I’ve become fascinated by Thaura.  It might be the most dangerous place in Iraq.  Not because of daily crime–which happens there all the time–but because these are the angriest, poorest, best-armed people in the country and they are pissed off.  They were pissed off at Saddam and they’re pissed off at America.  Amjad said: for them, two things ruined their lives, Saddam and Sanctions.  And Sanctions means America.  So, they hate Saddam and America equally.  Saddam’s gone, so we get it now.  The other thing is how organized the Shiites are becoming.  We went to the most popular mosque in Thaura for a second visit.  This is the one where the Imam says he is willing to fight and die to get rid of the American occupiers.  We went to the Imam’s entrance, which is down this dirty alley and you have to duck your head as you wait there because a cement staircase goes overhead.  We knocked on the door and a young imam-in-training in all black with that round black headdress that Shiite imams wear came out.  Amjad explained who we were and the guy went back inside and shut the door on us.  Amjad stood there saying, shameful. This is shameful.  I said: this is not the Arab way.  Amjad said no, it’s not.  He should invite us in.  Shake our hands.  Bring us tea.  Amjad kept saying, I hate these fucking assholes.  After a long time, the guy opened the door again and we sort of stood in the entrance.  The all-black imam-to-be was arguing with a tiny man who was showing him some documents.  Amjad told me that the guy’s house was taken by the Ba’ath party and he wants help getting it back.  The all-black guy waved him off, told him to leave, and finally pushed him away.  Then he invited us in and we took of our shoes (I had a momentary pang because I really love my New Balance sneakers and didn’t want someone taking them) and we went in and sat down.  He actually smiled and said, Asalamu Alaikum.  As we were waiting, some other reporters came in, a British writer and photographer. The photographer was dressed in a full abaya’a black cloak that covers the hair, much of the face, and the whole body in a shapeless mass.  It was obvious she needed to wear all that to be admitted.  People from this mosque are already driving around Thaura and telling liquor stores they have to close by the end of the week.  They’re shutting down the Turkish soft-core porn movie theatres.  They’re trying to make it so all women in Thaura have to wear the abaya.  They are, of course, strongly advocating an Islamic state in Iraq.  And they are pissed off at the Americans for not being included in the process at all.  It’s very hard to see where all this goes.  Will there be pockets of Shiite fundamentalism in Iraq and pockets of freedom?  Will they get seriously violent?  Thaura is filled with young men with no work, nothing to do, who have big guns.  Scary.

There’s something charming about Thaura. It’s not quite fully urbanized.  Driving down a busy street with lots of stores on either side, it’s common to see a sheepherder tending a flock or to see some kid riding a donkey.  You see animals all over Baghdad, actually.  Sheep and goats and horses and donkeys.  Even wild boar (we ate some delicious pork the other night.  Christians hunt the wild boar and sell the meat).  But Thaura has the most animals and it seems the most rural in a way.  I get the feeling many of these people have only recently come up from the less developed south.

Amjad starting asking me about the weekend.  He said that he heard that in America, people get two days for the weekend and they only do things they enjoy during that time.  That they guard their time very preciously on the weekend and won’t let work or anything get in the way of having fun.  I said that’s pretty true.  He explained that in Iraq, the weekend is only Friday.  And that’s the one day to take care of all the errands and things that piled up during the week because everyone who works has two or three jobs and no time.  Even if they had the time, nobody has any money to do anything. I said my friends and I like to go out to dinner a few nights a week.  Amjad said nobody in Iraq goes out to dinner.  This isn’t entirely true.  There are a couple nice restaurants.  But most of the places are just quick kebab restaurants.  Obviously only the quite wealthy go to the nice places.

We went to this supermarket in the wealthy Mansour neighborhood, a small but packed place.  There’s a supermarket a lot of reporters go to because the guy imports western products from Amman.  I don’t trust a lot of the Iraqi products.  The bottled water definitely makes you sick.  I got really sick on the yogurt.  And in a regular Iraqi supermarket, a lot of the canned goods are expired.  So, I go to this guy for things I don’t want to or can’t get elsewhere.  He has all the American candy bars and cookies and cereal.  He has decent cheese.  Nice canned vegetables.  But he’s shockingly expensive.  He takes such a big mark-up because he’s the only guy selling this stuff.  I bought some stuff and it came to $82.  I was surprised.  I expected it to be around $40 (the prices are market in what I thought were Iraqi dinars, but they’re in Jordanian dinars, a much higher cost currency).  As we were leaving, Amjad said, with shock, you spent $100 on groceries today.  (I also bought a lot of water for $20.  We’re drinking six 1.5 liter bottles a day between me and Jen.  It’s so hot.  We’re constantly running out of water).  I told Amjad it was expensive, but I probably spend more than $100 a week on groceries back in the States.  He and Thamar were shaking their heads and laughing.  They said that $100 would last them at least three months to feed their entire families.  Amjad said his whole family–mother, father, brother’spend about $120 a month on everything: rent, transportation, food.  Amjad, himself, spends about $25 a month.  He asked me what I make for a living.  I felt like I had to be honest.  I told him around $70,000 a year.  He asked me what my rent is, what my expenses are.  I told him one of the biggest expenses is going out to dinner and having drinks with friends.  It’s something he never does.  He said: you spend $6,000 a month.  (That’s a bit high, I think, but for the discussion I let it go.)  The whole thing felt less awkward than I would think it might.  They knew things were dramatically different.  But trading numbers made it all seem quite stark.  Things were a bit more awkward a few days ago when Amjad was telling me how he and his friends want to start up an ISP (that’s Internet Service Provider, mom).  He’s been talking about it for a while.  The other day, he said that a friend of his was saying that if I want to give them $100,000 I could be a co-owner of the company and make a lot of money.  I explained that even to me, this seemingly rich American, 100 grand is a lot more than I can come up with.

