Category Archives: Journalism

Wow, donations for journalism?

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It is with no small amount of mixed feel­ings that I notice that Michael Tot­ten has embarked on a dar­ing new exper­i­ment in reader-funded jour­nal­ism.
Oh, wait. It’s not new at all. (See: Iraq​.com, Back-to–)
On the one hand, I’m glad that more peo­ple are work­ing to do their own thing and bring­ing nuanced, insight­ful jour­nal­ism to the read­ing pub­lic with­out the bag­gage that main­stream media often attach. On the other hand, Tot­ten usu­ally has a some­what con­ser­v­a­tive rah-Amurricah tone that sets my teeth a-grate. That said, he does get out there and do some report­ing. While he’s not my cup of tea — I find his Mid­dle East report­ing naive and American-centric — give him a read. I’ll let you decide if it’s worth donat­ing. I’m going to pop him $5 on principle.

Neither a Good War, nor a Badr Peace

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_NOTE: Here is “the story”:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1175055,00.html I filed for TIME​.com over the week­end and which has been occu­py­ing much of my time here in Iraq these last few weeks. It will be my final Iraq story for a while, as I’m leav­ing in a mat­ter of days. After two months, it’s time to take a break._

The bod­ies began to show up early last week. On Mon­day, 34 corpses were found. In the dark­ness of Tues­day morn­ing, 15 more men, between the ages of 22 and 40 were found in the back of a pickup truck in the al-Khadra dis­trict of west­ern Bagh­dad. They had been hanged. By day­break, 40 more bod­ies were found around the city, most bear­ing signs of tor­ture before the men were killed execution-style. The most grue­some dis­cov­ery was an 18-by-24-foot mass grave in the Shi’ite slum of Kamaliyah in east Bagh­dad con­tain­ing the bod­ies of 29 men, clad only in their under­wear with their hands bound and their mouths cov­ered with tape. Local res­i­dents only found it because the ground was ooz­ing blood. In all, 87 bod­ies were found over two days in Bagh­dad.
The grisly dis­cov­ery was hor­ri­ble enough, the lat­est and per­haps most chill­ing sign that Iraq is descend­ing fur­ther into butch­ery — and quite pos­si­bly civil war. But almost as dis­turb­ing is the grow­ing evi­dence that the mas­sacres and oth­ers like it are being tol­er­ated and even abet­ted by Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated police forces, over­seen by Iraq’s Inte­rior Min­is­ter, Bayan Jabr. On his watch, sec­tar­ian mili­tias have swelled the ranks of the police units and, Sun­nis charge, used their posi­tions to carry out revenge killings against Sun­nis. While allow­ing an Iranian-trained mili­tia to take over the min­istry, crit­ics say, Jabr has autho­rized the tar­geted assas­si­na­tion of Sunni men and stymied inves­ti­ga­tions into Interior-run death squads. Despite numer­ous attempts to con­tact them, nei­ther Jabr nor Inte­rior Min­istry spokes­men responded to requests for com­ment on this arti­cle.
Jabr’s and his forces’ grow­ing rep­u­ta­tion for bru­tal­ity comes at a par­tic­u­larly inop­por­tune moment for the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, which would like to hand over secu­rity respon­si­bil­i­ties to those same police units as quickly as pos­si­ble. That has raised the dis­tinct and dis­turb­ing pos­si­bil­ity that the U.S. is in fact train­ing and arm­ing one side in a con­flict seem­ing to grow worse by the day. “Mili­tias are the infra­struc­ture of civil war,” U.S. ambas­sador Zal­may Khalilzad told TIME recently. Khalilzad has been pub­licly crit­i­cal of Jabr and warned that the new secu­rity min­istries under the next, per­ma­nent Iraqi gov­ern­ment should be run by com­pe­tent peo­ple who have no ties to mili­tias and who are “non-sectarian.” Fur­ther U.S. sup­port for train­ing the police and army, he said, depends on it.
But ever since Jabr was appointed Inte­rior Min­is­ter after the Jan­u­ary 2005 elec­tion brought a reli­gious Sh’ite coali­tion to power, Sun­nis allege, he began remak­ing the para­mil­i­tary National Police into Shi’ite shock troops. A mem­ber of the Iranian-backed Supreme Coun­cil for the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq (SCIRI), Jabr fled to Iran in the 1970s to avoid Saddam’s crack­down. Jerry Burke, a for­mer civil­ian senior police advi­sor to the Inte­rior Min­istry, said Jabr’s expe­ri­ence with Saddam’s gov­ern­ment has left him bit­ter and dis­trust­ful of any­one he sus­pects has ties to the pre­vi­ous regime. That would most cer­tainly include the for­mer mem­bers of Sad­dam Hussein’s Spe­cial Forces and Repub­li­can Guards which ini­tially made up the bulk of the National Police when Jabr took charge.
To help facil­i­tate his trans­for­ma­tion of the police forces, Jabr made sure to enlist the help of SCIRI’s armed wing, the Badr Orga­ni­za­tion. Mem­bers of the mili­tia have been a grow­ing pres­ence in the National Police, which now con­sists of nine brigades, with about 17,500 mem­bers divided between the Spe­cial Police Com­man­dos, the Pub­lic Order brigades and a mech­a­nized brigade, which will soon be trans­ferred to the Min­istry of Defense. “Lead­er­ship in the com­mando posi­tions has been turned over to Badr,” said Matt Sher­man, a for­mer CPA advi­sor to the Inte­rior Min­istry. “And new recruits are mostly Badr.“
