Fair weather in Iraq

Alright, I know it has been more than three months since I left Iraq, so I may not be the most reliable source of information and judgment anymore. Worse, as the National Review suspects in its current review of my new book I may at times be prone to “a not-quite-subconscious European delight in portraying Americans as clumsy imperialists”. (Great blurb, actually. Would jack up the sales in France, that's for sure.)

Anyway, that is why I am proud to announce that I got a co-author on board: Jack Fairweather, a reporter friend of mine who has just gone back to Iraq for six (SIX!) months.

He writes for a major British broadsheet but don’t you worry, he is not a jaded veteran hack, easily guilty of “the lazy Vietnam-templating, the 'of course America must be losing' spin” (Glenn Reynolds). Far from it: At 24, Jack is pretty much straight out of Oxford. Late last year, he went to Kuwait as a free-lancer to cover the Iraq war from start to finish. And unlike me he is an incorrigible optimist about the country's future. “You just wait, things will get better,” he told me when he left New York last week.

I have asked Jack to occasionally send dispatches from the frontlines, as a sort of reality check for all of us ranting pessimists writing from the heart of empire. His reports are likely to be more personal and honest than what his paper has the courage to print, I hope.
Here goes..

Jack Fairweather
On the road to Baghdad

There can be few things more demoralizing than being woken at 4 am in the depths of bandit country to be told that the vehicle you are travelling in has broken down. The road from Amman to Baghdad is a notorious haunt for gunmen and robbers who thrive in the general lawlessness of post war Iraq, and the driver called Essam, a usually stout and sensible man, looked suitably nervous. Although Essam had never been robbed he seemed to know plenty of people who had along the empty desert road.

‘Engine is finished, maybe you should go into the boot,’ said the Essam. It seemed an inauspicious start to my return to Baghdad, although for ordinary Iraqis the fear of being shot or robbed has become part of the fabric of life in the capital in recent months. A straw poll at the central morgue last month revealed that 50 Iraqis are shot every day in Baghdad and its environs. ‘There is terrible fear everywhere and the Americans are doing nothing to stop it,’ one Iraqi had told me at the border

We hung low until the first streaks of dawn, when a US military convoy drove past from guarding the border with Jordan. The driver tried to flag them down, but they didn’t stop, although one American soldier primed his gun at the taxi. A convoy of journalists passed next who had brought with them an armed escort. They told us that we were a security threat and that it would be impossible for us to go along with them.

There was only one solution: to rely on the goodwill of the Iraqis. Within the first hour of daylight, 9 vehicles had clustered around us, and several Iraqis had taken off their shoes to stand on top of the engine to shout encouraging things at it and to each other. Their efforts failed, although after the tension of the past few hours their Samaritan-like instincts had dispelled our fears.

I was given a lift into Baghdad and Essam was promised a pick-up truck. ‘This is our country,’ said Hamid, the humble taxi driver from one of the more dangerous suburbs of Baghdad who had picked me up. ‘There are people who want to fight and that has made us very scared. Most of us just want to live in peace. In sha’allah it will come, but we must work together.’ After a summer of bombings and increased attacks on coalition forces in the country, Hamid’s words seemed to offer solitary hope amid the gloom.

At first sight, however, Baghdad seemed like a city getting back on its feet. Down Baghdad’s central street Hamid took me, where shop fronts had been cleaned, more of them were open, and all are better stocked with the electronic gadgetry beloved of Middle Easterners: televisions, stereo systems, fridges. At one well to-do restaurants, families were dining out on what must be their first pay checks since the war. Outside the Iraqi policemen, previously a disconsolate and nervous-looking bunch, were out in force in their new uniforms and Kalashnikovs. ‘People are beginning to feel the difference,’ a Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman told me later.

It was possible to reflect that devastating though the violence has been over the past few months there was cause to be optimistic over all the things that had not happened in the country. Contrary to predictions before the war, Iraq has not descended into civil war. The August assassination of Ayatollah al-Hakim, spiritual leader of Iraq’s shia majority, passed without a wave of retaliatory killings of rival Shia groups or Sunnis. In the north, the Kurds have shown little desire to make a bid for independence. Iraq’s interim administration, although still dominated by the US, has the potential to form a future government that could lead Iraq to elections.

These were thoughts, however, to be had whilst sitting in the shade by the hotel swimming pool, where journalists, like the American administration on other side of the Tigris river, spend much of their time closeted behind security cordons. That evening there was a huge explosion in downtown Baghdad which rattled the hotel’s windows. At the roadside blastsite an ambulance was carting away a car that had been caught in the explosion. The minor casualties were already in hospital. American soldiers at the scene still flashed their guns around, although no one was killed, and it appears the small bomb went off prematurely.

It was, however, just the sort of thing to keep up the steady pressure of fear experienced every day by the ordinary Iraqis like Hamid. It is the same fear felt by the American military, who patrol the streets terrified of attacks by Iraq’s resistance force. And after my night broken down on the road to Baghdad, I had got a whiff of the feeling. Until Iraq’s security situation can be improved, future thoughts of a rehabilitated Iraq, and of ethnic strife must seem premature.

ends