I wasn't in much of a mood to write today, and spent quite a while sitting around trying to think of something worth mentioning.  It says something that today's bombings, which killed about 40 people in Sadr City and about another 20 up in Kirkuk, didn't leap out at me as something that demanded attention.  There's not much point in pointing out that these are terrible atrocities; that much should be clear.  And there's not much point in re-hashing everything I and others have written over the past couple weeks about the security situation here.

I think this is a trap journalists covering war fall into, and I don't think there's any way around it.  If the same terrible stuff happens every day it stops being news.  You can keep reporting it, but people are going to start ignoring you.  I'm fortunate to be stringing for a weekly magazine, which means I'm not on the hook to write news stories every time the daily violence spikes higher than "normal."   One of the reasons reporters have burned out on covering Iraq is that after a while all the violence starts to seem the same.  I had to take a very long break before I felt like coming back and writing about this place.

There's a school of thought (though it's getting less and less popular) that things here are actually going okay, it's just the news coverage that makes things out to be a big bloody mess.  Six thousand Iraqi civilians died in May and June—that's about the same as the number of American soldiers and civilians who've died on September 11, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq.  And Iraq's population is more than ten times smaller than the States'.  If suicide bombers in churches, grenade attacks on supermarkets and death squads in affluent suburbs killed 60,000 American civilians in two months we wouldn't be arguing about the definition of "civil war," and we wouldn't be slicing and dicing the statistics to prove that everything is actually headed in the right direction.

It's important to remember that life under Saddam Hussein was a relentless horror show.  But we're more than three years removed from the fall of his regime.  How long will he and his psycho sons be trotted out as the bogeymen whose evil negates all the terrors that have plagued this country since the summer of 2003?  And how can you claim to respect and have faith in the Iraqi people if you explain away the thousands of dead innocents by saying, essentially, "this is better than they've ever had it"?

 

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