Chatty Iraqi Cabbie

by Bruce Schimmel

What Kori the Philly cabbie loves most about being an American is freedom of speech. He’s got plenty to say, but coming from Iraq, he’s afraid of being heard. Kori is his actual first name -- it’s on his hack license -- but there’s little else he wants to reveal.

Single, in his early 40s and childless, Kori has both parents and six siblings living some 150 miles south of Baghdad. They count on him to send money and to watch what he says.

A soldier who fought briefly in the first Gulf War, he escaped to the U.S. in 1992. Before becoming an American six years later, he went by his Arab name while driving.

But this was before his phone machine filled up with death threats, his front door got marked with a black "X" and his taxi got trashed. So, he changed his name to hide his Iraqi birth, and remains cautious about which fares he'll talk to.

Still, Kori longs to exercise the freedom of speech missing for so long in Iraq.

As he tells it, "There's no difference [between Americans and Iraqis] in what we eat, what we drink. We both have scrambled eggs for breakfast; we love our kids, our family. What makes the real difference is freedom of speech, which was lost and [which Iraqis] still don't have.

"There used to be 25 newspapers in the '40s and '50s, in Baghdad alone. There were only two left after Saddam, and they were owned by the government."

There are some other things Kori would like you to know.

About the sanctions: "If they put any American state under those sanctions for 12 years, like they did to [all of] Iraq, I don't think that state would survive."

On Saddam: "Ninety-nine percent of the Iraqi people are very pleased to see him go. If I had a chance to kill him, I'd kill him."

On the American occupation: "It's the right move at the wrong time. It should have come in '91. Iraqi people don't like foreign armies inside Iraq. I see the expression of the Iraqi people on CNN. There's a kind of revenge [growing against the Americans] now over Iraqi civilian deaths."

Kori's advice to President Bush? "We need an Iraqi government in Iraq. An election supervised by the United Nations only. I don't want the American ambassador in Baghdad to be the next Iraqi president," he says with a bark of a laugh.

But what he wants most for his native land, and for himself, is the most precious right that Americans have: the freedom to be heard without fear. Though for now, Kori must choose his listeners carefully.