[vacets-gen] From Baghdad: A Wall Street Journal Reporter's e-mail to friends

[Tin Le]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0930-15.htm

Published on Thursday, September 30, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
>From Baghdad
A Wall Street Journal Reporter's E-Mail to Friends
by Farnaz Fassihi


Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under 
virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: 
a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away 
lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those 
reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a 
scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the 
streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, 
can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't 
drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking 
news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, 
can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at 
checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, 
feeling. And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, 
including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. 
So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story 
but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad 
I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.

It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April 
when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when 
Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr 
City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly 
battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began 
spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of 
Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. 
If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has 
been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure 
bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' 
they reply: 'the situation is very bad."

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control 
most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around 
the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's 
roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and 
explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are 
assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, 
means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and 
over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that 
the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public 
transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.

Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.

A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young 
men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They 
melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with 
dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals 
this is booby-trapped. He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were 
a dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid 
driving over them. Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate 
them as soon as an American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the 
population that was supposed to love America for liberating Iraq.

For journalists the significant turning point came with the wave of 
abduction and kidnappings. Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad 
because foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways between 
towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a journalist female friend at 
11 p.m. telling me two Italian women had been abducted from their homes in 
broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded this week and the 
Brit, were abducted from their homes in a residential neighborhood. They 
were supplying the entire block with round the clock electricity from 
their generator to win friends. The abductors grabbed one of them at 6 
a.m. when he came out to switch on the generator; his beheaded body was 
thrown back near the neighborhoods.

The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If 
any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every 
day. The various elements within it-baathists, criminals, nationalists and 
Al Qaeda-are cooperating and coordinating.

I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the 
military and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our 
fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it 
was determined we were missing. Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab 
you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to 
Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from Al Qaeda to 
the Baathisst to the criminals. My friend Georges, the French journalist 
snatched on the road to Najaf, has been missing for a month with no word 
on release or whether he is still alive.

America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard 
units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being 
murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date -- and the insurgents 
are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. 
military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just 
trained to get rid of them quietly.

As for reconstruction: firstly it's so unsafe for foreigners to operate 
that almost all projects have come to a halt. After two years, of the $18 
billion Congress appropriated for Iraq reconstruction only about $1 
billion or so has been spent and a chuck has now been reallocated for 
improving security, a sign of just how bad things are going here.

Oil dreams? Insurgents disrupt oil flow routinely as a result of sabotage 
and oil prices have hit record high of $49 a barrel. Who did this war 
exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up 
and Al Qaeda is running around in Iraq?

Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for 
insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any 
day, even if it means having a dictator ruler.

I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to 
run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly 
sad.

Then I went to see an Iraqi scholar this week to talk to him about 
elections here. He has been trying to educate the public on the importance 
of voting. He said, "President Bush wanted to turn Iraq into a democracy 
that would be an example for the Middle East. Forget about democracy, 
forget about being a model for the region, we have to salvage Iraq before 
all is lost."

One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of 
us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it 
from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem 
has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and 
it can't be put back into a bottle.

The Iraqi government is talking about having elections in three months 
while half of the country remains a 'no go zone'-out of the hands of the 
government and the Americans and out of reach of journalists. In the other 
half, the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up at polling 
stations. The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, leaving 
the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not 
be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war.

I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in 
the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some 
degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and 
risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered 
for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are 
you joking?"

Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal reporter sent this report as an 
e-mail to friends.