain_advisors_horrifying_ira.php). Sche­une­mann is Sen. John McCain’s chief for­eign pol­icy strate­gist and a spokesman, but he’s also part of the Project for the New Amer­i­can Cen­tury, helped draft the let­ter mak­ing regime change on Iraq offi­cial U.S. pol­icy after 1998, a man who saw WMDs under every Iraqi rock and peb­ble and, per­haps most damn­ingly, a backer of Ahmad Cha­l­abi, [who did a pretty good job of snook­er­ing the U.S. into invad­ing Iraq](http://www.back-to-iraq.com/2004/02/chalabi-to-us-thanks-suckers.php).

To me, all of Scheunemann’s sins pale com­pared to his back­ing of Cha­l­abi, a man who not only lied to get the U.S. to take down his neme­sis, Sad­dam Hus­sein, but might also have given infor­ma­tion to the Ira­ni­ans that [Amer­ica had cracked their codes](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E4DE1431F931A35755C0A9629C8B63). Cha­l­abi denies any wrong doing.

Josh Mar­shall and his team com­plain that the main­stream media (what­ever that is these days) have ignored or glossed over Scheunemann’s appalling track record. Usu­ally, when a blog com­plains about this, it’s hooey, but a quick [Google News search](http://www.google.com/news?q=scheunemann%20chalabi) comes up with no major cov­er­age of his past errors in judg­ment. And since this cam­paign seems to be focus­ing on the very per­ti­nent ques­tion of who has the bet­ter judg­ment on Iraq, this seems a valid press inquiry. And if [Obama is going to take heat for his advisors](http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&tab=nw&q=obama%20powers), shouldn’t McCain’s be under sim­i­lar scrutiny?

[](http://​pew​global​.org/​r​e​p​o​r​t​s​/​d​i​s​p​l​a​y​.​p​h​p​?​R​e​p​o​r​t​I​D​=​260)Bret Stephens, a reg­u­lar colum­nist for the *Journal*‘s op-ed page, finds four American-installed lead­ers in Iraq who back McCain. Imag­ine that. He then takes these four guys’ views and extrap­o­lates them to include all Iraqis. And while he men­tions a Pew poll that shows [the over­whelm­ing major­ity of the world sup­ports Sen. Barack Obama](http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=260), he notes that the poll skips Iraq. And he adds that he did no polling of his own. But speak­ing to four guys allows him to state: “Iraq, all but alone among the nations, will be pray­ing for a McCain vic­tory on the first Tues­day in November.”

This col­umn is so silly it’s barely worth men­tion­ing, espe­cially because there are dozens of polls that have been taken over the years that show Iraqis over­whelm­ingly despise the Amer­i­can pres­ence and most of them want the troops out. (This is not to say that *all* Iraqis want the Amer­i­cans to leave. I’m very aware some want the troops to stick around.)

Any­way, two can play at this game. Accord­ing to a Face­book poll I found using a sim­ple Google search, 62% of Iraqis pre­fer Obama as pres­i­dent. Now, obvi­ously, my “research” is about as sci­en­tific at Stephens’s. Which is to say, not at all. But then, I’m not des­per­ately try­ing to preach to the choir.

DUBAI — Greet­ings all… As is obvi­ous, I’ve not been writ­ing much. There are some good rea­sons for that. First and fore­most, I’ve been busy. Since Novem­ber of last year, I’ve

• Got­ten married
• Moved to Dubai
• Taken on a new job
• And started a new phase in my career.

Mar­ried life is great, and very com­fort­able. Mrs. Back-to-Iraq seems to like it, too, but to be hon­est, I got the bet­ter end of the deal. (That’s usu­ally the case, no?)
Dubai is less com­fort­able. It’s a strange place, an odd cross between Sin­ga­pore and Las Vegas with­out the former’s clean effi­ciency and the latter’s cheer­ful and unapolo­getic sin­ful­ness. Its love of bureau­cracy, lack of any con­cept of cus­tomer ser­vice and no real plan­ning makes it much less of an ideal place than peo­ple should believe. It’s also damn expen­sive, and the era of good liv­ing, cheap hous­ing and fat salaries is long over.

But the new job is a good one. I’m edit­ing [Trends Magazine](http://www.trendsmagazine.net), one of the region’s top busi­ness and polit­i­cal mag­a­zines, if I do say so myself. My bosses are really devoted to the idea of jour­nal­ism — a rar­ity in this part of the world — and are will­ing to take on big pow­ers here, like real estate com­pa­nies. (They’re all con­nected to the gov­ern­ment, which has any num­ber of vaguely defined “red lines” that jour­nal­ists cross — or even approach — at risk to their jobs and res­i­dency visas.)
But the big news is that I actu­ally won’t be stay­ing here. I’ve been awarded the [Knight Stan­ford Fellowship](http://knight.stanford.edu/), one of America’s big jour­nal­ism fel­low­ships, to go study the fea­si­bil­ity of var­i­ous busi­ness mod­els for online news. I plan to con­cen­trate on for­eign cor­re­spon­dence, nat­u­rally. Back​-to​-Iraq​.com was a big part of get­ting me into the fel­low­ship and I look for­ward to nine months at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity with excite­ment and humility.

So my four years in the Mid­dle East seem to be com­ing to an end, for now. I’ll be back in Dubai in July 2009, armed with expe­ri­ence, con­tacts and new lan­guage skills. Let’s hope Back-to-Iraq can be revi­tal­ized with the experience.