We had this great talk with Amjad’s mentor.  He was the head of IT for the ministry of trade and explained how he set up the computer system to handle the oil-for-food distribution during the sanctions years.  He was so proud, rightly, of setting up this enormous database of every single Iraqi citizen and foreign national.  The distribution system was incredible.  They were able to get the right amount of food to the right people every month.  Nobody could cheat the system.  Nobody was left out.  This is particularly remarkable since so much of the Iraqi government was corrupt and inefficient.  (It took months and massive bribes to get a drivers license or renew your car registration or any other bureaucratic errand.)  They were using old computers with an outdated database program (FoxPro) on DOS.  They were able to dispatch trucks all over the country perfectly efficiently.  He said it worked so well because the Minister of Trade was a really good, committed guy who wanted to get the job done.  People praised Saddam, but Saddam had nothing to do with it.  It’s another reminder of how well-functioning certain parts of the state were.  These very well-educated, professional technocrats are in the Ministries of Trade, Finance, Oil.  Apparently the Mukhabarat secret police did a good job, too, but that’s depressing not praise-worthy.  I asked this guy what it was like working so hard for a regime he despised.  He said that he never worked one day for the regime.  He never worked for Saddam Hussein.  He worked for the people of Iraq.  All the technocrats worked for the people of Iraq.  He’s working now with the Americans and the UN World Food Program to get the operation up and running again.  But now they’re fucked.  All their computers were looted.  Most of their trucks were looted.  Their buildings were destroyed.  The entire network that allowed 24 million people to be fed efficiently and properly every month was destroyed by a week of looting.  This is the case everywhere, by the way.  There’s no reliable electricity in Baghdad–as everyone complains–not because of the bombing (the Americans left the power plants intact) but because people have been looting the wires and cables that bring electricity.  They’re looting the cars and trucks and equipment that linemen use to fix the wires.  This semi well functioning state has all but collapsed in all of these areas.  It makes me mad.  Makes everyone mad.  People say it’s a protest against Saddam and his government, but there were many pieces of the government that functioned well and served the people well.  Why destroy a library?  The IT guy said that he’s been extremely unimpressed by the Americans he’s been working with.  They know nothing about Iraq, nothing about the ministries and how they functioned. And that stuff wasn’t secret.  I knew a lot about it.  And I know a lot of people who know a lot more.  He said the questions the Americans are asking are so basic, embarrassingly so.  He says he sees a big change between Garner and Bremer. He calls him Bremer Hussein, because he makes such strong decisions without caring what others will think.  He’s not sure if it’s good or bad yet.  He said–and I agree very strongly’that Bremer’s decision to disband the army was so stupid.  Suddenly there are 400,000 angry men with big guns who know how to use them and now have no money and nothing to do but seethe with rage against the Americans.  There was a protest the other day in which some of these now-ex-soldiers said that they would march peacefully that day and again in a week. After that, they’re going for blood.  They’ll blow up the Sheraton, the big hotel where many journalists stay.  They’ll start suicide attacks on Americans.  There have been attacks on American soldiers today and yesterday.  Everyone expects many more.  Iraq feels like it could go in a very good direction: peaceful, wealthy.  And it could explode and soon.

I got some emails complaining that I’m writing too much about the other reporters, that I’m writing too much about the newfound comforts here in Iraq or the blissful escape to Amman.  One guy was particularly brutal.  I guess these people just want reports on Iraq and the suffering and all that.  Which I am eager to provide.  But this is a diary.  This is not a newscast.  This is my experience.  And a huge part of this experience, for me, is the amazing fun of being with all these great reporters.  This has been overall probably the best experience of my life.  Much of that is watching history unfold, etc.  All that stuff.  But a lot of it is the chance to be with these great, smart, cool people. Work hard all day and then have great dinners and laugh over drinks.  I guess it’s upsetting to some people to hear that we take time to indulge in fun in Baghdad.  Well, fuck you.  The Iraqis have fun when they can.  I’m constantly laughing with Iraqis out on the street or in restaurants.  Everyone should have fun when they can.  I remember when I first met up with reporters on my first night in Amman in November.  I remember feeling kind of outraged that they spend their evenings in bars with each other rather than out on the street getting to know the people.  But now I understand.  This job is so fucking hard.  It’s so much work.  It’s so mentally exhausting, emotionally overwhelming.  And it seems, to me, at least, absolutely necessary to enjoy the evenings.  This one emailer said I have “a self-centered, colonial-governor mentality.”  Fuck that.  What bullshit.  It makes me feel so snotty. Like: It must be tough living in Park Slope and feeling the pain of Iraq.  Why don’t you  come to Baghdad and write your own diary about how you live in the slums of Thaura.

That brings something else up.  I hear from many friends that Iraq is just not a topic of discussion anymore.  Nobody is following the post-war reconstruction.  The story is over.  This really pisses me off.  Although I completely understand it and know that if I were back in the states I’d be in the same boat.  But now is the time to protest.  Now is the time to call the government to task.  The post-war looting (which the Americans should have predicted and prevented) did a lot more damage than the war.  The current botched reconstruction effort is also horribly damaging Iraq.  Our country is fucking up in a big way and it’s hurting 24 million people and it will bite us so hard in the ass down the road.  It’ll be like September 11th or something’something big will happen and we’ll all say oh, we forgot about Afghanistan, we forgot about Iraq.  I guess you can’t get a half-million person protest in Manhattan over subtle issues of reconstructing a faraway country.  But I do feel quite disappointed in all the people who were so involved in protesting the war and now have moved on.  The Iraqis will tell you, again and again, that right now, today, is the worst time of their lives.  Worse than the war.  Worse than Saddam.  It’s all I hear all day.  And it’s because of our government.  (I don’t actually agree that now is worse than Saddam.  There’s more looting and crime and less services, but there is hope and freedom.)  A lot of the human shields are still around here.  But they don’t do anything.  They hang out in the hotels or go on tourist jaunts around Iraq.  The hospitals are desperate for any kind of volunteer.  You could do just about anything and it would help.  But they weren’t here to help Iraq, they were here to protest the war.  That’s over, so they’re now on vacation.  I feel like Rumsfeld and Bush and Bremer all know this.  They know that nobody gives a shit anymore.  So, they know they can do whatever they want here.  It’s certainly not going to affect any election.

If I can complain and whine for a minute: It is so hard working here some days.  I want to do a story about how Shi’ite religious leaders think about economic issues.  It seems important.  The Shi’ites are becoming unbelievably well organized and a potent political force.  But the Americans are not dealing with them all that much.  The US Treasury people are dealing with technocrats from the former regime.  These aren’t Saddam loyalists, but they’re secular and largely Sunni.  Yesterday, I went to the Baghdad office of the Hawza, the 1,000 year-old religious school in the Shi’ite holy city Najaf. In Najaf, the Hawza is a sprawling thing–divided up among all sorts of mosques and homes and small schools.  In Baghdad, they have this one little office just off a big traffic circle not far from my hotel.  There’s a big hand-painted sign on the circle saying, in Arabic and English, Information office for Hawza.  I walked in yesterday and the guy at the front desk said I have to speak with Sheikh so-and-so.  I need an appointment, he said.  The Sheikh is very busy.  I asked for his next available appointment and the guy picked up a date book on the desk.  It was completely empty–nothing written on it.  He asked if the next day, today, at 10 am would be good.  I said fine.  He wrote it down on the page for January 1st.  I just knew the guy wouldn’t be there.  I had no doubt about it.  But I woke up early (yeah, I know, 10 isn’t that early, but I’m rarely up by then usually) and met my driver and translator.  We drove over there and the guy wasn’t around.  I was annoyed and they saw that and they said I could speak to the deputy director, a young guy with a beard and a long, skinny face with intense eyes.  Graduate students are graduate students, whether they’re at the University of Chicago or at the Najaf Hawza.  This guy seemed nice enough and certainly eager to help, but he was so fucking annoying.  He kept saying things like: you cannot answer any question without understanding the theoretical foundation of the answer.  I kept asking simple questions about how Shi’ites think about economic issues and he kept giving these endless, boring lectures about Adam Smith and Karl Marx.  I got excited when he mentioned that there’s this book, called Our Economy, by a Shiite leader named Mohamed Bakr.  He kept saying, don’t you know Our Economy?  It’s famous all over the world.  Bakr is famous everywhere.  I said I’m American, we never heard of it.  No.  Everyone in America knows Bakr’s book.  Everyone respects him and knows that his economic model can work for any country.  You don’t have to be Muslim.  I asked him if he could tell me if there’s someone in Baghdad who could walk me through Bakr’s book and explain his economic model.  He said, Henry Kissinger greatly respects Bakr.  I got stern and angry: I’m not interested in Henry Kissinger.  I want someone here in Baghdad.  A Shiite.  He told us to go to a certain mosque in Thaura.

