I went out to the airport this morning for a story (which I'll be writing about later).  We were approaching a main drag near the hotel when an Iraqi Police truck passed, followed by an SUV with tinted windows, followed by what must have been an extraordinarily brave Iraqi cop riding a police motorcycle.  We were about to inch back out into the intersection when yet another SUV with tinted windows zoomed by, followed by another, and another, and another.  I could make out dim shapes through the windshields, but the side windows were virtually opaque.  I noticed they weren't just passing through; some were turning up the road ahead of us, some were stopping on the other side of the intersection.  At around the same time a very serious Iraqi jumped out of an SUV wearing a tan flak vest and a Kalashnikov, yet an umpteenth SUV turned directly in front of us and pretty much made it clear we should turn around and head back in the opposite direction.

We made a u-turn and our driver slowed down to ask a group of guys what was going on.  Iraq may be in dire straits, but I'm happy to say that, at least in this neighborhood, the tradition of Iraqi men hanging out doing nothing at all hours of the day is alive and well.  They nonchalantly told the driver that it was a convoy for Adil Abdel Mahdi, a SCIRI big-shot.

On the way to the airport I chatted with my driver as best I could; his English is a bit better than my Arabic, but that's not saying much.  He's a Sunni and lives in a very volatile neighborhood—he told me that lately mortars have been coming in from a nearby Shiite enclave.  He's sent his family out of the country and they may not be back for a while.  On the way home I had a similar conversation with another driver, a Shiite who lives in a mixed neighborhood.  It was a surreal discussion.

Me:  How is your family.
Driver:  Fine.  Except we're worried about our children.
Me:  Why?
Driver:  Becuase of kidnappings.

He said there was shooting at a checkpoint near his home the other night, and that ten bodies have turned up in the neighborhood over the past few days.

In 2004, when western journalists were going into lockdown as the kidnapping threat escalated, I sometimes wondered if our sense of the security situation was skewed by our status as prime targets for the most radical elements of the insurgency.  But it's becoming clearer to me that Iraqis are prisoners in their own country.  A guy like Adil Abdel Mahdi is infinitely more in touch with the situation in his country than any western journalist could hope to be.  But he's no more able to live a normal life in Baghdad than I am.  And what's normal life at this point?  Iraqis discuss the risk of losing their children to kidnappers the way suburban Americans discuss problems with the car pool.

I was thinking about this after reading my buddy Chris Allbritton's dispatches from Beirut (they're great, check it out if you're curious about the situation over there).  He says that tourists stuck in the city are beside themselves, while he's having to remind himself what everybody's so worried about.  People are amazing animals, and can adapt to just about anything.  Chris spent years in Iraq, so a little aerial bombardment here, a little ground invasion there, isn't going to rattle him too much.  It's the same with the Iraqi people—they understand the gravity of their predicament, but they realize that flipping out isn't going to make the situation any better.  So they do what they can, they leave if they have the means, they protect their families the best they can.  Life does go on in a war zone, but sometimes you have to take a step back and wonder how it's warping the people forced to weather the storm.

 

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