BAGHDAD — This is the farewell note, both to Iraq and to you, the read­ers. Tomor­row I will drive to the Jor­dan­ian bor­der through Bagh­dad and thence to Amman.
The war here is wind­ing down, and the long, labo­ri­ous process of rebuild­ing has started. Much of the activ­ity in Bagh­dad involves the U.S. com­mand look­ing for qual­i­fied peo­ple to help get the city back on its feet. Water and power still have to be restored. A state econ­omy now lacks the state, so peo­ple have no jobs; no one is there to pay them. Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen in Kirkuk are a hair’s breadth away from Yugoslavia-style eth­nic clashes. Mosul is still sav­age, with lit­tle order. One reporter who returned from there yes­ter­day described it to me as “like Mogadishu” with the city divvied up into ter­ri­to­ries for armed gangs and almost no civil author­ity. There are fewer than 300 Amer­i­can troops for a city of two mil­lion peo­plel. This has gone almost com­pletely unre­ported from what the journos in Arbil are hear­ing from edi­tors back home. No one seems to care about Mosul, they say.
“They [the Amer­i­cans] have given up on Mosul,” said one reporter, who asked to remain anony­mous. “It’s ter­ri­fy­ing.” He could have been talk­ing about his edi­tors, too.
At the same time, other cities are calm­ing down — at least dur­ing the day. Kirkuk sports traf­fic lights that work, cops in the street and a bustling street mer­chant com­mu­nity. At night, how­ever, there is still shoot­ing and thug­gery.
All of this will set­tle down even­tu­ally — or explode into civil war — but the ques­tion is how long will it take? I think the vio­lence will con­tinue at a low throt­tle for months, but even that would be a wel­come con­trast to 35 years of Ba’ath Party sys­tem­atic ter­ror and three wars since 1980.
Whether Iraqis gets the gov­ern­ment they deserve, how­ever, is a dif­fer­ent story. Their neigh­bors don’t wish to see a new Amer­i­can client state in their midst and can be expected to med­dle most mis­chie­vously. Also, the frac­tured nature of Iraqi soci­ety, thanks the Ba’ath Party’s repres­sion and play­ing one group off another will take a long time to heal. Free-wheeling democ­racy is not in the cards for quite a while, if ever, thanks to the major­ity Shia pop­u­la­tion and the eth­nic divi­sions in the north. If elec­tions were to be held in the next few months (not likely) they would prob­a­bly bring to power a gov­ern­ment friendly to Iran and hos­tile to the United States and every­one else in the region. The Kurds would walk out and demand _de facto_ — or even _de jure_ — inde­pen­dence. The United States can not allow this.
Still, many Iraqis are opti­mistic about the future. “We are happy,” said Hoshang Sadraddin, 22, a Kurd in Arbil. “We want a demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment, a future. And for all the peo­ple in Iraq to live in peace.“
“I look for a bet­ter life in the future,” said Jasim Khid­hir, 18. “I look for­ward to suc­cess in life, get­ting an edu­ca­tion, that is my dream.“
And in Bagh­dad, an Arab who wouldn’t give his name smiled at me and said in halt­ing Eng­lish that he was happy that democ­racy had come to Iraq. The sen­ti­ment was gen­uine, if a lit­tle pre­ma­ture.
We’ll see. The Kurds I’ve talked want the United States to stay “for­ever” as Assan Ahmen Awla, 30, a taxi dri­ver, told me. Amer­ica is seen as the Kurds’ insur­ance against con­trol by Bagh­dad and Arab vio­lence. The marchers in Bagh­dad demand­ing a quick end to Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion, he said, were incited by Ahmed Cha­l­abi and the INC to stir up trou­ble against the Amer­i­cans, so they will leave and the INC can seize com­plete con­trol. Cha­l­abi, obvi­ously, isn’t pop­u­lar up here. Nei­ther are Arabs in gen­eral.
“I think for­ever I will chose Amer­i­can troops to keep us away from the Arabs,” said Taha Muhammed Has­san, 30, a fruit ven­dor. “We know what the Arabs will do if they have con­trol.“
Sen­ti­ments like these, as well as threats against Kurds in Tikrit, Bagh­dad and the south­ern part of the coun­try are omi­nous signs, both for a coher­ent coun­try and a demo­c­ra­tic future. Delshad wrote me to tell me his thoughts:
“The heavy her­itage of more than three decades of dic­ta­tor­ship and oppres­sion will need many, many years to be over­come and Iraqis to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what is lib­er­a­tion and its lim­its. And if the Amer­i­cans keep in their cur­rent role [of] being only observers stand­ing aside then things can’t get bet­ter!!“
Oth­ers sug­gest democ­racy isn’t that big a deal to them, that jobs are a pri­or­ity rather than self-government. “We choose jobs, not democ­racy,” said Hemin Sul­tan, 28, a trans­la­tor.
