Is it getting better?
by ChrisSeptember 30th, 2004 3:31 pm
Will Bunch has had a couple of posts over the last few days quoting two different
foreign corespondent discussing their experiences in Iraq. The first
comes from photojournalist David Swanson of the Philadelphia Inquirer:
"As a photographer, I couldn’t find one positive image in Iraq. Isn’t
it obvious that there were no positive outcomes to this war?"
You can see some of Swanson’s pictures here.
The second set of comes from a letter sent home by Wall Street Journal reporter
Farnaz Fassihi. She sent this to family or friends and was not intended for
publication. Here are some of the passages that struck me but read the whole
thing:
It’s hard to pinpoint when the ‘turning point’ exactly began. Was it April
when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada
and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home
to ten percent of Iraq’s population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans?
Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni
triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments,
Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under
the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign
policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young
men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt
a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put
an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped.
He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen landmines per every
ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the
walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an American convoy
gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was supposed to love
America for liberating Iraq.
The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If
any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day.
The various elements within it-baathists, criminals, nationalists and Al Qaeda-are
cooperating and coordinating.
One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of
us on the ground it’s hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from
its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been
unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can’t be
put back into a bottle.
There’s nothing I can add to this other than to speculate how these observations
will square with the type of rhetoric we will be hearing from the debate tonight but I won’t bother. It’s too obvious.