Indeed, out­side the min­istry head­quar­ters, ban­ners pro­claim­ing sol­i­dar­ity with Imam Hus­sein, one of Shi’ites’ holi­est fig­ures, snap in the spring breeze along­side — and some­times instead of — Iraqi flags. Most of the guards’ beards are invari­ably cut in the close-cropped Iran­ian style, mak­ing them stand out in Bagh­dad, where beards are less com­mon.
Like so many things in Iraq right now, it wasn’t sup­posed to be this way. As far back as Decem­ber 2003, David Gom­pert, the for­mer National Secu­rity Advi­sor for the Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity, real­ized the dan­gers sec­tar­ian mili­tias posed to Iraq’s sta­bil­ity. And in the wan­ing days of the Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity, Amer­i­can viceroy L. Paul “Jerry” Bre­mer issued Order 91, which was intended to demo­bi­lize or inte­grate nine mili­tias total­ing about 100,000 men into the Iraqi secu­rity forces. But the Kur­dish pesh merga and the armed wing of SCIRI, the Badr Orga­ni­za­tion, still exist today because the order was never com­pletely or com­pe­tently car­ried out.
For that, Gom­pert puts the blame squarely on the Iraqi gov­ern­ment, then under Iyad Allawi, as well as the Amer­i­can embassy. With the U.S. mil­i­tary engaged in sev­eral major oper­a­tions in 2004 and the gov­ern­ment tran­si­tion­ing from the CPA to a more tra­di­tional diplo­matic pres­ence with the arrival of U.S. ambas­sador John Negro­ponte at the end of June, Gom­pert says, nei­ther Allawi nor the U.S made the rein­te­gra­tion pro­gram a pri­or­ity. Job train­ing pro­grams run by Allawi’s Labor Min­istry were can­celled over per­sonal feuds and pen­sion pro­grams and other aspects of the pro­gram of DDR — “demil­i­ta­riza­tion, demo­bi­liza­tion and rein­te­gra­tion” — were bounced around from one com­mand to another.
Mak­ing mat­ters worse has been the fact that the police — unlike the Iraqi Army, which is still under U.S. com­mand and super­vi­sion — were prac­ti­cally ignored almost from the begin­ning of the occu­pa­tion, says Burke. And what super­vi­sion the National Police did get came from U.S. mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cers, not civil­ian police advi­sors.
This grave over­sight, which stemmed from the military’s unfa­mil­iar­ity with civil­ian police meth­ods and its unwill­ing­ness to learn, has led to numer­ous abuses and lit­tle account­abil­ity. The U.S. State Depart­ment, “in a report released two weeks ago”:http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61689.htm, doc­u­mented numer­ous inci­dents in 2005, dat­ing back to early May when Jabr was first appointed Inte­rior Min­is­ter, where Sunni men were killed execution-style by Inte­rior Min­istry police or Shi’ite mili­tias. In each case, Jabr ordered an inves­ti­ga­tion, and in each case the inves­ti­ga­tion had yet to report any find­ings.
Thanks in part to the Inte­rior Minister’s “non­fea­sance,” said Burke, the for­mer Inte­rior Min­istry adviser, Jabr was at least indi­rectly respon­si­ble for the deaths of hun­dreds of military-age Sunni men whose bod­ies have turned up at the sewage plant in south­east Bagh­dad since late Decem­ber. Men in police uni­forms and vehi­cles rou­tinely travel through the city in day­light hours with bod­ies in the back of trucks for dis­posal at the sewage plant, he said. Pris­on­ers often dis­ap­pear, Burke said, because they’re picked up at night and no one has an accu­rate account of who is arrested and where they are taken. “The Spe­cial Police Com­man­dos,” he said, using their old name, “are most def­i­nitely out of con­trol.“
So black is the rep­u­ta­tion of the National Police, that after the Feb. 22 bomb­ing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, many Sun­nis said the per­pe­tra­tors were Inte­rior Min­istry troops who were look­ing for a pre­text to start a civil war. Their fears were fur­ther fueled in the bloody two days after the attack, when Iraq became a sec­tar­ian slaugh­ter­house. Instead of pro­tect­ing cit­i­zens from each other, National Police units stood by as Shi’ite riot­ers — and rival mili­ti­a­men from Moq­tada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army — stormed Sunni mosques and swarmed over Sunni neigh­bor­hoods, accord­ing to numer­ous reports, includ­ing some con­firmed by U.S. Gen. George Casey, com­man­der of Amer­i­can forces in Iraq.
The Amer­i­can efforts to try and help stem the deadly sec­tar­i­an­ism will likely do lit­tle good — and in some respects may well exac­er­bate the prob­lem. Instead of increas­ing the num­ber of civil­ian advi­sors to Iraq’s local police forces, a spokes­woman for the Multi­na­tional Secu­rity Tran­si­tion Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) said more U.S. mil­i­tary police and mil­i­tary per­son­nel will be assigned to train them. The Spe­cial Police Tran­si­tion Teams (SPTTs) are the model that will be fol­lowed. “The SPTTs have been very suc­cess­ful in their efforts,” the spokes­woman said. No change is planned for the over­sight pro­gram on the National Police.
Gom­pert notes, “I remem­ber say­ing, ‘If there is going to be a civil war, it’s going to be fought between Sunni insur­gents and Shi’ite mili­tias.” And as long as Jabr is run­ning the Inte­rior Min­istry and its police forces, there is lit­tle doubt which of the two in such a con­flict will have the law — and Amer­i­can train­ing — on its side.

