[Vision2020] It's worse than a civil war

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

October 30, 2006, New York Times Blog 11:42 am 

It’s Not a Civil War

It’s worse. Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his coverage of Iraq, returns to Baghdad after a year’s absence and is discouraged by the deterioration of the Iraqi capital.

Shadid writes: "On my return, it was difficult to grasp how atomized and violent the 1,250-year-old city has become. Even on the worst days, I had always found Baghdad’s most redeeming quality to be its resilience, a tenacious refusal among people I met over three years to surrender to the chaos unleashed when the Americans arrived. 

"That resilience is gone, overwhelmed by civil war, anarchy or whatever term could possibly fit. Baghdad now is convulsed by hatred, paralyzed by suspicion; fear has forced many to leave. Carnage its rhythm and despair its mantra, the capital, it seems, no longer embraces life. 

Shadid tries and fails to come up with a word to describe Baghdad now. Civil war is “perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy,” he writes. 

He adds: "I felt as though I was witnessing something more: the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. 

"Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy."
 
Shadid tells a story he “heard from a friend”: “Insurgents stopped a driver at a checkpoint. They opened his trunk. ‘Why do you have a spare tire?’ the insurgent asked solemnly. ‘You don’t have trust in God?’” 

He visits Wamidh Nadhme, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. “I find myself unable to understand what’s going on,” Nadhame says. Shadid writes:
I asked him whether it would become worse if the American military withdrew.
He looked at me for a moment without saying anything, as though he were a little confused.

“What could be worse?” he asked, knitting his brow.

I saw Wamidh again a week later, and the question had lingered with him. “I sometimes wonder what I would do if I were the Americans,” he said over a traditional Ramadan dinner.

 His answer seemed to hurt him. “I have no idea, really.”

“It’s like a volcano that has erupted. How do you stop that?”