Letter from Baghdad, the Progress of Disaster

Christian Parenti

The air in Baghdad is potent stuff. Plastic rich garbage heaps burn in empty lots. Massive diesel generators run round the clock. Over a million vehicles--old cars, trucks and fuel guzzling US tanks -- creep through the streets belching fumes. On the horizon, beyond the looted and bombed out office blocks,looming above the low-rise residential sprawl, is a giant smokestack; its massive black plume hangs over the city constantly. Add to this the haze the soot of building fires, the stench of sewage and the ubiquitous dust from countless rubble heaps; then cap and seal the mixture with the 115 degree hostility of a desert sun. Forget the poisonous air. The really pressing issue in Baghdad, as I learned from two weeks traveling around, is escalating chaos. The six million people living here want electricity, water, telecommunications, and security. As yet have none of these is sufficient supply. The occupying forces - increasingly isolated and alienated from the population - insist that they are making progress on all fronts. But on the ground it seems that this American adventure is spinning out of control. The crisis now has a momentum and dynamic of its own. Most Iraqis adamantly want peace but a terrorist war of resistance requires only small and determined minority.

Here the criminal is King. Sadam emptied the prisons and the US disbanded the police. Eighty percent of people are out of work. As a result, carjacking, robbery, looting and murder are rife. Marauding men in "misery gangs" kidnap and rape women and girls at will. Some of these victims are dumped back on the streets only to be executed by their "disgraced" male relatives in what are called "honor killings." Many women and girls stay locked inside their homes for weeks at a time. And increasingly those who do venture out wear veils, as the misogynist threats and ravings of the more fundamentalist Shia and Sunni clerics have warned that women who do not wear the hejhab should not be protected.

According to the city morgue there were 470 known murders in July, up from 10 the year before. Not surprisingly most people in Baghdad are armed and edgy. Under such conditions community solidarity takes on strange forms. An Irish peace active, Michel Birmingham who works Voices in the Wilderness witnessed the new vigilantism first hand. Three carjacker took a vehicle in midday. In response, the crowd on the streets started throwing stones while shopkeepers started firing AK 47s. Before long the crowd had dragged one of the carjackers out on to the street and started beating him. "They were jumping on his head and his chest. I don't think he made it," explains Michel in a deadpan Dublin brogue. As for the American troops - whom Iraqis call the kuwat al-ihtilal, or forces of occupation - they are stretched too thin to deal effectively deal with
such crimes. Beyond that, they have little understanding of Iraqi culture or politics. They are adrift in a sea of unintelligible Arabic, where even the street names are a mystery. At crime scenes they can just as easily arrest the victims as the perpetrators. And at the moment their main task is just staying alive. Their small convoys are under constant assault. Officially there is an average of 13 attacks on Coalition force in Baghdad everyday. Since May first when the war "ended" over 404 US soldiers have been permanently removed from action due to wounds, while more that sixty have been killed in attacks.

I relay these numbers to a grunt in the field, a young GI with first armored division. He has no clear picture of how the counter-insurgency war is going other than that someone shot at the gate he is guarding a while back and missed. But he's sure of one thing. "Whatever they tell you is a lie. It is bullshit. They're camouflaging."

Even journalists are getting killed. There was the Reuters photographer recently taken out by US troops. Before that a young British freelancer named Richard Wild was murdered by an assassin who probably thought his victim was a solider. Three GIs had died the same way: at close range, in the neck, from behind, with a pistol. Barely a week ago May Ying Walsh -- a stellar American reporter who now works for Al Jazeera - was almost killed. She recounts the tale with an air of blank serenity.

  "I was interviewing some solders and a grenade fell right in between us,
like a ripe piece of fruit. Everyone ran, but I just froze. The grenade rolled under a Humvee and when it blew, somehow, the shrapnel missed me. I think I was behind the tire or something."
Her film crew and two GI's were not so lucky, all of them were wounded, one of them very badly.

