Dear Friends–
I’ve not been blog­ging much lately, and I’d like to explain why.
First and fore­most, I’ve doing com­mer­cial free­lance for a major newsweekly and have been approached by other pub­li­ca­tions to free­lance for them. This is exhaus­tive work.
Why? Well, first of all, the logis­tics of mov­ing around are ter­ri­ble here. Let’s tackle it from the inside out, as if I were an Iraqi.
Bagh­dad is a city of 5 mil­lion (or so) peo­ple, and it sprawls on the banks of the Tigris. There has been an influx of hun­dreds of thou­sands of cars since the fall of Bagh­dad last year, and every­one of them seems to be one the streets at once. Traf­fic lights, when they work, are bliss­fully ignored. There are a few very brave souls who make up the traf­fic divi­sion of the Bagh­dad police force, and they stand out and try to direct traf­fic as best they can, but it’s a Her­culean task. Plus, they can cover only so many inter­sec­tions. I think I’ve seen them at three inter­sec­tions since I’ve been here — and I’ve been dri­ving around a lot.
Sec­ondly, the U.S. forces have the habit of clos­ing off streets, seem­ingly at ran­dom. At any given time, sev­eral major thor­ough­fares will be blocked off by con­certina wire, humvees, Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles and occa­sion­ally M1-A1 tanks. There is no expla­na­tion given, but it’s usu­ally because of a sus­pi­cious vehi­cle or a road­side attack.
Com­bined, these two fac­tors lead to a colos­sal amount of time spent sit­ting in traf­fic as you move around. This is hard going for Iraqis. It’s worse for me, as an Amer­i­can, as it’s pretty damn risky to move around Bagh­dad. No one has taken pot­shots at me yet, but I keep a low pro­file and S. is a very good dri­ver. But it means my move­ments are lim­ited and I’m depen­dent on S. to take me around. It is def­i­nitely not a good idea for me to go off walk­ing by myself chat­ting up your aver­age Iraqi.
This safety issue should not be under­es­ti­mated. It’s a real fac­tor and it is very, very dif­fi­cult and drain­ing to deal with.
As such, by the time I’m back to a com­puter line that works, inshal­lah, I’m exhausted from just daily life. This is what Iraqis prob­a­bly feel like all the time. There’s really no good way to explain how this stress­ful envi­ron­ment affects you. The phones don’t work well — Iraqna, the new cell phone com­pany is an Egypt­ian firm and they haven’t yet got­ten up to capac­ity — and the rela­tion­ship of sources to the press is very dif­fer­ent than it was dur­ing the war.
As I implied, the good­will among Bagh­dadis has evap­o­rated. They’re very nice and wel­com­ing, but only up to a point. I’ve been unwill­ing to push peo­ple who have so much to worry about just to sur­vive too far.
Sec­ondly, as far as offi­cial Iraqi sources go — the bureau­crats and min­is­ters, for exam­ple — have learned from their Amer­i­can patrons well. There is a press offi­cer in every min­istry now, and there is a delib­er­ate pro­to­col for work­ing with them.

1. There are no phone inter­views allowed. It’s just not done, and the phones don’t work any­way. This means all inter­views are done in per­son, with the con­cur­rent prob­lems of mov­ing around the city. Put a few inter­views close together in a day and you’ve got a recipe for frustration.
2. Reporters must get a per­mis­sion slip from the appro­pri­ate press offi­cers before we can inter­view any­one. And mul­ti­ple lay­ers of bureau­cracy com­pound this has­sle. At the oil min­istry, for exam­ple, first you have to con­vince the press officer’s sec­re­tary to ask the press offi­cer for per­mis­sion to ask for an inter­view. If he says OK, she will then call the sub­ject you want to inter­view and ask him if he can talk to you. Your sub­ject will never see you today. If you’re on a dead­line of a day, then you’re out of luck. And don’t think about pes­ter­ing the press offi­cer in the oil min­istry. His sec­re­tary will make only one request per day on your behalf. If you want to inter­view three peo­ple, she will ask for per­mis­sion for the first one on Sat­ur­day, the start of the work week, the next one on Sun­day and so on.
