The Besieged Press

[This piece, which appears in the April 6, 2006 issue of the NewYork Review of Books, appears here courtesy, tomdispatch.com]

1.

"Ladies and Gents," the South African pilotmatter-of-factly announces over the intercom, "we'll be starting our spiraldescent into Baghdad, where the temperature is 19 degrees Celsius." Thevast and mesmerizing expanse of sandpapery desert that has been stretching outbeneath the plane has ended at the Tigris River. To avoid a dangerous glide pathover hostile territory and missiles and automatic weapons fire, the plane bankssteeply and then, as if caught in a powerful whirlpool, it plunges, circlingdownward in a corkscrew pattern.

Upon arriving in Amman, the main civilian gateway to Baghdad, one already hashad the feeling of drawing ever nearer to an atomic reactor in meltdown. Even inJordan, there is a palpable sense of being in the last concentric circle awayfrom a radioactive ground zero emitting uncontrollable waves of contamination.

Almost nowhere in our homogenized world does crossing an internationalfrontier deliver a traveler to a truly unique land. There is, however, no placein the world like Iraq. Even at Amman's Queen Alia International Airport, onefinds hints of this mutant land to come. Affixed to the wall above a baggagecarousel is an advertisement for "The AS Beck Company, Bonn, Germany:CERTIFIED ARMORED CARS." The company's logo is a sedan with the crosshairsof an assault rifle's telescopic scope trained on the windshield on the driver'sside. "WHEN GOING TO IRAQ, MAKE SURE YOU DRIVE ARMORED!" the adproclaims cheerfully. At the departure gate, a crimson placard warns againstcarrying FORBIDDEN ITEMS: "Gun Powder, Golf Clubs, Hand Grenades, Ice Axes,Cattle Prods, Hocket Sticks [sic], Meat Cleavers and Big Guns," making onewonder if "little guns" are OK.

The small Royal Jordanian Fokker F-28-4000, which makes daily trips toBaghdad, sits out on the tarmac away from the jetways as if some airportofficial feared it might prove to be an airborne IED (improvised explosivedevice, a US military acronym). Those of us on this hajj to the global epicenterof anti-Western and Islamic sectarian strife are an odd assortment of privatesecurity guards, military contractors, U.S. officials, Iraqi businessmen, andjournalists; a young man in a sweatshirt announces himself as part of the"Military Police K-9 Corps" (bomb-sniffing dogs).

The Baghdad International Airport terminal is full of armed guards and ringedby armored vehicles. I saw no buses or taxis awaiting arriving passengers.Almost everyone is "met." I am picked up by the New York Times'sfull-time British security chief, who has come in a miniature motorcade of"hardened," or bomb-proof, cars, escorted by several armed Iraqiguards in constant radio contact with each other.

As America approached the third anniversary of its involvement in Iraq, I hadgone to Baghdad to observe not the war itself, but how it is being covered bythe press. But of course, the war is inescapable. It has no battle lines, nofronts, not even the rural-urban divide that has usually characterized guerrillawars. Instead, the conflict is everywhere and nowhere.

It starts on the way into Baghdad, the cluttered seven-mile gauntlet whichhas come to be known as Route Irish after the Fighting 69th "Irish"Brigade of the New York National Guard, which patrolled it after the invasion.Some also now call it Death Road, because so many attacks have occurred alongits length. Now largely patrolled by Iraqi forces, it is not quite the firingrange it used to be. But it is still the most nerve-racking trip from an airportthat any traveler is likely to make.

Although pre-war Iraq had a relatively modern highway system, with multilaneroads and overpasses, an occasional clover leaf, and even international standardgreen and white signs in both Arabic and English, it has been eroded by neglect,fighting, bombings, and tank treads which have ground up curbs and centerdividers. Everywhere there is churned-up earth, trash and rubble, loops of razorwire draped with dirty plastic bags, decapitated palm trees, wrecked equipment,broken streetlights, and packs of roaming yellow dogs sniffing at piles ofgarbage, the perfect places for insurgents wishing to hide cellphone–triggered IEDs to greet the next passing convoy of patrolling Americantroops. Much of the roadside looks like a combat zone, even when it hasn't beenunder attack.

