Charles Crain

On the road

2006-08-30T20:39:00Z

I left Baghdad this morning and am now in Amman.

I skipped town during an odd interlude. Violence in Baghdad is down, with American and Iraqi troops all over the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. Word is the killings are down 30 percent. That's good news and it's significant. Whether it's of long-term signficance remains to be seen. There's a fine line you have to walk with this kind of news. I'm more than happy to report it, but a lot of people seem to want more than that. They want analysis saying that this proves things are about to start heading in the right direction. That's possible. I'm inclined to be skeptical and that skepticism is based on past experience, not a lack of respect for Iraqis or the United States military.

In January of 2005 I thought the elections were going to be marred by low turnout and violence. I was wrong about that. Up in Mosul and Tal Afar with the 25th Infantry and the Stryker guys I saw a very small segment of a huge nation-wide effort to suppress the insurgency ahead of the elections. From what I saw it was a masterful plan carried out with tremendous competence and energy. It was a good news story and I was happy to report it. But while things would undoubtedly be a lot worse right now if the insurgents had wrecked that election, the election alone did not "turn around" the situation in Iraq. The same over-arching issues that fueled the violence before January 2005 continued to do so after January 2005.

Similarly, after the US military and the Iraqi security forces finish their security sweeps in Baghdad's worst neighborhoods, they will probably not have altered the dynamic of the sectarian conflict in Iraq. All the commanders readily agree that's the case; what they say they're doing now is getting the violence down to a level where Iraqi forces can assume day-to-day responsibility for security and the government has room to pursue national reconciliation. So, as I think I wrote a few days ago, the real test of this operation has little to do with short-term drops in violence and everything to do with the Iraqi government, the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Police.

All that said, I don't sneer at the current success even if it is temporary. If the latest statistics are accurate the operation is saving lives. And things seemed a bit more normal on the streets yesterday. So normal that the traffic is back to its usual snarl. I was heading to a press conference in the Green Zone yesterday (it was officially a mystery guest; the mytery guest turned out to be the US attorney general). We didn't take our usual route because traffic was absurd; apparently the fuel shortage has eased and everyone was out trying to buy cheaper gas. So we took the long way around, through neighborhoods that used to be quiet, ritzy Sunni enclaves but are now pretty dodgy.

Traffic was heavy, people were on the streets, and things seemed about as normal as you could expect. There were Iraqi soldiers manning checkpoints and looking pretty professional. I started thinking about what a strange war this is--an insurgency against the US while Sunnis and Shiites wage a double insurgency against each other's civilians, politicians and fighters. It's a frustrating war to cover (not that I've covered any others) because so much happens beneath the surface. I was thinking in this vein as we drove through Mansour on a big four-lane parkway. We drove past an Iraqi military base surrounding by high concrete blast walls, by a mosque with an Iraqi soldier out front protected by sandbags, a free-standing blast barrier and a machine gun.

Further on up the road I heard a few gunshots. It got my attention, but I assumed it was Iraqi soldiers or police clearing traffic in their usual aggressive fashion by shooting into the air. But there was another rat-a-tat-tat, and we saw the cars ahead of us driving across the parkway to head in the other direction or turning onto side streets. There was some discussion in Arabic and the driver said there was fighting up ahead. He asked if I wanted to go back to the house. I thought for a second and said, "Let's just drive somewhere you think is safe and we'll figure it out from there." We turned off onto a side street, looped around and came back up onto the main drag. By the time we'd done so the right-hand lane of traffic had reversed entirely and was jammed full of cars slowly moving away from the trouble down the road. In the distance I heard a few thudding rounds from a heavy machine gun.

We merged back into traffic. There was an Iraqi police truck trying to move towards the fighting, which was tough when hundreds of cars wanted to go in exactly the opposite direction. Once it was beyond us I heard someone firing very nearby--someone in the truck shooting at the sky to clear traffic. I told the driver what he already knew--that we should make sure not to barrel ahead too quickly or we might surprise anxious cops or soldiers driving towards us. But there was no drama; we maneuvered through traffic, crossed over into the right-hand lane, and made it back to the house without a problem.

One thing I won't miss about Iraq is the commute.

I'm going to keep blogging even while I'm out of Iraq. There'll be plenty to write about.

Bon voyage

2006-08-29T20:54:00Z

I'm flying out of here to Amman tomorrow morning (actually, this morning--it's almost 1 am here). I ended up having a slightly busier day than I thought, partially because it was busy and partially because I let things drag on. But when I get to the hotel tomorrow I'll write a bit about my last day in town. Kind of an appropriate coda to the trip.

Punditry vs. journalism

2006-08-27T18:26:00Z

Andy McCarthy, National Review Online:

At the press conference, Steve Centanni stated that he and Olaf Wiig "were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint."

Will Reuters, which thought the "conversion" was newsworthy, report on that?

Or will we get the usual slew of "mainstream" Muslim experts who tell us that in Islam "there is no compulsion in religion," and that jihad is "the inner struggle against sin"?

Posted at 10:55 AM [Eastern Time, I believe]

Reuters, 2:08 PM, BST [9:08 AM Eastern Time, I believe]:

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - Militants in the Palestinian Gaza Strip freed two kidnapped journalists from the American Fox News Channel on Sunday after forcing them at gunpoint to say in a videotape they had converted to Islam.

Correspondent Steve Centanni, a 60-year-old American, and New Zealand-born cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, looked happy but tired after two weeks of captivity in the Palestinian coastal strip.

A previously unknown group called the Holy Jihad Brigades had made a sweeping demand for the United States to free Muslim prisoners in exchange for the release of the men.

"I am really fine, healthy, in good shape and so happy to be free," Centanni told the Fox Channel.

He said that he and Wiig had been forced at gunpoint to say they were converting to Islam.

"I'm thinking: 'Oh God, a remote warehouse with a big noisy generator, they could simply shoot me in the head and nobody would hear it'," Centanni said.

"I have the highest respect for Islam ... but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns and we didn't know what the hell was going on."

...A statement from the captors before the men were freed had said the two journalists had to choose either Islam, a tax imposed on non-Muslims to be paid to a Muslim ruler, or war.

