Three weeks isn’t much time in most places. Just a cou­ple week­ends of meet­ing with friends, maybe hav­ing a beer or see­ing a movie. Three weeks of work­ing at a job that maybe you like, maybe you don’t. In my case, I’ve been in Bagh­dad Since May 19, so let’s call it three weeks. It’s a nice round num­ber.
In that time, in no par­tic­u­lar order I wit­nessed “a car bomb­ing next to my hotel”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000770.php, started work for TIME Mag­a­zine, watched an interim gov­ern­ment unveiled, inter­viewed a vice pres­i­dent, been mortared more times than I can count, missed two other car bombs by a few min­utes, pined for New York and ten­ta­tively fell in love with Bagh­dad.
She’s a city that has seen bet­ter days, frankly. As men­tioned, the elec­tric­ity is bad. The gas lines are long — up to 5 km in some places — and U.S. sol­diers still break up black mar­ket petrol rings even though that’s often the only way for Iraqis to get petrol.
Bagh­dad is also an incred­i­bly stress­ful place to live and work, espe­cially as a west­erner, as “I’ve mentioned”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000771.php. We’re tar­gets, and when you look very west­ern, like I do, you’re con­stantly aware of eyes on you and the hos­til­ity. At restau­rants, the wait­ers sul­lenly clear your table, some­times being none too care­ful about keep­ing _chai_ or food from spilling on you. The kind­ness I encoun­tered last year is absent; a west­ern face brings a sullen wel­come, cal­i­brated to the bare min­i­mum.
Vio­lence, too, is never dis­tant. A few days, there was an IED attack against an Amer­i­can humvee near the Inte­rior Min­istry. It killed one Amer­i­can sol­dier and wounded three oth­ers. We were on our way to the Oil Min­istry and we detoured to the site of the attack. As I rushed up to the cor­don, I yelled out to the sol­diers that I was press. They responded by wav­ing me away. I tried to ask one sol­dier a few ques­tions about what had hap­pened. Traf­fic streamed around us and cars horns beat out a cacoph­o­nic con­cert.
“Can’t talk to you, sir, go away,” he said.
“Well, where was the attack?” I pressed.
“I said go away,” he growled.
“Can I speak to your com­mand­ing offi­cer? Who is he?“
“He said get the fuck out of here!” a sec­ond sol­dier screamed and both sol­diers pointed their weapons at me. There are few things more threat­en­ing than see­ing scared and pissed-off Amer­i­can sol­diers point­ing weapons at you. The Iraqis know this feel­ing well. I quickly retreated and returned to the car, shaken at the Amer­i­cans’ hos­til­ity.
This feel­ing of trust­ing no one has got­ten to me; it’s pal­pa­ble and the con­stant vig­i­lance is exhaust­ing. My mood is black and I can feel a depres­sion that is never far away. Not writ­ing for the blog is a source of guilt, too, but TIME has kept me so busy with sto­ries that don’t bring me in touch with aver­age Iraqis much. I’ve been mov­ing between the CPA and the for­mer mem­bers of the Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil.
I also can’t seem to get excited over sto­ries of abused Iraqis. There are so many and they have a numb­ing qual­ity. Also, the hos­til­ity I encounter from Iraqis makes me — shame­fully — less empa­thetic to their com­plaints. But nor do I feel much sym­pa­thy for Amer­i­cans who point guns at me. The tragic part of this is that there is no way to blame any­one in this sit­u­a­tion. The Iraqis will nat­u­rally hate an occu­py­ing army. And sol­diers will nat­u­rally grow to hate a peo­ple they think they came to lib­er­ate but who con­tinue try­ing to kill them.
