What Goes On
Last night I was listening to ABC radio and the news came on. The reporter announced that at least six people had been killed outside a courthouse in Baghdad. The next news item was about rising interest rates.
It's odd that that particular security incident was reported in the news, implying that it was the major event of the day in Iraq, when in reality it was just one among many such incidents.
Today In Iraq, a comprehensive and increadibly sobering blog that reports on the daily situation in Iraq, illustrates just how misleading it is to single out one act of violence and ignore all the others. Apparently, between 30 and 50 bodies are brought to Baghdad's main morgue every day, most of them with gunshot wounds. This is one morgue, in one city.
That statistic alone should give some small indication of the herrendous situation, one that is not adequately being reported. This is not from lack of trying, however. A recent article in the New York Review of Books painted a fairly disturbing picture of the risks journalists faced if they dared to venture outside the American controlled security compund known as the Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad. Orville Schell makes a poignant comparison of the relative freedom the press enjoyed in 2003, to the extremely limited and restricted environment many journalists now work in:
"In the summer of 2003, you could walk out of the Al Hamra and get a cab or even drive to Falluja for dinner, chill out, or go to a CD shop," I was told by the Los Angeles Times's Borzou Daragahi, whose bureau is in the Al Hamra. "Now, the AP won't even let its people leave the city."
"It's amazing now to think back to November 2003 when the insurgency was starting to gain momentum, and all we had were a few sandbags in front of our house and a few guards," Ed Wong, who is on his seventh rotation at the New York Times Baghdad bureau, later recalls. "Back then, you might have met a few angry people, but you didn't fear for your life. Then, things started to change. At first, a few civilians became targets, but not journalists. Then, in the spring of 2004, we started changing our security protocols, using two-car convoys and guards. It felt very weird. For the first time I confronted that barrier between me and the people I was supposed to be reporting on...
It may well be that the besieged American press in Iraq will find that the main story is not about Americans fighting Iraqi insurgents, but Americans standing powerlessly aside in their armed compounds, Green Zone, and military bases, watching as Iraqis kill other Iraqis and the country disintegrates. It would be all too ironic if this were the result of the invasion of March 2003, which was promoted as a critical step in bringing peace to the Middle East."
Democracy, freedom, liberation. These words increasingly have little real meaning in the face of so much suffering.
It's odd that that particular security incident was reported in the news, implying that it was the major event of the day in Iraq, when in reality it was just one among many such incidents.
Today In Iraq, a comprehensive and increadibly sobering blog that reports on the daily situation in Iraq, illustrates just how misleading it is to single out one act of violence and ignore all the others. Apparently, between 30 and 50 bodies are brought to Baghdad's main morgue every day, most of them with gunshot wounds. This is one morgue, in one city.
That statistic alone should give some small indication of the herrendous situation, one that is not adequately being reported. This is not from lack of trying, however. A recent article in the New York Review of Books painted a fairly disturbing picture of the risks journalists faced if they dared to venture outside the American controlled security compund known as the Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad. Orville Schell makes a poignant comparison of the relative freedom the press enjoyed in 2003, to the extremely limited and restricted environment many journalists now work in:
"In the summer of 2003, you could walk out of the Al Hamra and get a cab or even drive to Falluja for dinner, chill out, or go to a CD shop," I was told by the Los Angeles Times's Borzou Daragahi, whose bureau is in the Al Hamra. "Now, the AP won't even let its people leave the city."
"It's amazing now to think back to November 2003 when the insurgency was starting to gain momentum, and all we had were a few sandbags in front of our house and a few guards," Ed Wong, who is on his seventh rotation at the New York Times Baghdad bureau, later recalls. "Back then, you might have met a few angry people, but you didn't fear for your life. Then, things started to change. At first, a few civilians became targets, but not journalists. Then, in the spring of 2004, we started changing our security protocols, using two-car convoys and guards. It felt very weird. For the first time I confronted that barrier between me and the people I was supposed to be reporting on...
It may well be that the besieged American press in Iraq will find that the main story is not about Americans fighting Iraqi insurgents, but Americans standing powerlessly aside in their armed compounds, Green Zone, and military bases, watching as Iraqis kill other Iraqis and the country disintegrates. It would be all too ironic if this were the result of the invasion of March 2003, which was promoted as a critical step in bringing peace to the Middle East."
Democracy, freedom, liberation. These words increasingly have little real meaning in the face of so much suffering.
posted by canoe at 9:40 AM
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