The Big Lie

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BAGHDAD — And no, I’m not talk­ing about WMDs or any­thing like that. More in my quixotic feud with noted fic­tion writer Ralph Peters, who came here for a lit­tle while and declared All is Well, and “the media” are aim­ing to under­mine the heroic mis­sion here in Iraq with all that bad news. Why, he him­self saw Iraqis cheer­ing his patrol as he rum­bled through Bagh­dad atop an up-armored humvee.
Let’s con­duct a lit­tle thought exper­i­ment. “The media” here are fiercely com­pet­i­tive. Every­one of us is look­ing for any angle — any! — that will break news, make our sto­ries stand out or oth­er­wise dis­tin­guish our­selves. That’s what jour­nal­ists do, and the corps here comes from the entire ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum, from the con­ser­v­a­tive to the social­ist. But weirdly, this herd of cats — which is what we could be best be com­pared to — have all come to the same con­clu­sion: Iraq is a mess.
I would argue that this pre­vail­ing view is the aggre­gate of a lot of pro­fes­sional report­ing, mine but a small bit. If it grav­i­tates toward a sin­gle view­point, well, that’s the way it is. Sorry, truth hurts. But a guy who writes exclu­sively for pub­li­ca­tions that sup­ported the war before it went down comes here and says things are fine, and some­how I’m sup­posed to sud­denly doubt my own obser­va­tions and expe­ri­ence? Par­don me if I believe my lyin’ eyes instead of him.
But more unfor­giv­ably, Peters also “con­tin­ues his libel”:http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/03/myths_of_iraq.html against Iraqi stringers/journalists by say­ing the “The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbal­anced, often-hysterical claims.” (empha­sis added.)
Mr. Peters, you should be ashamed of your­self. Three Iraqi jour­nal­ists have been killed this week alone try­ing to report the news, and the stringer who work for us are no less the jour­nal­ists than the guys at the Iraqi net­works. Accord­ing to the Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Journalists:

Muhsin Khud­hair, edi­tor of the news mag­a­zine Alef Ba, was killed by uniden­ti­fied gun­men near his home in Bagh­dad Mon­day night, becom­ing the third jour­nal­ist killed in Iraq in the last week, Reuters and Agence France-Presse reported. The shoot­ing took place just hours after Khu­dair attended a meet­ing of the Iraqi Jour­nal­ists Union, which dis­cussed the tar­get­ing of local jour­nal­ists in Iraq, Reuters said.
The killing punc­tu­ated a deadly week for the press. Amjad Hameed, head of pro­gram­ming for Iraq’s national tele­vi­sion chan­nel Al-Iraqiya, and dri­ver Anwar Turki were killed on Sat­ur­day by gun­men appar­ently affil­i­ated with al-Qaeda. Mun­suf Abdal­lah al-Khaldi, a pre­sen­ter for Bagh­dad TV, was killed by uniden­ti­fied gun­men last Tues­day as he was dri­ving from Bagh­dad to the north­ern city of Mosul.
At least 67 jour­nal­ists and 24 media sup­port work­ers have been killed in Iraq since March 2003, mak­ing it the dead­liest con­flict for the media in recent his­tory. The killings con­tinue two trends in Iraq: the vast major­ity of vic­tims have been Iraqi cit­i­zens; and most cases have been tar­geted assas­si­na­tions rather than cross­fire. CPJ research shows that Iraqis con­sti­tute nearly 80 per­cent of jour­nal­ists and sup­port staffers killed for their work in Iraq. Over­all, sixty per­cent of jour­nal­ist deaths were murders.

Maybe Mr. Peters would like a nice chat with “Salih” from the _Washington Post_, who reported a story about the loot­ing of Saddam’s palaces in Tikrit after the U.S. mil­i­tary turned it over to the Iraqi secu­rity forces. His reward? A $50,000 bounty put on his head by the head of secu­rity in Tikrit, Jas­sam Jabara.
Per­haps he’d like to talk to the fam­ily of Allan Enwiyah, the trans­la­tor for the _Christian Sci­ence Monitor_’s Jill Car­roll. He was killed when Jill was kid­napped Jan. 7, unpro­tected by Amer­i­can fire­power. She is still cap­tive, by the way.
Or per­haps he’d like to dis­cuss “blood money” with the widow of Yasser Sal­i­hee, a care­ful and con­sci­en­tious reporter for Knight-Ridder who was killed by Amer­i­can sol­diers at a check­point when the car in front of him blocked his view of the troops, who opened fire and killed him. Did I know him? Yes, but not well. I found out about his death when Han­nah Allam, then bureau chief for Knight-Ridder called me in hys­ter­ics.
You want to know what the Iraqis — who frankly do a bet­ter job that we do — feel and think? “Read this”:http://cjr.org/issues/2006/2/McLeary.asp. Highlight:

“To get a story you have to risk your life,” [said Sal­ima] matter-of-factly. “Some­times I won­der if the peo­ple in the U.S. really under­stand how much we go through in order to write the story.” To under­score that, she told of being pushed from behind by an Iraqi man while cov­er­ing a story with a West­ern reporter, of being caught in a fire­fight in Sadr City, Baghdad’s sprawl­ing and vio­lent slum, and of being threat­ened by a group of insur­gents while out report­ing. Yet in a coun­try with few oppor­tu­ni­ties, jour­nal­ism is a way to make a liv­ing, and to stay involved. “We never know when some­thing could hap­pen to us,” she said. “But then at the same time, I can­not stop living.”

How dare you, Ralph. How dare you ques­tion these men and women’s inten­tions and hon­esty. I’ve worked with our staff in the TIME house for two years and I’ve never seen a more ded­i­cated, care­ful group of jour­nal­ists. They’re not in this for the money. We pay them well, yes, but they could make more money doing other work. Lord knows they’d be safer, and their fam­i­lies would be, too. But they come in to work every day and do their level best to get us every scrap of infor­ma­tion and to get it right. Any­one of them is a bet­ter jour­nal­ist than Ralph Peters, who feels his view from the back of humvee is the only valid one. It’s _a_ view­point, yes, but hardly the whole story. You come talk with _me_, Ralph, we’ll go walk the streets of Kar­radah, drive with­out armor, feel the cop­per in your mouth when the fear and adren­a­line comes to you in wave after wave and you real­ize the L-T from the 320th hasn’t got your six for you, man. You come talk to me then.
Finally, I’ll let a for­mer Army guy have the last word. This from a buddy of mine who was a Pub­lic Affairs Offi­cer just a few short months ago:

Oh my god, dude. [Peters] is com­pletely full of sh*t. That’s all I can say. Appar­ently that f**k hasn’t spent enough time down in the trenches here to under­stad the lit­tle bas­tards will run out and wave at any patrol for one rea­son — beg­ging for choclate or soc­cer balls. They don’t care the Grunts are valiently com­ing to save the day. … He’s not aware of how f**king dan­ger­ous it is for grin­gos to roam the streets here.