I wish I could see more of the good­ness in Iraqis that I know is there. And like­wise, I wish they could see the good­ness in Amer­i­cans. But peo­ple here — the Iraqis, the CPA, the mil­i­tary and even some jour­nal­ists — have become blinded to each other’s con­cerns and qual­i­ties. Those of us here, all of us, we’re not all bad peo­ple, I don’t believe. And I say “we” because no mat­ter our nation­al­ity, this place ham­mers us into a col­lec­tive body. The Iraqi sell­ing me deli­cious juice con­coc­tions, the Amer­i­can sol­diers at the check­points miss­ing his wife, the CPA employee who truly believed the Bush rhetoric, we are all in this together now.
But this envi­ron­ment is killing our abil­ity to give a damn about any­thing other than stay­ing alive. It’s bury­ing our bet­ter angels. The lack of empa­thy is a bad qual­ity for a jour­nal­ist, and it’s a worse one for a human being. How can I do my job like this? It is for these rea­sons I’m in awe of the Bagh­dad artists who still man­age to cre­ate beauty here. After a year of all this, they still see some­thing worth see­ing. “They are magnificent.”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000775.php
But it’s thoughts like this that make me think­that the Amer­i­cans should pull out sooner rather than later even if dis­as­ter strikes. The Iraqis over­whelm­ingly don’t want the Amer­i­cans here any­more (I’m not count­ing Kurds in this sen­tence,) but Iraqis know they’ll need help. They’re not ready to run their own coun­try yet, and the new lead­ers — Allawi, Yawer, et al. — know it. The way the announce­ment of the interim gov­ern­ment was han­dled is prime exam­ple.
The part han­dled solely by the CPA — the ini­tial accred­i­ta­tion — went sorta smoothly, despite some mor­tar fire and a car bomb, but after we arrived at the clock­tower that was Saddam’s for­mer Museum of Gifts Other World Lead­ers Gave Him, it turned into a dis­as­ter. The tele­vi­sion reporters got their inter­views, but after the cer­e­mony, in a chaotic scram­ble, the Iraqis declared the day over, leav­ing print reporters with lit­tle to do except recap what the tele­vi­sion cam­eras had cap­tured. Ebrahim Jafari, the leader of the Dawa Party and now one of two vice pres­i­dents, came back out to wade into a jour­nal­is­tic mosh pit. Some offi­cials screamed at him to get back into the other cham­ber with the rest of the gov­ern­ment. He ignored them for as long as he could before some­one — I’m not sure who — lit­er­ally grabbed his arm and pulled him back into the other room.
No one knew who was in charge. The Iraqis, inex­pe­ri­enced at man­ag­ing the logis­tics of the day, were over­whelmed. The CPA peo­ple just wanted to get the hell out of there. There were attacks through­out the day. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps troops were merely win­dow dress­ing, with the real secu­rity pro­vided by beefy South Africans pri­vate con­trac­tors. U.S. troops hung around get­ting in everyone’s way.
It was an almost per­fect metaphor for the New Iraq.
I write this not as a plea for pity or under­stand­ing. I don’t under­stand this coun­try myself, so that may be impos­si­ble. And I know I have writ­ten things that will anger peo­ple: I am ashamed of many of the emo­tions I feel these days. But I care about the truth as best as I can see and tell it. I once believed that telling the truth — or a small part of it — could help the world. It could help peo­ple under­stand things bet­ter and thus make the world bet­ter. But this war defies com­pre­hen­sion. It’s so stu­pid and there seems to be no point to any­thing that hap­pens here. Peo­ple die on a daily basis in ran­dom, ter­ri­fy­ing attacks. And for what? Free­dom? Sta­bil­ity? Peace? There is none of that here and it’s likely there won’t be after the Amer­i­cans leave. Iraq has spi­raled into a dark place, much worse than where it was a year ago dur­ing the war. There is no free­dom from the fear that is stoked by mutual hatred, cyn­i­cism and an appre­hen­sion about the future. So what if one side has supe­rior fire­power? Every bul­let fired helps kill souls on both sides of this war, whether it hits flesh or lands harm­lessly.
We — Iraqis and the Amer­i­cans here — are caged by fear, and we are all con­quered peo­ple now.