"They chose Islam, and that is a gift God gives those whom he chooses," the statement said.

______________________________

Fortunately for McCarthy he's from the Podhoretzian school of punditry (e.g., "Would we be better off in Iraq if we massacred all adult male Sunnis? Just askin'!") and technically didn't accuse Reuters of anything. If you don't know anything it's a good idea to phrase your arguments in such a way that you can always deny you were saying anything at all.

Paul Salopek

2006-08-26T21:46:00Z

Paul Salopek, a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, was arrested several weeks ago in Sudan and has now been charged with "espionage" and "writing false news." If things proceed as scheduled he'll be put on trial next month in Darfur, where he, his driver and his interpreter were arrested.

Salopek was on leave from the Tribune working on a story for National Geographic. Both publications are working to get him released and to make it clear to the Sudanese government that the guy isn't a spy. I don't think there's much reason for me to go beyond what Salopek's employers have already stated clearly (those links are behind the Trib's registration wall, but registering is easy and free). Railing against the Sudanese government is redundant. If you have a passing understanding of Sudan, and know that Salopek and his colleagues were arrested by pro-government forces in Darfur, I think the situation speaks for itself.

Salopek has two Pulitzer Prizes (neither of which is the much-maligned "Pulitzer Prize for Espionage"). In 1998 he won for his coverage of the Human Genome Project; in 2001 he won for his coverage of Africa. Last month the Trib published his fantastic series on America's consumption of oil, where that oil comes from, and the effects of our oil addiction on the US and the rest of the world. If that sounds like an invitation to a dry political screed, read the pieces. He went all over the world--from a gas station in suburban Chicago to a militia safe-house in Nigeria to southern Iraq--and his stories are full of telling details, sympathy and insight. They exemplify what I admire most about great journalism and what I aspire to in my reporting--telling complicated stories clearly, fairly and with compassion. He's probably going to win another Pulitzer, and shouldn't be languishing in a Sudanese prison when he does.

Journalism can be a tricky business. It gets trickier when reporters are subjected to arrest or persecution for doing their jobs. Asking folks to write their Congressman seems like a weak response, but I'll do it anyway. In particular, if you're an Illinois resident get in touch with Sen. Durbin or Sen. Obama and ask what they're doing to help get Salopek and his colleagues released (apparently Obama is working on this while he's traveling in Africa). The Sudanese government has an impressive track record of ignoring the mild-mannered scorn of the international community; it's important to implore the US government to apply some real pressure in this case.

It's important to focus attention, not just on Salopek, but on his driver and translator. They're both from Chad, which has a rocky relationship with Sudan. Its government may be unable to help its citizens when they're in peril abroad. Drivers and translators aren't employees who do menial tasks while reporters do the important work. They're partners in doing good journalism--any journalism--and an absolutely vital part of working in difficult and remote parts of the world. They're brave, they're dedicated and in places like Iraq they are sometimes killed on the job. Tossing them in prison is every bit as much an attack on journalism as imprisoning full-time reporters.

I don't have any in-depth knowledge of the Sudanese government's track record in situations like this or of the specifics of this case. As far as I know Salopek and his colleagues will be released tomorrow; they could also go on trial as scheduled and run the risk of spending years in jail. I'm hoping for the former but under the circumstances it's important to work against the latter.

I caught my first tube today

2006-08-24T13:48:00Z

Not really, but one of the comments reminded me of an unfairly neglected cinematic masterpiece. Never fear, I'm not going to find a way to make Point Break relevant to Iraq (except to mention that on one of the nights I spent with the MiTT team in Adhamiya the 101st guys were very excited about watching the Keanu Reeves surfing epic on DVD).

But Ponce--if you're out there--the email address in your comment is sending me back an error message. How should I get in touch with you? I found a passport of yours in Sumatra; missed you by about a week in Fiji. But I know you wouldn't miss the Fifty Year Storm.

Ignorance is bliss

2006-08-23T22:35:00Z

John Podhoretz is delighted to report that, uh, other people are reporting that there's been a drop in violence in Baghdad lately. But so far this follows the usual pattern--violence gets out of control, the US moves in and sits on the hardest-hit areas, violence declines, the US hands over security duties to Iraqis, and violence ramps up again.

Every single military official I've heard in the past several weeks--a few Iraqis and quite a few Americans--says that the test of this new security push will be how well Iraqi Army and police units perform once the American presence declines again. They also--very significantly--say that the ultimate solution to the violence is political, not military. So if you're trying to make predictions about where Iraq will be next month or next year, and not just next week, you'd do well to keep an eye on the Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces. One clue to where things stand in the Iraqi government is that everyone is still bending over backwards to avoid naming specific militias as part of the problem. And the word on the street in some of the targeted neighborhoods is that the insurgents are coming back now that the Americans have swept through and moved on.

But I'm glad to see that Podhoretz has newfound faith that house-to-house searches and civil affairs programs can defeat an insurgency. It's a cheerier perspective than his coy ruminations on the strategic necessity of genocide.

"Perspective"

2006-08-22T19:21:00Z

Since Andrew Sullivan's on vacation I'll take a potshot at Mickey Kaus (for some reason there's no option to link to the specific post). He writes:

Edward Luttwak notes that
6,821 Americans ...died to conquer the eight square miles of Iwo Jima.
That's more than twice the number of Americans who've died in the entire Iraq war. ... [Rationalization?-ed Perspective.]

It's certainly perspective, but I don't see why it's useful perspective. If there are people laboring under the misunderstanding that Iraq is one of the bloodiest wars of all time, or that American casualties are astronomical compared to previous American wars, I suppose cluing them in to US military history and the world's sad record of violent death and mayhem is important. But what's the point of bringing up Iwo Jima in a discussion of Iraq? If this war wasn't necessary, or if the costs of fighting it are massively greater than the likely costs of avoiding it, then no amount of "perspective" about previous blood-lettings is relevant. If Kaus wants to defend the war by arguing that the price we and Iraq have paid is acceptable given the gains we're likely to make down the road, he should have at it. But pointing out that it's not the worst thing that's ever happened, like World War II was, is beside the point.

