> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18844
>
> Baghdad: The Besieged Press
> By Orville Schell
> Volume 53, Number 6 · April 6, 2006
>
> 1.
>
> "Ladies and Gents," the South African pilot matter-of-factly announces
> over the intercom, "we'll be starting our spiral descent into Baghdad,
> where the temperature is 19 degrees Celsius." The vast and mesmerizing
> expanse of sandpapery desert that has been stretching out beneath the
> plane has ended at the Tigris River. To avoid a dangerous glide path
> over hostile territory and missiles and automatic weapons fire, the
> plane banks steeply and then, as if caught in a powerful whirlpool, it
> plunges, circling downward in a corkscrew pattern.
>
> Upon arriving in Amman, the main civilian gateway to Baghdad, one
> already has had the feeling of drawing ever nearer to an atomic reactor
> in meltdown. Even in Jordan, there is a palpable sense of being in the
> last concentric circle away from a radioactive ground zero emitting
> uncontrollable waves of contamination.
>
> Almost nowhere in our homogenized world does crossing an international
> frontier deliver a traveler to a truly unique land. There is, however,
> no place in the world like Iraq. Even at Amman's Queen Alia
> International Airport, one finds hints of this mutant land to come.
> Affixed to the wall above a baggage carousel is an advertisement for
> "The AS Beck Company, Bonn, Germany: CERTIFIED ARMORED CARS." The
> company's logo is a sedan with the crosshairs of an assault rifle's
> telescopic scope trained on the windshield on the driver's side. "WHEN
> GOING TO IRAQ, MAKE SURE YOU DRIVE ARMORED!" the ad proclaims
> cheerfully. At the departure gate, a crimson placard warns against
> carrying FORBIDDEN ITEMS: "Gun Powder, Golf Clubs, Hand Grenades, Ice
> Axes, Cattle Prods, Hocket Sticks [sic], Meat Cleavers and Big Guns,"
> making one wonder if "little guns" are OK.
>
> The small Royal Jordanian Fokker F-28-4000, which makes daily trips to
> Baghdad, sits out on the tarmac away from the jetways as if some
> airport official feared it might prove to be an airborne IED
> (improvised explosive device, a US military acronym). Those of us on
> this hajj to the global epicenter of anti-Western and Islamic sectarian
> strife are an odd assortment of private security guards, military
> contractors, US officials, Iraqi businessmen, and journalists; a young
> man in a sweatshirt announces himself as part of the "Military Police
> K-9 Corps" (bomb-sniffing dogs).
>
> The Baghdad International Airport terminal is full of armed guards and
> ringed by armored vehicles. I saw no buses or taxis awaiting arriving
> passengers. Almost everyone is "met." I am picked up by The New York
> Times's full-time British security chief, who has come in a miniature
> motorcade of "hardened," or bomb-proof, cars, escorted by several armed
> Iraqi guards in constant radio contact with each other.
>
> As America approached the third anniversary of its involvement in Iraq,
> I had gone to Baghdad to observe not the war itself, but how it is
> being covered by the press. But of course, the war is inescapable. It
> has no battle lines, no fronts, not even the rural– urban divide that
> has usually characterized guerrilla wars. Instead, the conflict is
> everywhere and nowhere.
>
> It starts on the way into Baghdad, the cluttered seven-mile gauntlet
> which has come to be known as Route Irish after the Fighting 69th
> "Irish" Brigade of the New York National Guard, which patrolled it
> after the invasion. Some also now call it Death Road, because so many
> attacks have occurred along its length. Now largely patrolled by Iraqi
> forces, it is not quite the firing range it used to be. But it is still
> the most nerve-racking trip from an airport that any traveler is likely
> to make.
>
> Although pre-war Iraq had a relatively modern highway system, with
> multilane roads and overpasses, an occasional clover leaf, and even
> international standard green and white signs in both Arabic and
> English, it has been eroded by neglect, fighting, bombings, and tank
> treads which have ground up curbs and center dividers. Everywhere there
> is churned-up earth, trash and rubble, loops of razor wire draped with
> dirty plastic bags, decapitated palm trees, wrecked equipment, broken
> streetlights, and packs of roaming yellow dogs sniffing at piles of
> garbage, the perfect places for insurgents wishing to hide cell phone–
> triggered IEDs to greet the next passing convoy of patrolling American
> troops. Much of the roadside looks like a combat zone, even when it
> hasn't been under attack.
>
> Many of Baghdad's main roads are a nightmare of traffic congestion. When
> American or Iraqi patrols of Humvees mounted with 50-caliber machine
> guns, M-1 Abrams tanks, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles pull onto a
> street, everything slows to a crawl. Signs tied on their tailgates warn
> in English and Arabic: "DANGER: STAY BACK!" Every driver gets the
> message. Failure to maintain one's distance can draw fire.[*] And so,
> like a herd of cold and hungry animals fearful of getting too close to
> a campfire, traffic cringes behind such patrols, while frustrated
> drivers are left to wait, breathe one another's exhaust, and curse the
> occupation.
>
> It has not helped that when Saddam Hussein fell, almost all ordinary
> governmental activities—such as registering cars and issuing drivers'
> licenses— ceased, and thousands of vehicles flooded the market in Iraq
> from other countries. Traffic lights rarely work since electric power
> is still sporadic; the only control comes from a few street cops who
> have been recently posted at key intersections to direct the relentless
> crush of vehicles. To make matters worse, after several attacks or
> bombings, the US military or the Iraqi government will often simply
> prop up a sign in the center of a main artery saying: "HAIFA STREET IS
> CODE RED! DON'T USE!" Moreover, as the city has become ever more
> violent and chaotic, people have begun blocking off streets on their
> own to create safety zones. Since there has been little law
> enforcement, there is no one to stop this private appropriation of
> public space.
