BAGHDAD — The temperature in Baghdad has been below 100 at 7
a.m. every day for six straight days! The strange thing is that,
crazy as it sounds, it does feel cooler here even as the early
morning temperature hovers around 97 or 98 degrees.
Life on the streets is once again cooler too. Even though people
continue to get killed, the numbers have fallen off noticeably. The
number of car-bomb explosions has dropped very sharply in the past
30 days or so. The factors responsible for this good news are
something of a mystery. The passage of a Constitution gets some of
the credit. If that is true, then the details of how it came about
are so arcane as to be incomprehensible.
Something else that gets credit is the Iraqi Army. There truly
are signs that this army is starting to have some impact on events
here. The terrorists can’t simply walk up to a checkpoint, kill
everyone in sight, and not take a very strong risk that they might
all be killed in return.
What continues to be whispered, and what I have reported here
once or twice, is the claim that the Iraqi Army is killing hundreds
of the terrorists whom they do arrest. No trials. No niceties. Just
a quick shot in the head. I can neither confirm nor refute this
persistent report. But, I hear it so often that I do tend to
believe something along those lines is happening. The victims of
the Army killings (if they are happening) are the former Saddam
loyalists who form the core of the terrorist groups.
It’s noteworthy that absolutely no one is bothered by this
evidence of an army that is perhaps running amok. In many other
countries (even in parts of ours) there would be mass hand wringing
and hyperventilation. The New York Times editorial board
would have a collective case of acid indigestion. Not here. These
people have tasted what it is like to live at the hands of a
butcher and an assassin. They can’t wait for Saddam’s trial and
execution to be over so they can quickly get on with the more
important things in life.
What is also remarkable about all the talk of Iraqi Army
atrocities is that not a soul in the media has reported a word
about it. This is the scandal of what passes in Iraq for news
gathering and reporting. Since this place is so dangerous, the
media quite literally stay hunkered down in the trenches. As a
result, nobody in the world has any idea of what is going on. If
they want to claim they are “reporting” that is all well and good.
No reporter wants to go out and get killed. But, what they do is
report from the safety of their trenches how badly things are
going, when they have not the foggiest idea of how
anything is going.
This is an incredibly difficult war on which to report
completely and accurately. That is a given. But the press has been
derelict in not acknowledging that its reporting is subject to an
astonishing amount of inaccuracy and incompleteness. One thing we
seem to know nothing about, for example, is what is going on in
Baghdad itself. Why don’t we? The city is right here at the feet of
all the visiting reporters who rotate in and out every month. The
reason we don’t know is that the reporters don’t care. Any reporter
assigned to Baghdad simply wants to get in and get out, without
being killed.
The vast majority of the reports coming out of Iraq are written
by the Associated Press. How many of you have noticed that as a
matter of company policy the AP never reports the number of U.S.
servicemen killed in Iraq without always using the
qualifier “at least”? It is always “at least 1,850 U.S. soldiers
have been killed since 2003.” I challenge any reader to find an
exception to that statement. A few days ago company policy made an
AP staff writer look like an illiterate fool by forcing him to use
the “at least” qualifier twice within the span of five words. The
purpose of the qualifier is obvious, of course. What the AP is
saying is: “The liar Rumsfeld is willing to acknowledge at least
1,850 deaths, but we elites who are privy to the truth know the
number is much higher than that.”
And speaking of deaths, one morning last week Iraq paved the way
for Saddam’s hanging by executing three garden variety terrorists.
Each had been responsible for killing fewer than five people; penny
ante stuff compared to the hundreds of thousands that Saddam
killed. The speculation now is that the Saddam trial starting
October 19 will be divided into about five or six segments, each
dealing with a long catalogue of barbarisms. The first segment will
be devoted to Saddam’s execution of 150 people after a failed
attempt on his life about 1982. In the entire scheme of Saddam’s
butchery, this one was a reasonably minor event. The trial will be
quick and have lots of easily provable allegations. As soon as this
segment is over there will be a verdict. It is widely assumed that
Saddam will be found guilty and his execution ordered. After a day
and a half set aside for appeal, he will be promptly executed, and
life will start to return to normal. Obviously, the rest of the
trial dealing with the other segments will become “moot.”
About ten days ago, I wrote
here about Ben and Lawrence, two guys in the Project
Contracting Office who, by sheer force of talent and determination,
had turned around what had been a sleepy “banana republic”
operation. At the end of that dispatch I expressed the wish that
these two guys’ bosses not wake up one day and decide to move them
back to the States. Sadly, that day has come far sooner than I
thought for one of them. Wednesday morning I learned that Ben is on
his way out, barely five months after his arrival. So many of our
problems here are self-inflicted!
