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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The silent streets of Baghdad tell an ominous tale: A year after Saddam's fall, the hope and optimism that followed the American invasion are dead.
Apr 14, 2004 | On Saturday afternoon, the pilot started his steep descent after following the great black wire of the Tigris south toward Baghdad. Cultivated areas along the banks looked like burn marks, as if the electrical current had suddenly spiked, leaving a tarry ghost where the river should be. The large reservoirs to the north of the city were empty spaces in the dun vastness and the water in them had a metallic sheen that did not reflect the sky. As we made our approach, fires burned north of town. Smoke from a burning fuel tanker poured into the air and finally stretched out into a gray line over the horizon. We couldn't see much from the air, but on the ground in Fallujah, the U.S. Marines were fighting militants for control of the city. But the uprising, because that is what it is, is not confined to Fallujah. In Baghdad, battles with militia loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr were raging in the Sadr City slum. Other Iraqi towns are under the control of his Mahdi army. Refugees streamed out of Fallujah on any available road.
It was true long before we landed in Baghdad: The American project in Iraq is dead, and with it much of the hope and optimism that followed the overthrow of Saddam. The city I remembered from a year ago, with its long palm-lined boulevards and frantic markets, no longer exists. It has been replaced by something that echoes of shell-shocked Kabul, in Afghanistan. On the way toward Sadoun Street and Paradise Square, I was turned around and couldn't locate the river. Baghdad has become a tangle of concrete barriers and barbed wire; officialdom and the press have retreated into an archipelago of fortified islands. To do this to a city does not seem right under any circumstances, but it is easy to understand why the elite has created the armed enclosures. Most of them no longer believe that the American mission can succeed, and so they are afraid of becoming targets; the blast walls are monuments to their pessimism. Of course, it is far easier to hate strangers who live behind a maze of walls. This is what is happening in Iraq now.
On the way into the city from the airport, we drove past the wreckage of a convoy that was still smoking off to the side of the road. A few drivers nearby accelerated to get away from the twisted frame. When our airport van passed it, the passengers became quiet and abandoned their excited chatter, hypnotized by the sight of the ruined trucks. I was struck that the United States, whose careful public relations campaign stressed the reconstruction of Iraq, could not even secure the road to the airport. Too much was happening at once, and there just are not enough soldiers to go around and protect long stretches of road. They are too busy protecting themselves.
