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 female 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, the 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 or members of
the Shi'ite militias, or from the US-supplied
Iraqi forces that are attacking them.
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 actually to "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 12-square-kilometer
compound in the middle of Baghdad surrounded by a
13-kilometer-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 meters 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 people
and wounding 19. 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 checkpoint." (The
fear, of course, is that an insurgent with a
mobile telephone will detonate a bomb by remote
control.)
And then, you must begin
navigating numerous checkpoints manned by guards
who check identifications 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 Cafe, 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 Republic
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 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. 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 30
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 asked a Peruvian, who was 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 thought of Iraq, he
frowned and pointed one thumb down.
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), commissaries, fast-food
outlets, swimming pools and other recreational
facilities, and seemingly inexhaustible supplies
of US 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 United Nations mission; the offices of
big construction firms such as KBR and Bechtel; US
military command centers; a Pizza Inn; a bar
called The Bunker; and CNN and the Wall Street
Journal. All have sought haven 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 such cities as Shanghai
once allowed "Westernized" Chinese to live inside
them, together with expatriates 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"
that were held each day at 5pm 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, fingerprinted and accredited.
Indeed, without the official CPIC plastic badge,
it is virtually impossible for a reporter to
survive in the parallel universe of US
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 female joggers; men in rakish
safari hats; 30-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, multi-pronged US
government public relations effort to "rebrand"
the Green Zone. In January, after the legislative
elections, nominal control over some 20 buildings
in the zone was passed over to Iraqis in a
ceremony that featured a brass band and a
chocolate cake.
That the administration of
US President George W Bush 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 Multinational
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 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 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."
Since then, the insurgent attacks on the
US forces and Iraqi government and the sectarian
fighting between Sunnis and Shi'ites 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
Shi'ite 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, Shi'ite partisanship.
Until Edward Wong's story on the ministry in the
New York Times of March 7, no journalist I know of
had been able to show in any detail just how the
ministry works and what relations it may have with
the Shi'ite militias.
The unraveling of
Iraq into incipient civil war took another ominous
step forward when on February 22, suspected Sunni
militants military blew up al-Askariya, the sacred
Shi'ite Golden Mosque in Samarra. In retaliation,
some 20 Sunni mosques were then attacked. The
Washington Post of February 28 was the only US
newspaper I've seen that reported that "more than
1,300 Iraqis" were killed in the days that
followed.
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-80s 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 Shi'ite
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 said. And so, he added, "It was a great
disappointment that 80% of Iraqis voting did so
according to sectarian affiliations, not political
beliefs."
What is needed, said 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 US
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.
Orville Schell is the dean of
the graduate school of journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley and a
contributor to the New York Review of Books as
well as Tomdispatch.com. His most recent book is
Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from
the Himalayas to Hollywood.
(This article
appears in the April 6 issue of the New York Review of Books.
Used with permission.)
