If we don't know what is going on in Iraq, how can we really debate its future? Information sources who actually know what is going on are drying up and it is worth looking at what is left to get a last glimpse at the mess we in the US have made but can probably do little to fix.
Lost in statistics about numbers of dead, brief images of car bombs and stories about US soldiers are what life in Iraq is now like for Iraqis.
Faiza Al-Arji used to report from Iraq but now lives in Jordan. She recently posted the following from a letter she got on her blog:
At last I managed to get out of the house...
Yesterday they targeted and hit a humvee vehicle on the main street, around 11 am, so the Americans put a post at the street's end and started shooting every passer by in our smaller streets. They hit five pedestrians, who all died, including an old man who was out shopping and a young boy on a bicycle. ...Things remained like this until around 6.30 pm, then the shooting resumed, they hit two more people and one of them died. Then the ambulance arrived, and they shot at it too.
http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com...
Most good Iraqi bloggers have left Iraq, stopped writing or are planning on leaving.
Faiza moved to Jordan a few years ago and mainly now updates her blog with things she hears from friends. Her son Raed Jarrar moved to the SF Bay Area recently but also used to blog from Baghdad. Raed's friend Salam Pax last updated his original blog in 2004 (briefly wrote for another blog) and is probably living in the US in Europe following the publication of his book.
Riverbend from Baghdad Burning in what she says in her last entry on her blog states "It's difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain."
Unlike previous wars where technological advances mean we get a clearer image of what is going on as things progress we are now stuck with the picture of Iraq growing murky with the lies from US military spokesmen and the Bush administration only being contradictable from brief images of car bombs and Green Zone arguments (by Iraqis who know little about what is going on in the rest of Iraq).
Since we hear a bit in the US about Baghdad and Sunni areas its revealing to get the following in another blog entry by Faiza about S Iraq:
And then came the astonishing reports and photos...
Poverty and hunger such as I have not seen even in Falluja, overtaxed by the siege and hunger....
I started my questions: where is the government and its institutions?
Answer: sinking in administrational corruption; the money is sent from Baghdad, the officials in the municipality councils steal it, and the province's streets remain dirty and poor without tending. The displaced go without care, the youth without job opportunities, and the cities without re-construction projects...
- Well then, what about the militias?
- Raking havoc about the provinces, they belong to Parties represented in the government, battling with each other, tempting young people to join them. And if we organized some gatherings to debate and criticized the existence of militias, we received phone calls and personal threats to shut up and not to start such debates again...
http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com...
Most of the good Iraqi bloggers have now fled Iraq so its hard to get any images of what life is like in the country anymore.
I knew some people who went to Iraq to see what was going on in 2004 (see http://www.indybay.org/... ). While they didn't really have enough background to know what was going on, their images of Abu-Ghraib (before the scandal broke), forming militias and the like showed what the future would be like for Iraq more than most of the analysis I heard coming out of experts at the time. It would be too dangerous for the same people to go back now but that leaves us with little to base our opinions on.
A few recent books I have read like "Prince of the Marches" and Allawi's "The Occupation Of Iraq" do give glimpses of Iraqi politics that looks starkly different from what we get in the mainstream US media. Unfortunately those books are by people who lost touch with what is going on in Iraq a few years ago... so it is very hard to know where things are now.
Who are these thousands of suicide bombers who have died in numbers adding up to more than all other conflicts involving suicide attacks combined? Is the main conflict in Iraq now Sunnis vs Shias, Badr vs Sadr, various tribes against each other or a little of each? Do any Iraqis really care about sectarianism or is more of the violence about personal revenge and self-protection? Are US troops doing anything that really prevents violence or by going from city to city fighting "militias" are they just attacking, killing and alienating all sides with only those who have staked their Green Zone jobs on the US staying in Iraq the ones reporting to the US media that they want the US to stay?