>
> At first people made themselves feel more secure after the invasion by
> piling sandbags along streets or in front of their houses and offices.
> But as suicide bombers began to proliferate and their explosive charges
> grew larger and more destructive, private defense efforts became more
> elaborate as well. The advent of the "blast wall" changed the Baghdad
> landscape.
>
> Developed by the Israelis in order to put up a physical barrier between
> themselves and the Palestinians, the Iraq version of these segmented
> walls is constructed out of thousands of portable, twelve-foot-high
> slabs of steel-reinforced concrete. When stood upright on their
> pedestals, these "T-walls" look something like giant tombstones, totems
> perhaps from some long-lost Easter Island culture gone minimalist. When
> placed together edge-to-edge as "blast walls," they form the gray
> undulations that have now become Baghdad's most distinguishing feature.
> And because they proliferated during the administration of L. Paul
> Bremer III, they became known to some as "Bremer walls."
>
> For example, when one major news organization became alarmed at the
> deteriorating security situation in the city, it occupied part of Abu
> Nawas, a main road along the Tigris River that the US military had
> already blocked in front of two adjacent hotels in order to erect a
> maze of protective blast walls, guard towers, and other fortifications.
> So, where there was once a major highway complete with a center divider
> shaded by trees, there is now a relatively quiet, garden-like parking
> lot, surrounded by twelve-foot-high protective concrete walls.
>
> As the quest for greater private security increases, a new and
> unexpected kind of public insecurity has grown alongside it. With
> vehicles rerouted through an ever-diminishing number of open streets,
> traffic jams have become more frequent, exposing foreigners, rich
> Baghdadis, and anyone else out of favor with one or another group of
> insurgents to a greater danger of being kidnapped, shot, or blown up.
> It is unnerving (to say the least) to be stuck in such traffic, wedged
> into a welter of dilapidated sedans, vans, and pickup trucks with
> heavily armed Iraqis staring sullenly through the window of your
> expensively reinforced car, as security guards sitting next to you
> cradle their automatic weapons. With no possibility of escape, you
> can't help wondering when your unlucky moment will come. And when
> traffic completely stops and frustrated drivers begin to break out of
> line, gun their vehicles up sidewalks, veer across center dividers, or
> just charge up the opposite lane against the flow of oncoming traffic,
> it is difficult to remain calm.
>
> The worst offenders are private security guards who are committed to
> protecting their charges any way they can, and the Iraqi police, who
> now have brand-new fleets of green and white cruisers with whooping
> sirens, allowing them to plow their way through traffic-clogged streets
> as if they were kids on joy rides.
>
> Adding to the overall racket and general sense of anxiety is the fact
> that it is hard to tell if the incessant sounds of sirens, the periodic
> bursts of automatic weapons fire, or the occasional explosions that are
> heard throughout the day mean anything or not. There are police firing
> ranges within the city, and sometimes a bored guard will just
> harmlessly fire off a few shots by way of a warning. As Borzou Daragahi
> of the Los Angeles Times explained, "Squeezing off a few rounds of
> automatic weapons fire here in Baghdad is the equivalent of honking
> your horn in America."
>
> So unless an explosion is quite close, people hardly break step. At
> most, if there is a particularly loud report, a journalist might go up
> onto his bureau's rooftop to see where the smoke is coming from.
>
> There is undeniably a Blade Runner– like feel to this city. The violence
> is so pervasive and unfathomable that you wonder what people think they
> are dying for. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the everyday
> violence is horrendous, it does not take too many days before the
> deadly noises and the devastation everywhere seem to become just part
> of the ordinary landscape. Soon, quite to your surprise, you find
> yourself paying hardly more attention to the sounds of gunshots than a
> New Yorker does to the car alarms that go off every night...until, that
> is, someone you know, a neighbor, or just someone you have heard about,
> gets blown up, shot on patrol, or kidnapped by insurgents.
>
> Just a few days after I left Baghdad, Iraqi newspapers carried a short
> notice that a well-to-do Iraqi banker, Ghalib Abdul Hussein, had been
> kidnapped from his fortified house by gunmen wearing Iraqi army
> uniforms. Five of his personal guards were shot execution-style in his
> yard. This is just one of thousands of such occurrences. But except for
> obeying the security guards responsible for you (if you have them),
> there isn't much else you can do.
>
> Driving through the streets of Baghdad, one now sees members of the
> newly created, blue-uniformed Iraqi Police Service, extolled by the
> Bush administration as another hopeful sign of "Iraqization." But
> because police recruitment stations, training schools, and district
> precincts are favorite targets of the insurgents, many of these new
> police are afraid of being identified as collaborators with the
> Americans or the new Iraqi government. Their remedy is to wear black
> stocking caps with eye, nose, and mouth holes pulled down over their
> faces so they look like so many bank robbers. One sees these
> sinister-looking protectors of the peace at traffic circles and
> intersections, or brandishing automatic weapons in the back of
> American-bought pickup trucks, which makes them seem far more menacing
> than reassuring.
> 2.