Many of Baghdad's main roads are a nightmare of traffic congestion. WhenAmerican or Iraqi patrols of Humvees mounted with 50-caliber machine guns, M-1Abrams tanks, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles pull onto a street, everything slowsto a crawl. Signs tied on their tailgates warn in English and Arabic:"DANGER: Stay Back!" Every driver gets the message. Failure tomaintain one's distance can draw fire. And so, like a herd of cold and hungryanimals fearful of getting too close to a campfire, traffic cringes behind suchpatrols, while frustrated drivers are left to wait, breathe one another'sexhaust, and curse the occupation.

It has not helped that when Saddam Hussein fell, almost all ordinarygovernmental activities -- such as registering cars and issuing drivers'licenses -- ceased, and thousands of vehicles flooded the market in Iraq fromother countries. Traffic lights rarely work since electric power is stillsporadic; the only control comes from a few street cops who have been recentlyposted at key intersections to direct the relentless crush of vehicles. To makematters worse, after several attacks or bombings, the U.S. military or the Iraqigovernment will often simply prop up a sign in the center of a main arterysaying: "HAIFA STREET IS CODE RED! DON'T USE!" Moreover, as the cityhas become ever more violent and chaotic, people have begun blocking off streetson their own to create safety zones. Since there has been little lawenforcement, there is no one to stop this private appropriation of public space.

At first people made themselves feel more secure after the invasion by pilingsandbags along streets or in front of their houses and offices. But as suicidebombers began to proliferate and their explosive charges grew larger and moredestructive, private defense efforts became more elaborate as well. The adventof the "blast wall" changed the Baghdad landscape.

Developed by the Israelis in order to put up a physical barrier betweenthemselves and the Palestinians, the Iraq version of these segmented walls isconstructed out of thousands of portable, twelve-foot-high slabs ofsteel-reinforced concrete. When stood upright on their pedestals, these"T-walls" look something like giant tombstones, totems perhaps fromsome long-lost Easter Island culture gone minimalist. When placed togetheredge-to-edge as "blast walls," they form the gray undulations thathave now become Baghdad's most distinguishing feature. And because theyproliferated during the administration of L. Paul Bremer III, they became knownto some as "Bremer walls."

For example, when one major news organization became alarmed at thedeteriorating security situation in the city, it occupied part of Abu Nawas, amain road along the Tigris River that the U.S. military had already blocked infront of two adjacent hotels in order to erect a maze of protective blast walls,guard towers, and other fortifications. So, where there was once a major highwaycomplete with a center divider shaded by trees, there is now a relatively quiet,garden-like parking lot, surrounded by twelve-foot-high protective concretewalls.

As the quest for greater private security increases, a new and unexpectedkind of public insecurity has grown alongside it. With vehicles rerouted throughan ever-diminishing number of open streets, traffic jams have become morefrequent, exposing foreigners, rich Baghdadis, and anyone else out of favor withone or another group of insurgents to a greater danger of being kidnapped, shot,or blown up. It is unnerving (to say the least) to be stuck in such traffic,wedged into a welter of dilapidated sedans, vans, and pickup trucks with heavilyarmed Iraqis staring sullenly through the window of your expensively reinforcedcar, as security guards sitting next to you cradle their automatic weapons. Withno possibility of escape, you can't help wondering when your unlucky moment willcome. And when traffic completely stops and frustrated drivers begin to breakout of line, gun their vehicles up sidewalks, veer across center dividers, orjust charge up the opposite lane against the flow of oncoming traffic, it isdifficult to remain calm.