Thaura is the new (old) name for Saddam City, the miserably poor part of Baghdad where millions of Shiites live in danger and squalor.  My translator, Amjad, didn’t want to go.  He said it’s too dangerous.  He’s never been there, but he knows it’s no good and we shouldn’t risk it.  My driver, Thamar, said it’s fine.  He goes there all the time.  He’s poorer than Amjad, who is middle class.  And he drove a cab before he met me, so he knows Thaura well.  So, we drove off.  Thaura is kind of disappointing, if you’re looking forward to the worst miserable poverty you’ve ever seen.  That’s what friends have told me, and maybe I just didn’t see the worst of it, probably not.  It’s bad.  It’s crowded and the streets are all but destroyed (unlike most of the rest of Iraq where the streets are well-paved and look as good or better than American streets).  But it isn’t as overwhelmingly poor as these villages in the south of Iraq or this other neighborhood in Baghdad, the Seven Palaces, where a big gun market is.  On the main street of Thaura is this amazing site: every piece of looted crap that was taken from all the government offices is on open display for sale.  There’s a stretch maybe a mile long alongside the road where there are piles of copper tubing or bent up sheet metal or desks from offices and schools or broken air conditioners or spent artillery shells.  It’s all so obviously looted.  I felt this shock: someone should be doing something.  But there’s no army around.  The army has started to prevent looting, but not all that much.  And they’re certainly not going around arresting people selling looted things.  And who else would?  I became interested in the guys selling the artillery shells.  There are huge expanses of these tall (three feet?) shell casings.  Some guys were loading a bunch on to a truck.  I wanted to stop and interview them, but Amjad was very scared. He said it’s dangerous and they all have guns and are on drugs.  We drove around, but finally, I said we should stop.  I felt it was OK.  We got out of the car and immediately were surrounded by all these teenage boys.  This happens all over Iraq.  You show up with a microphone and you’re surrounded.  But usually people just pay very close attention to the interview and are quiet and respectful.  I don’t normally like it.  I find it confusing and distracting and it makes it much harder to think of questions and I assume it changes the person’s answers.  But this was way too much.  These kids were all yelling and bumping up next to me (I had put my wallet in Thamar’s glove compartment just in case).  It made the interviews almost impossible.  I interviewed some of the guys loading the truck.  They said the shells weren’t American.  They were Iraqi shells from the Iran-Iraq war.  They go to battle sites and pick them up.  It’s a huge boom business now because Saddam would sentence you to death for selling old shells and now it’s wide open.  They sell them to Kurds who bring them up north to melt them down for the copper.  They are now really cheap, something like 50 dinars a kilo.  The dinar is fluctuating a lot, but 50 dinars is still almost nothing.  Like 5 cents or something.  Before the war they were 3,500 dinars a kilo, more than a dollar.  I thought it would be a cool story, but there didn’t seem to be much else to say and then the guy running the operation, an older guy, gestured for me to leave.  He was very rude, waving me off, saying they have to work.  I walked up to him and said Salam Alaikum and shook his hand.  Another reason to love Arabs.  They often treat foreigners a bit coldly, but you just say that and shake their hand and they smile and are much warmer.  But he still didn’t seem in to me being there, so the people were so loud and annoying, I gave up.  We walked over to the piles of looted things, the young men following in a close bunch.  The place is packed with young men, but the guys running things are all older men sitting on chairs under sloppily constructed tin roofs to keep out the sun.  The old men don’t want to talk.  They wave me away or walk away themselves.  But the young guys can’t stop screaming things out.  They say they are laborers and the old men underpay them terribly.  They’re making less than they did before the war, even though they’re doing more work.  But I think that’s not true.  They get about 3 dollars to unload a truck and they unload several a day.  That would have been a fortune for some poor kid from Saddam City before the war.  They also were hurling conspiracy theories at me.  The big one here is that Kurds are buying all the looted stuff “for mysterious purposes.”  I found this kind of funny.  These guys either actually did the looting–many did, I’m sure–and are certainly benefiting from the looting.  But they’re still saying the looting isn’t really the fault of Iraqis.  It’s Kurds (or Kuwaitis, or Americans).  Someone was more specific: the Kurds are selling the stuff to Iran.  I think in America there’s this sense that Iraqi Shi’ites are loyal to Iran over Iraq because Iran is the Shi’ite capital.  There are some Shi’ite groups that are clearly loyal to Iran.  But the average Shi’ite I talk to says strongly they’re Arabs first and Shi’ites second and if there’s ever a conflict between Iraq and Iran they will certainly side with Iraq.  When I’m in a big crowd, I usually feel pretty safe, especially with Amjad and Thamar hovering around me, looking out for me.  But then the crowd can turn.  Well, I’ve never been in a crowd that turned, but I’ve heard enough stories about crowds turning and things becoming uncontrollably horrible.  So, suddenly, the crowd just felt wrong.  There’s a wild look to these kids, something in the eyes and the intense energy.  It felt like time to go.  Also, I just couldn’t do any reporting with this big crowd yelling and bumping back and forth.  I couldn’t think or focus.  So, we left.