Given that much of the coun­try is work­ing at sub­sis­tence lev­els, even in the rel­a­tively pros­per­ous cities of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, his opin­ions are under­stand­able. But I worry that unless the Iraqis demand democ­racy for them­selves the United States won’t give it to them… I believe the White House would pre­fer a docile Iraq to one that can say no to Amer­i­can inter­ests. But of course, I’m con­sti­tu­tion­ally inclined to oppose the idea of an Amer­i­can empire based on com­mer­cial ties, so I do hope the Iraqis real­ize that real democ­racy — unruly, net­tle­some and untidy — is in their long-term best inter­ests.
But while the Iraqis have just started a long jour­ney into the future, the Back​-to​-Iraq​.com jour­ney is com­ing to an end. B2I has suc­ceeded beyond what I expected or envi­sioned when I began writ­ing it in Sep­tem­ber 2002. Through the months, the site has man­aged to pro­voke, enter­tain and — hope­fully — enlighten peo­ple. It’s gar­nered some atten­tion and peo­ple have said it’s a new form of jour­nal­ism and that it’s his­tory mak­ing.
I don’t know if it’s all that, but I’m cer­tainly flat­tered by the com­pli­ments and the acco­lades. This was jour­nal­ism with­out a net (although it was on the Net.) I’ve stum­bled a few times, almost los­ing my bal­ance, but look­ing back over the site, I hope it was good enough.
Now I’m going home. The sto­ries that I’d like to do require money and time that I sim­ply no longer have. The loom­ing eth­nic con­flict in north­ern Iraq, the role of the Turks, the treat­ment of women, the fate of the polit­i­cal pris­on­ers and the new government’s fal­ter­ing first steps are all sto­ries that I would love to pur­sue, with the style and tech­niques I’ve devel­oped on the site. I’d also wanted to find Salam Pax.
As for the future of B2I, I’m work­ing on that. The site and list­serv will remain up for as long as the server has power, but I’m still unde­cided on what to do next to push for­ward the con­cept of inde­pen­dent, reader-funded jour­nal­ism. I will use the site and the pre­mium email list to announce any­thing new, so stop in every now and then to say hello.
I do plan on return­ing to Iraq in a few months to check in on how things are going. Those dis­patches will also be pub­lished here and on the list­serv. Donors who have donated will con­tinue get pre­mium con­tent and pho­tos when­ever the site is active.
A note about dona­tions: I am no longer actively solic­it­ing them. The mis­sion is over — for now. Save your cash or donate it to other indy jour­nal­ists. It’s impor­tant to develop this genre of jour­nal­ism, and reader con­tri­bu­tions are key. We all proved that this kind of endeavor is pos­si­ble. I may be the first, but I sin­cerely hope I’m not the last. I believe other inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists will soon strike out and cover major events along­side the major media. I hope they break more sto­ries than I did, and chal­lenge their main­stream col­leagues to keep up.
A few of those main­stream­ers here — most enthu­si­as­ti­cally from Fox News, oddly enough — think the ideals that B2I brings to the table are grand and think some­thing like this site could be the future of the craft. They bemoan the top-down edi­to­r­ial con­trol and like the idea of read­ers’ input in decid­ing what to cover.
That can wait for a bit, how­ever. For now, I must bid you farewell. I’m dis­ap­pointed and sad to do so, as I feel like I’m leav­ing early. The real­ity of a lim­ited bud­get is an incon­ve­nient fact of life, how­ever. I hope you all don’t hold it against me.
It’s been a truly fan­tas­tic jour­ney and I am sin­cerely grate­ful to every­one who donated, read, sent in feed­back, argued on the com­ment boards or wished me well. While truth may be the first casu­alty in war, I hope I was able to save a small shard of it. But it’s hard to say. Many times since I’ve been here, lis­ten­ing to the claims of Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen or Assyr­i­ans, I’ve thought that there is no such thing as *Truth,* only myths that peo­ple tell their chil­dren to get them through to the next gen­er­a­tion. His­tory doesn’t exist here, at least not in the Amer­i­can sense; the past is never really past and his­tory isn’t some­thing that hap­pened long ago; it’s very much alive and kick­ing. In this ancient place, a land of empires, gods, gar­dens, wars, blood and beauty, at the heart of it, you will find only sto­ries. I hope I’ve been able to bring a few of them home to you.
Sin­cerely,
Christopher