>
> The News Bureaus
>
> Visiting any of the news bureaus gives an immediate sense of how
> embattled foreign journalists now are and how difficult it has become
> for them to do their jobs. Everyone I spoke to complained that the
> deteriorating security situation has increasingly made them prisoners
> of their bureaus.
>
> "We could go almost anywhere in Iraq in a regular car, unprotected,"
> wrote the Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi this
> February, in a wistful front-page story for her paper about the
> situation she found when she first arrived in 2003. "I wore Western
> clothes—pants and T-shirts, skirts, sandals—walked freely around
> Baghdad chatting with shopkeepers and having lunch or dinner with
> people I met." By the spring of 2004, she writes,
>
> the insurgency had been spreading and gaining strength faster than
> we had imagined possible. For the first time, I hired armed guards and
> began traveling in a fully armored car. Outings were measured and
> limited and road trips were few and far between.... As security
> deteriorated around the country, the areas in which we could safely
> operate shrank.
>
> Foreign news bureaus are either in or near the few operating hotels such
> as the Al Hamra, the Rashid, or the Palestine. Like battleships that
> have been badly damaged but are still at sea, these hotels have
> survived repeated bomb attacks and yet have managed to stay open. A few
> hotels like the Rashid, where once there was a mosaic depicting George
> Bush Sr. on the floor of the lobby, are sheltered within the Green
> Zone. A few other bureaus have their own houses, usually somewhat
> shabby villas that have the advantage of being included inside some
> collective defense perimeter that makes the resulting neighborhood feel
> like a walled medieval town.
>
> Wherever in the city the news bureaus are, they have become fortified
> installations with their own mini-armies of private guards on duty
> twenty-four hours a day at the gates, in watch towers, and around
> perimeters. To reach these bureaus, one has to run through a maze of
> checkpoints, armed guards, blast-wall fortifications, and
> concertina-wired no man's lands where all visitors and their cars are
> repeatedly searched.
>
> The bitter truth is that doing any kind of work outside these American
> fortified zones has become so dangerous for foreigners as to be
> virtually suicidal. More and more journalists find themselves hunkered
> down inside whatever bubbles of refuge they have managed to create in
> order to insulate themselves from the lawlessness outside. (A January
> USAID "annex" to bid applications for government contracts warns how
> "the absence of state control and an effective police force" has
> allowed "criminal elements within Iraqi society [to] have almost free
> rein.")
>
> Nearly every foreign group working in Iraq has felt it necessary to hire
> a PSD, or "personal security detail," from more than sixty "private
> military firms" (PMFs)—Triple Canopy, Erinys International Ltd., and
> Blackwater USA—now doing a brisk business in Iraq. In fact, there are
> now reported to be at least 25,000 armed men from such private firms on
> duty in the country today. Led mostly by Brits, South Africans, and
> Americans, these subterranean paramilitary PSDs form a parallel
> universe to America's occupation force. Indeed, they even have their
> own organization, the Private Security Company Association of Iraq.
>
> It has not escaped the attention of US National Guardsmen, reservists,
> regular army soldiers, and Marines that their mercenary counterparts
> get paid four or five times more than they do, sometimes as much as
> $1,000 a day. Understandably, there is a good deal of resentment about
> this inequity, and not a few American soldiers now aspire to nothing
> more than getting out of their low-paying jobs working for the military
> so that they can sign on with one of these companies.
>
> "I look at it this way," one young former Marine told me. "The Corps was
> an all-expenses-paid training ground to graduate me into the private
> sector."
>
> But being in a PSD is a dangerous occupation, as four guards from
> Blackwater learned in 2004 when, while on a mission to pick up some
> kitchen equipment from an 82nd Airborne base in Falluja, their SUVs
> were attacked and set on fire, and they were killed and hung from a
> bridge over the Euphrates River. (As this issue went to press, fifty
> employees of a private Sunni Arab– owned security company were abducted
> in Baghdad.)
>
> The US government has ended up hiring thousands of private guards to
> protect its contractors and even high-ranking officials such as Paul
> Bremer. In fact, a 2005 US government audit reported that between 16
> and 22 percent of reconstruction project budgets in Iraq now go for
> security, almost 10 percent more than had been anticipated. As one
> private security guard told PBS Frontline's Martin Smith, "We are a
> taxi service, and we're equipped to defend ourselves if we're
> attacked."
>
> Security is a very costly business, which has meant that most stringers
> and freelance journalists who could never afford such protection have
> been driven out of Baghdad. Bureaus like that of The New York Times
> which can afford it and are still in Iraq now carry costly insurance
> policies and require that all coming and going —indeed, all aspects of
> life outside the compound, including trips to the airport—be under the
> control of a full-time security chief, who acts as an earthbound
> air-traffic controller for the bureau. His job is to carefully set
> times and routes for reporters' trips, and then maintain almost
> constant contact with their cars until they are safely back. If you
> want to have an interview outside the bureau, there is always a chance
> that it will be canceled or delayed for security reasons. Security
> chiefs are also in charge of the armed guard details that protect the
> bureau around the clock. No one goes anywhere without a plan worked out
> in advance, and then preferably in a "hardened," or reinforced, vehicle
> followed by a "chase" car with several trusted Iraqi guards ready to
> shoot if necessary.
>
> Even if a reporter wants to conduct an interview in another secure zone,
> it has become increasingly foolhardy not to coordinate the meeting in
> advance. If a photographer is out covering the aftermath of a suicide
> bombing or a reporter is interviewing an Iraqi, for example, he or she
> is advised to stay no more than a very short time, because someone may
> be tempted to phone the sighting to a jihadi group, often for a payoff.
