KJ
Selections
Stifling
Spirit
From KJ #58
(Freeing Spirit)
KJ contributing editor Donald Kirk, on the ground in Baghdad,
reflects on Iraq, North Korea and Vietnam
BAGHDAD. At this end of the axis of evil, you have to
ask which is the greater evil — a nuclear threat on the Korean
peninsula or the latest bombing down the street or across the river.
You wake up one morning to the sound of mortar and rocket rounds, and
you turn on the TV to CNN and BBC broadcasting reports of a bizarre
mushroom cloud over the northern reaches of North Korea. The bombings
and minings and ambushes here in Iraq are clearly worse, short-term.
My hotel, the Al Mansour, happens to be on Haifa Street — about
midway between one of the many sandbagged, barricaded entrances to the
green zone, that enclave of mysterious U.S. and Iraqi authority, and
some ominous apartment blocks and alleys hiding rebels clutching caches
of arms. You peer from a balcony, looking at wisps of smoke from the
latest attack, following the gentle curve of helicopters arcing over
the Tigris, but rarely venture off the hotel grounds into the real world.
Or, when you do, it’s in a hired car with a driver with long experience
tooling around the city on behalf of foreign journalists, plus maybe
a security guard, to a fixed appointment, not to the scene of the latest
mayhem.
Could life be worse at the other end of the axis? Like millions of others,
I first heard the term while tuned into George W. Bush’s State
of the Union speech in January 2002. I was listening absent-mindedly
in my home on a hillside in Seoul, not exactly paying attention, when
I perked up at the mention of North Korea — right there with Iraq
and Iran as one of the targets of Bush foreign policy. Could he really
have used such an odd turn of phrase? Did he know what he was saying,
what he might be getting us into? I knew South Koreans, looking for
ways to reconcile with the North, would respond with dismay to what
might appear as a retrogressive step. By the end of that year, it was
a toss-up which would be the first to feel the blow of massed U.S. power
— Iraq or North Korea. Iraq was first, but the nuclear build-up
on the Korean peninsula, from the North’s return to nuclear production
at the Yangbyon facility to the South’s confession that it too
had been dallying in fusion, gives fresh meaning to the journalistic
description of Korea as an “explosive tinderbox.” Light
a match, it seems, and the whole place could explode on a scale unimaginable
in Iraq, where, as we all know by now, the only weapons of mass destruction
are those in the hands of the U.S. forces now flailing like a giant
Gulliver pinned down by Lilliputians.
The war over here, and the rumors of war over there, on the Korean peninsula,
all revolve around the issue of democracy, the credo the United States
purports to want to instill or else to defend. In the struggle for democracy,
however, real freedom, the freedom to speak and think as one wishes,
appears to be a casualty as conflicting factions speaks in the tongues
of ideologues and myth-makers. Here in Baghdad, the mantra is about
free elections in January, but one cringes at the prospect of the fighting
that is likely to happen first, either before the elections or before
it’s decided, as may be more likely, to postpone the whole show.
Think of the alternative, though, and the loss of freedom appears even
more likely. Does anyone really want fanatic Sunni or Shiite rebels
installing their own Taliban-like regimes, fighting one another to the
death and, of course, executing, annihilating, all those who disagree
with them?
Not that the killing will end with the Americans here. No, although
U.S. troops aren’t likely to line up prisoners and shoot them
en masse, don’t try to present that argument to those who witnessed
the shooting down the street from me when an observation helicopter
swooped low for a look, followed by the sounds of more helicopters firing
rockets and muttering machine-gun bursts, clearly audible from my balcony.
Some minutes later I heard the sirens but not the cries of the wounded
and dying until turning on the television to Al Arabiya and hearing
the shouting of one of its correspondents, in Arabic, wailing, “I’m
dying, I’m dying,” as blood spattered the lens of the camera
that was filming (one can’t say shooting in this context) him
at the time.
