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Outside Magazine October 2004

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Jamboree Jihad (cont.)

IT'S NOT EASY to imagine kids selling Thin Mints and making lanyards in one of the world's most war-torn countries. But the fact is, scouting is an Iraqi tradition.

Not long after the 1908 publication of Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys—which launched the world's largest educational youth movement—scout troops sprouted everywhere, including the Arab world. (In 1910, Baden-Powell also founded the Girl Guides.)

Iraq was one of the first Arab nations to embrace the movement, launching its program in 1921, only two years after the League of Nations carved the country out of the old Ottoman Empire. By

The inside walls of the new Scout Headquarters still bear the old police slogans: "Saddam is with me" and "Work Much, Talk Little."

1954, scouting had become so popular among Arabs that the WOSM established the Arab Scouting Region, based in Cairo.

Today, one-third of the world's 38 million scouts and guides are Muslims—residents of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries. Muslim scouts might not always partake in the same activities as their American counterparts—they don't roast weenies, for one thing, since pork violates their dietary laws—but like Tenderfoots everywhere, they vow to be prepared.

Nothing, however, could have prepared Iraq's 12,000 scouts for what happened after the Baathists took control in 1968 and Saddam seized power in 1979. One by one, youth groups were retooled to serve the state. One replacement program, Saddam's Cubs, offered "summer camps" where 10- to 15-year-old boys endured 14-hour days filled with hand-to-hand fighting drills. By 1999, Iraq had been expelled from the WOSM.

Then came the 2003 war in Iraq, and the collapse of Saddam's dictatorship.

Beck was retired from the military by this time: He was working in Washington as a Defense fellow at the Pentagon. But, like the "man of wealth and taste," in the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," he'd spent an entire career being in the worst places at the worst moments—Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Lebanon, Afghanistan. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked for volunteers to go to Iraq, he signed up.

Beck arrived in Baghdad in December 2003 and took a job for the CPA Strategic Communications office doing "public diplomacy"—reaching out to the locals.

In January, sitting around a table and listening to mortar bursts outside, Beck, along with his boss at Strat Com, Gary Thatcher, and another CPA staffer, Terry Logonsky, started talking about their families. All of them, it turned out, lived in the Washington, D.C., area, and all had children involved in scouting.

Beck's three children were scouts in Arlington, Virginia, his current home; Beck himself had been a scout in his native Hagerstown, Maryland. Like the other two men, he'd heard that scouting once existed in Iraq. Maybe this was a good time to get things restarted?

The trio sent out an "all hands" e-mail in the Green Zone to see if anyone wanted to help; several hundred people replied. In short order, Beck started a multinational volunteer council of scout leaders and boosters.

Thousands of miles away, meanwhile, Michael Bradle heard about the project through a friend. He and Beck agreed by phone to co-chair the effort, with Bradle in charge of, among other things, forming a nonprofit fundraising organization, the Iraqi American Foundation.

In February, CPA administrator Paul Bremer formally approved the Iraqi Scouts Initiative. Beck flew to Geneva and Cairo to meet the WOSM's Gabr and Fawzi Farghali, director of the Arab Scouting Region. He met with Bradle and Boy Scouts of America officials in Irving, Texas, the group's headquarters.

He also found a right-hand man, Nima Motashar, a 46-year-old Iraqi civil engineer who'd scouted in the 1970s and wanted to help Beck find former troop leaders. "Let me take you to an old scout camp in western Baghdad," Motashar offered by phone. "People there want to meet you."

"I didn't have time to vet Nima," Beck recalls. "So I went with him to meet these strangers—armed with a couple of weapons in my backpack."

The strangers turned out to be about a dozen former Iraqi scout leaders, including current and past officials with the Iraqi Ministry of Education, and Farouq Solaiman, who'd once been a scouting commissioner.

Some of these men had vanished under Saddam; colleagues had presumed them dead. When Farghali flew to Baghdad in April for a meeting with Beck, he was amazed to see Solaiman—whom he hadn't heard from in 16 years.

"Beck literally, one by one, pulled them out of the woodwork to gather an organization together," says the WOSM's Clayton.

Next, Beck found the police site and hired Motashar to manage it. And the initiative started to mushroom. Iraqi scouting, according to its formal blueprint, will involve all 18 Iraqi provinces. Its "21st-century headquarters" in Baghdad will include a dormitory, mess hall, restaurant, leave-no-trace campground, nature preserve, and jamboree area. The project will be financed with donations and campaigns like the ongoing Operation Pocket Change, in which scouts worldwide have been asked to pitch in with pennies.

"With $4 million, we can turn a camp for killers into a camp for kids," says Beck. It's one of the many scout-salesman lines that I've heard from him since we met. "With $100 million," he proclaims, "we can change the face of the Middle East."

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