>
> Some critics, like the London Independent's Robert Fisk, have written
> about how Western reporters have been reduced to "hotel journalism," or
> what the former Washington Post bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran
> somewhat more charitably describes as "journalism by remote control."
> The Guardian war correspondent Maggie O'Kane was even more emphatic:
> "We no longer know what is going on, but we are pretending we do."
>
> The Washington Post, which has been forced for security reasons to move
> several times, now occupies a large house next to the run-down Al Hamra
> Hotel. When I stop there for lunch with a group of other journalists,
> the Post's Jonathan Finer tells me that concern for reporters' lives
> has "completely changed the way people move around the city."
>
> "In the summer of 2003, you could walk out of the Al Hamra and get a cab
> or even drive to Falluja for dinner, chill out, or go to a CD shop," I
> was told by the Los Angeles Times's Borzou Daragahi, whose bureau is in
> the Al Hamra. "Now, the AP won't even let its people leave the city."
>
> "It's amazing now to think back to November 2003 when the insurgency was
> starting to gain momentum, and all we had were a few sandbags in front
> of our house and a few guards," Ed Wong, who is on his seventh rotation
> at the New York Times Baghdad bureau, later recalls. "Back then, you
> might have met a few angry people, but you didn't fear for your life.
> Then, things started to change. At first, a few civilians became
> targets, but not journalists. Then, in the spring of 2004, we started
> changing our security protocols, using two-car convoys and guards. It
> felt very weird. For the first time I confronted that barrier between
> me and the people I was supposed to be reporting on."
>
> Dexter Filkins of The New York Times, who was in Afghanistan before he
> went to Iraq, told me:
>
> When I first got here in March of 2003, it was like any war zone I
> have covered: dangerous, but lines were clear. We went all around the
> Sunni Triangle at night. I went to Uday and Qusay's [Saddam Hussein's
> sons] funeral. Saddam's family stared at us, but I had no trepidation.
> Now, only a lunatic would do something like that!
>
> It all started to change in the fall of 2003 when all of us started
> to have a lot of close calls. I was shot at, attacked by a mob and had
> bricks thrown at my car. We had one car raked by gunfire.
>
> Then, everything totally changed after April 2004 and Falluja and
> the uprising of the Mahdi Army [the militia run by Moqtada al-Sadr].
> John Burns was captured, blindfolded, and walked into a field. He
> thought he was a goner. Later in 2004 came the beheadings.
>
> According to Filkins, "the situation has just truncated the center of
> being a reporter. We can still talk to Iraqis and do journalism, but
> it's dangerous and unpredictable."
>
> As Larry Kaplow of the Cox Newspapers said, it is "frustrating not being
> able to talk to the insurgents" and not to be able to find out what is
> happening in other parts of Baghdad.
>
> The price of staying in Baghdad is to have Iraqi surrogates perform more
> and more tasks, from driving and shopping to getting exit visas and
> plane tickets —and reporting. This situation deeply frustrates Western
> journalists, who pride themselves on their independence; but they know,
> as the Committee to Protect Journalists reports, that some sixty-one
> reporters (many of them Iraqis) have been killed here, and many others
> wounded, since the 2003 invasion.
>
> The New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise, who had spent several
> years reporting from Russia and had been to Baghdad several times
> before her most recent rotation, said:
>
> I sometimes think that all I know are tiny little pieces of the
> larger puzzle. If you can get into someone's house, you can tell that
> other side of the story. But the hurdles to doing that, just going to a
> hospital after a bombing, are now huge. During a recent Muslim holiday,
> I went to a park to talk to people and children. But, I had a
> translator, a photographer, three guards and two drivers.
>
> It was, she said, "intimidating."
>
> In recent history, there have been few wars more difficult to report on
> than the war in Iraq today. When I was covering the war in Indochina,
> journalists went out into the field, even into combat, knowing that we
> would ultimately be able to return to Saigon, Phnom Penh, or Vientiane
> where we could meet with local friends or go out to a restaurant for
> dinner with colleagues. Although occasionally a Viet Cong might throw a
> hand grenade into a bar, the war essentially was happening outside the
> city.
>
> I had arrived here in Baghdad naively expecting that as an antidote to
> their isolation from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up
> something of a fraternity among themselves. What I discovered was that
> even the most basic social interactions have become difficult. It is
> true that some of the larger and better-appointed news bureaus (with
> kitchens and cooks) have tried to organize informal evening dinners
> with colleagues. But while guests were able to get to an early dinner,
> there was the problem of getting back again to their compounds or
> hotels by dark, when the odds of being attacked vastly increase. The
> only alternative was to stay the night, which posed many difficulties
> for everyone, especially Iraqi drivers and guards.
>
> The result is that reporters find themselves living in a strangely retro
> mode where their days end before sunset, and they are pulled back to
> their bureaus for dinner like an American family of the 1950s. Not a
> few have sought solace in cooking.
>
> One evening while I was in Baghdad, a British security guard mentioned
> that Fox News was giving a "party" in the nearby Palestine Hotel, once
> the almost elegant, five-star Le Meridien Palestine on the banks of the
> Tigris River. I was curious both to see what had happened to this
> legendary hotel and also what now passed for a social gathering among
> foreign reporters here. So at dusk, accompanied by two armed guards, I
> walked over to the Palestine through the maze of blast walls.
