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And then there are the cases of what--at least to Iraqi eyes--are just tragic misunderstandings. In Samarra last week three Iraqi teenagers were killed and 10 injured in what the U.S. describes as a fire fight with American troops. But staff members at the local hospital say the Americans responded to innocent firing from a wedding party. (The U.S. military is investigating.) ORHA had already announced plans to ban celebratory firing, but communications in central Iraq are so poor--there is effectively no functioning TV or radio--that it is doubtful whether anyone in Samarra had heard of them. "Hell," says a senior official at ORHA, "we don't even get copies of Bremer's decrees."
It's an age-old problem. Young men in uniform, eager to get home, dismissive or just plain ignorant of local customs and unable to express themselves with anything more than a vein-popping scream and a brandished machine gun. "You are f_____g around. Just f___ off!" a soldier yelled at an Iraqi who was trying to visit the regional governor's residence in Kirkuk last week. (Every Iraqi, sadly, already knows the F word.) "The American soldier is, please excuse the word, very high-handed," says Abu Mousa, a veteran Iraqi journalist. Much more worrisome: some Iraqis believe the U.S. troops are light-fingered too. "They raid houses and take any money they can find," says Abufawaz Khazal, a former government scientist. "It's clear that [U.S. soldiers] are working with the local black marketeers," says a businessman in Baghdad. "They take guns from people on the streets and pass them to their fences." Sheik Khalid Alefan, cousin of Sheik Barakat Alefan, says that a young American soldier recently took his satellite phone and spent half an hour making calls on it.
These allegations may be false. They may even have been planted--some U.S. officials believe that the speed with which a particular story makes the rounds is a good indication of the strength of the local Baath underground. But in a part of the world where rumor is a hard currency, the truth or falsehood of any specific incident hardly matters. What counts is what Iraqis believe. And they will continue to believe the worst of the Americans as long as communications between occupier and occupied remain terrible. In the office of the regional governor in Kirkuk, there are just four or five interpreters mediating between U.S. troops stationed there and the governor's approximately 200 local staff. "We don't speak English, and they don't speak Arabic," says Alefan, the Fallujah tribal chief. Because few TVs work, it's hard to disseminate official decrees. When the U.S. Army first entered Iraq, says an ORHA official, it had state-of-the-art links to everything that moved in the air or on the ground. Now Iraqi ministries rely on part-time couriers--that means someone's cousin on a motorbike--to deliver official mail outside Baghdad. "I admit I don't think our communications with average Iraqis have been good," says Bremer, whose frequent travel around the country seems to be an attempt to compensate.