Wherever one goes, it’s the Americans who are blamed for the war,
for the failure to stop it, for the inability of the interim government
to bring about security, but others are complicit, if only under American
pressure. Didn’t Bush rattle off a whole list of partners in the
great coalition? Guess what, though. He forgot all about Korea, which
happens to have committed 3,600 troops to this place, almost all in
and around the northern city of Arbil in the Kurdistan region. When
I called Korea, my contacts there were sure the omission was deliberate,
a reflection of Bush’s annoyance over Seoul’s soft-line
policy toward the North along with Seoul’s objections to U.S.
plans to pull about one third of its troops from South Korea. A report
that Condoleezza Rice had called Korean authorities and said, Oh, it
was just an oversight, was not convincing. In fact, the call was all
part of the U.S. plot, said my Korean interlocutor. The fact is, however,
that about 2,800 Korean troops are already in Arbil (the rest are arriving
in November), while Japan has 550 troops here. They're focused mainly
on do-good projects, providing medical aid and engineering expertise,
not roaring through city streets on patrols on which casualties are
inevitable.
The real parallel between Iraq and Korea, at opposite ends of Bush’s
axis of evil, lies in the seemingly intractable nature of the standoffs
and the sense that much worse could happen. In both Baghdad and Seoul,
the atmosphere of crisis intensifies even as politicians and diplomats
talk up the chances for peace, for transition, for dreams come true.
The tension was in the air from the moment I boarded the Royal Jordanian
Air flight in Amman, the only way into Iraq these days except by perilous
road journeys that no foreigner in his right mind would consider. The
South African air hostess told me with a pleasant laugh that I shouldn’t
read the Jordanian newspaper she was about to give me since the news
was mostly from Iraq and was all bad and might spoil my flight. A few
minutes later the pilot, also South African, warned the passengers the
plane would do a series of sharp corkscrew turns during its descent
to make it a more difficult target for snipers who liked to fire at
aircraft on final approach.
After the plane had gone through its contortions, landing without incident,
and its assortment of journalists, U.S. bureaucrats and contractors
had trooped into the nearly deserted terminal, ruddy-faced Brits hefting
automatic weapons greeted us with reassuring smiles. They were private
security guards, former military people hired at high prices to help
insure the safety of the airport and environs. A van carried me and
some of the others, all but those who did not have the privilege of
official vehicles, SUVs equipped with full body armor and radios, not
to mention their own private security people, to a parking lot a couple
of miles away. There, in the 120-degree sun, taxi drivers waited, imploring
us to hire them for the ride into town.
I happened to arrive on what might have seemed an auspicious day. It
was June 28, and I heard over the radio of my taxi, tuned to BBC as
we drove in from the airport, that the Coalition Provisional Authority
was no more. An interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, was now in charge,
at least nominally, and he had appointed a cabinet that was assuming
the appurtenances of authority. In the same palace that the Americans
had taken over after driving Saddam Hussein out of Baghdad in April
2003, American diplomats and civil service officials now performed much
the same functions as they had under the CPA. L. Paul Bremer, who had
run the CPA for all of its 14-month history since Saddam’s ouster,
had taken off that very morning, leaving the way clear for John Negroponte,
fresh from his posting as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to
take over what would now be the largest U.S. embassy in the world in
terms of both physical size and number of people on its staff.
For all the articles I had read about the CPA, the perils of working
in Iraq and the restraints placed on journalists who had once gone unimpeded
to outlying scenes of conflict, nothing prepared me for the realities
of covering a war that is like none other in my experience. In the old
days in Saigon, in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was spending
much of my time there, you could go just about anywhere inside the city
and much of the surrounding region without much chance of getting shot
at. You knew pretty well how far you could go on the roads to outlying
provincial capitals and district towns, and you could fly any time aboard
a military aircraft to Danang, the port city on the northeastern coast
of South Vietnam, to Cantho, the central city of the Mekong River delta,
or to any of a number of other towns and bases whose names are forever
engraved in my mind as well as the history of the war.