>
> The first thing I noticed was that the hotel, which had become something
> of a household name when US tanks opened fire on it in April 2003,
> killing three journalists, was now largely dark. Of the major bureaus,
> only Fox News and APTN are still here. The Palestine and the equally
> fabled Ishtar Sheraton, known as "the Missile Magnet," are the two
> tallest buildings in Baghdad. They are situated adjacent to the
> roundabout in Firdos Square, made famous when a statue of Saddam
> Hussein was pulled down by a US tank in 2003. Although the Ishtar has
> long since been excommunicated by the Sheraton chain, the hotel
> continues to call itself a Sheraton, like some aging divorcée who
> cannot quite bear the thought of giving up her former husband's last
> name.
>
> In October of 2005, both hotels were the target of attacks by three
> vehicles with explosives driven by suicide bombers. The last of them, a
> cement mixer loaded with explosives that drove through a hole just
> blasted in the wall by another suicide bomber, might have brought both
> hotels down if its axle had not got snarled in a razor-wire barricade.
> Snipers on the roof of the Palestine Hotel then opened fire on the
> truck, setting off an explosion that, among other things, blew out
> windows at Reuters, The New York Times, and the BBC several hundred
> yards away. The Sheraton Ishtar was so badly damaged that it never
> really reopened, while the Palestine, which had much of its lobby blown
> out, somehow manages to keep going in a state of suspended animation.
>
> Inside its darkened lobby, a lone Iraqi sits dozing at a battered wooden
> desk under a caved-in ceiling that is hemorrhaging wires, electrical
> fixtures, and plumbing. A faded placard still marks the closed Orient
> Express Restaurant, once the meeting place of all the correspondents
> who used to live here.
>
> In our search for the alleged Fox News party, we ask the attendant in
> the lobby for directions. He tells me and my guards to go to the fifth
> floor, but adds that in order to get upstairs, we must first go
> downstairs, evidently a strategy to prevent suicide bombers from going
> directly to their targets. In the basement, amid a stack of discarded
> cardboard boxes and heaps of broken plate-glass windows, an Iraqi man
> is kneeling on a rug in front of a cement block wall, presumably facing
> toward Mecca, in prayer.
>
> When we finally arrive on the fifth floor, we have to leave our guards
> at a checkpoint fortified with a steel door. Inside, we are greeted by
> the stink of disinfectant and stale air filled with the smell of curry
> and cigarette smoke. Down a hallway with a greasy carpet I find a small
> sitting room with shabby furniture and a soccer game playing on a TV.
> The Fox News staffers who are smoking and drinking seem glad to see
> almost anyone. The scene makes me think of a group of elderly retired
> people clinging to a residential hotel slated for demolition.
>
> "Where are all the other guests?" I ask, as one of them thrusts a bottle
> of beer into my hand. Zoran Kusovac, Fox's bulky, unshaven bureau
> chief, takes a long drag on his cigarette and explains in his Croatian
> accent, "Everybody's gone home." He laughs. "It's Saturday. We wanted
> to have some fun. We used to be able to have parties until late at
> night. But now our security people told us that if we wanted to have a
> party, it would have to end no later than 6:00 PM, so that everyone
> could get home before dark. We started at 3:00!"
>
> "It's a little like being in third grade, where everybody has to be home
> before dark," someone else says. Everyone laughs.
>
> "TV means you have to get close to the action," Kusovac complains when I
> ask how Fox's coverage has been going. "After all, we have to get
> pictures. It's absolutely essential. If you're a print reporter and out
> in a Humvee, you can look through the window. But as a TV reporter, you
> have to stand up and get tape." Everyone nods, thinking, no doubt,
> about ABC TV's Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, who had just
> been wounded while out on patrol. "All of us," Kusovac said, "depend on
> our Iraqis whom we have learned to trust.... Our 'bona fiders.' But
> still, they're filters."
>
> The BBC's Baghdad bureau is housed at an adjacent compound in a shabby
> old villa occupied in the 1930s by a Jewish school, which still has
> Star of David patterns on its floor tiles and its old rickety
> wrought-iron porch railings. "The challenge here is always getting
> there to get the story," the Canadian-born bureau chief, Owen Lloyd,
> tells me. "And then, when we do get there, we can only stay for fifteen
> to thirty minutes. Finally, the focus has to be as much about safety as
> it is about the story."
>
> I ask Lloyd how the BBC deals with these problems. "We have a staff in
> the newsroom with four Iraqis who work as fixers," he tells me. "They
> are from different Muslim factions and give us a sense of what people
> in their neighborhoods think. We couldn't get by without them!"
> 3.
>
> 'The New Journalism'
>
> The days when journalists could move around Iraq just by keeping a low
> profile—traveling in beat-up old cars, growing an Iraqi-style mustache,
> and dyeing their hair black, or when women reporters could safely
> shroud themselves in a black abbaya and veil—are gone. When Jill
> Carroll of The Christian Science Monitor tried such tactics this
> January, she was kidnapped while trying to get to an interview with a
> Sunni politician, Adnan al-Dulaimi.
>
> What journalists have learned to do in this unprecedented situation is
> to give increasing responsibility to their Iraqi staff—readers of the
> Arab press, drivers, fixers, researchers, translators, or stringers
> whom the larger bureaus have placed around the country or in key
> government offices.
>
> Farnaz Fassihi has written how at The Wall Street Journal she "began
> relying heavily on our staff for setting up interviews, conducting
> street reporting and being my eyes and ears in Baghdad."
