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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
A Georgetown professor goes to Baghdad to assess post-war conditions and finds terror spreading by the day -- and the U.S. unable to stop it.
Nov 12, 2003 | November has been the deadliest for both Americans and Iraqis since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1. The headquarters for the International Committee of the Red Cross was bombed. Baghdad's deputy mayor was assassinated. Three of the city's police stations were simultaneously attacked. Two U.S. helicopters have been shot down. In the past few days, alone, gunmen in Mosul opened fire on an oil company executive's car, wounding him and killing his son, and a bomb in Basra claimed several civilian casualties.
When a missile blasted the Al Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad in late October, a distinguished guest narrowly escaped injury: U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the chief architect and a leading proponent of the Iraq War. He was shaken, and a few days later, at Georgetown University in Washington, I heard him speak about the attack. Wolfowitz downplayed his own risk and his own reaction, but certainly he experienced something that many Baghdadis now experience on a regular basis: fear. The profound fear that makes your heart pound in your chest, that freezes you in your tracks, that leaves you wondering whether you are about to die.
Whether the attackers are Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein, foreign fighters, Islamic jihadis, or a nationalist resistance, a key objective of the attacks is clearly to create fear. They want to see the Americans depart, of course; but a point sometimes lost in American news coverage is that the attackers aim to intimidate ordinary Iraqis, too. Fear is also a result of the absence of law in Baghdad, the failure of the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide security against carjackings, kidnappings, armed robbery, abduction and rape, every kind of theft and general banditry imaginable. And so fear comes to the people of Baghdad in various shapes and sizes: The fears that accompany American soldiers on foot patrol in Fallujah; the fears that tear at parents' hearts sending their children to school each day, hoping they come home safely; the fears about personal security that all residents of the Iraqi capital now experience; the fears that ordinary Iraqis feel for the future of their country.
Fear is like a virus, a contagion that can come to infect whole neighborhoods, whole cities. Sometimes it starts with a single victim; I know this from personal experience. I traveled to Iraq in late August expecting to stay for two weeks of research and interviews; I'd been in Baghdad before the war, and I wanted to get a firsthand feel for the place after the fall of Saddam. But I stayed for only four days -- days in which I was constantly reminded of the danger, days in which I regularly heard gunshots and explosions, days in which every moment was colored by the possibility of spontaneous violence. And yet, in that brief time, I managed to walk Baghdad's streets more or less freely. As I rode in cabs or bought ice cream from street vendors on pleasant summer evenings, I saw a nation that was bustling with life. I had a chance to speak with ordinary Iraqis who are yearning for a return to normalcy -- and who are increasingly furious that the United States, with its mythic stores of power and wealth, has not been able to provide it.
Things have only gotten worse since my visit, and in reading the horrific accounts of recent explosions and attacks, I've come to wonder whether the United States can ever win the war if it cannot stem the fear that its often invisible opponents are injecting into daily life on the streets of Baghdad.
Before I left my home in Washington, I knew the trip would be dangerous. I read the newspapers and watched the television news shows. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East and I have a lot of friends there, friends who have recently been to Baghdad. My friend Edmund, an Iraqi Christian, had spent several years in Iraqi prisons before managing to get out of the country. Now he works for a Jordan-based NGO doing humanitarian work in his homeland. When I spoke with him in Amman the day before my flight to Baghdad, he was blunt: "I don't advise you to go," he warned. "It's worse than the wild West. You don't know what's going to happen at any time, even before the curfew."
I was resolved to make the trip, but I was terrified that I would not return to Washington in one piece. I made it through that night and to the next morning with the help of several drinks. Once I began the routines of packing, having breakfast and making my way to the airport, things seemed almost normal, at least for the time being.
But the sense of normalcy did not last.
Our flight made a plunging descent onto the landing strip at what used to be Saddam International Airport -- a defensive measure, apparently, to counter the threat of shoulder-fired missiles. I hitched a ride into the capital with three members of the airline's ground crew, and along the way, they pointed to where the U.S. military had downed dozens of old and beautiful trees to make it more difficult for people to hide and mount attacks on U.S. soldiers. On the route to the Ard al-Zuhur Hotel (Flower Land Hotel) in the relatively well-to-do neighborhood of "outer Karada," I recognized some neighborhoods from a trip to the city last winter, before the invasion. Though I'd heard so much talk of danger, crime and violence, the streets were busy and humming with life. Businesses were open, people were out -- mostly men, of course. But then you see some bombed and burnt-out buildings and the peculiar sight of heavily armed U.S. soldiers in tanks and fighting vehicles -- clearly out of place as they patrolled an Arab city -- and you remember that you are in a war zone.
By the time I checked in to my hotel -- an apartment building that had hastily been converted into suites, with an Internet cafe on the ground floor -- I was genuinely confused. I had just heard all about Baghdad's dangers, which had confirmed everything I had seen on television and read in the press, but I had just seen the hustle and bustle of urban life. It was now early afternoon and I didn't know whether to stay in my hotel room until my return flight to Amman two weeks away or explore the city. After washing up and calming down, I decided to venture outside to acquaint myself with the surroundings near my hotel.
Baghdad is more like Los Angeles -- sprawling, endless and suburban -- than a truly urban city, and much as I walked in the late summer heat, I seemed to be getting nowhere. But it seemed normal. Things were quiet. When I visited here last winter, before the war, I'd regularly walked the streets of the city by myself or with American friends well into the early hours of the morning. I took cabs everywhere, talked with anyone, and never felt fearful of crime, chaos or random violence. Of course, Iraq under Saddam truly was a "republic of fear" but it was a profoundly different kind of fear. Iraqis were afraid of politics and the regime, one of the most brutal, bloody and ruthless regimes the world has ever seen.
I went back to my hotel and showered. Braced by my newfound courage, I went back down to the street, hailed a regular cab, and directed the driver to the Qasr Al-Muqtamarat -- the Baghdad Convention Center on the grounds of the former Republican Palace that now serves as the headquarters for the American occupation. The conference center turned out to be part of the sealed-off American complex in the center of town that includes one of Saddam's former palaces, now home to Paul Bremer, Bush's envoy to Iraq. What is amazing -- even startling -- is that the symbolism and irony of living in and ruling Iraq from Saddam's former palace seems to be lost on the American administration. It is not lost, however, on ordinary Iraqis.