Wherever you go in Baghdad these days, you’re taking a carefully
calculated risk. You don’t think about hailing a taxi on the street,
much less jumping aboard a city bus, and you don’t stroll around
the central bazaar, tempted though you are to size up the rugs, look
for pieces of jewelry and silverware or works of art, ancient or modern.
You have a habit of looking over your shoulder as you walk into homes
and offices for interviews, and you find a driver who comes recommended
by others who have used him. Your driver navigates quickly through traffic,
going through red lights as much as possible, stopping only for military
and police checkpoints and traffic jams and advising if certain streets
seem “dangerous” or “not dangerous.”
You don’t argue with such judgments. You know that American humvees
and the larger Bradley fighting vehicles are patrolling the streets.
In fact, you see them from time to time, columns of three vehicles,
each of them with a flak-jacketed, helmeted GI peering through the top,
manning a machine gun, and you also drive by Iraqi policemen in blue
uniforms and Iraqi National Guard troops, in brown-hued camouflage fatigues,
but much of the time there is precious little real security. You can
see how easily insurgents can plant bombs outside strategic targets,
how simple it is to ambush cars, kidnapping or killing drivers and passengers.
You tend to sit back in your seat, away from the window, so no one will
suspect you’re a foreigner, hoping your car will merge into the
morass of vehicles.
You’re a constantly moving target, but you’re not exactly
in a war zone. In this city of more than five million people, one senses
an overwhelming urge for peace, normal life, a return to the ancient
pursuit of making money in a highly mercantile culture. You may hear
the occasional bomb go off, quite often not as distant as you would
like, but you also see crates and cartons of luxury goods, of computers,
of refrigerators and television sets piled high in front of shops, and
cars line up for blocks for gasoline sold at the world’s cheapest
prices, 50 Iraqi dinar, a few cents a liter at the exchange rate of
1,450 dinars to a dollar, about a quarter of the price of a cup of Turkish
coffee at a roadside stand.
On a Friday evening, after prayers, along the Tigris River, crowds gather
at the restaurants purveying masgouf, the delicious fish that
is indigenous to the Tigris and the Euphrates, and still more crowds
stand in line at what my driver assures me is “Iraq’s best
ice cream restaurant.” No way, though, is it advisable for a foreigner
to join the line. Rather, the driver comes back with a three-dip, three-flavored
parfait, dripping with chocolate and bits of fruit, packed with enough
calories to get me through the rest of the day. Driving in quest of
an appointment, we veer around a circle and under a bridge where young
men are hanging out — planning terrorism, revolt, a holdup? In
fact, they’re drinking beer, imported from Turkey and sold more
cheaply on the street than in a store but still far more expensive than
gasoline.
There are constant reminders, though, of the violence that awaits those
who are picked up by insurgent groups, kidnappers, gangsters in search
of a few dollars — or, for that matter, anyone who runs afoul
of American soldiers, edgy, on guard, suspicious, ready to shoot first
and ask questions later. Stay here a few days, and you’re sure
to encounter incidents that are more than disconcerting, sometimes tragic.
One day, walking out of my hotel, I saw a small crowd gathering by a
column of American humvees. The soldiers told me not to step around
the vehicle. They said they didn’t know what was happening and
more or less ordered me to stand back. People, however, were walking
around the humvees to where some Iraqi policemen were hovering over
the body of a man wrapped in a white sheet. The man was beside the car
he had been driving, a burgundy-colored Honda Accord. He had been on
the way to my hotel to arrange for his wedding reception and had made
the mistake of cutting in front of one of the humvees, giving the impression
to the soldiers that he might be a terrorist about to toss a bomb. One
of them shot him.
About ten minutes later, after the humvees had roared off, the man’s
relatives arrived, weeping, chanting, shrieking. It was a small tragedy,
a trivial event in a conflict characterized by just such tragedies.
