I met Kirk Semple when we happened to be doing the Saddam trial pool report together.  He has a great piece in the New York Times today about the nature of the violence in Baghdad.  I remember shortly after Sept. 11 President Bush saying that the war against al Qaeda (and against the very idea of terrorism) would be "a different kind of war."  He was talking about a war that would be fought in the shadows, where intelligence and quick strikes against a hidden enemy would be decisive.  But Iraq, too, is a different kind of war.

Kirk's piece gets at something essential to understanding Iraq.  I think one of the reasons people get worried about my being here is that, on some level, they imagine that every bad thing that happens in the course of a day is happening right in front of me.  So I wake up when someone mortars the Hamra, narrowly avoid a kidnapping on my way out the door in the morning, drive through a pitched battle between the US Army and insurgents on my way through Karrada, and arrive at the site of an interview just as it's being leveled by a car bomb.  The reality is a lot less dramatic.  But you don't need to be shot at that often, or know that many people who've been killed, or see the aftermath of more than a few suicide bombings, before it makes an impression.

There's an all-or-nothing mentality evident in some of the commentary on Iraq.  If it's not Omaha Beach on D-Day, then it's nothing to worry about, really.  And there's a natural tendency to imagine war's worst moments, and to assume that if you're not walking through the crossfire every day things aren't as bad as they could be.

It's definitely possible that the situation here will get even worse.  But it's a massive error to imagine that Baghdad needs to be reduced to utter chaos before the situation becomes intolerable.  More than a year ago I wrote on my old blog about the nature of the violence here—assassination campaigns of against policemen and politicians and religious leaders and their families, brutal kidnapping schemes that are driving college professors and well-off professionals out of the country; campaigns of intimidation against civilians.  Whether that's open war, civil war, or falls into some other category, it has the effect of destroying civil society.  One symptom of that destruction is the state of the Iraqi security forces; it's difficult to tell whether, in a crisis, various units will fight for the government, for a militia, or for no one.

In the meantime the sectarian violence has taken the form of a double insurgency—Shiite groups attacking Sunni civilians, Sunni groups attacking Shiite civilians.  That is, indeed, a different kind of war.  It doesn't need to explode into an open and traditional civil war—with rival militias attacking each other's neighborhoods with artillery, for example—to destroy the country.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem, arguably the most powerful Shiite politician in Iraq, said Friday that he supported disbanding Iraq's militias.  Hakeem also called for the US military to step aside and let the Iraqi security forces handle the security situation.  I read an analysis that called this good news.  But to me it just underlines the problems that have scuttled one security plan after the other.  Hakeem' heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.  SCIRI's Badr Brigade militia is among the most powerful (if not the most powerful) in Iraq.  It has also, according to a westen diplomat in a position to know, been infiltrating the Iraqi security forces under the guise of "integrating into" the Iraqi security forces.  When Hakeen says he wants the Iraqi security forces in charge, that could very well mean that he wants himself—or at least people he trusts—in charge.

I'm always impressed by the intelligence and practical know-how of American soldiers, Marines and diplomats in Iraq.  But sometimes it seems like they're gliding across the surface, while the real battles are fought in the depths, out of sight.  I feel that way as a journalist here a lot of the time.

 

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