We went to the big Shi’ite mosque in Thaura.  I wanted to find some respected Imam who could talk to me about Bakr’s book on the economy.  Most mosques you see in the Arab world are empty and quiet except during the five times a day (three times for Shi’ites) that they pray.  Then they fill up with quiet men who walk in, do their prayers, and leave.  This mosque, hours before the next prayer, was packed with people.  The walkway in front is covered in all sorts of Shi’ite religious and political slogans.  One said “shi’ites and Sunni: one religion, together” but most were pushing for Shi’te political power.  I didn’t see anything specifically anti-American but the implication here and everywhere you see organized Shi’ites is clear: don’t leave us out.  I think the Americans will leave them out.  At least the religious ones and I think that’s going to be bad in ways I can’t predict.  The mosque itself is packed with people just sitting around.  They’re waiting for one of the three Imams to counsel them on marriage or property disputes or to complain about no water, electricity, security.  There’s no other authority in Thaura right now.  There’s no one else to turn to. It reminds me of Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza.  They provide social services, they fill the vacuum left by crappy Israeli and PA authorities and then it’s easy to get backing for suicide bombings and the like. The Shi’ites need proper political representation, no question.  They’re almost two-thirds of the country.  And leaving them largely out of the process now, the Americans are setting up a situation where they will take power in a way that probably won’t work out all that well for America or Iraq or anybody.  We were told the three Imams weren’t there.  These three are famously anti-American.  One of them was arrested by the Americans a few weeks ago.  They were out doing something and we drove around Thaura for an hour and then came back.  We arrived just as the most important Imam, the guy who got arrested, named Fartousi, showed up.  He wears that round black hat that Shi’ite imams where and a white dish-dash robe and a thin black gauzy overcoat.  The overall impression is: this man is important.  We almost reached him down this back alley to the rear entrance of the mosque when we were stopped by some guy who said he’s his press representative and the Imam will not conduct any interviews until after the next prayer, which was an hour away.  We walked away and Amjad, my Shi’ite translator, was so pissed off.  He said, These people are assholes.  They think they are so important now.  He explained that these were not big figures before the war, just local clerics.  Suddenly, he says, they have press representatives and tell people they won’t talk until after the prayer, which is bullshit.  I said that in English there’s this word ’self-important’ and Amjad said, that’s it, they’re self-important.  It was so hot, I was so tired, so we left back to the hotel and I napped.

I started all this complaining about how hard it is to do work here some days.  The heat is unbearable and you can’t reach anyone by phone, so you have to drive around and find people and they’re not there and there’s no way to make an appointment and you end up wasting a day.  But since I started writing this, I’ve moved into my other mode.  I seem to have two: 1. this sucks and is hard; 2. I am so fucking lucky to be here and this is just amazing.  I’m feeling more of the second most of the time.  I’m working less, to be honest.  There isn’t the hunger for stories from here and if I do two a week, I seem to be ahead–as opposed to needing to get one out a day like I used to.  So, I can take things a bit easier and watch what’s happening around me.  Also, there’s some kind of change in Baghdad.  It’s no longer immediate post-war shock.  People are funnier, more relaxed, and more forward-looking.  That’s not to say it’s all fine.  Things are pretty fucked up here.  No reliable electricity,  lots of looting.  It’s just a sense, but the place feels more relaxed (far from fully relaxed, of course) people are joking more.  A lot of what they’re joking about is how fucked up everything is.  But they’re joking and laughing more.

The next day was much easier working.  There are stories here that are just easy to get and stories that are a nightmare.  Basically, anything that involves actually meeting a specific person takes forever if you can get it at all.  Anything that involves just driving around and talking to Iraqis comes easily and is a lot of fun and there are usually surprises.  I went to the book market in the morning (I think Jen wrote about that on her site). Then I wanted to do something on the sanctions being lifted, so I went to the Daura oil refinery where I had a great interview with the plant manager a few weeks ago.  He’s always there and always friendly.  I think I described him earlier’this great, deep smokers voice and perfect English from his graduate student days in England.  He’s a short guy with long hair and holds himself with solid confidence.  He’s one of these great Iraqi technocrats who made the state function so well.  Oil production at his refinery is way up.  They’re over 70 percent capacity, up from less than 20 percent a couple weeks ago.  He says Americans are there all the time.  He met with two generals the previous day.  They come by to ask when there will be more gasoline available to Baghdadis so the army doesn’t have to spend so much time guarding gas stations from frustrated drivers who have to wait in line for days.  The Americans come and ask questions, but he has yet to get any technical advice or any supplies or any help of any kind.  He doesn’t seem upset about it.  He doesn’t seem to want it.  He’s running the plant just like he’s been running the plant for years.  But it is constantly amazing to me how much credit the Americans take for things like getting the oil running when I have yet to see any evidence of any American soldier or ORHA person doing anything to help these technical ministries.  Maybe it’s happening, but I haven’t seen it.  And I’ve been looking.  Another funny thing.  The phone all the reporters and the army use here is a Thuraya sat phone, which only works when you’re outside with an unobstructed line to the satellite.  This is a big problem, because people don’t spend their days standing outside in the sun with their sat phone antenna fully extended.  So, you can never get a phone call.  Whenever you call someone else’s Thuraya, you’re all but guaranteed they’re not going to answer.  It’s particularly a big problem when trying to reach any of the American forces.  I have called many times and I have never once had one of them answer their phone.  That’s why you have to drive all the way to the Republican Palace (now called Freedom Palace) and go through a big hassle and waste several hours just to get to talk to an American who will tell you they have no comment and you have to go.  With a phone, you could make appointments or at least get the official brush-off much more quickly.  Dathar, the oil refinery guy, worked out this brilliant solution.  He installed an antenna on his roof, ran a wire down to some handmade docking station and hooked his thuraya and a regular cordless phone up to it.  I don’t understand how it works, but basically, he can be anywhere inside the refinery (where no normal Thuraya would work) and get phone calls easily.  He doesn’t even use the clunky Thuraya phone, he uses the regular cordless phone which is somehow patched in to the thuraya.  It’s so brilliant and simple and he was able to figure it out and build it with some wires and an antenna.  I told him that the Americans desperately need this solution.  Why don’t they have it.  He said he knows, he always tries to call those guys and they never answer.  He says every time he meets with army people he shows them his invention, but they never pay much attention.  This drives me crazy.  This simple thing is what the army press operation needs so badly.  But they don’t do it. I’m sure it would takes weeks and they’d have to bid out the contract and get all sorts of regulations written.  I don’t think I ever realized what an unwieldy inefficient mess the army is.  Someone said today the obvious: they’re great at destroying things, lousy at building them up.  We were joking last night that if the US really wants to fuck the French, we should just hand the whole Iraq operation over to them.