A U.S. army major, in the confines of the green zone, shielded by high
sandbagged walls, U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police and soldiers, did nothing
to relieve the sense of tragedy. When I asked her about the incident,
how it happened and why the soldiers on the humvees did little to help,
she had no answers. When I told her what I had seen, noting that the
soldiers had tried to prevent me from seeing what happened, the major
snapped back with a question of her own, “Why did you violate
orders?”
But don’t I have a right to cross a street, and isn’t Iraq
now under the control of the interim government of Prime Minister Allawi,
not the coalition of Paul Bremer? That’s a question that invites
an ambivalent response. Allawi himself operates from an imposing building
in the green zone, right behind the convention center where the coalition
has set up a press office and international press center.
On the few occasions in which I get to see him, at press conferences
and once while walking through the convention center, he’s guarded
not by Iraqis but by stern-looking Americans. Soldiers in uniform guard
access to press conferences, and you have to show up well in advance
or the Americans will bar you from attending. When I run into him in
a hall of the Convention Center, three or four bodyguards, all Americans,
all in civilian garb, possibly soldiers, possibly with a private security
firm, try to keep me from getting near him. Yes, I manage to shake them
off — but only long enough to shake his hand and ask him when
he’ll be talking again to the foreign press. (“Maybe tomorrow,”
he responds as the bodyguards shoulder me away.)
It is in the convention center, of course, that the Americans staged
the Iraqi National Conference — dreamchild of the Bremer administration,
in which “the Iraqis themselves” were supposed to go through
the exercise of selecting a national assembly carefully divided among
religious factions and groupings. The process was not merely artificial,
a make-believe attempt at an appearance of democracy. It was so flawed
as to make it impossible to come up with an assembly seriously recognized
as the center of the legislative process in a culture that has no real
concept of democracy.
The problems of staging a national conference are likely to appear trivial,
however, compared with the challenge of democratic nationwide elections,
a show that is supposed to happen in January so voters can decide on
a “permanent” set of leaders to replace the “interim”
ones now in power. No one expects the process to happen without such
bloodshed as possibly to force the government to postpone the whole
charade. Assassinations and kidnappings are bound to increase as elections
approach and the Americans doggedly do their best to force democracy
down the throats of a people to who have never known anything other
than dictatorship. The presence of all those American bodyguards around
Allawi symbolizes the artificiality of his existence as a national leader.
Lately still more American security people have arrived, beefy former
Special Forces types, young, tough and largely ignorant about life and
customs in Iraq, a country that many of them have never previously visited.
American officials make a pretense of moving into the shadows, avoiding
on-the-record comments, but more than ever Allawi needs them.
Again one looks for comparisons with the Vietnam experience. There are
none. In Saigon in “the old days,” that is, during the period
of the American war in Vietnam, U.S. officials never exercised such
control over South Vietnamese leaders. There were no U.S. soldiers guarding
the South Vietnamese leaders whom I encountered, first Nguyen Cao Ky
and then Nguyen Van Thieu, and there were no Americans protecting the
offices of ministries. The green zone in Baghdad exists as a special
world, penetrable by walking through a gauntlet of checkpoints where
both American soldiers and Iraqi security people look at your passport,
go through whatever you are carrying, pat down your pockets and ask
to see anything that looks suspicious — in my case a wallet stuffed
with airline mileage cards and other pieces of mostly useless plastic.
The worst part about entry into the green zone is the walk from your
car to the first layer of sandbags. There, for a distance of 100 feet
or so, you feel exposed to any odd bomber or sniper, a sense that is
not altogether paranoid.
One morning over breakfast, I was startled by the sound of an explosion
that shook my hotel. It was 9:20 A.M. and I was relaxing in the dining
room. When I got to the green zone 30 minutes later, American soldiers
had blocked off all the streets to the entrance, and Iraqi National
Guard troops stood between them and spectators, mostly journalists,
converging on the scene. It turned out a car containing an enormous
bomb had exploded at the entrance where vehicles with permission to
enter the zone are checked. The driver, we learned later, had detonated
the bomb when an Iraqi guard peered through the window for a closer
look. A dozen people were killed, including the driver and the guard.