>
> Occasionally The Washington Post's local staff "managed to persuade
> Iraqis to come to our hotel for interviews, giving me a chance to
> interact personally with sources and subjects," Jackie Spinner, a
> former Post Baghdad bureau chief, acknowledges in her
> soon-to-be-published book, Tell Them I Didn't Cry. She recounts how she
> "spent the nights writing stories pasted together from reports gathered
> by our Iraqi staff, my only access to the war outside my window...."
>
> But while Western journalists are relying on surrogates, what I observed
> at the bureaus I visited in Baghdad was far from a dereliction of duty.
> If anything, it showed how the old overseas bureau model of independent
> reporters has been forced to evolve under very extreme pressure to
> survive. Much of the basic reporting now is done by Iraqis, while most
> of the writing and analysis is still done by Westerners. Some of the
> Iraqis I met are impressive in their knowledge and commitment to this
> new kind of team journalism. But one question being frequently asked is
> whether these local reporters were getting adequate credit. Omar
> Fekeiki, a young Iraqi at The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau, was
> quick to say, "Of course we want a byline! This is practically all we
> get."
>
> Iraqis who contribute to a story do get mentioned, although often at the
> end of the article and in somewhat smaller print than the Western
> correspondent—an unfortunate inequity. This practice has started to
> change, especially at the Post. Still, the reality is that because of
> the dangers of being associated with a Western news bureau, many Iraqis
> do not want their names published. Out of fear of reprisal, many do not
> even tell their families and friends where they work.
>
> Few reporters I talked to, whether Western or Iraqi, have any direct
> contact with the insurgents or with the sectarian militias: it is too
> difficult and dangerous, they say, to talk with Iraqis who do the
> fighting and set off the explosives. And thus, the various attacks,
> suicide bombings, and the pervasive anti-Western sentiment, as well as
> the sectarian hatred that has erupted during the occupation, continue
> to be largely unexplored and unexplained from the viewpoint of the
> Iraqis, whether they are Sunni insurgents, members of the Shia
> militias, or from the American-supplied Iraqi forces that are attacking
> them.
> 4.
>
> The Green Zone
>
> Sooner or later, anyone involved with the Americans must go to the
> so-called "Green Zone." Since it is so dangerous and difficult for
> Westerners to circulate in the everyday world of Baghdad, the Green
> Zone is one of the very few places to which a journalist can go to
> actually "report" a story. The alternative is to become embedded in the
> US military. That Western journalists now find being embedded a kind of
> liberation from imprisonment in their bureaus is something of an irony,
> especially in view of the debate three years ago whether embedded
> reporters were accepting conditions that restricted their freedom to
> describe the war. Now they readily accept these limitations, because
> working as a "unilateral" has become practically impossible. At least
> with the military they see the killing in the streets at first hand.
>
> The Green Zone is a 4.5-square-mile compound in the middle of Baghdad
> surrounded by an eight-mile-long, Christo-like running fence of blast
> walls. Someone dubbed it "the largest gated community in the world."
> The easy way to enter it is to "chopper in" to the zone's helicopter
> pad—code-name "Washington"—from Baghdad International Airport or one of
> the many other US military bases that now form a growing American
> archipelago throughout Iraq. Indeed, all day and night choppers
> carrying military brass, diplomats, security specialists, contractors,
> and VIP civilians rattle a few hundred feet over Baghdad.
>
> Reporters seeking access to the Green Zone must drive there and then
> negotiate passage through a heavily fortified access gate. Since these
> have been magnets for suicide bombers, they are ringed by armored
> vehicles, guard towers, and squads of heavily armed troops. If a
> visitor does not have the requisite US military-issued special pass for
> his vehicle, he or she must get dropped off at a special place outside
> a gate in a maze of blast walls, rubble, razor wire, and armaments. But
> cars dare not linger for more than a brief moment, lest soldiers
> presume that your vehicle is that of a bomber and open fire.
>
> Once disembarked, the visitor walks across a dangerous no man's land to
> the outermost checkpoint. As cars whiz by and as you thread your way
> through corridors of blast walls, razor wire, and chessboard-like
> configurations of metal mesh bins filled with dirt and sand as blast
> barriers, you feel utterly exposed. There have, in fact, been many
> attacks on these gates. In December 2004, for example, a car loaded
> with explosives blew up at Harithiya Gate, killing seven peo-ple and
> wounding nineteen. A Web-published message purporting to be from Abu
> Musab al-Zarqawi triumphantly proclaimed: "On this blessed day, one of
> the lions of the martyrdom-seeking brigade struck a gathering of
> apostates and Americans in the Green Zone."
>
> At the gate itself, you are greeted by signs in English and Arabic: "Do
> Not Enter or You Will be Shot," "Stop Here and Wait," or "No Cell Phone
> Use at Check Point." (The fear, of course, is that an insurgent with a
> cell phone will detonate a bomb by remote control.)
>
> And then, you must begin navigating numerous checkpoints manned by
> guards who check IDs again and again, pass you through metal detectors
> and scanning machines, introduce you to bomb-sniffing dogs, and give
> you pat-down searches. Their object is to make certain that no
> terrorist breaches these walls, as happened in October 2004 when
> suicide bombers blew themselves up inside the Green Zone Café, killing
> several contractors, and reminding everyone that even the seemingly
> secure barriers dividing the Green Zone from the rest of Baghdad could
> be breached.