After the power plant, I went to a hospital.  I wanted to just find out how the sanctions had affected hospital care.  But what I found was so upsetting and so different.  They said they are in such worse shape than they were during the sanctions.  Before the war, during the sanctions, they had some shortages of medicines and equipment, but basically the hospitals were well functioning.  They were fully staffed with well-trained doctors.  They had plenty of nurses, plenty of support staff.  I went to the surgery wing of the emergency room.  It’s this dirty room with unpainted white walls and a bunch of gurney beds with no sheets and people lying on them in incredible pain.  Nobody has an IV in their arm.  There isn’t a single machine monitoring anyone, they were all looted.  There’s no nurses, no support staff of any kind.  A doctor was walking out as I came in and I asked him if I could ask some questions.  He said he’s too tired and too nervous to talk about anything.  There are only two surgeons in the hospital.  I spoke with both of them.  They are so tired they said.  Look at my eyes, one guy said, they’re not like yours.  They have to do everything.  They wash the bodies, they cart patients around.  Without any machines, even an x-ray, they have to diagnose patients by guesswork.  They perform surgery on patients without really knowing what they’re going to see inside.  They don’t have any pain killers at all.  They perform surgery without any anesthetic.  They can’t knock anyone out.  The people lying on the beds are in agony and there’s nothing they can do about it.  I put this on the radio: one of the doctors said, with such painful earnestness, my heart is squeezing, pumping, thumping for these people.  There’s nothing I can do for them.  He said they’ve gotten no help from anyone.  There are soldiers guarding the front of the hospital, but no Americans have offered them supplies or machines or a generator or an army doctor or anything.  None of the NGOs have done anything either.  This pissed me off.  I spent some time with the PR guy for doctors without borders.  He said they’re so bored. They have nothing to do.  They only handle actual crises, not routine medical care.  He asked me if any of my reporter friends need any care, because their doctors are sitting around doing nothing.  (I’ve heard such bad things about Doctors without borders–Mediciens Sans Frontiers, MSF–from other NGOs.  They are called Publicite Sans Frontiers, because they are famous for trying to get as much press as possible.  They spend massive amounts of money on themselves.  Someone said I should do a story about their red wine bill. Seriously.  They are always fully stocked with red wine.  A friend who worked with NGOs for years says there’s a continuum from the ones who do the most work with the least expense and bullshit to the ones who do the least work for the most money and are the most annoying.  MSF is the worst of them all.)  The doctor said in the history of Iraq they have never faced a situation more horrible than right now.  I think there are hospitals that are better off–more NGO help, etc.–but Amjad said this is pretty much the norm.  He was so upset that he just left and sat in the hall.  He said he would have fainted if he stayed.  Most of the people in the surgery wing were there because of car accidents or because they got beat up on the street.  One teenage boy came in with his family.  His face was–there’s no other way to say it–beaten into pulp.  He looked kind of Mayan, his face was made so round and flat by the beating.  He stood there, quietly crying, while his family tried to get the doctor’s attention.  The doctor wanted to keep talking to me and I wanted him to see the kid. It wasn’t that the doctor was an asshole, trying to avoid work.  It’s just that there’s nothing he can do for the kid.  Tell him to sit down.  That’s it.  He doesn’t even have ice packs.  And he felt like getting word to an American audience is really important.  We then went to the pharmacy of the hospital.  It’s a big hospital.  Lots of wings.  The pharmacy is maybe the size of a small Manhattan bedroom.  There is one narrow bookshelf of medicine.  Most of the space is given over to saline water, the one thing he seems to have plenty of.  I fell in love with the pharmacist.  He’s this little guy–maybe 5′2″ and he is running around like a maniac, grabbing prescription forms, his arms always waving around, grabbing medicine, and giving it to the people who need it.  He moves so quickly and efficiently, I don’t think any patient stands there more than two minutes.  I asked what he wants most.  I meant what medicines does he need.  He said that what he wants most is to be able to get a prescription form and be able to give the patient everything on it.  He said that most people who come to him can only get about 15% of the medicines they need.  This is also new.  During the regime, they actually had almost enough medicine for people.  He is probably 40 and he said that since the day he graduated from pharmacy school he has loved every day of his job.

There are a bunch of reporters here who speak Hebrew.  There’s one guy reporting for the Jerusalem Post, another guy for the New York Times.  At first, we had some tentative, whispered words in Hebrew.  Now–behind closed doors–we’re all yacking away in Hebrew as often as we can.  I always like speaking Hebrew, but there’s something particularly fun about speaking the language here where it is forbidden.  I’ve seen a few signs of Hebrew around.  There’s one shop near my hotel which has an umbrella with Hebrew writing on it.  It says Mai Eden–Waters of Eden–which is a famous bottled water company in Israel.  I’d love to find out how that umbrella got here.  I haven’t told Amjad and Thamar, my translator and driver who have become friends, that I’m Jewish.  I did point out that umbrella to him and he said I’m wrong, it’s Assyrian writing.  I told him no.  It’s not.  It’s Hebrew.  At the book market, I saw a Hebrew-Arabic dictionary.  It has the text of an Israeli newspaper on the cover and I stood there reading the Hebrew out in broad daylight and feeling a tiny bit scared and excited. There are also a bunch of books in Arabic with Stars of David on them and Amjad told me they’re about the Zionists and how bad they are.  I had these thoughts flash through my mind.  How I could write about how anti-Semitic these Iraqis are.  Then I thought it would be kind of bullshit.  I saw, maybe, six of those books in a market with thousands and thousands of books. It certainly doesn’t seem like a special obsession–unlike Jordan, where those books are everywhere.  Most of the books are histories or philosophies or books to learn a trade, like computers or medicine.  I don’t hear much about Jews. In fact, except when I bring it up with Amjad, I don’t hear anything about Jews and Israel or about Palestinians.  It’s not the pressing issue it is in Jordan, where there are so many Palestinians and the border with Israel is right there.  Amjad does keep giving me these lectures about Jews and Zionists.  At lunch the other day, he was telling me that Muslims respect the religion of Judaism.  It’s totally valid and comes from god. But the people who practice the religion, the Jewish, have been fixated on destroying Islam from the very beginning. He said not all Jewish want this, but many do.  It does seem like a special issue for him, something he thinks about.  But maybe that’s just because I keep bringing it up.  I keep thinking he’s got to figure I’m Jewish.  I always show so much interest in anything Jewish, any Hebrew writing or whatever.  But I don’t think he’s clued in to it.  Maybe Jews are too abstract a concept for him.  Or maybe he just likes me so much that he can’t imagine I’m one of them.  I really almost told him and Thamar the other day.  I was having so much fun with them and I felt like saying it.  It does feel like a lie not to say anything.  But it also feels like a mistake to say something.  I don’t know what would happen, but I’m here to do a job and I think it would get in the way and I’m also just scared.  Scared of some kind of violence a little bit.  But much more just scared that he won’t like me anymore and it will be unpleasant and awkward.  I think he’d actually probably handle it well and maybe I should say something.  I don’t know.  A bunch of us were talking about how many Jewish reporters are here now.  That there are probably more Jews in Baghdad now than there have been in fifty years.  There are some Jews left (I hear estimates from 30 to 300 and they’re all cagey and don’t like talking to reporters.  I just realized I meant to go to the synagogue this morning and forgot about it.) but there are a lot of Jewish reporters.  I also realized that now any Israeli could easily drive to Baghdad.  They just have to go to Amman, hire a car, and at the border the American army will wave them through.  Even with Israeli passports I would guess.  I can’t imagine too many have done that.  Probably none.  But it’s a strange idea.  That Israel’s biggest enemy in the Arab world is suddenly open to Israelis.  I wonder if the new government will be strongly encouraged by the Americans to make peace with Israel.  The Americans have said they won’t do that.  And it would be a big mistake to do it early–kind of like Clinton’s gays in the military thing–a way to ensure the Iraqis feel the new government is an American fraud and the war was fought for the Jews.  But I could imagine it happening almost naturally as the new Iraq is more and more in the American sphere of influence.  I have a friend in Tel Aviv who grew up in Baghdad and left for Israel in the ’50s. He’s dreaming of coming back and seeing his old city.  He described some of the places he remembers and I’ve been to many of them.  They certainly are not as glorious as he remembers.  Nothing is glorious is Baghdad right now. Very often here, I find myself about to say something like: “oh, that’s funny, because in Israel”  Or, upon learning some new Arabic word, yes, it’s the same in Hebrew.  When I’m speaking Arabic, I every now and then slip in a Hebrew word or two.  They’re so close and my brain just does it automatically.

