Okay, so I sent two batches of pictures to Ryan_Liam from Baghdad. I took them on the roof of my compound around sundown. They are pictures of the Baghdad skyline. In one you can see two blackhawks in the distance on patrol. I also took closeups of my entrance and exit stamps from my passprt. I took them with my cell phone so the pics aren’t great.
I’m in Amman today and leave for 2 weeks vacation in the states, so I probably won’t be on the SDMB for a few days while I eat/sleep/be with my wife; lather rinse repeat.
You know, the people I talk to who are really sure about how things are in Iraq are the ones who are farthest away. The situation here is like a Seurat pointillism painting, the closer you stand to it, the less clear it is.
I do think that things are pretty horrible in Baghdad and much of it should have been anticipated and could have been prevented. What signs of hope I see for the country are in the Iraqi people I know. I work with some amazing Iraqis. They are truly dedicated to making their country a better place and they risk their lives to do it. If Iraq is able to pull it out of the fire, it will be because of the quiet dignity of decent people like them trying their hardest to do the right thing. And it won’t be because of the ill-advised and poorly executed invasion of G. W. Bush, but in spite of it.
At this point, no one in Baghdad is seriously talking about democracy, or at least not any kind of democracy people in the west would recognize. The question isn’t whether Iraq is going to be a democracy, but whether it is going to continue to exist as a state at all. Every day is a little worse than the day before.
On my way to the airport yesterday, we drove through a neighborhood I used to live in, in 2003 and I was shocked. It had been a little rough, but viable neighborhood in 2003. We (cautiously) went out to eat in restaraunts, we knew the neighbors. Now the neighborhood is just wrecked. The restaraunt we used to go to is an empty shell, everything is wrecked, everything is in disrepair. I saw little kids, maybe 11 standing on the street corner huffing gasoline on a rag, I’m telling you I never saw anything like that 3 years ago. Never just out in the open. The whole area just seems to have given up.
Like I said, I’m going on leave and I’m not going to be on the board for a few days, and maybe for the next couple of weeks. I usually don’t get on line much back in the states, I use the SDMB to get a human connection when I’m far from home. But I’d like to share two stories from my experience here that sum up Iraq for me:
One time I was at the Sheraton and two construction workers got into an argument/shoving match about something. The argument was in Arabic, which I don’t speak, so who knows what they were fighting about. This American soldier sees them arguing, unslings his rifle, points it at them and just starts screaming in English “stop fighting! stop fighting!” I remember thinking to myself, “God, what a metaphore for this mess. A guy screaming to stop fighting in a language no one here understands and if they don’t he’ll shoot them.”
The other story took place in 2003. I was talking to a US Army captain and he complained that the only news station he could get on his satellite tv was the BBC. I said that I really liked BBC news, what was the problem?
He said, “I’m tired of being told how badly things are goind here, I want to be lied to. I want CNN (this is when all the networks were trying to out patriot each other).”
I said, “Captain if you want to be lied to, you don’t want CNN, you want Fox News.”
He said, “I’m not an idiot, I don’t want to be lied to that much, I just want to be lied to a little bit.”
So there you have it, for what it’s worth. See you in a couple of weeks.