The worst offenders are private security guards who are committed toprotecting their charges any way they can, and the Iraqi police, who now havebrand-new fleets of green and white cruisers with whooping sirens, allowing themto plow their way through traffic-clogged streets as if they were kids on joyrides.

Adding to the overall racket and general sense of anxiety is the fact that itis hard to tell if the incessant sounds of sirens, the periodic bursts ofautomatic weapons fire, or the occasional explosions that are heard throughoutthe day mean anything or not. There are police firing ranges within the city,and sometimes a bored guard will just harmlessly fire off a few shots by way ofa warning. As Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times explained,"Squeezing off a few rounds of automatic weapons fire here in Baghdad isthe equivalent of honking your horn in America."

So unless an explosion is quite close, people hardly break step. At most, ifthere is a particularly loud report, a journalist might go up onto his bureau'srooftop to see where the smoke is coming from.

There is undeniably a Blade Runner-like feel to this city. Theviolence is so pervasive and unfathomable that you wonder what people think theyare dying for. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the everyday violence ishorrendous, it does not take too many days before the deadly noises and thedevastation everywhere seem to become just part of the ordinary landscape. Soon,quite to your surprise, you find yourself paying hardly more attention to thesounds of gunshots than a New Yorker does to the car alarms that go off everynight... until, that is, someone you know, a neighbor, or just someone you haveheard about, gets blown up, shot on patrol, or kidnapped by insurgents.

Just a few days after I left Baghdad, Iraqi newspapers carried a short noticethat a well-to-do Iraqi banker, Ghalib Abdul Hussein, had been kidnapped fromhis fortified house by gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms. Five of his personalguards were shot execution-style in his yard. This is just one of thousands ofsuch occurrences. But except for obeying the security guards responsible for you(if you have them), there isn't much else you can do.

Driving through the streets of Baghdad, one now sees members of the newlycreated, blue-uniformed Iraqi Police Service, extolled by the Bushadministration as another hopeful sign of "Iraqization." But becausepolice recruitment stations, training schools, and district precincts arefavorite targets of the insurgents, many of these new police are afraid of beingidentified as collaborators with the Americans or the new Iraqi government.Their remedy is to wear black stocking caps with eye, nose, and mouth holespulled down over their faces so they look like so many bank robbers. One seesthese sinister-looking protectors of the peace at traffic circles andintersections, or brandishing automatic weapons in the back of American-boughtpickup trucks, which makes them seem far more menacing than reassuring.

2.

The News Bureaus

Visiting any of the news bureaus gives an immediatesense of how embattled foreign journalists now are and how difficult it hasbecome for them to do their jobs. Everyone I spoke to complained that thedeteriorating security situation has increasingly made them prisoners of theirbureaus.

"We could go almost anywhere in Iraq in a regular car,unprotected," wrote the Wall Street Journal correspondent FarnazFassihi this February, in a wistful front-page story for her paper about thesituation she found when she first arrived in 2003. "I wore Western clothes-- pants and T-shirts, skirts, sandals -- walked freely around Baghdad chattingwith shopkeepers and having lunch or dinner with people I met." By thespring of 2004, she writes, "the insurgency had been spreading and gainingstrength faster than we had imagined possible. For the first time, I hired armedguards and began traveling in a fully armored car. Outings were measured andlimited and road trips were few and far between... As security deterioratedaround the country, the areas in which we could safely operate shrank."

Foreign news bureaus are either in or near the few operating hotels such asthe Al Hamra, the Rashid, or the Palestine. Like battleships that have beenbadly damaged but are still at sea, these hotels have survived repeated bombattacks and yet have managed to stay open. A few hotels like the Rashid, whereonce there was a mosaic depicting George Bush Sr. on the floor of the lobby, aresheltered within the Green Zone. A few other bureaus have their own houses,usually somewhat shabby villas that have the advantage of being included insidesome collective defense perimeter that makes the resulting neighborhood feellike a walled medieval town.