The explosion forced some changes in security. The Iraqi guards were
posted a few yards farther from the entrance, lengthening the walk into
the zone, while American soldiers gazed from atop nearby humvees.
That incident was the worst that I personally encountered but hardly
the only one. Four days after my arrival, staying at the Sheraton before
moving to the Al Mansour, I was awakened one morning by an explosion
that seemed close but not that close. My attempt at drifting off to
sleep again had to end with another much louder blast. On the elevator,
some contractors told me the first explosion had been a rocket that
hit the wall of the hotel four floors below my window. The second had
been rockets misfiring and exploding in a van on nearby Firdous Square,
where Saddam’s famous statue was yanked down on that triumphant
day when American troops had driven into Baghdad, blowing up the van
and killing two of the people who’d been firing the rockets.
The real center of power in Iraq, of course, remains the palace where
Bremer lorded it over the country for more than a year and Negroponte
now runs the embassy. Never before in American history have U.S. diplomats
operated in such surroundings, all thanks to the man the U.S.-led coalition
threw out in March and April of last year. High marble walls and marble
staircases were the norm for the tastes of Saddam, who I’m told
did not care much for this particular palace, preferring still vaster,
more ornate quarters to the north in Tikrit. Upwards of 2,000 people,
including officials, soldiers, and contractors work in the palace, shielded
from outside temperatures that routinely go above 120 degrees Fahrenheit
by a vast air-conditioning system installed by the Americans soon after
they got there. They’re quartered in nearby trailers, four to
a trailer in the case of junior people, two to a trailer for senior
officials and, of course, single-occupancy trailers — or even
apartments inside the palace — for those at or close to the top.
Entry into the palace, the inner sanctum of the war, where generals
and counselors and senior diplomats and highly paid consultants plot
the future of the country, turns into a project requiring meetings with
public relations people, conferences with aides and, finally, perhaps,
a carefully monitored appointment. You’re escorted from the convention
center to the palace aboard an embassy vehicle and don’t get inside
until you’ve left your passport with a marine guard, at a checkpoint
in another sandbagged wall. Such meetings are often “for background”
or “off-the-record.” The embassy wants to perpetuate the
fiction that the Iraqis are busy carrying out their own reforms and
the Americans are only there to help. In fact, while Bremer was around,
the CPA drafted rules, regulations, laws and codes penetrating every
aspect of the governing system, and they all remain in effect. Then,
in a final touch of sugar-coating, the Americans formally renamed their
epicenter of authority the “international zone’ in an effort
to somehow improve its image. Fear not, though, everyone still calls
it the green zone.
Somewhere near the machinery of American power lurks Iraq’s best
known captive, Saddam. His whereabouts are a secret, but he too is believed
to live in a trailer — probably not quite in the green zone but
in the sprawl of military structures beyond still more checkpoints,
concrete barricades, barbed wire and heaps of sandbags near the international
airport. He, of course, is the highest value of about 100 “high
value” prisoners. His trailer is presumably armor-plated, surrounded
by still more sandbags, guarded by U.S. as well as Iraqi troops. Like
all the other fictions perpetrated by the Americans, Saddam’s
“transfer” from U.S. to Iraqi authority soon after the “transfer”
of power from the coalition to the Iraqis was a paper move. Saddam stayed
where he was, reportedly writing poetry, without a TV set or newspapers,
comforted perhaps by the sound of explosions that are so disturbing
to everyone else. They are the best evidence he could ask that “loyalists”
are still fighting on his behalf.
KJ contributing editor Donald Kirk, formerly Seoul correspondent
for the International Herald Tribune, has been filing from
Baghdad for CBS News/Radio.
Copyright held by the author
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