It's also an argument that quickly becomes offensive. Maybe it's tempting, out in Los Angeles, to roll your eyes at the ignorant anti-war poseurs in your midst and point out that more Americans died at Iwo Jima than have died in Iraq. But you'd have to be a harder person to make light of Iraqi civilian casualties in the same way (e.g., "Let's have a little perspective here--about 18,000 innocent Iraqis have died this year, but what's that compared to the 100,000 innocents who died when the US firebombed Tokyo?"). And you'd have to be someone who doesn't value a place in polite American society to turn the argument around and say, "What was the big deal about Sept. 11? Almost 400,000 innocent people died during the Rape of Nanking, let's have a little perspective about 3,000 people killed in New York and Washington." People don't (or shouldn't) say things like that because it belittles human suffering and replaces authentic historical perspective with a snide game of "Can you top this?"

Unless you're literally talking about the worst thing that has ever happened you can always be lazy and beside the point by bringing up some previous calamity that dwarfs the one under discussion. But, for not-so-mysterious reasons, a guy like Kaus--who's still agnostic on whether Iraq will end up being worth it--is happy to trot out Iwo Jima to minimize the bloodshed here but did not minimize Sept. 11 in the run-up to the invasion in 2003. The thousands of Americans who died on Iwo Jima gave their lives destroying a regime responsible for the Rape of Nanking, a slew of other atrocities, and numerous unprovoked invasions (of China, of the Philippines, of southeast Asia, etc.). It was a regime that killed millions. It sought (and at one point largely possessed) imperial control of east Asia and the Pacific. It was formally allied with Nazi Germany in a war against Britain and the United States, the only surviving liberal democracies with enough men and enough money to stave off the global triumph of genocidal fascism. What the scale of that conflict has to do with the scale of the conflict in Iraq escapes me, but maybe I just lack the proper historical perspective.

Applied conservatism

2006-08-18T15:07:00Z

Andrew Sullivan has weighed in on the tabloid story du jour, saying "I'm a conservative of doubt on this JonBenet arrest." Which got me wondering: how do the various schools of conservative thought seek to understand arrests in decade-old child beauty pageant murder cases?

Paleo-conservative: The perpetrator comes from a culture in which murdering child beauty pageant contestants in their basements is an acceptable practice. Judging him by our standards and attempting to "change" him is not only arrogant but also dangerous.

Neo-conservative: If we allow the murder of child beauty pageant contestants in Colorado it's only a matter of time before they're killing child beauty pageant contestants in our own cities.

Realist: If we attempt to punish this particular murderer of child beauty pageant contestants we set a precedent for intervention in all child murders. We should only prevent child murder in North Asia and Western Europe, where it might harm our vital interests.

Libertarian: Yes, we're preventing child murder--but at what cost to our civil liberties and way of life?

Gibsonite conservative: The Jews are responsible for all the child beauty pageant murders in the world.

It's tough to be in Iraq and also keep up, at least minimally, with what's going on back in the States. I can't really tell how big a deal the Ramsey story is. It's on the front page of most of the news websites I check, but that doesn't necessarily mean people care. Personally, I'd classify myself as a "conservative of disinterest" on this one. If this is the guy I'm glad the girl and her family will get some justice. If he's a warped publicity seeker, that's creepy but not necessarily interesting. Beyond that the story never grabbed my attention (and I'm not immune to the lure of tabloid journalism).

I wish I could work myself up into a big rant along the lines of, "What kind of a world do we live in where people fixate on a decade-old murder and ignore vital stories like, uh, the one I happen to be covering?" But I get it--when cute kids from safe neighborhoods get killed in their homes people are going to wonder what the hell happened. When kids die in Iraq it's one of those things that makes you shake your head and page ahead to the sports section. People can only handle so much tragedy before their eyes glaze over.

In a weird way, though, this story makes me miss the US. Not because I wish I were back in Chicago discussing JonBenet over beers at the Hopleaf, but because it makes me realize how cut off I am from what people back in the States think about and care about (and, come to think of it, that "beer at the Hopleaf" part is pretty appealing). I can't imagine how cut off ex-pats in a place like this would have been only 10 or 15 years ago. I can sit at my desk and read pretty much any local US paper I want, I can download hours of American music, I can read blogs and baseball recaps. I can keep up with the same goofy internet fads as everyone else. I don't watch much TV here but last night I watched a fairly recent episode of Letterman. I've seen Miami Vice on DVD.

That said, being immersed in internet and TV culture is not the same thing as being immersed in US culture (unless something has gone horribly wrong since I skipped out in April). I have all the data, but none of the texture. I'm missing out on the moments and conversations that make up everyday life. I was talking to Bobby and a couple of western diplomats the other day about Iraqi exiles, and the rude awakening they got when they returned to Iraq during the spring and summer of 2003. I think they ran into the same problem (magnified by the totalitarian lockdown on information and travel under Saddam's regime). Many of the exiles are brilliant and well-meaning people, but that isn't enough. They knew about Iraq, but they didn't really know Iraq. http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/5713946

Frivolity

2006-08-17T20:47:00Z

I spent the past couple days writing and then revising my story for this week's magazine, so I'm in no state to blog intelligently about Iraq. Which, I think, is a good state to be in when thinking about the way Iraq is debated by American politicians. The whole thing seems like theater to me. The people who are actually here, doing their damnedest to make this work, may be running out of ideas. They now face the choice of either confronting Shiite militias and risking an anti-American insurgency among Iraq's well-armed and well-organized Shiite majority, or hanging back and allowing sectarian violence to escalate. Being smart and committed, having a great plan, won't necessarily help anymore. It's possible every option we now have is a bad option.

But no American politician with anything to lose or gain by discussing the issue of Iraq can say that publicly. So if you're, say, Ned Lamont, you're stuck taking positions like this:

Lamont emphasized he’d keep U.S. troops right next door in Kuwait ready for action in case they were needed to deter Iran and Iraq’s other neighbors from intervening in its internal politics.
“We’re not abandoning the people of Iraq,” Lamont assured a crowd in Wilton, Conn. six days before he won. “We are going to be there for humanitarian assistance” and reconstruction, he said.