I came back with a  friend of mine, Jen, and she’s started writing a web diary as well at  www.mideastdiaries.com/jensite .  We’ve been traveling together the last few days, so her diary covers what I haven’t been writing.  Maybe I felt OK to take a break, since she was posting things.  So, go read her diary as well.  I haven’t read it yet, because I wanted to write fresh, so maybe we’re covering the same ground here.  Probably are.  But with excitingly different perspectives.

Things have quieted down so much in Baghdad and the reporters are relaxing so much more.  The hotel across the street has this great pool and pretty much every night there’s some kind of party or gathering there with drinking and swimming and eating.  At times I have to remind myself I’m in Iraq, in Baghdad.  It feels like a fun vacation at some resort.  It’s been so much that last night I had to leave the party early and just go get some sleep.  A few weeks ago it would have been hard to imagine that the most tiring thing in Baghdad would be drinking and laughing until late in to the night.  Although the heat continues to be so overbearing that it is hard to work.

I feel sort of disjointed and jumbled and I don’t think this’ll be an award-winning entry.  I also am kind of sick.  It could be any of the many things I’ve eaten and drank in the last few days.  Salads, humus, chicken, water.  I am eating mostly, as the soldiers say, on the local economy, and I think that just means being sick a lot.  Some people have gotten very sick.  A friend of mine who I ran in to in Amman was rushed out of Baghdad and had to have surgery on his intestines.  So many people are clutching their stomachs and mumbling about feeling off.  But then there’s the flip side: constantly saying no when very nice people offer you a glass of tap water or some salad or something.

Getting out of Amman was a bit of a chore.  There are so many of these GMC cabs running the Amman-Baghdad route, but it was hard to pick the right one.  A fixer in Amman told me I must use her driver, even though he’s $450.  She says he’s safe and reliable.  But other friends told me he’s just awful and tries to take your money and is a general asshole.  Another fixer told me not to go with a Jordanian driver, they’re too expensive.  I should just go with one of the Iraqi guys who hang out at the oddly named American Parking Lot.  They only charge $100.  But someone else said some of them are crooks and get word ahead to looters inside Iraq who then rob you on the road just outside Ramadi, about an hour west of Baghdad.  I felt stuck.  And I felt responsible.  Jen was traveling with me.  And then another guy showed up in Baghdad who was a good friend in Junior High and High School, a photographer, who I haven’t seen in 16 years.  And he had two friends traveling with him.  Since I was the only one who had actually done all this, I was putting it together and wanted to get the right driver.  The morning of Wednesday (we were planning to leave early Thursday morning) I still hadn’t picked a driver when I suddenly remembered this odd thing.  Just two blocks from my place in Brooklyn there’s this little grocery shop, a bodega, run by a Jordanian bedouin who I became friendly with.  Before I left for the Middle East in November, I asked him how to get from Amman to Baghdad and he told me to just call his brother who runs a car service.  I checked my wallet and was surprised to see that his brother’s number was still on a piece of paper in my wallet.  I called him and he said, don’t worry, everything is taken care of.  I will give you the best drivers, the best cars.  He started going in to all sorts of details that I didn’t understand about the make and model of his GMC’s and how they are better than other peoples.  Then he insisted on coming by our hotel and going over everything in person.  I had taken these photos of his brothers when I was in Brooklyn, so I could show their family what they’re up to.  The guy came over and I showed him the pictures.  The brother I like the most in Brooklyn, Rajab, is this big, funny, great guy who everyone in the neighborhood loves.  I showed the guy in Amman Rajab’s picture and he was laughing and saying, That’s Rajab.  He’s fat like me.  Then I showed him pictures of his other brother, Thayer, who is sad and unpleasant and dark.  The guy in Amman (I forget his name and am too lazy to go get my wallet) just looked at the picture and got quiet and looked sad and said, that’s Thayer.  My brother.  I don’t see him for ten years.

The guy said he had been in the Mukhabarat, the Jordanian secret police.  I told him I wanted to know more about that.  He said we must have dinner when I return.  He was very upset that I called him too late to have dinner now.  All these traveling friends were there, and he said you must all come to dinner.   I’ve probably written this before, but it is so absurd that Arabs have this reputation of beligerence and war-mongering.  Arabs are by far the kindest, most generous, peaceful people, overall.  This happens all the time, Arabs can’t just meet you briefly and talk business.  They want to eat with you, show you hospitality.  Another guy came by the hotel, a friend of my Baghdadi translator who wanted to send some clothes and other things home to his family.  He was also so upset that he couldn’t bring us to his house for dinner, that we didn’t have time.  He also insisted we come over when we get back to Amman.  Another friend of my translator’s came by to drop off a bunch of cartons of cigarettes, brands I had never heard of, that he wants to see if his cousin in Baghdad wants to sell them in Iraq.

I felt so good about arranging the cars through this Bedouin guy.  I felt–maybe foolishly, but I don’t think so’that I was truly protected by Bedouin code.  I am a friend, a guest, of the family that owns the company.  They cannot let anything happen to me.

Before I leave Amman, I do want to say how pleasant it was.  Cold air-conditioned room, room service, an afternoon floating in the dead sea.  When I was in Baghdad I kept saying I need at least two weeks of relaxing somewhere, just sleeping and watching movies, and reading and sleeping.  I got to Amman on a Friday, spent Saturday sleeping and going to movies.  By the time I went to the dead sea on Tuesday, I felt completely relaxed.  Completely finished with the exhaustion and tension of Baghdad.  And, to my surprise, ready and eager to get back.