Ralph Peters: Sucker or Liar?

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BAGHDAD — I’m sorry for not post­ing more. Still some latent server trou­bles. But I have to address an issue: Ralph Peters, who is cur­rently traips­ing around Bagh­dad with the 506th Infantry Reg­i­ment 1st Pla­toon of Bravo Bat­tery, 4 – 320 Field Artillery, is, to be blunt, full of shit.
He’s cur­rently a “favorite”:http://www.google.com/search?q=ralph%20peters of the pro-war set, who say we reporters have “agen­das” to under­mine the troops and get our civil war on, ’cause, you know, that makes Bush look bad… or some­thing.
(A quick note on the above link: it’s all con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tions. Why is it I, a pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ist, get tarred with a “lib­eral” brush when I have never, ever writ­ten for Mother Jones, the Nation or Granta, etc. But polemi­cists who spend the all their ener­gies crank­ing out pieces for the National Review, Front Page and the New York Post some­how don’t get called “con­ser­v­a­tives” but instead are “truth tellers”? Such a mys­tery.)
Among the claims in his slan­der­ous col­umn: “The Iraqi Army has con­founded its West­ern crit­ics, per­form­ing extremely well last week. And the peo­ple trust their new army to an encour­ag­ing degree.“
The Iraqi Army — and police, for that mat­ter — stood by while Shi’ite mili­tias ran ram­pant through Sunni neigh­bor­hoods. They only took up the secu­rity posi­tions when the Shi’ite cler­ics, includ­ing Moq­tada al-Sadr, had already calmed down the worst of the vio­lence. That’s not “per­form­ing extremely well,” unless by “extremely well,” you mean not con­fronting the ene­mies and keep­ing your head down until it’s safe to come out. That’s usu­ally called “hid­ing.“
He also says we west­ern reporters don’t get out on the streets, which is patently untrue. I don’t get out as often as I’d like, but I do get out. My col­leagues at TIME, who look much less west­ern than I do, get out much more. And, unlike Peters, we don’t travel with a big-ass armed con­voy under the pro­tec­tion of the U.S. mil­i­tary.
He then fur­ther slan­ders Ellen Knick­meyer, of the _Washington Post_, when he says, “Did any West­ern reporter go to that morgue and count the bod­ies — a rough count would have done it — before telling the world the news? I doubt it.“
Well, actu­ally, Ralph, I know Ellen. And yes, she did go down to the morgue. While there are many issues with her story, what is unde­ni­able is that she risked a hell of a lot more than you did when she put her life in jeop­ardy to go down there.
Then he says, “If reporters really care, it’s easy to get out on the streets of Bagh­dad. The 506th Infantry Reg­i­ment — and other great mil­i­tary units — will take jour­nal­ists on their patrols vir­tu­ally any­where.” Well, no, they won’t. Some reporters I know are hav­ing trou­ble get­ting embeds because they’re not the “right” reporters. They don’t write the “right” kind of sto­ries — mean­ing they don’t fol­low the military’s play­book.
It’s more than a lit­tle churl­ish to say, “We’ll take you any­where, as long as you’re not too liberal/French/whatever” and then turn around and crit­i­cize those you refuse to take with you as cow­ards. If they sit­u­a­tion is so rosy, Mr. Peters, why on earth do I need to embed in the first place? Believe me, I’d much rather travel around with­out a mil­i­tary entourage. You tend to get more truth­ful answers from Iraqis when they’re not sur­rounded by sol­diers with big guns, after all.
Then, this guy with a “back­ground as an intel­li­gence offi­cer” goes on to say there’s no civil war because, by gosh, _he_ sure didn’t see any thing like that. And the Iraqis _cheered_ the Amer­i­cans!
Let me try to paint the pic­ture a lit­tle more clearly, Mr. Peters: When Sun­nis cheer the Amer­i­cans, it’s not because things are rosy, it’s because they’re more scared of the Shi’ites than they are of you. Sun­nis in Bagh­dad I’ve spo­ken with have told me they would rather be arrested by the Amer­i­cans than by the gov­ern­ment forces, because at least now the Amer­i­cans won’t tor­ture you _as badly._ They have no love for Amer­i­cans, they just know who is best able to pro­tect them from their neigh­bors.