I try not to pay attention to American politics unless absolutely necessary, but this seems less like a "position" and more like a politically-motivated attempt to keep people from realizing that a proposal to admit defeat and leave Iraq is something other than a proposal to admit defeat and leave Iraq. Iran and Iraq's other neighbors are already intervening in Iraq's internal politics. What is the Lamont threshold beyond which we would re-deploy our retreated troops to Iraq to do battle with Iran and its proxies in Iraq? It's a silly question to ask, because the practical answer is that once we leave we'd never go back. That's certainly one way out of Iraq, but politics doesn't allow anyone to make that argument forthrightly.

Lamont's plan resembles Peter Galbraith's plan. Here's an excerpt of Galbraith's article, along with some scene-setting by David Frum (Galbraith's article is locked away in the New York Times' online ADMAX). Galbraith proposes moving American forces to Kurdistan, where they'd be in a pro-American region and close enough to Sunni Iraq that they could sally forth to stomp on any attempt by al Qaeda to establish a foothold. Again, there are practical considerations--once we leave western Iraq will the public have any stomach for periodic clearing operations in haunted towns like Fallujah, Ramadi and Haditha? Given our relatively limited ability to gather intelligence on the Sunni insurgency when we're sitting right on top of it, how would we even know if al Qaeda had gained a foothold within the complicated tribal and insurgent networks of Anbar Province? This seems like an intellectual version of Lamont's predicament--how to practically acknowledge defeat without giving in to the hopelessness defeat will spawn.

I'm not sneering at these proposals. Personally I don't think the situation is so far gone that retreating from Arab Iraq is our best option. But it's not crazy to consider that possibility. I just don't have the stamina to play the eternal optimist and think of a best-case scenario for managing defeat. The reality may be a lot more dire than even these plans take into account.

Taking the easy way out...

2006-08-15T22:01:00Z

I'm a little distracted by work this week, so I'm reviving my periodic feature, "Respond To A Post By Andrew Sullivan." I caught myself writing him a letter in response to this post:

The BBC is on the case of the orphanage massacre in Sri Lanka. Good for them. But the MSM seems eerily silent. What do you think the coverage would be if the Israeli government killed 61 children in an anti-terror bombing campaign? Front-page A-1. Sri Lanka? Nada. And people wonder why some of us believe much of the media has an anti-Israel bias.

In the midst of writing my cranky letter it occured to me that, as a member of the dreaded mainstream media, I should broadcast my reaction to my dozens of loyal readers. So, here it is. The media doesn't have an "anti-Israel" bias. It has a "cover Israel" bias. If Hamas or Hezbollah killed 61 Israeli children in an orphanage the result would be wall-to-wall coverage for days casting the attack, correctly, as a major atrocity. You don't need to run an off-the-wall thought experiment to figure that out; just think back to how the American media covered Hamas' suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians a few years ago.

As for Sri Lanka, it's a painful fact that Americans don't care about places that can't be plausibly linked to vital American interests. They don't care about places they can't relate to, or about places where there's an expectation (deserved or not) that lots of people will die as a matter of course. So genocide in Europe causes an outcry (eventually) but genocide in Rwanda earns a shrug--Africa is one of those places where people are just supposed to die horribly. That's why you can't get anyone to care about the war in Congo that's wrecked central Africa and killed millions of people. Is insufficient coverage of that bloodbath also an indication that the mainstream media has it in for Israel?

This doesn't even have anything to do with the dreaded MSM's dreaded lack of urgency in covering the war on terror. When about 200 people died in al Qaeda's attack on Madrid's commuter trains it was a huge story. It was a huge story when more than fifty people were killed in the London bus and tube bombings. A month ago more than 200 people died when terrorists attacked Bombay's commuter trains. Not such a huge story for Americans--and why not? Part of it is that Iraq is a big story, so attacks on countries that have troops in Iraq matter to Americans. India may have a problem with Islamic terrorism, but that problem has little to do with America's terrorism problem except at the level of rhetoric and (very) grand strategy.

And an American can walk around Madrid and certainly London and feel somewhat at home in the culture and among the people. When you see pictures of Madrid or London they obviously look like foreign cities, but in a lot of very important ways they look like American cities, too. It's hard for most Americans to relate to what life might be like in Bombay, so the destruction of life in Bombay doesn't register. In a slightly different form it's the same dismissive attitude that allows some people to downplay civilian casualties in Iraq by pointing out that lots of civilians died in Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s. Hey, dying horribly is just something these folks do--nothing to worry about, really, except as it impacts American interests in the Middle East.

I don't think there's much to be done about this. People care about things they relate to, and no amount of high-minded devotion to foreign coverage will make Americans care about Sri Lanka. And what if Americans did care deeply about Sri Lanka? Would that lead to American involvment in Sri Lanka as extensive as American involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict? Would the result be peace and prosperity in Sri Lanka, as American involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict has brought peace and prosperity to Israel and its neighbors?

I think Sullivan is thinking in this post about the way the media covered civilian deaths in Israel and civilian deaths in Lebanon. Civilian deaths in Lebanon got a lot more coverage even though Hezbollah was deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. But the disparity in sheer numbers is staggering--I think dead Lebanese civilians out-number dead Israeli civilians by ten or twenty times. If the cease-fire holds neither side will have accomplished much (though Hezbollah will have won a signficant victory in terms of morale and propaganda). So the dead are the only monument to the war. The dead are the only true monument to any war. Sullivan's been eloquent lately, in another context, about the tragedy of starting a war that leads to large-scale suffering--even if the war was justified, and even if the suffering was not part of the plan. He could, I think, profitably apply that mindset to Israel and Lebanon.

