There are two main reasons why I don’t write a great deal about politics here. The first, and most important, is that I tend not to like the way that I end up sounding when I go off on political topics. The second, only slightly less important, is that I rarely feel like I have anything worthwhile to add to the discussion that a hundred other homebrew pundits won’t also say.<\/p>\n
This is one of the exceptions. A good friend of mine from college– the best man at my wedding<\/a>— is a journalist working for the French wire services in Baghdad. He sends occasional email updates about what’s going on over there, which are generally fascinating. I got another one today, and permission to excerpt the email here, so we’ll turn the rest of this over to our Official Middle East Correspondant, Paul Schemm:<\/p>\n It was supposed to get better. That was my tacit, agreement with myself about There were to be elections, and then a new government and then Iraqis would And most importantly I would be able walk through a marketplace – which as far (More behind the cut.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So I was there for the elections, I went to the half-destroyed town of I watched the new government – one with Sunnis participating — being sworn […]<\/p>\n All of these events should have meant that buy mid-2006, things should now be […]<\/p>\n The day started with the usual odd incident here or there, until suddenly came It was like the stories of Lebanon on all over again. I remembered an Iraqi I A few months ago, one of our tech guys was stopped in the Sunni stronghold of Our drivers used to have a rotation whereby one would sleep in the hotel every […]<\/p>\n We called the imam of the lone Shiite mosque in the area and he was quite Of course that might have been a retaliation for the bomb left in front of the After all, only ten days earlier an enormous truck bomb killed 66 Shiites in […]<\/p>\n We like to think that that night everyone took a break. Maybe watched the It’s often said that the US needs to stay in Iraq to prevent the country from falling into civil war. This looks an awful lot like civil war.<\/p>\n Of course, lest you think there are no decent people left, he closes with a more uplifting anecdote:<\/p>\n The other day I visited a water treatment facility north of the city, it I met the head of maintenance there, a spry, gray-haired gent, with flashing “If it hadn’t been for us, the city would have had no water,” he recalled with So, there you go. The bad, and the good, in Baghdad as everywhere else. I’ll probably post excerpts from future dispatches, and if there’s interest, I may excerpt some stuff from past emails, at some point when I need lazy blogging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are two main reasons why I don’t write a great deal about politics here. The first, and most important, is that I tend not to like the way that I end up sounding when I go off on political topics. The second, only slightly less important, is that I rarely feel like I have… Continue reading Life During Wartime<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\ncoming here. The idea being that 2005 was a bad year, some kinks had to be
\nworked out and then this year it would all get better.<\/p>\n
\ntake over the running of things, the insurgency would be defeated or
\nre-absorbed, the Americans would leave and the streets would be safe again.<\/p>\n
\nas I’m concerned is the God-given right of anyone living in a Middle Eastern
\ncity and something I have yet to do here. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
\nFallujah and watched people go out and actually vote. It’s not like they’d
\nforgiven the Americans for flattening their town a year before, but they were
\nbuying into the whole process, and that was important.<\/p>\n
\nin. I walked over the final resting place of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and picked
\nup the shredded pages of a Arabic-language edition of Newsweek that might have
\nbeen the last thing he read before two 500 bombs hit this homey little
\nstructure nestled in a palm grove.<\/p>\n
\nokay here.<\/p>\n
\nthe awful news that a LOT of people had been killed in the unfortunately-named
\nwest Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad. Masked gunmen had gone on a rampage
\nthrough the area, setting up checkpoints, shooting people on the basis of
\ntheir names (Marwan, Omar, and Othman are typically Sunni names, so are tribal
\nnames like Dulaimi, Janabi and Juburi – Shiites tend to be called Ali and
\nHussein).<\/p>\n
\nmet working for ABC news who had an hour’s drive to work through several
\nneighborhoods and carried with him a variety of fake IDs, giving different
\nnames depending on what kind of checkpoint he was stopped at.<\/p>\n
\nAdhamiyah by gunmen who thought he was Shiite, he managed to convince them he
\nwas Christian, which apparently baffled them and they let him go.<\/p>\n
\nnight in case we needed a driver – it was considered a bit of burden, but now
\ntwo drivers just spend every night at the hotel because they are afraid to go
\nhome. One’s a Turkmen Shiite from Sunni Adhamiyah, the others a Sunni from the
\nmixed neighborhood of Dura, in southern Baghdad.<\/p>\n
\nfrank – of course those were Shiites doing the killing, could you blame them?
\nThey’ve been killing Shiites in this neighborhood for months. In fact just the
\nnight before this man’s mosque had been bombed, killing a half dozen people.<\/p>\n
\nSunni mosque not far away. In fact that Friday three Sunni mosques and two
\nShiite mosques were bombed during prayer time. You look at the patterns in
\nretrospect and it becomes more of a case of wondering why it took so long to
\nhappen rather than being surprised at it taking place.<\/p>\n
\nthe Sadr City slum… they don’t appreciate that kind of thing.<\/p>\n
\nWorld Cup final and held off going on a midnight rampage (rumor has it the
\nShiites supported the Italians and the Sunnis backed the French). Not too many
\ncorpses turned up in the morning, but the killing continued and we heard
\nseveral more explosions from our perch on the Tigris.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
\nserves about a quarter of the city’s population, including Shiite Sadr City
\nand Sunni Adhamiyah. It had just been rebuilt and renovated by USAID.<\/p>\n
\neyes and a white hard hat who was really excited to take about his plant.[…]
\nThe old engineer (who was actually only in his mid-40s but looked a lot older)
\nhad worked there since 1992 and described how when the old regime fell and the
\nlooting started, he and the other employees banded together, fought them off
\nand protected the creaky old plant.<\/p>\n
\npride. And the plant kept on pumping water, to each neighborhood, regardless
\nof who lived there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n