3. Finally, you have the inter­view, which — like many inter­views is — is more or less good.

This is not to engen­der sym­pa­thy for me specif­i­cally but to increase your under­stand­ing of how jour­nal­ists have to work here. You can’t just call up a source — unless you know them well. And even then, there’s a good chance the phone won’t work. The threat of cap­ture or worse is very real. Two Japan­ese jour­nal­ists were killed yes­ter­day try­ing to do their job. An NBC crew was cap­tured in Fal­lu­jah ear­lier this week but — mer­ci­fully — released unharmed. There are a lot of kid­nap­pings and deten­tion going on that aren’t reported for very valid rea­sons: If jour­nal­ists are cap­tured, there needs to be some time to allow the nego­ti­a­tions to work, and also, no one knows what story the jour­nal­ists have told their cap­tors. If they say they are Cana­dian, and it’s all over the news that they’re Amer­i­cans, it will go very badly for them.
So to the peo­ple who think they’re being fed a stream of lies from the press corps here, I’m going to dis­agree. To those who think the reporters aren’t aggres­sive enough in stick­ing it to The Man and report­ing on the abuses, you have no idea what it’s like try­ing to get accu­rate and ver­i­fi­able infor­ma­tion here. Often it just doesn’t exist, and you can’t just take Iraqis’ words for it. They’re very pas­sion­ate and have very strong opin­ions about the cur­rent life in Iraq and frankly, they’ll exag­ger­ate, repeat and amplify gos­sip until it’s con­ven­tional wis­dom, even though it has only a fleet­ing resem­blance to the truth.
To those who think that reporters aren’t sup­port­ing the war effort enough and “refuse” to report good news, well, here’s a shocker: There isn’t much good news to report. The secu­rity sit­u­a­tion is grow­ing worse. The power is still bad (three hours on, three hours off, or so.) Major U.S. con­trac­tors are bypass­ing Iraqi com­pa­nies, lead­ing to grow­ing resent­ment. What kinda sorta good news there is is being pretty well cov­ered. The (maybe) truce between Moq­tada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and U.S. forces in the south, the com­ing together, how­ever shak­ily, of a care­taker gov­ern­ment. I refuse to reprint the press releases that pour out of the CPA on any given day. Most of the “good news” they release has to do with pass­ing out free soc­cer balls to kids. Is this what should be reported when U.S. troops and Iraqis are dying every day?
Like the woman on the day of the car bomb who wailed that “The Amer­i­cans did it!” I got some flack for just quot­ing her, but I included her not because I believed her (I don’t.) but because her reac­tion is part of the story. To those who think the press doesn’t pay enough atten­tion to the Iraqis: This woman is a prime, albeit exag­ger­ated, exam­ple. I would hon­estly be shocked if the U.S. had done this and I don’t think it did. You have to exam­ine Iraqis’ state­ments crit­i­cally. This one was easy, oth­ers are not.
To those who crit­i­cized me for even quot­ing her, if you don’t like that Iraqis feel this way and express them­selves by blam­ing the Amer­i­cans, well, too damn bad. The occu­py­ing forces — includ­ing the Amer­i­cans — are respon­si­ble for secu­rity under the United Nations res­o­lu­tion. So far, they haven’t done a very good job of pro­vid­ing it.
My point in all of this is that the reporters I’ve met so far are smart, tal­ented and very good at what they do. Many of them most emphat­i­cally do not stay in the Green Zone. Most live and run around Bagh­dad in con­stant fear for their lives. All of us are try­ing to a do a job and stay safe at the same time, which is the same thing Iraqis are try­ing to do every day. And like Iraqis, the jour­nal­ists I’ve met are frus­trated with the secu­rity sit­u­a­tion.
Now, this long dia­tribe doesn’t com­pletely explain my lack of post­ings, and if any­one still cares, it’s because of my free­lance work. This work is nec­es­sary because, as I explained pre­vi­ously, I plan to stay here a long time. I’ve effec­tively moved to Bagh­dad. Reader dona­tions don’t really cover the approx­i­mately $4000/month burn rate for dri­ver, hous­ing and fixer. I like work­ing free­lance as well, and I want to advance my career. This may strike some of you as “sell­ing out” but I’ve been clear about my inten­tions since I started rais­ing funds again.
So here’s the deal: I’m going to con­tinue to blog, but not as often, and more like essays on the state of Iraqi life. That seems to be what most peo­ple want to hear about any­way. When I pro­posed this third trip I was open that the dona­tions would go to estab­lish­ing a beach­head in Bagh­dad until the free­lance work kicks in. I’m still work­ing on that, but it is start­ing to kick in quickly. I will attempt to work out deals that allow me to blog effec­tively, but I am lim­ited in what I can do. I hope you will understand.