Out of gas

2006-08-14T13:05:00Z

While I was moving through Baghdad earlier today I saw a group of Iraqis under the morning sun pushing their car down the road. I assumed it had broken down, but this afternoon I saw the exact same thing--a group of Iraqis pushing their car up the rise of a bridge in punishing heat. I wondered if the cars were falling apart or had just run out of gas. The driver I was with said it costs about $1 to buy a liter of gas in Baghdad, which translates into about $3.80 per gallon. I'm not sure if that's the legit price or the price you pay if you can't or won't wait in the horrifying gas lines that now snake down the city's streets. The lines are so slow-moving that you often see cars that have just been parked in line. Sometimes the owner's nearby, sometimes there doesn't seem to be anyone around.

There was in influx of new cars after the invasion, when the sanctions were lifted. But while you do see nice cars here--BMWs and Mercedes, mostly--you rarely see a car that looks "new." Baghdad traffic isn't kind to side panels, bumpers or paint-jobs, whether your in a battered old VW taxi or a Bavarian luxury car. And the dirt and dust that flies around the city ends up coating everything, including cars, with a thin layer of grime.

One of the good news stories from Baghdad, for a long time, was the dirt-cheap price of gasoline. I'm not sure why the cost has ratcheted up lately. It doesn't seem like insurgents are hitting oil pipelines and disrupting the supply and more than usual. There don't seem to be more cars on the road, either. But just about every misfortune imaginable has befallen Iraqis over the years, so I guess high gas prices were inevitable.

Hope

2006-08-14T00:00:00Z

I've had a hectic few days, which is why I've missed out on posting. This is a strange time in Baghdad. The new(er) security plan is shifting into gear, which is something I'll be writing about for Time's next issue. In the meantime I'm back at the bureau to write and get in some interviews before the end of the week. A lot of the guys on the staff ended up staying the night, I think because there are more roadblocks up now as part of the latest security push.

I've said before that I'm wary about writing in much detail about the staff. Some of them are happy to let people know what they do, but many are taking a real risk by working for a western magazine. In a lot of ways the staff is representative of the country, or at least of Baghdad. There are Sunnis and Shiites, very observant Muslims and guys who finish the day with a Scotch on the rocks. They live all over the city and, in addition to the risks they take working with westerners, face the same dangers as all the other Iraqis living in Baghdad.

The evidence in the bureau is that Iraqis from different sects and different backgrounds, men of strong faith and men of no faith in particular, can live and work together. But these men live in neighborhoods where bodies turn up in the streets and you must submit to impromptu roadblocks (legit military, insurgent, militia) to move around. I know some of the Iraqis who work for other bureaus around here and they're in similar situations. It's painful, sometimes, to wonder where the country will be in six months or a year or five years. There are a lot of good and capable people in Iraq who can do nothing but hope things get better.

Up on the roof

2006-08-11T00:25:00Z

After an interesting but, all things considered, quiet embed in Adhamiya, Pete and I are back where we were a couple days ago getting ready to wrap things up. We went up to the roof to smoke. It was hot but tolerable. Once again, it was remarkably quiet. Once again, that turned out to be temporary. Shortly after we got up there we heard the crack of Kalashnikov fire, followed by the thud of a .50 caliber machine gun and the pop of M4 rifles. A single stream of red tracer fire flew through the sky once, then again. At one point we saw a distant flash, then heard an explosion a few seconds later. Pete thought it sounded like a grenade.

This went on for a while. It sounded close, and we were wondering if maybe insurgents had attacked the checkpoint in front of the base. We oriented ourselves using the dark office towers in the distance, trying to figure out if the fire was coming from the direction of Adhamiya or Sadr City. We went downstairs a couple times to ask some of the soldiers if they knew what was going on; when we came back up to the roof gunfire was still erupting sporadically. Of course, when Pete went downstairs to get a digital recorder the noise died off almost completely.

I'll be writing a bit more about the embed in the next day or two; right now I'm beat.

Home

2006-08-09T18:30:00Z

Back in the spring or early summer of 2004, when the fight against the Mehdi Army was heating up, I read about a unit that had aleady left and was called back from Kuwait to fight in southern Iraq. On the scale of unpleasant surprises, that's surpassed by the Stryker Brigade that was recalled after some of its men had already landed back in the United States.

Pete covered those guys for a while up in Mosul and we bumped into a group of them this afternoon. All things considered they're not in a terrible mood. They've now been in Iraq a year and will be here for another four months, so they have a decidedly philosophical outlook. One of the guys arranged a leave to be home for the birth of a child. The due date got pushed back and he was able to extend his leave to witness the birth. He opened a pocket on the upper sleeve of his uniform and pulled out a set of pictures--the baby, his wife with the baby, him with the baby. The new duty in Baghdad will keep him from his family during his kid's first few months.

The captain in charge of the MiTT team I'm with is a guy named Ben Shaha. He's 31, but has a grin and a mild manner that makes him seem younger. He's on a year-long deployment; in the middle he returned home to Utah, got married, honeymooned in-state, and then returned to Iraq. Sgt. Maj. James Clinton, who showed me and Pete around the old government complex two nights ago, is a lean guy with a creased face and close-cropped thinning hair. Out on the balcony, where sometimes the smell of the morgue ruins your cigarette break, he spoke of retiring when he hits the 30-year mark so he can live in Tennessee and ride around the country on his motorcycle. He recalled driving from Tennessee to Kansas City for lunch with a friend, then driving home--an 18-hour roundtrip for a meal at Appleby's. A while back he, his wife and some friends rode from Tennessee down to Key West, then up to DC, then back home, all in a few days.

I've only covered the military in Iraq. So what for them is an extraordinary situation--six months or a year or 16 months in Iraq away from their families--seems to me like the only reality for American soldiers and Marines. When these guys talk about their homes and their families they aren't complaining about their lot in life. They're just talking about who they are, and what they're going to do when they get home.

Hurry up and wait

2006-08-08T20:51:00Z

After doing an interview this morning I promptly went back to sleep for another couple hours. Peter and I spent most of the day waiting to see where we'd be going next. Early in the afternoon we went up to the roof of the building we were in for a cigarette. There was no real shade; we had to cower against the wall to keep out of the sun. It was surprisingly peaceful, and Peter remarked that it was hard to believe we were in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in the most dangerous city in the world. On cue, a few gunshots rang out; a few seconds after that three small helicopters--I associate them with the US special forces and with private security contractors--buzzed past.