Yes­ter­day, the gen­eral in charge of the Iraqi Army divi­sion in Bagh­dad was killed by a sniper while he was on patrol. An inves­ti­ga­tion has been opened because there are sus­pi­cions he was killed for being Sunni by one of his Shi’ite troops.
To be blunt: We are as close to full-scale civil war as we’ve ever been. We are one more bomb­ing, mas­sacre or atroc­ity from a national blood­let­ting. But even if that hap­pens, there will be ebbs and flows. Just because peo­ple aren’t curled up in the fetal posi­tion under their beds all the time doesn’t mean there’s not a war on of some kind. In Lebanon, for 15 years, peo­ple went to the beach, cafés, bars and, in gen­eral, tried to live a nor­mal life. For long stretches, a neigh­bor­hood would be calm. And then the shells would come, or a run­ning street bat­tle would break out and civil­ians would go run­ning inside to hide. The vio­lence would even­tu­ally pass, like a break­ing wave, and they would come out into the light. That’s the way war works, and that’s what’s hap­pen­ing in Bagh­dad right now.
Finally, two things: Mr. Peters says he has a back­ground in intel­li­gence. And he says he’s been hitch­ing rides with this unit, rather than being assigned to it. He also makes what may be an unin­ten­tion­ally ironic com­ment when he crit­i­cized Iraqi stringers: “The Iraqi stringers have cracked the code: The Amer­i­cans don’t pay for good news. So they exag­ger­ate the bad.“
First of all, the Amer­i­cans _do_ pay for good news. They have in the past, when _American officers_ wrote sto­ries and paid local papers to run them. These happy tales invari­ably painted a rosier pic­ture than was war­ranted.
Sec­ondly, Gen. George Casey, com­man­der of U.S. troops here, told reporters in a news con­fer­ence three days ago that the pay-for-play pro­gram was on-going. “We were oper­at­ing within our author­i­ties and respon­si­bil­i­ties,” he said, and added that he had not received an order to stop the pro­gram. “And, right now, based on the results of the inves­ti­ga­tion, I do not intend to in the near term.“
Thirdly, just what is Mr. Peters doing here? A for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cer, rid­ing around Bagh­dad, paint­ing a rosy pic­ture? I may just be assum­ing stuff here — hell, if Ralph can do it, so can I — but is Mr. Peters one of those story-planting Amer­i­cans? Was he out get­ting mate­r­ial and pic­tures? And has he taken his skills at writ­ing happy sto­ries to the Amer­i­can pub­lic?
Peters’ lit­tle yarns sure sounds nice, but he sounds either des­per­ately clue­less or will­fully blind. Offi­cials in the Amer­i­can embassy, at least, are very wor­ried that civil war is upon us, and it’s surely no coin­ci­dence that Casey has a rep­u­ta­tion for not want­ing to hear bad news. And so Peters con­tin­ues to think because he rolls around in an armored con­voy and no one takes a shot at him, there’s no civil war. As some­one I’m sure he admires once said, “absence of evi­dence is not evi­dence of absence.“
Rant over. For now.
*CORRECTION:* Slight cor­rec­tion regard­ing my post on Ralph Peters. He is with the 1st Pla­toon of Bravo Bat­tery, 4 – 320 Field Artillery rather than the 506th Infantry Reg­i­ment, which he men­tions far­ther down in his piece. My apologies.

Radio appearance

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BAGHDAD — I will be appear­ing on WBUR, the NPR affil­i­ate in Boston for the show, “On Point” with Tom Ash­brook at 10 a.m. EST today if any­one wants to lis­ten in. The topic will be Iraq, civil war, etc. It will be syn­di­cated in New York and in many other mar­kets.
In an hour, the day­time cur­few will be over, and already I can hear the chants from Shi’ite mosque down the streets. The faint rat-a-tat of auto­matic weapon fire is clearly audi­ble. This could be a bad night. Let’s hope not.
UPDATE 4:24 p.m. +0300 GMT: There’s a report, uncon­firmed, that a crowd of 100 – 700 Iraqis have gath­ered and are march­ing toward the Min­istry of Inte­rior. Approx­i­mately 50 of the crowd are armed, but so far the march has been peace­ful.
UPDATE 6:10 p.m. +0300 GMT: Well, damn. Can­celled radio spot.