Friday, Sep 5, 2008
For the first time, I've started to feel unsafe in Iraq.
Mar 20, 2004 | The morning after the bombing at the Mount Lebanon Hotel in the Karada neighborhood, I traveled five miles from my home to visit the site. A block away from the hotel, the force of the explosion had shattered windows and strewn metal, brick and plaster along the road. Shopkeepers stood with blank, dazed expressions in the doorways of their messed-up stores. Some laconically cleared debris. Above one shop, a red plastic tricycle (like the Big Wheel I rode as a little kid) dangled by one handlebar from a metal window frame.
Farther down the street, I could see that the explosion had sheared the fagade of the hotel clean off, leaving a puzzle of half-rooms. Across from the hotel, two houses had been utterly destroyed by the blast. One was missing its roof and front and the remaining walls tilted outward. Amazingly, the whole family in the house had survived. Family members were venturing up to what was left of the second floor and sorting through belongings. Some chucked debris from the second floor onto a bigger pile of debris below. The family seemed anxious to be doing something, anything. It seemed as though, in throwing the debris, they were exercising some modicum of control over the chaos of their environment.
I spoke to some of the family members (through Amjad, my translator) next to pieces of a bedroom set that they had salvaged from the remains of the house. The family believed that American missiles had caused the destruction. A man in a plaid shirt, sweating from the heat and his exertions, said that he knew the Americans had fired missiles on purpose to kill Iraqis. They don't really want security, he said. They want chaos. That way they can stay in Iraq and take all the oil. The man gestured broadly with his arms and as he spoke his chin shot forward as though firing the words out of his mouth. FBI forensic experts have said that the blast did, in fact, come from a car bomb. But the man's insistence that the U.S. had fired a missile at the neighborhood is indicative of the streak of hatred and blame being aimed at the U.S. occupation right now. Iraqis who feel furious with the occupation see the U.S. presence as responsible (either actively or passively) for the continuing violence in their country.
The man pointed to his next-door neighbor's house. "What have they done to deserve this?" he asked. Most of the occupants of his neighbor's house -- a Christian family -- had died in the bombing (the man said eight, though other reports from the scene put the number at four). The man and I looked over at what was left of the house. Rubble, splintered wood. On a broken door poking from the debris, I saw part of a colorful wall calendar.
I turned back to the man and asked him a question many people have been asking Iraqis lately: "Was your life better before the war?" "Yes," the man said. "Yes, yes," his family agreed. "It was better." Then I asked whether he felt the situation had been improving since the end of the war. "It's getting worse all the time," the man said. "Every day explosions. A year has passed and no law." Again, his family voiced their agreement. "We want jihad against the Americans," the man told me. When I asked whether he was Sunni or Shia, he said he was Shia, but that it did not matter. Sunni, Shia -- they would all fight together against the Americans. "We are sleeping lions," he said. "We're waiting for the time to eat Americans."
The man asked Amjad where I was from, a question I hear so much that I understand it perfectly in Arabic. "American," I said. "I'm from America." Usually, when I say I'm an American journalist, people become happily excited at the possibility of conveying their story to the American public, which they see as separate from the Americans of the occupation. But in this case, as soon as I properly identified myself, I regretted it. The man stopped talking, probably worried that his talk of jihad might get him in trouble, but he looked at me with a spiteful expression. Other American journalists at the bombing site told me they had been saying they were Canadian or Australian. Anything but American. Here in Iraq, on the anniversary of the invasion, bad feelings toward the occupation have morphed into a general anti-American and even anti-Western sentiment. And for the first time -- Mom, stop reading this -- I've started to feel unsafe.
To be fair, while that man's pissed-off sentiments reflect those of many people in Iraq these days, they certainly don't reflect all. The results of a recent poll conducted in Iraq for ABC and the BBC paints the situation a little more optimistically. The poll shows that more than half the population -- 56 percent -- feels as though their lives are better than before the war. That number may seem surprising given the grim news from Iraq these days. But on the streets of Baghdad, I meet plenty of people who would agree with that view. At the Mount Lebanon bomb site, for instance, I spoke to a man who said he owned the property on which the hotel had been built. He was an older Kurdish man dressed impeccably in a suit and tie. He told me that, under Saddam, he had been persecuted, forced to give up his Baghdad house and move to the South. Now he had hope for his future. As we stood looking at the wreckage of the hotel, he said things were getting better. It would just take time.
A year ago I sat watching television in my New York apartment, listening to President Bush make his case for the war in Iraq. Despite the massive international protests, despite the U.N.'s case for continuing to search for weapons of mass destruction, I felt a depressing sense of inevitability . While President Bush indicated that Saddam and his stores of WMD posed an imminent threat to the American people, there was an overriding impression that the choice to invade Iraq had already been made, long ago, behind closed Washington doors.
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