It’s best to leave Amman at around midnight.  The American-controlled Iraqi border doesn’t open ’til eight (seven Amman time) and it’s only a three hour drive to the border.  But it’s best to leave early so you’re at the front of the line at the border, so you can get across early and drive as quickly as possible to Baghdad so you get there before the looters around Ramadi wake up and start doing business.  I felt kind of stressed out by driving all night, figuring I won’t be able to sleep.  There’s this pharmacy near my hotel in Amman where an older man, British educated, likes to talk to Americans about how horrible America is. We went by there and got what he offers to everyone going to Iraq: Xanax.  He says normally you’d need a prescription but anyone going to Iraq should have some, prescription or no.  He asked us if we really thought Osama bin Laden was responsible for September Eleventh.  We all wanted that Xanax so we just sort of nodded and mumbled something about who knows.  He said, that’s right.  Bin Laden couldn’t do it.  He’s not sophisticated enough.  Mysterious forces are responsible.  When he turned his back, I pointed at myself (a Jew) to show my friends who those mysterious forces are.  We all laughed, quietly, got our Xanax and left.  That Xanax is strong.  We took some and just slept the whole way.  Thick, restful sleep.  We had to wake up to deal with the border.  On the Jordanian side it’s surprisingly normal, you wait in line with your passport, get an exit stamp, pay the 5 dinar exit fee.  Just like you’re going to a normal country.  Then you drive in to No-Man’s-Land between Jordan and Iraq and sit there for an hour or so with hundreds of other cars.  I couldn’t figure out who everyone was.  Mostly Jordanians, judging by the passports I saw.  Someone said something about how lots of Jordanians are driving in with cars to sell.  It’s best to do the drive with a  convoy of other journalists.  The thought is seven or so cars driving together are less likely to be stopped by looters.  Also if someone gets a flat tire or something, they’re covered. We spoke with so many reporters who just said, meet us at the border.  But we couldn’t find anyone.  So, it was just our two cars and the car of these two British guys who were going to start the first independent English-language paper in Iraq.  We crossed the border, stopped for the much-cheaper gas, filled up, and fell asleep.  As we neared Baghdad I really felt excited, almost like I was getting there for the first time.  Like there’s all this excitement ahead of me.  I was surprised at how happy I felt.  I left knowing I’d be back, but thinking I’d stay as short a time as possible, do my work, and get out for good.  Now I was having thoughts about staying a long, long time. Which I don’t think I’ll do, but only because of the heat.

Baghdad, in just a week, seemed even more normal.  Many more stores open.  The previously chaotic and dangerous gas stations were well-mannered and protected by US soldiers, though the lines are still more than two days long.  A lot more intersections have these volunteer traffic cops.  Just guys in regular clothes who stand out there and direct traffic.  Most of them have even gotten themselves whistles. I love these guys.  They really make me feel very good.  The city is in chaos and they find this one thing to do to sort out one area.

We got in, and went to a friend’s room and a whole bunch of my crowd were there.  It felt like exactly the place I wanted to be.  Sitting in that room, laughing with these guys.  I felt very happy to be there.  But I felt an obligation to leave and go to the first press conference of Paul Bremmer, the new US head of Iraq who replaced the constantly befuddled Jay Garner.  I actually, somehow, had high hopes for this guy.  I read good press about him, someone told me they followed him when he was the US man in charge of anti-terrorism and that’s he’s smart and straight.  I am always kind of optimistic about things like that and somehow thought maybe he’d really start getting Iraq in shape.  The press conference was in the same hall where Garner had his first.  But then it was air conditioned. Now it was just fucking hot.  Bremmer stood up and my heart sank.  He started off talking about what a tyrant Saddam Hussein was and how great it is that he’s gone.  He said, sure, Iraq has problems, but there isn’t anarchy.  That’s our goal?  Not to have anarchy?  It seems like we should pretty much expect that there wouldn’t be anarchy.  And that even without anarchy, there’s room to be upset about the general chaos, the constant crime, et cetera.  Bremmer just seemed like the perfect asshole bullshit politician.  Everything he said implied that everything is going great, just a few to-be-expected bumps in the road.  People were asking questions and I kept wanting to stand up and say, could you please repeat everything but this time say it as if we’re not a bunch of idiots.  He said that more people in Iraq have electricity than ever before.  This is not true.  When asked about the general lawlessness and crime, he said the US forces had arrested 300 people that week.  That’s not an answer.  They need to rebuild the Iraqi police force, have an overall security plan.  I feel too tired to remember and go in to all the things he said that seemed like total bullshit.  But trust me, everything was ridiculous.  It made me feel really bad.  I actually missed Garner, who at least talked a bit straight on the rare occassions he talked at all.  I talked with a friend afterwards about the conference and she said it wasn’t for us.  He knew we all knew he was full of shit.  He was talking to the American people.  That night, I checked the news stories about the conference and they all quoted him pretty straight. None of the reporters I read pointed out that he was totally full of shit.  The articles had headlines like “No Anarchy in Iraq.”  He won.

The next day we went to a mass grive site that was so powerful and upsetting.  Jen writes about it well on her  site  so I won’t go in to it in great detail.  But walking up to the mass grave, I kept thinking about the holocaust.  Coming across this ground that was hallowed and desecrated by such massive human tragedy and not knowing how to approach the place.  Wanting to be respectful but not sentimental.  It was too much.  All these bags of human remains and families wailing about not finding their loved ones.  Others quietly digging through the bags looking for some sign that their husband or son or father or whatever is there.  That they can burry them.  Or maybe they’re still alive, in some undiscovered prison somewhere.  I wanted to stay there a long time and take it in, to absorb what I was seeing. But I found myself having these excuses to go to the tent nearby and sit with other reporters and talk about how to do the story.  I had this strong feeling that it is so fresh.  That I was, horribly, lucky to be there to witness this in its freshess.  That in a few years there would be a memorial here and it would be a piece of history.  But right now, it’s raw and inconceivable and agonizing.

That night a big party for my best friend here who was leaving, finally, after spending months, including the war, in Baghdad.  Eating amazing lamb another friend cooked, drinking and swimming in the pool and laughing until 4 am.  Then Saturday, mostly lying around recovering.

Today we went to the ORHA office, the former Saddam place where the Americans are who are supposed to be running Iraq.  I’m too tired to go in to too much detail.  But the place had the feel of a model UN field trip.  There are all these tiny offices that have sheets of white paper with laster printing on them “Ministry of Trade; Ministry of Oil” or whatever.  And you see two guys in there on laptops.  We were hosted by a friend of a friend who works for ORHA.  He confirmed all my worst fears and my strong sense that ORHA was a total mess.  One thing that really upset me: he said that they’re never allowed to go out in to Iraq and explore the place, meet the people. He’s worked on other reconstruction efforts in other countries and said the most valuable time is spent wandering the streets.  That’s the only way to learn what the people need. But the ORHA people are trapped in that building. He joked about calling Human Rights Watch and reporting Americans being trapped in one of Saddam’s palaces.  I am tired and want to go to bed.  This ORHA trip seems important and I’d like to write more.  But I’m so tired.  Maybe tomorrow.  Or Jen will.  Suffice it to say: the place is fucked.  At one point, I ran in to the army guy who is in charge of public affairs for financial issues.  He kept asking me questions, really basic questions, about the Iraqi economy.  He doesn’t know anything.  Because he’s not doing what all us reporters are doing: going out and actually talking to actual Iraqis.  He asked me to send him my reports so he could understand what’s going on.  When an ORHA person wants to leave the building they need an armed army escort.  It’s ridiculous.