Wherever in the city the news bureaus are, they have become fortifiedinstallations with their own mini-armies of private guards on duty twenty-fourhours a day at the gates, in watch towers, and around perimeters. To reach thesebureaus, one has to run through a maze of checkpoints, armed guards, blast-wallfortifications, and concertina-wired no man's lands where all visitors and theircars are repeatedly searched.

The bitter truth is that doing any kind of work outside these Americanfortified zones has become so dangerous for foreigners as to be virtuallysuicidal. More and more journalists find themselves hunkered down insidewhatever bubbles of refuge they have managed to create in order to insulatethemselves from the lawlessness outside. (A January USAID "annex" tobid applications for government contracts warns how "the absence of statecontrol and an effective police force" has allowed "criminal elementswithin Iraqi society [to] have almost free rein.")

Nearly every foreign group working in Iraq has felt it necessary to hire aPSD, or "personal security detail," from more than sixty "privatemilitary firms" (PMFs) -- Triple Canopy, Erinys International Ltd., andBlackwater USA -- now doing a brisk business in Iraq. In fact, there are nowreported to be at least 25,000 armed men from such private firms on duty in thecountry today. Led mostly by Brits, South Africans, and Americans, thesesubterranean paramilitary PSDs form a parallel universe to America's occupationforce. Indeed, they even have their own organization, the Private SecurityCompany Association of Iraq.

It has not escaped the attention of U.S. National Guardsmen, reservists,regular army soldiers, and Marines that their mercenary counterparts get paidfour or five times more than they do, sometimes as much as $1,000 a day.Understandably, there is a good deal of resentment about this inequity, and nota few American soldiers now aspire to nothing more than getting out of theirlow-paying jobs working for the military so that they can sign on with one ofthese companies.

"I look at it this way," one young former Marine told me. "TheCorps was an all-expenses-paid training ground to graduate me into the privatesector."

But being in a PSD is a dangerous occupation, as four guards from Blackwaterlearned in 2004 when, while on a mission to pick up some kitchen equipment froman 82nd Airborne base in Falluja, their SUVs were attacked and set on fire, andthey were killed and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. (As this issuewent to press, fifty employees of a private Sunni Arab– owned security companywere abducted in Baghdad.)

The U.S. government has ended up hiring thousands of private guards toprotect its contractors and even high-ranking officials such as Paul Bremer. Infact, a 2005 U.S. government audit reported that between 16 and 22 percent ofreconstruction project budgets in Iraq now go for security, almost 10 percentmore than had been anticipated. As one private security guard told PBSFrontline's Martin Smith, "We are a taxi service, and we're equipped todefend ourselves if we're attacked."

Security is a very costly business, which has meant that most stringers andfreelance journalists who could never afford such protection have been drivenout of Baghdad. Bureaus like that of the New York Times which can affordit and are still in Iraq now carry costly insurance policies and require thatall coming and going -- indeed, all aspects of life outside the compound,including trips to the airport -- be under the control of a full-time securitychief, who acts as an earthbound air-traffic controller for the bureau. His jobis to carefully set times and routes for reporters' trips, and then maintainalmost constant contact with their cars until they are safely back. If you wantto have an interview outside the bureau, there is always a chance that it willbe canceled or delayed for security reasons. Security chiefs are also in chargeof the armed guard details that protect the bureau around the clock. No one goesanywhere without a plan worked out in advance, and then preferably in a"hardened," or reinforced, vehicle followed by a "chase" carwith several trusted Iraqi guards ready to shoot if necessary.

Even if a reporter wants to conduct an interview in another secure zone, ithas become increasingly foolhardy not to coordinate the meeting in advance. If aphotographer is out covering the aftermath of a suicide bombing or a reporter isinterviewing an Iraqi, for example, he or she is advised to stay no more than avery short time, because someone may be tempted to phone the sighting to ajihadi group, often for a payoff.