letter from baghdad
|
Letter From Baghdad
|
In the shade of a high sandstone arch, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and a platoon of American soldiers from the 1st Armored Division guard the main point of entry into Baghdad´s Green Zone, the heavily fortified area west of the Tigris River from which the Coalition Provisional Authority governs occupied Iraq. The arch was built a few years ago by Saddam Hussein, in imitation of ancient gates that once protected Baghdad from Persian invaders. American soldiers now call it the Assassin´s Gate.
|
|
THE HISTORIAN
|
The Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A., is headquartered in the Republican Palace, about a mile beyond the Assassin´s Gate, down a road of eucalyptus trees, past bombed state buildings and concrete barriers. The palace, protected by a high iron gate and sandbagged machine-gun positions, is a sprawling two-story office building in the Babylonian-Fascist style favored by Saddam, with Art Deco eagles spanning the doorways. Evenly spaced along the top of the façade are four identical twenty-foot gray busts of Saddam, staring straight ahead, his eyes framed by an imperial helmet. Beneath these Ozymandian tributes, twelve hundred officials of the C.P.A. go about the business of running the country. Getting in to see one of them, a senior adviser to Bremer acknowledged, is like a jailbreak in reverse. Though it is in the geographical heart of ochre-colored, crumbling Baghdad, the C.P.A. sits in deep isolation. There are legitimate security reasons for this: on November 4th, the compound was hit by mortar fire, and four people were injured.
|
|
THE PLANNERS
|
Before arriving in Iraq, in April, Erdmann had done a lot of relevant historical thinking. In his dissertation, Americans Search for Victory in the Twentieth Century, he wrote about Americans growing realization that in a military intervention a careful transition from war to peace is as crucial as battlefield success. The language that we live with today of exit strategy and the focus on the end game that's recent, and part of this historical evolution, he said.
|
|
FREEDOM�S UNTIDY
|
An infantry captain in Baghdad gave me his war log for the months of March, April, and May. The days leading up to the city´s fall are crowded with incidents. But immediately after April 9th, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down, the entries turn brief: Nothing significant to report, stayed at airport all day doing maintenance and recovery operations. Meanwhile, the city´s leading institutions were being plundered.
|
|
THE CAPTAIN
|
In April, CNN aired footage of a marine in Baghdad who is confronted with a crowd of angry Iraqis. He shouts back in frustration, We're here for your fucking freedom!
|
|
THE SHEIKH
|
The human committee for prisonners and lossners international, said the sign on a side street in Kadhimiya, a Shiite neighborhood in the northern part of Baghdad. The sign indicated a two-story building that was office and home to Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi. The sheikh had spent almost ten years in Saddam´s prisons, where he had formed a clandestine prisoners´ group. Now that Saddam was gone, he was becoming an important man in Baghdad. Like other Shiites, he was eager to fill the vacuum of postwar Iraq with his own ideas.
|
|
THE ADMINISTRATOR
|
The leisure reading of American officials I met in Iraq tended toward sadly pertinent history: guerrilla wars and botched peace efforts. Colonel William Grimsley, an infantry brigade commander, was reading A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne´s study of the French-Algerian conflict. Lots of similarities to this place, Grimsley told me. A young lieutenant I met had brought a copy of Four Hours in My Lai. Drew Erdmann was bogged down in David Fromkin´s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. No one at the C.P.A. had much time to read, though, or to think.
|
|
WE ARE STILL AFRAID
|
Dr. Baher Butti is a small, nebbishy man of forty-three who treats patients in crisis at the Ibn Rushd Teaching Psychiatric Hospital, in central Baghdad. He also dispenses antidepressants and antipsychotics of some previous generation to the long-term cases in a locked hospital at the city´s eastern edge. Dr. Butti sees private patients as well, and he´s made it his goal to offer sensitive therapy in a country where psychological care hasn´t always been distinguishable from the methods of the security police.
|
|
THE ENVOY
|
Nobody searched me on the August day I went to the Canal Hotel, where the United Nations had its offices, to see Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Secretary-General´s special representative in Iraq. His staff occupied a hall on the third floor, but before going to Vieira de Mello´s corner suite I stopped to talk with his political adviser, a Lebanese professor and former culture minister named Ghassan Salamé. Vieira de Mello and Salamé had met only a few months earlier, when the career international civil servant from Brazil asked the political veteran from Beirut to help him in what seemed to be an impossible assignment: representing the U.N. in occupied Iraq under a Security Council resolution that gave it no real authority. He said he knew nothing of Iraq, Salamé said, and less of me.
|
|
SOME TYPE OF DEMOCRACY
|
Drew Erdmann left Baghdad in late July, for meetings in Washington and to see his wife, in St. Louis. They spent a beautiful Saturday morning walking through the dazzling green of an organic market, but he felt remote, as if he were looking at the world through a thick pane of glass. He woke up every morning before dawn, just as he did in Baghdad, feeling the stress of what remained to be done. It was nearly impossible to tell his wife what he´d been doing. He felt dizzy, his hands shook with nervous energy, and he wanted to get back to Iraq.
|
|
title
|
content
|