>
> The first few checkpoints are now manned by teams of soldiers from the
> country of Georgia in full combat gear. The names on their identity
> badges all end in "-villi," and none of them seems to speak English.
> Next, one encounters phalanxes of Spanish-speaking guards who, in
> pidgin English, tell me they are from Peru, Colombia, Honduras, and
> Chile. Because US troops are both overstretched and expensive, the
> Pentagon has for some time taken to outsourcing guard duty here at the
> Green Zone to foreign contract laborers—in somewhat the same way the
> news bureaus are outsourcing their work to Iraqis. At first, the US
> hired the UK-based firm, Global Strategies Group Ltd., which imported
> British-trained Sri Lankans, Fijians, and Nepalese Gurkha mercenaries.
> But in November 2004, after the US reopened bidding for the contract,
> Triple Canopy Inc., a Virginia-based outfit started in 2003 by a group
> of veterans from the US Delta Force, won the job. In order to keep
> costs down, it brought in recruits from Latin America.
>
> These guards joined an already vast force of foreign truck drivers and
> food and service workers in the Green Zone (and on other US bases) who
> come from countries as varied as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Bulgaria,
> and India. The result is a globalized labor force that makes the Green
> Zone look something like one of the United Arab Emirates, where Asian
> contract workers often far outnumber actual citizens. These "private
> warriors" and service workers in Iraq are estimated to make up the
> equivalent of an extra thirty battalions of military troops.
>
> Knowledge of English does not seem to have been a requirement for Triple
> Canopy workers in this new Tower of Babel. Since the Latins are cut off
> from any regular Spanish-language publications or broadcasts, it is
> hard to imagine what they make of the imbroglio in which they find
> themselves. When I ask a Peruvian who is standing at a checkpoint under
> a tent fly in front of a giant stele inscribed in Arabic with a
> quotation from Saddam Hussein what he thinks of Iraq, he frowns and
> points one thumb down.
> 5.
>
> A Foreign Concession
>
> Several people told me that the Green Zone's name was derived from
> military parlance: when a soldier clears the chamber of his M-16, he is
> said to have his weapon "on green," while "red" means that a rifle is
> "locked and loaded" and ready to fire. Hence, this relatively safe zone
> occupied by American "liberators" came to be known as the Green Zone,
> while everything else outside, where weapons were ubiquitous and
> gunfire was almost incessant, came to be known as the Red Zone.
>
> When one first lands "inside the wire," as the world inside the Green
> Zone is known, one has the feeling of having gained access to some
> large resort in which soldiers have been turned into staff. Walking
> among the trailers, modular offices, generators, shipping containers
> (filled with thousands of items of equipment), PXs, fast food outlets,
> swimming pools and other recreational facilities, and seemingly
> inexhaustible supplies of American soft drinks, even the sight of the
> former palaces and buildings of Saddam Hussein and rows of date palms
> is not enough to jolt one back into Iraq.
>
> The Green Zone houses almost everything that matters in Iraq: the
> so-called "US embassy," which has taken up residence in Saddam
> Hussein's old Republican Palace; other favored foreign legations (the
> British, but not the French, who remain across the river on their own);
> a remnant UN mission; the offices of big construction firms like
> Kellogg-Brown-Root and Bechtel; American military command centers; a
> Pizza Inn; a bar called the Bunker; and CNN and The Wall Street
> Journal. All have sought haven here in the Green Zone. There is also
> the Convention Center, future home for the new Iraqi parliament, as
> well as important offices of the new Iraqi government. Just as the
> foreign "concessions" in cities like Shanghai once allowed
> "Westernized" Chinese to live inside them, together with ex-pats
> enjoying extraterritorial rights, select Iraqis are protected in the
> Green Zone.
>
> It is here also that the Combined Press Information Center, known as
> CPIC, is located and where it holds its Thursday press briefings, which
> remind some veterans of the surreal "Five o'clock Follies" held each
> day at 5:00 PM in the windowless JUSPAO (Joint US Public Affairs
> Office) theater in Saigon. There, an earlier generation of "press
> information officers" gave journalists briefings, complete with
> four-color overlay charts tabulating "body counts" "targets hit,"
> "structures destroyed," and "villages pacified" in a war that seemed to
> be getting statistically won, even as it was actually being lost.
>
> It is to CPIC that arriving journalists must go to be photographed,
> finger-printed, and accredited. Indeed, without the official CPIC
> plastic badge, it is virtually impossible for a reporter to survive in
> the parallel universe of American installations that, with few
> exceptions, provide the country's only working systems of transport,
> food delivery, overnight quarters, communications, and emergency
> medical care.
>
> Inside the Green Zone, one encounters a world that is nowhere to be
> found outside. The zone has its own taxi service. There are women
> joggers; men in rakish safari hats; thirty-year-olds in neckties who
> have vaguely described jobs "advising" the Iraqis on political and
> administrative matters; sweating women in halter tops, short skirts,
> and flip-flops. And almost everyone has an identity pouch hung around
> his or her neck with double transparent windows for all those important
> plastic ID cards. If most of the wearers weren't so tall, white, and
> overweight, they might be confused with those tagged refugees who are
> found in US airports waiting in groups to be put on mercy flights to a
> new host city.
>
> These oversized badges are prominently embossed with the words
> "International Zone," part of an ongoing, multipronged US government
> public relations effort to "rebrand" the Green Zone. This January,
> following the legislative elections, nominal control over some twenty
> buildings in the zone was passed over to Iraqis in a ceremony that
> featured a brass band and a chocolate cake.
