CHAPTER 24
TRIBALISM
A
lthough Babylon Inc. is registered in Iraq and is staffed almost exclu-
sively by Iraqis, from day one I have tried to instill in our workforce
American values and business practices. Our first office manager, “Ali
Baba,” was a former sergeant in Saddam’s army, so his reflexive response
when an employee showed up late for work was to beat him senseless. This
was apparently the only motivational tool at this former Iraqi soldier’s dis-
posal. We counseled him that corporal punishment of tardy employees
was no longer acceptable, since he was now working for an American-run
company. Ali Baba viewed Americans as weak, but so did Saddam, and we
all know where he ended up: cowering in a filthy spider hole until he and
his flea-infested beard were captured by US forces.
My approach to Iraq was informed in large part by my decade of
experience in the former Yugoslavia, a similarly cobbled-together mosaic
of a state where ancient ethnic hatreds were stoked by modern-day dema-
gogues until civil war literally destroyed the country. For better or worse, I
viewed Iraq through the Yugoslavia prism because of the centuries-old bad
blood and rivalries between the Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds, in a country
whose borders were drawn by the British. With openly sectarian post-
Saddam leadership and demonization of “the other,” Iraq could easily go
the way of Yugoslavia, breaking up into two or three separate countries.
That was my assumption anyway, and so we immediately set up shop in all
three regions of Iraq. Beyond that, I had no control over what happened in
Iraq. What I could control was how we hired and treated employees.
Simply stated, we hire Iraqi employees based on their qualifications,
attitude, integrity, and skills, without regard for their ethnic or religious
background. As a result, from the day we opened for business in May 2003,
my company has employed Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, Turkmen, and Iraqi225