Politics never really interested Shayma Bairuty. But you wouldn’t know it to hear her speak about the 2004 U.S. presidential race.
Bairuty, 26, voted for George W. Bush in 2000. But she is so thoroughly disillusioned with the current administration that “right now,” she says, seated on her living-room sofa in Irving, “I would vote for any single one in [the] Democratic Party. Anyone.”
Chalk one up for John Kerry.
But Bairuty’s vote isn’t just any vote. She’s an Iraqi-American with a personal stake in this election’s most volatile issue. Her four brothers and one sister still live in Iraq, as does much of her husband’s family. And what they tell her about the current state of her homeland only solidifies her antipathy toward Bush.
“He’s a war person,” she says with disdain, “just like his dad.”
Iraqi-American women make up only a tiny fraction of the likely voters this fall. And such a sparse demographic doesn’t much interest campaign pollers.
But these women are an increasingly visible constituency, especially those who have mobilized in support of U.S. foreign policy over the past few years. One of them, Rend Rahim Francke, an American citizen born in Iraq, was named Iraq’s ambassador to the United States last November. Others have met personally with President Bush. At least one heads an organization that won a government contract to help rebuild Iraq.
Still, this is a group as divided on the issues–be it Iraq, the Patriot Act or the economy–as the rest of the country. And talking with Iraqi-American women reveals how especially deep their political passions run this campaign season.
Bairuty, who grew up during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, describes a childhood partly spent anticipating bomb sirens. Two of her stepbrothers, she says, were killed in combat, leaving behind six children.
She has no patience for warfare.
“I don’t like people to die whether American, whether Iraqi, whether Pakistani,” says the mother of four. And she doesn’t believe the reasons that the current administration gave for its decision to invade Iraq. Bairuty is no admirer of Saddam Hussein–“He’s not a human” is how she puts it–but the Iraqi leader could have been eliminated some other, less bloody, way, she believes.
Maha Hussain couldn’t disagree more. Hussain fled Iraq in 1980, a month after graduating from medical school and just before the outbreak of war with Iran. Now a professor of internal medicine and urology at the University of Michigan, she has been an outspoken supporter of the president’s Iraq policy.
“We are extremely appreciative of what the president has done and the sacrifices of the American people,” says Hussain, who has believed for many years “that Saddam had to go, that the Baath regime had to go, that Iraq had to become a democratically recognized society.”
The United States left the job unfinished after the 1991 Gulf War, Hussain adds, leaving Saddam to “flourish while the people were dying. And, therefore, for the sake of moral reasons, we needed to rectify the wrong.”
Hussain is one of a select group of highly educated Iraqi-American women who have organized in support of the war. She is a former president of the Iraqi Forum for Democracy and a member of Women for a Free Iraq, whose ranks also include Zainab Al-Suwaij. Al-Suwaij, in turn, co-founded the American-Iraqi Congress, a Boston-based group formed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She returned from a year-and-a-half stay in Iraq just last month.
As a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, Al-Suwaij’s organization spent that time helping develop Iraq’s education system and promoting women’s rights through training sessions on democracy and leadership.
She also interacted with everyday citizens on a daily basis.
“What I hear from Iraqi people,” says Al-Suwaij, is, “`We know there is a lack of security, and we know there are some mistakes, but at the end of the day, we know Saddam no longer exists, and that keeps us happy.'”
The Iraq war may be the primary motivating factor for the Iraqi-American women who vote this fall, but it’s not the only factor. Though Guity Nashat won’t say who will get her vote, the University of Illinois at Chicago professor clearly sympathizes with a more conservative view of the war–and the world.
“I have no doubt that if Saddam had not been taken out, given the kind of wealth he had accumulated, given the U.N. program of oil for food, that he would have tried to acquire … weapons of mass destruction,” says Nashat, an associate professor of history. “We blame Bush for not anticipating 9/11, and now we’re blaming him for having taken out someone who could have been a definite threat.”
Nashat grew up in Baghdad and left Iraq in the 1950s to pursue a series of degrees in the United States. After completing a PhD from the University of Chicago, she met and married her husband, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, in 1979.
She and Hussain both say that growing up in a country modeled on the socialist Soviet Union, in which the government controlled most everything, has given them a deeper appreciation of a free-market economy. They like Bush’s tax policies and condemn a national health-care system (such as in Britain, where both lived for a time).
“Also, I’m an immigrant,” Hussain adds, explaining her aversion to programs that promote people based on race, gender or ethnicity rather than merit. “Working hard to me is very important; personal responsibility is very important.”
Nadia Khayat would vote for the Kerry-Edwards ticket if she could, but as a British citizen living in Dallas, she’ll have to sit out this election.
“I think Bush has done a terrible job on the economy,” says 30-year-old Khayat, who was born and raised in England by Iraqi parents. “It just seems like all the money that was spent on the war could have been spent here. Secure the borders.
“They could have assassinated him,” she adds of Hussein, “and saved a lot of people on both sides.”
Both Khayat and Bairuty are devout Muslims. Yet both say that the Democrats’ more liberal views on social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, don’t bother them enough to sway their votes.
“This is a free country,” Bairuty says.
What bothers her more are the chilling effects of the Patriot Act, in her view, and the current administration’s crackdown on Arab-American citizens.
Last year, returning from a trip to Lebanon through Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport, Bairuty’s husband, Saad, was stopped and interrogated for nearly an hour by airport security. The man asked where Saad, who came to the United States in 1978, had obtained his money and the square footage of his house.
“What this have to do with terrorism?” Shayma Bairuty insists.
But Amira Bajoka, a Chaldean (Roman Catholic) Iraqi-American, thanks the Republicans, whom she has voted for consistently over the years. She likes that there are so many women in the Bush Cabinet. She likes the party’s dedication–more so than the Democrats, she believes–to family and religion. She likes the Bush administration’s policies toward small businesses, such as her West Bloomfield, Mich., travel agency.
And she was “all the way [on] the war.”
Which doesn’t mean her Iraqi-American sister feels the same way.
“She’s for Kerry,” Bajoka says. “And that’s the beauty of America. Two different sisters and two different opinions.”