The guys we were with are mostly advising the Iraqi Army's staff officers at the brigade level, so we wouldn't have had much of a chance to get out on patrols. By the end of the day they'd figured out how to hook us up with adviser units that are hitting the streets more often. Early in the evening we packed up our stuff, tossed it in the back of a Humvee, and headed into Amariyah. The guys in my Humvee had set up small speakers on top of their military radios and attached an iPod. We spent a few hours driving through the neighborhood with rap, country and heavy metal in the background. As night fell we drove past a mosque--the street in front full of Iraqi Police pickup trucks--to the sound of a steel guitar and honky tonk piano.

The atmosphere here is strange. Kids chase after the Humvees, or wave. The grown-ups mostly ignore the vehicles or glower. As a lot of people have noted, the Iraqi Army seems a little more on the ball than the Iraqi Police. But everybody's frank about the limits of what the military--Iraqi or American--can accomplish here. The solution is political. Everyone's been saying that since 2003 and it's still true. I'll be writing more about the Army and the security situation here for Time.

We finished the night at a building that apparently used to be part of a palace complex for either Saddam's wife or one of his sons. It now has kind of frat house atmosphere--a big, dingy kitchen full of frozen pizzas and Gatorade, a decent TV, and guys hanging out playing Monopoly or just chatting. Our accomodations--along with a few other guys from a unit based here temporarily--are down in the basement. The soldier down there when we checked it out told a story about chasing down and killing a roach with his knife. That said, it's air conditioned and seems like a decent spot to spend a few days.

And, once again, I'm surprised by the internet situation. The guys have rigged up a couple computers and created a mini internet cafe, so I don't have to sweat outside while I use a BGAN. Pete and I will be trying to get out with these guys as much as possible in the next few days.

Embedded

2006-08-07T19:05:00Z

I've been trying to set up an embed for a while now; for various reasons the plan kept changing or falling through. I'd been telling people for probably two weeks that I was about to do an embed. Last night, after the final schedule change, I said I was starting to feel like the kid who tells his friends that he has a girlfriend, she just goes to a different high school.

But today I went to the Green Zone for an interview and then headed over to the landing zone to catch a chopper. I met up with Peter, the photographer doing the pictures. He's cool and laid back--being laid back is a big bonus in a place like this.

I noticed at the end of the day a dry erase board listing today's high temperature as 117 degrees. That's hot enough that you collapse exahusted at the end of the day and then realize that all you did was get sit on a chopper, sit in a Humvee, and walk around a little bit.

The chopper ride was the usual; very hot, very crowded and very loud. As I was cinching up my four-point harness one of the crew chiefs saw me and loosened up the belts that go over your shoulders. He smiled at me--and all I could see was the smile, because he was wearing a dark gray visor over his eyes--and put his hands up around his throat. Then he leaned close to my ear. I could barely make out him saying, "IF WE CRASH YOU'LL CHOKE YOURSELF." Then he moved away, smiled and shook his head, and said (I could read his lips) "That's not what you want." Crew chiefs are cool guys.

We flew to a base near Sadr City and then drove to another base near the river. The drive made me realize how long it's been since I spent any real time in East Baghdad. It was close to curfew, and the sun was setting. A lot of the stores had already drawn down their metal gates. Some kids ran along the Humvees for a bit yelling and giving thumbs-up; the adults mostly looked on impassively. I looked down a side street and noticed that it was really just a dirt road with sewage running down the middle.

The base we're at is a complex of old Saddam-era government buildings where American military trainers live and work with Iraqi soldiers. Up on a balcony you can look over towards Adhamiya in one direction and Sadr City in the other. The occasional pop of gunfire came over from Adhamiya. A couple of the soldiers said that when the wind is blowing in the wrong direction the smell of bodies wafts over from a nearby morgue.

There's the usual ingenuity and no-BS attitude here. The men have rigged up their own internet, and one of the sergeants managed to set up a connection for Peter and me in our room. I'm absolutely beat--mostly from the heat and from not getting enough sleep last night. I'm going to hit the sack early (for me) so I'm not useless by the end of the day tomorrow.

Armies and militias

2006-08-05T10:24:00Z

Stephen Farrell has a piece in the Times of London about Israeli infantrymen fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It's illustrative of the difference between how a group like Hezbollah deals with the media and how the Israeli (or American) military deals with the media. It's obvious from reading the story that Farrell is dealing with some restrictions on what he can say; he's explicit about that in the story. But he pretty much has the freedom to write about anything he sees, and reports the candid comments of the soldiers around him. I haven't seen western reporting on Hezbollah with this level of detail. It's possible I've just missed it, but I'm sure it's rare.

Obviously part of this may be that Hezbollah is doing things it doesn't want the media to see--like launching rockets in civilian areas. But I also think there's just a greater level of paranoia within organizations like Hezbollah than within a well-organized western military (I'm basing this on my experiences in Iraq; I've never covered Hezbollah or the IDF). It's hard for a group like Hezbollah to really trust its foot-soldiers. They're a militia, not an army, which means there may not be any kind of reliable standard for who ends up in the militia and who's kept out for being incompetent. And the chain of command may be murky, meaning guys at the bottom may have no idea what guys at the top expect of them. So the leadership is probably wary of what individual militiamen are doing, the militiamen are wary of crossing the leadership, and the easiest thing is to just keep the media at a distance.

On the other hand, if the IDF is anything like the US military there's a remarkable confidence throughout the chain of command in the ability of soldiers on the ground to behave responsibly. The US military doesn't have to micro-manage what it's soldiers and Marines say to the same extent, because it trusts them--whether they're privates or colonels--to keep sensitive information to themselves (or to assess the trustworthiness of a reporter before speaking candidly about things that shouldn't be published). I'm not naive, I know that soldiers and Marines tell their subordinates not to say anything stupid or inflamatory around reporters. But that doesn't mean soldiers won't be honest about what they're thinking and what they're doing--Steve's story on the IDF is full of honest details.