>
> That the Bush administration keeps trying to change the Green Zone's
> name is only one of its many battles over language. Its tireless use of
> didactic labels—"Coalition Forces," "Operation Iraqi Freedom," or "The
> 27 Nation Multi-National Force"— only seems to end up creating an
> ever-widening gulf between official language and the reality of the
> actual situation in Baghdad. While official language is relentlessly
> upbeat, the already nightmarish reality has been getting worse with
> each passing day. As the Green Zone has become safer and ever more
> tightly controlled, and as the government's language continues to
> project a bright future for the US effort in Iraq, much of the rest of
> the country has descended into an ever more violent maelstrom.
> Meanwhile, during their tours of duty here in Iraq, only a very few
> American missionaries of democracy learn Arabic or ever touch an Iraqi
> dinar, buy anything Iraqi except in the trinket shops within the Green
> Zone, or share a meal in the house of an Iraqi citizen.
>
> "A critical mistake was made," observed the American security analyst
> Anthony Cordesman as early as September 2003. "By creating US security
> zones around US headquarters in Central Baghdad, it created a no-go
> zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the US into a
> fortress that tends to separate US personnel from the Iraqis."
> 6.
>
> Since then, the insurgent attacks on the US forces and Iraqi government
> and the sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Shiites have become
> destructive beyond what most journalists have been able to convey.
> Every morning, the residents of Baghdad find piles of bodies, hands
> manacled, skulls riddled with bullet holes, that have been dumped
> without identity cards beside some road. Insofar as there is any
> semblance of government control, it is all too often by the new Iraqi
> Ministry of the Interior, which remains in Shia hands but is widely
> suspected of complicity in the sectarian killings. According to
> official announcements, the ministry is supposed to be carrying out a
> comprehensive new plan by US Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey and
> Major General Joseph Peterson to construct a reformed national army and
> police force. In fact, as I was told by those few Iraqis I was able to
> meet, the Ministry of the Interior has a deserved reputation for
> lawless, Shia partisanship. Until Edward Wong's story on the ministry
> in The New York Times of March 7, no journalist I know of has been able
> to show in any detail just how the ministry works and what relations it
> may have with the Shia militias.
>
> The unraveling of Iraq into incipient civil war took another ominous
> step forward when on February 22, Sunni partisans dressed as members of
> the Iraqi military blew up al-Askariya, the sacred Shia Golden Mosque
> in Samarra. In retaliation, some twenty Sunni mosques were then
> attacked. The Washington Post of February 28 was the only American
> newspaper I've seen which reported that "more than 1,300 Iraqis" were
> killed in the days that followed (although as this issue went to press,
> the Post, after its estimate was challenged, wrote that three
> additional sources "put the toll at 1,000 or more, though none gave a
> toll as high as 1,300"). While all such statistics in Iraq are open to
> question, the claims of President Bush to have calmed violence by
> talking with Iraqi religious leaders sounded ever more hollow as dozens
> more people were killed in the following days. Although it is difficult
> to imagine Baghdad in an even worse state, as such violence escalates,
> this strife could plunge Iraq into a widening conflict that may
> eventually overshadow both the daily violence against Americans and the
> already intense anti-American nationalism.
>
> Adnan Pachachi, the much-respected politician in his mid-eighties who
> has long been in exile but was recently elected to Parliament and so
> moved back to the well-to-do Mansur neighborhood of Baghdad where he
> lives sequestered in his own compound, with a private militia of
> bodyguards and a diesel generator, represents a saner but probably
> unrealizable vision of Iraq's future. Pachachi is a Shiite Muslim who
> deplores the rise of sectarian violence, and like some other well-known
> exiles, he did not anticipate it. "The Iraqis are known as the least
> religious people in the Middle East," he says. And so, he adds, "It was
> a great disappointment that 80 percent of Iraqis voting did so
> according to sectarian affiliations, not political beliefs."
>
> What is needed, says Pachachi, is "a new federal allegiance...some time
> for the country to stabilize." But he told me that "there is so much
> violence, fear and distrust, that my optimism is dwindling. We seem to
> be descending into a situation of civil strife between
> sects...organized killings on each side. Three years ago when the
> Saddam Hussein regime was toppled, no one thought the situation would
> now be as bad as it is."
>
> It may well be that the besieged American press in Iraq will find that
> the main story is not about Americans fighting Iraqi insurgents, but
> Americans standing powerlessly aside in their armed compounds, Green
> Zone, and military bases, watching as Iraqis kill other Iraqis and the
> country disintegrates. It would be all too ironic if this were the
> result of the invasion of March 2003, which was promoted as a critical
> step in bringing peace to the Middle East.
>
> —March 9, 2006
> Notes
>
> [*] As New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief John Burns wrote in a March
> 6, 2005, dispatch after the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was
> fired on by American troops while driving to the airport in an incident
> in which an Italian intelligence agent was killed: "American soldiers
> operate under rules of engagement that give them authority to open fire
> whenever they have reason to believe that they or others in their unit
> may be at risk of suicide bombings of other insurgent attacks." Burns
> added that while few of the incidents of such firing are ever formally
> investigated, "any Westerner working in Iraq comes across numerous
> accounts of apparently innocent deaths and injuries among drivers and
> passengers who drew American fire, often in circumstances that have
> left the Iraqis puzzled as to what, if anything, they did wrong."
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