Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation

April 2004

Well, you can thank the insurgents for that. The supply lines have been cut. —A CPA public affairs of‹cer, when I noted that there was no Coke in the cafeteria April 2004 Amman 4.17.04 I’ve spent the last couple months in Washington, D.C., trying to take a break from the war zone by freelancing on Capitol Hill. I told my parents I was looking for jobs stateside, but eventually I picked up a couple of freelance assignments in Iraq and got an offer to ‹nish this book. I guess once you’ve been in, you never really get out. The one thing that makes me sure I’ll go back, long before I’ve ‹gured out how, is watching a bunch of military families and other activists delivering a petition on the Hill in favor of censuring George W. Bush for lying about the case for war. Standing in front of one of the Senate of‹ce buildings, Sue Neiderer , a ‹ftyish woman from New Jersey, talks about losing her son, who was killed near Baquba by a roadside bomb. He’d been in the country two weeks, almost straight out of basic training, and was following orders to defuse the bomb, even though he had no training to do so. The group holds a short press conference, and afterward I walk up to Sue to tell her that I was in Iraq, as well. She has man133 aged to hold back tears until now, but suddenly they ›ow. She hugs me, and all I can do is hug her back. I’m holding back tears of my own. “Tell them what it’s like,” she says. The fear of going back to Baghdad is no longer there. That feeling in the pit of my stomach is gone. Back in Amman I have coffee and a whiskey with Fayyez at the Saraya and tell him about D.C. It’s a relief to be out of Washington, free from the bureaucratic revolution underway there. But it’s hard to ignore the Capitol’s weird allure. The Hill is a little world unto itself, whether it’s Condoleezza Rice’s testimony in front of the Sepember 11 Commission (did anyone else notice how she neatly shifted blame for the whole Iraq venture onto Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld?) or waiting for the weapons inspectors to come out of a closed session with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee . “Hollywood for ugly people,” Garrison Keillor called it. If so, it produces a higher order of farce than its sister city on the West Coast. Since September we’ve left Fayyez with a few souvenirs from the Baghdad Bulletin days, among them our poster-sized printer and a stuffed wolf (I think it looks suspiciously like a dog) that was purportedly shot by Saddam Hussein. It came to one of our reporters through a colleague of the former ruler and now sits atop one of Fayyez’s ‹le cabinets, scowling vacantly down on our heads. A plastic Iraqi Army helmet sits nearby. Shadi picked it up somewhere (we shuddered to think about the fate of its previous owner) and nervously doffed it during the barrage of celebratory gun‹re after Uday and Qusay were killed. En Route to Baghdad 4.18.04 This is the ‹rst time I’ve ever gotten on a plane that I knew someone might have a serious interest in shooting down. It’s about the size of an airline commuter jet, and it’s about half full 134 BAGHDAD BULLETIN of crusty-looking private security types and a few Iraqis of indeterminate purpose. I don’t feel much like talking after shelling out more than six hundred dollars for the ›ight. There are inklings that Baghdad may be closed, after Iraqis protested the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. Bush’s expression of support for Ariel Sharon a couple of days ago isn’t likely to help things, so until further notice I’m French. I’ve come to dread the monotony of the fourteen-hour drive more than the physical danger. However, there’s a lovely little saj oven sandwich stand at the border, staffed by a man from Chicago who makes a great egg and cheese pita (it’s the Middle Eastern equivalent of an Egg McMuf‹n) and a mean cup of coffee . What’s even stranger is that although the restaurant is...