There are some other cultural and institutional reasons for that honesty, I think. Whatever over-heated pundits in the US may say, western reporters aren't spies or traitors or a fifth column and the military knows it. They may worry about coverage that casts them in a bad light, but they don't worry that the media is actively working to undermine its forces in the field. Militias aren't so sanguine. Whether it's Hezbollah or the Mehdi Army or the Irish Republican Army, militias and insurgent groups worry a lot about whether "reporters" are actually spies. In terms of sheer manpower and firepower militias are weaker than organized national armies. They rely for survival on their ability to hide. So, when a foreigner walks up with a notebook and a camera and starts recording all the details he can, a militiaman is likely to freak out.

This is exactly why it's crazy for folks in the US to complain that reporters in Lebanon aren't picking "the right side" as they cover Hezbollah. I'm not talking about hiding relevant facts about Hezbollah's activities in southern Lebanon. But there's a difference between reporting what you see and being a partisan for one side or the other. I've read in a few places, mostly in reference to Iraq, that reporters who cover insurgents or militias have an obligation to rat out those groups to save lives. Whether deputizing reporters as intelligence operatives would save lives is highly debatable. What it would do is make it completely impossible for reporters to cover all sides of a conflict, and make reporting in places like Iraq and southern Lebanon even more dangerous than it already is.

Ground rules

2006-08-04T18:52:00Z

My friend Chris apparently scandalized some people when he wrote, "To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hizbullah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one."

This has led to all sorts of nonsense about Hezbollah controlling reporters, reporters being propagandists for Hezbollah, etc. Chris has a rejoinder to all that on his site and he's actually on the ground in Lebanon, so I defer to him on the specifics. More generally, though, you have to be quite a starry-eyed innocent to believe that you can cover war without facing restrictions on what you see, what you hear and what you say. Hezbollah is a militia with a history of kidnapping and killing civilians. If it's anything like the Shiite militias I've seen in Baghdad it probably also has a lot of high school-aged foot-soldiers who are acting more or less on their own authority and would not get in too much trouble for shooting, harrassing or otherwise inconveniencing a reporter.

Reporters cover similar groups all the time. In January, 2005, I was embedded in Mosul with the 25th Infantry Division. I was reporting for Time and, for a lot of the embed, Tom Dworzak was with the same unit taking photos for the magazine. For a few days we were in Tal Afar with Chris Hondros, who shoots for Getty Images (and to whom I owe a great debt--he took a pretty cool photo of me during a gun battle in Tal Afar). Both of those guys are great photographers. Take a look at their portfolios and really think about where they've been--Chechnya, Liberia, Angola, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, the West Bank, Kashmir. They were both appreciative of the American military's embed program in Iraq.

Embedding has come under a lot of criticism from leftists on the grounds that it allows the US military to manipulate reporters. Having embedded quite a bit I don't see it--if you're on the ground with a unit for several days they can't stage-manage what you see and what they say. They could steer you towards units in particular places, I suppose, but I don't see that, either--with occasional exceptions you can pretty much get an embed anywhere you want, including the most violent and difficult parts of Iraq. In any case, the point Dworzak made about embedding with the US military is that it's no different than "embedding" with a militia in Chechnya--if you run around with those guys, you either play by their rules or you leave (except that in Chechnya you might leave horizontally).

I think the right needs to be reminded of the same thing from the other side. There's no moral comparision to be made between the US military and Hezbollah--Hezbollah targets civilians as a matter of policy and the United States military does not (that should go without saying, but I don't want to be misinterpreted). But all fighting forces engaged in combat are going to be protective of information that might put their fighters in harms way. If you want to embed with the US military in Iraq you have to sign an 11-page document that lays out the risks and the ground rules. To give you an idea of why Hezbollah might keep western reporters away from its rocket sites, here's a section of the US military's embed ground rules:

(11) The following categories of information are not releasable since their publication or broadcast could jeopardize operations and endanger lives:

a) For MNF-I / MNC-I or allied units, specific numerical information on troop strength, aircraft, weapons systems, on-hand equipment, or supplies (e.g. artillery, tanks, radars, missiles, trucks, water, etc.) including amounts of ammunition or fuel moved by or on-hand in support of combat units. (Unit size may be described as “company-size,” “multi-battalion,” “multi-division,” “naval task force,” and “carrier battle group.” Number or amount of equipment and supplies may be described in general terms such as “large,” “small,” or “many.”)

b) Any information that reveals details of future plans, operations, or strikes, including postponed or cancelled operations.

c) Information, photography or imagery that would reveal the specific location of military forces, or show the level of security at military installations or encampments should not be revealed. EXCEPTION: Locations may be described as follows: Stories written with Military units deployed in country will be datelined with that country’s name. All Navy embark stories can identify the ship upon which embarked as dateline and will state that the report is coming from “off the coast of,” etc

d) Unless a host-nation has publicly acknowledged that it is a participant or has otherwise authorized the release its identity, stories written in a specific country supporting the MNF-I / MNC-I will state that the report is coming from the geographic region.

e) Details of rules of engagement.

f) Information on intelligence collection activities, including targets, methods, and results.

g) During an operation, specific information on friendly force troop movements, tactical deployments, and dispositions that would jeopardize operational security or lives will not be disclosed. This includes unit designations, names of operations, and size of friendly forces involved, until released by the appropriate COMBATANT COMMANDER.

h) Identification of mission aircraft points of origin, other than “land” or “carrier based.” (Number and type of aircraft may be described in very general terms such as “large flight,” “many,” “few,” “fighters,” “fixed wing,” etc.

i) Information on intelligence collection activities including targets, methods and results.

j) Information on effectiveness of enemy camouflage, cover, deception, targeting, direct and indirect fire, intelligence collection, or security measures.

k) Information on missing or downed aircraft or missing ships while search and rescue operations are planned or underway.

l) Information on special operations units, unique operations methodology or tactics.

m) Specific operating methods and tactics, e.g., air angles of attack, and speeds; naval tactical or evasive maneuvers, etc. General terms such as "low" or "fast" may be used.

n) Information on effectiveness of enemy electronic warfare.

o) Information on operational or support vulnerabilities that could be used against MNF-I/ MNC-I Forces, such as details of major battle damage or major personnel losses of specific MNF-I/ MNC-I units, until that information no longer provides tactical advantage to the enemy and is, therefore, released by the appropriate COMBATANT COMMANDER. Damage and casualties may be described as "light," "moderate," or "heavy."

p) No photographs or other visual media showing an enemy prisoner of war or civilian internee's recognizable face, nametag or other identifying feature or item may be taken.

