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An Interview with Observer News Correspondent Richard Rubright
By Penny Fletcher penny@observernews.net
May 8, 2008 - 11:00:10 PM

RICHARD RUBRIGHT

APOLLO BEACH - I’m going to miss the “Straight from Iraq” series written by Observer News correspondent Richard Rubright. But I’m glad he’s back safe and sound.

With a grandson in the 82nd Airborne who has been to both Iraq and Afghanistan, Richard’s column was the first thing I read each week.

When he wrote about raids, I felt like I was right there. When he talked about night vision while inside a huge tank, I could almost feel the cramped quarters. And his description of the Hawk’s technology took me straight to the cockpit’s controls.

Then he comes back to the States, I interview him and find out he was never trained as a journalist. I was amazed. “I couldn’t have done as good a job myself,” I – who have been at this more than 35 years – said. “There’s got to be more to your story than we know.”

As it turns out, there is.

Richard has always been very determined,” said his mother, Sharon. “He made up his mind he was going, so I knew somehow, he would.”

At 34, Richard has been many places. Growing up as a child of a lifetime civil servant (his father, Earl, who died five years ago) Richard traveled a lot, around the country- overseas, and often, to Washington, D.C.

His dad’s transfer to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa allowed Richard to attend East Bay High School before he started college or enlisted in the Army. After being injured on a parachute jump, he made up his mind to go back to school and major in international strategic studies.

I especially wanted to study under Professor Collin Gray,” Richard said during our recent interview by the pool at his Apollo Beach home. So he spent a year in England studying with Gray, and then came back to Florida to do research for his Ph.D. In the future, having the doctorate will allow him to teach in government think-tanks, work for international organizations, or do a large number of other jobs both for the government and private companies.

Fascinated by the Middle East, Richard, who speaks some Arabic, has traveled to other countries too- 28 of them in fact.

But what has all this to do with his writing a column in Iraq, I wondered as we talked. So far, I hadn’t found one thing in our conversation to explain it.

“I wanted to go to Iraq to gather material for my thesis,” he said at last.
Ah- now we were getting somewhere.

But the military wouldn’t let me accompany them (any troops) without some entity giving me a letter of accreditation.”

Nobody in his academic world wanted to be responsible for him. “So I figured maybe I could go as a journalist.”

With a mom- and a home- in Apollo Beach, The Observer News was a natural choice. And that’s how residents of South County got the chance to read his impressions of U.S. military engagement in Iraq. He went on his own- responsible for himself - with credentials as a columnist.

That answered my biggest question so I quickly moved on to others.

Next I asked about his Feb. 28 account of the Ugandan guards who wouldn’t let him into the PX to buy Pepto Bismol.

“I wasn’t in the military, so they wouldn’t let me enter,” he said.

That made me wonder what Ugandan guards had to do with anything in Iraq.
Much to my surprise, Richard said there are as many private contractors involved in the Iraq War as there are military personnel. About 200,000 of them- doing all kinds of jobs from cooking and serving food to providing security to the military and civilians on the streets.

I asked him also about a comment he made in his March 6 column: “The rebuilding is hampered by the mindset of the Iraqis.” Although he had written extensively about it in his column, I had more questions.

The way Richard describes it, the Iraqis have been oppressed so much and for so long that they usually always equate money with power- which leads to graft on even the smallest level. “This means they’ll help themselves and their family before thinking about bettering their community,” he explained.

But he thinks that is getting better due mostly to a change in thinking spearheaded by new procedures initiated by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who was appointed last fall and Col. Jon Lehr, commander of the 4th Stryker Brigade.

There is a new hope over there and I may go back in time for the elections in October,” Richard said. “The last elections were very corrupt, and if you remember, the Sunnis didn’t get to participate and they protested. But now, things are beginning to change. With new technologies, as well as new ways of thinking about conflicts and political matters- outlining how you go about this and that- we can turn a record of failure into a possibility of success,” he said.

He easily answered all my questions about the warring Shiite and Sunni tribes we hear so much about in our newscasts. “It’s like our civil war,” he said. “Only the thinking of Iraqis is different than ours because of their long oppression.”

In other words, over there everybody wants to be top dog because they think that’s the only way they can survive.

But Gates and Lehr and others like them are starting to turn that thinking around with new U.S. policies and protocols. “I am very anxious to see how this will affect the fall elections,” he said.

“How do you feel about him going back?” I asked his mother.

“If he says he’s going, I know he’s going,” she said. “As I said before, he’s always been very determined.”

When asked if he had any political aspirations for the future, Richard just smiled. Right now he just wants to write his dissertation, which will be about 90,000 words long. (That’s book-length.)

He summed up his feelings about the future of U.S. involvement in Iraq like this: “The number of Iraqi soldiers putting down their weapons is down 70 percent. You have to remember these people are often in the same clans, or even cousins, so a lot of them were just walking away- which left the fight to the foreign (U.S.) military. But that’s not happening so much now. And officials are meeting with tribal militia, which is a real step in the right direction. They’re all talking to one another in one tent. Recently there were 1,500 tribal leaders who met together to reconcile the issues between the Sunnis and Shiites but the only thing I saw reported by the media (from that week) was about the suicide bombing of one lone man. There’s a definite lack of reporting on the larger story.”

Richard would like to see more reporting from the front lines and less from Baghdad.

“Look at the datelines (on your national news stories). It looks like everything is happening in Baghdad. That’s because only a few reporters leave the main camp and get out there where the real action is taking place.”

Richard’s opinions are based on an up-close and personal first-hand view few of us will ever get to have. And while he’s home he’s busy interviewing people in both private and government positions for his dissertation. He has lots of plans and lots of ideas. Yet as of this week, he had no definite plan to return to Iraq in the fall. Well, not yet anyway …

Richard Rubright Photo Medical care is administered to an Iraqi child by U.S. military personnel.

Soldiers follow a trail through a typical Deyala Palm grove.

A UH-60 doorgunner prepares to board a chopper at LZ Washington, Baghdad.

During night hours U.S. troops confirm the identities of suspected insurgents. Richard Rubright Photos

A medic examines a soldier grazed by friendly fire.

Four suspected insurgents were captured and detained. They later confessed.

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