Baghdad also suffers from the less-dramatic structural violence of epidemic poverty. War, sanctions and Saddam's greed have left a large destitute class with no work, medicine or schooling. Exploring the rubble of some government ministry two colleagues and I meet Ibrahim Kadum who lost his foot in the Iran-Iraq war, then he lost his home and now squats in these ruins with his wife, nine children, and a shaggy and bleating ewe. Kadum can't work so he lives off the meager wages of his children some of whom do odd jobs in a local market. But mostly he survives on World Food Program
donations of flour, legumes, oil, salt, sugar and tea. These allotments keep most Iraqis alive, but the scheme -- which feeds 27 million and is a direct continuation of the oil-for-food program of Saddam's era - is scheduled to end in November. Some sort of food aid will have to continue but the scale and form of any new system is as yet unclear. To make matters worse Kadum has been told by some of the new Iraqi police that he and all other squatters must leave government buildings within a month. Some sixty-five other families from Kadum's old neighborhood also squat in the ruins around him. They all moved here, more or less together as a network. But when asked if they'll resist the eviction orders he says no. "Every one will have to find their own way." As we talk a bleary-eyed child approaches with very realistic toy pistol and levels it at my colleague's head.

At the Palestine Hotel, now a huge fortified camp where highly paid TV journalists are guarded by the razor wire and tanks of US army, one can find ye more forms of the war's violence and desperation. The young woman won't give her name but through a translator explains the details of her work. For fifteen dollars a session she has sex with American
soldiers. She's seventeen, wants to go to college and leave Iraq.
"Do you use protect with the soldiers?"
She blushes and pauses. "She says she takes the pills," explains our
translator Ahmed. Does she know about AIDS? "No condoms?" I ask. She blushes ever more deeply and answers directly in English. "Sometimes."

In the center of this sprawling war zone is a clean and air-conditioned oasis, the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters. Situated in one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces - a huge complex of high-modernist trophy architecture- the CPA is where L. Paul Bremer III and his army of freshly minted MBAs brainstorm on vital topics like competitive bidding and privatization. Somewhere else in this fortress sits the Coalition's handpicked Interim Governing Council of Iraq. This body of twenty-five notables took almost a month just to create a nine member rotating chairmanship for itself. Creating a new political constitution, government and a functioning economy will drag on for a very long time indeed. Everyday at three, the CAP's spin-doctors address the press in a large auditorium. In Vietnam style we call these confabs "the follies." The ritual begins with a slew of statistics about the "good progress" being made. But the numbers are often mumbled like a Latin mass, and one begins to feel that the driving force here is faith, not reason or planning.

  "In the last twenty-four hours coalition forces have detained 149 individuals, conducted over a thousand patrols and twenty raids." The pale and pudgy colonel Shields is presiding today. "We have confiscated one hundred and ten diesel smuggling tanker trucks, and destroyed more than twenty IEDs [improvised explosive devises]. Coalition forces completed four civic action projects in the Basra area and â?¦" On and on it goes until the colonel gets stuck on the word
adjudicated.

  "Several of these cases will be edjuda-rated, that is educated, I mean"
Ask Shields how many Iraqis have been killed by US troops and despite his reams of stats he doesn't know. How many women raped by gangs? No number. How many US soldiers committing suicide? Any troops busted for looting? Can't say. Then from the auditorium below -- a loud snore followed by snickering laughter. The LA Times man, just in from Jordan, has passed out cold. He didn't nap last night during the dangerous 13-hour drive in and obviously the combination of Shield nattering on and the wonderful air-conditioning have had a powerful soporific effect.

Smoke is rising from Karaka Street, an electronics district popular with US troops. An American humvee has just pulled up on the median and been blown to pieces by a remote activated mine. I am traveling with my two friends, a reporter from the SF Bay Guardian and an independent filmmaker, by total chance we're the first press on the scene.


The sidewalks are packed with refrigerators and air conditioning boxes. In the street sit a military transport truck and a humvee, beyond that are remains of the burning Humvee. A few US soldiers are crouched behind the truck. There are two wounded GI's on the ground and now a medivac helicopter circles just overhead. But there's no way the chopper can land because of overhead wires. A firefight ensues for about two hours until Bradley Fighting Vehicles start pounding the targeted building with 250-millimeter cannon shells. Whoever was inside has either left out the back or they are now definitely dead. Two Iraqi civilians are dead and one or two wounded. A cigarette stand has been knocked down, its packs of smokes strewn on the street. An Iraqi shopkeeper leans on a wall near by sobs as his store, and probably his life savings, goes up in flames. The GIs next to us among the refrigerators seem neither scared nor brave, just weary and numb. They are no longer driving the larger situation but rather riding it. And from this vantage point, crouching among the smashed merchandise, and empty shell casings one can feel the war taking on its own momentum. A mile away the Jordanian embassy has just been bombed, the first of the big soft targets.