Finally, additional guidelines may be necessary to protect tactical security.

All of that seems perfectly reasonable to me, which is why I don't have any problems with the embed program in Iraq. Obviously Hezbollah probably has reasons beyond operational security for restricting press access to certain locations. That, again, would make Hezbollah like every other fighting force in the world. Journalists are some of the best (worst?) navel-gazers in the world, and the Israeli-Arab conflict inspires a lot of passion among both well-informed and not-so-well-informed observers. So when Chris writes a bit about the difficulties journalists face covering the story in Lebanon it inspires a lot of commentary from "media critics" (who may be reporters, bloggers, professional pundits or, God help us, professional press critics). But before making a lot of sweeping judgments about the particular situation in Lebanon it's worth understanding the ways in which the situation there is the same as the situation anywhere else people are trying to kill each other.

Troop strength

2006-08-03T18:00:00Z

The US military and the Iraqi security forces are bringing more troops into Baghdad, and pursuing a revised security strategy. It's worth pointing out that Iraq's militias are also bringing more troops to Baghdad, and pursuing a revised security strategy. Yesterday Abdel Aziz al-Hakeem, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, spoke to thousands of Shiite civilians, including many dressed in the garb of SCIRI's Badr Brigade militia. Those gathered were members of "resident committees"--groups of armed men tasked with protecting their neighborhoods. Hakeem told them that they "are the nucleus and the pioneers for these popular committees that will defend Iraq, its religion, its dignity and its people."

I'm no expert on the structure of Iraq's militias, but my impression is that they are not rigidly organized and hierarchical. So talking about "militia violence" and assuming that everyone in a militia is part of a death squad is irresponsible. With the security situation deteriorating it's very possible that militias will gain strength, not because people want to go on the offense, but because they're scared that they won't be able to defend themselves. So there's nothing sinister, necessarily, about groups of armed men patrolling a neighborhood. If Chicago were in the same situation as Baghdad I'd buy a gun, try to organize the people on my block, and look for powerful friends. I think militias are gaining power in large part because people are making the rational decision that their best hope of staying alive is supporting their local militia (assuming they're not on the wrong side of that militia, in which case their best hope of staying alive is to flee to a more hospitable part of town).

Of course, part of the reason militias are thriving is pure power politics, the egos and prejudices of political leaders, and so on. Tomorrow members of the Mehdi Army will be in Sadr City, ostensibly to support Hezbollah in Lebanon but probably also for a show of force. The US, while not calling the Mehdi Army by name, has been targeting some of its members. And SCIRI and Sadr aren't overly fond of each other, so a show of strength by Badr may require a reciprocal show of force by Sadr.

It's this kind of stuff--militias organizing neighborhood defense groups, rival politicians calling their armed supporters into the streets--that makes me wonder how much can be accomplished by this new security push by the Americans and the Iraqi government. Powerful forces are at work, and they aren't moving things in a peaceful direction.

Assessing the threat

2006-08-02T19:29:00Z

James Fallows has an essay in The Atlantic about America's position in the larger fight against al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups. You have to be an Atlantic subscriber to get the piece on their website, but if you aren't it's worth paying for a copy of the magazine. Based on his own sense of the situation and interviews with dozens of experts, Fallows concludes that things are going reasonably well. Al Qaeda as an effective organization is pretty much gone, the capacity of terrorists to launch large-scale attacks within the US is limited, Arab and Muslim Americans are not disaffected and open to the lure of extremism like they are in France, Spain and Britain.

Fallow believes we should "declare victory," on the grounds that al Qaeda has been crushed. I don't think we can declare victory against al Qaeda while bin Laden is still alive. The extent to which he's cut off from any role in planning terror attacks is irrelevant. If we declare victory while he's still alive it will ring hollow in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It will also ring hollow in the United States. The man orchestrated the deadliest massacre of Americans in history, and leveled a good portion of downtown Manhattan. If he's still alive we haven't "won."

But that's a separate issue from whether we'd be better off acknowledging our successes and ratcheting down the tension, rather than continually speaking and acting as if we're locked in a never-ending struggle against an enemy with the capacity to destroy us. Fallows points out that, while it's impossible to stop every terrorist attack, it also not possible for terrorism to destroy the United States. What terrorists can do is goad the United States into destroying (or at least grievously harming) itself. We're more likely to do that if every foreign policy decision is taken in an atmosphere of perpetual crisis.

This isn't a failing unique to Republicans, conservatives, or supporters of the war in Iraq (I'm not sure of the extent to which those three groups even overlap these days, but that's another story). Democrats, liberals and opponents of the war also tend to portray the threat from al Qaeda and its allies as existential. I think part of this is political. President Bush says he's battling an existential threat. Why argue that he isn't? It's much better politics to say he's failing in the fight and making the country less safe. But I think, for the most part, that the war mentality is sincere across the American political spectrum. Fallows points out all the ways in which that mentality is self-defeating; rather than re-state all his articles I'll just recommend the piece. I thought it was an encouraging perspective, one that is optimistic without ignoring very real dangers and trade-offs.

One benefit of brining the rhetoric of war and national destruction under control is that it will make it easier to weigh costs and benefits rationally. Really, what wouldn't we do to save the United States? The country needs to make difficult decisions about Iraq, the power of the executive branch and plenty of other issues. Always envisioning the downside as "the country is destroyed" or "New York is incinerated" makes it difficult if not impossible to look at these issues rationally. Of course, nuclear terrorism needs to be taken seriously as a threat. But, as Fallows points out, defaulting to the most aggressive possible response may not make us any safer.