Dear Friends,

So I’ve spent more than a month in Northern Iraq, during which time I’ve had nothing published. One of the more historic events I’ve ever witnessed — the Iraqi elections — has come and gone and I don’t have a printed word to show for it. Time magazine takes my stories, edits them, fact checks them, and dumps them when pressed for space. Suddenly they sent me to Sulymania to get an interview with Jalal Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and probably the next president of Iraq. But it seems that I’m not the only one come to pay court. The hotels in town are booked solid, and my driver and I are moving from one flophouse to another in search of a room with a seated toilet.

In the meantime, I’m trying to get a sense of what kind of leader Mam (“Uncle”) Jalal would be if he won the post, and if the presidency had anything more than symbolic power. So far the signs are promising. If Sulymania is the future of Iraq, then the future’s in mini-skirts. And go-go boots. Yes, boots and skirts and sturdy pair of stockings is the look that’s taken Suly by storm this mud season. True, this isn’t swinging sixties London, but the Kurdish Twiggy costume is better than anything the winning Islamist Shia coalition is planning for Iraqi women. (Black: the New Black.) Yesterday, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel, one young woman dressed just so actually made eye-contact with me, and for a giddy moment such as I hadn’t felt since Election Day, anything seemed possible in the new Iraq.

Back home in Beirut this week, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon was blown up by a massive bomb outside a hotel where I often go swimming. Besides being a sign of bad things to come for the people of Lebanon, it was the biggest piece of news to come out of that country in the last five years, and I wasn’t there to cover it. On the bright side, my parents may be coming to terms with my unusual lifestyle choice. My mother sent me a note on Valentine’s Day: “Sorry you missed the assassination, Andrew.” It was my only Valentine.

If I don’t get the interview with Talabani, and if Time doesn’t throw me a bone, I’m afraid that you, my loyal friends and readers, may have to wait until mid-March before you see another Andrew Lee Butters byline. A new environmental lifestyle glossy called “Plenty” will then publish an account of my visit to a sexism re-education camp run by radical Kurdish feminist guerillas in the mountains of northern Iraq near the Iranian border. While you’ll be glad to know that the story has nothing to do with environmentalism, I must say it was interesting working for such a do-gooder publication. When it suddenly became clear to the editor of my piece that we had different ideas about the nature of the editor/writer relationship, she called me “an arrogant little fuck.”

Rest assured, I am YOUR arrogant little fuck.

Andrew

Now it’s my turn to write a letter while watching the snow fall from my bedroom window. The rest of the house — unheated, uninsulated concrete — is as cold as a a meat locker, but I’ve got a kerosene burner going, and and maybe another hour of town electricity before I have to go up on the roof and start our generator.

When I arrived in Irbil, on an expense-account assignment or Time, I immediately checked into the newly-built Sheraton, now the best hotel in Iraq. But the charm of rooms with key-card locks and public bathrooms with motion-sensor flush urinals wore off when I saw the pathetic security arrangements. Night duty at the front gate consisted of one sentry, sometimes armed, and a flock of geese. So I moved in with some freelance friends to this cold-water flat in a Christian suburb where there are liquor stores on every corner and beer gardens in the summer, and very little chance that a terrorist cell could set up shop without alerting the entire neighborhood.

For a while it was quite the hive of activity. One housemate, a reporter for Reuters, had two friends visiting, Kurdistan’s first British tourists, both girls, one an artist who had just finished her masters degree in London by building a replica of the spider hole in which Saddam Hussein was captured, and the other a yoga instructor who knows massage therapy. We set up Iraq’s only ashram in my room, and many an evening I’d return and find dinner made and waiting. My driver Mohammed put it best, “The girls are like flowers in the home.” Their replacements came a few days ago: another two guys from Reuters, an Arab photographer and his Kurdish fixer, taking a break from Mosul. They aren’t nearly as good-looking, and they can’t cook. But they did have some pretty shocking pictures from Mosul.

Now everyone has gone off on a field trip to Sulymania, Kurdistan’s second and far prettier city, to try and track down Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and possibly Iraq’s next president. I was thinking of going with them, but my assignment is finished — I’ve got a two-pager running this week, inshallah — and I’m just going to slink on back to Beirut this Friday. So it’s just me here by myself, except for an occasional visit from our housekeeper, Shawqat.

As I was writing this, he came in with a tray of coffee and hot chocolate. We sat at my desk, the heater behind us, and for the first time he told me about himself. He had been studying tourism management in Baghdad during the early eighties when he was drafted, along with everyone else, into the Iran-Iraq War. Eight army years later they let him return to civilian life, only to be dragged back for the invasion of Kuwait. He was eventually captured by the Americans, spent 10 months in a Saudi internment camp, refused political asylum because he wanted to see his family again, returned to Iraq only to be locked up in Abu Ghraib for two weeks, and finally made it home to Irbil to find it deserted in the face of Saddam’s onslaught against the Kurdish uprising. Now he makes breakfast and does laundry for the likes of me, surely no compensation for his troubles. Tomorrow he’s going to show me an English-language Bible that American soldiers gave him while he was a prisoner of war.

By then the snow will probably have melted, and the streets will turn to into the thin brown broth that in these parts passes as mud, but which is really just liquid dust that after even a few hours of dry weather returns quickly to its natural state. But for now, the house across the street has turned on the lights of their Christmas decorations, which, though it’s February, they haven’t yet taken down. The pine tree in their garden is the neighborhood Christmas tree, and tonight the electricity has stayed on longer than I expected.

Andrew