It does make me realize just how stressful and hard life is in Baghdad.  I certainly realized while I was there.  But being away, it’s all so clear.  I hate to sound like a prima donna, but just having nice sheets and pillows is so pleasant.  Somehow, all the laundry I do in Baghdad comes back really stiff and scratchy.  There is no air conditioning.  It’s so hot and dusty.  And I never can just relax.  I always feel like I’m missing a story or something or I’m just antsy and buzzed.  Being in a place where there is nothing to do, no news to report, oh, it’s nice.

It was hard to get out of Baghdad.  I was lying in bed Wednesday night thinking, my god, I’ll be in the Hyatt tomorrow.  How nice.  I was supposed to be on the first civil flight out.  These two cameramen came up with the idea of starting Air Baghdad to let reporters avoid the ten hour dangerous drive.  It’s much more expensive, but it’s quick and safe.  I even talked them in to giving me a discount.  So, I was psyched to get out quickly and easily.  I woke up early on Thursday morning, got to the Palestine Hotel where a bus would pick us up to take us to Baghdad (formerly Saddam) International Airport.  It’s a completely secure military base now and no civilians, no reporters, are allowed on.  So, we had to go in on the official bus.  I got there at 10:30, as I was told to.  When I arrived, they said the flight was delayed until 6 that evening, because the military took away their early flight.  I didn’t have much to do, so I just hung out at the Palestine, talking to different friends.  At four, when the bus was supposed to take us, one of the cameramen/airline entrepreneurs showed up and said there’s a problem.  The Jordanians won’t allow the plane to take off from Amman to come get us.  The cameramen got permission from the Foreign Ministry but apparently never spoke with the Jordanian civil aviation authority and those guys freaked out and wouldn’t let it leave.  I should have known then the flight was doomed, but the cameraman kept saying it would work out.  I know, very well, how difficult and intransigent Jordanian bureaucracy can be.  There were 20 or so of us camped out in the lobby of the hotel.  Mostly it was people from the BBC.  The BBC won’t allow any of it’s people to drive to Amman, because some reporters had been shot on the road.  We looked like a boy scout outing or something, all these people sitting on the floor with our knapsacks around us.  Friends would constantly walk by and say, that flight is never leaving.  But I refused to believe that.  I kept up hope.  The next several hours were so annoying.  At every moment we were just five minutes away from being told we can leave.  The Jordanians seemed to be relenting when the Americans took away the slot.  Then the Jordanians were being tough and the Americans gave a slot.  On and on.  Finally, it was set. We were going to leave at 3 in the morning, but had to get to the airport during daylight, because the streets of Baghdad are still pretty dangerous at night and a big bus of foreigners is a juicy target.  The sun was setting, and we’re getting anxious: is this going to happen.  Then it was night and the cameraman said he had arranged a military escort to the airport.  This whole time, we’re all shifting from annoyed to resigned to hopeful to depressed.  The BBC guys were making plans to drive to Kuwait, since they’re not allowed to go to Amman.  I had to go to Amman, but was trying to figure out if it’s too dangerous to drive on that road.  There have been several reporters shot at, one every other day or so.  I didn’t have my bullet-proof vest and helmet, because I didn’t want to carry the extra weight on the plane.  One guy waiting for the plane had a bandaged hand.  He’s a CNN cameraman who got shot in the hand the day before.  But I just didn’t want to drive down to Kuwait (I never want to be in Kuwait again) and then find a hotel and wake up before dawn to catch the early morning flight to Amman.  This is supposed to be a vacation.  So, I arranged for a backup, a car to Amman.  Then we were all but certainly going to leave, everything was set, and the Jordanians decided they need a written letter from the American authorities stating they are prepared to handle civil aircraft.  That wasn’t going to happen, so we gave up.  There are all sorts of theories about why the Jordanians were being so difficult.  Someone wanted a bigger bribe.  They want Royal Jordanian to handle the Baghdad-Amman route and don’t want to help a new airline get started.  Or they’re just incompetent bureaucratic assholes.  I go for all three.

Then my only problem was that I didn’t have an alarm clock and had to be up at 5:30 for the ride.  I thought I would just stay up all night, but a friend lent me his.  I couldn’t sleep.  I felt like I was trapped in Baghdad.  I figured something would go wrong.  The car wouldn’t be there, or there wouldn’t be a convoy, and I wouldn’t want to go alone, or I’d go and get shot at.  The whole thing seemed miserable.  I really felt trapped there.  I even had to sleep in the miserable Sheraton hotel again.  It was all depressing and claustrophobic.  Then I got up, the car was there.  There was a convoy of Fox News and ABC and some Christian missionaries from Scotland.  Fox even had a former British special forces security consultant going with them.  Though when I asked him if I could tag along the convoy, he said I could do whatever I want but he’s taking no responsibility for me.  We took off and the ride was so easy, so uneventful, I slept for most of it.  Though I found out that a little while later, an NBC convoy got shot at, no one was hurt.

Most of what I saw of the long road to Jordan is featureless, dull desert.  Just boring.  We passed a sign for H3′the airbase that saw some very fierce fighting during the war and which people thought .  But there was no sign Then we were at the border.  Americans are guarding it, which is odd to see.  There are still all the Saddam mosaic posters and Iraqi signs.  They just kind of wave you through.  The Jordanians are hard core, though.  They check every inch of your luggage.  Some idiot Japanese reporter took out a grenade as a war souvenir when they weren’t checking so hard.  At Amman airport, a security guard found the grenade and it went off, killing the guard.  I was talking to a friend about that.  What if the grenade got on his flight and went off and took down the plane.  It would be seen as this terrible terrorist incident, maybe caused by Saddam. The whole world would change a little.  Because of this stupid Japanese guy–who’s now on trial for a life sentence, I understand–we all have to undergo massive searches.  They take forever.  Some ABC guy–in line before me–had bought all these boxes of tiles and the customs guys were taking each tile out, one at a time.  It took so long.  But then back in the car and asleep.  I’d wake up every once in a while.  Jordan is filled with this truly shitty little towns.  Just cinderblock houses and dirty and horrible.  They are completely charmless.  I can’t imagine spending a life in one of them.

A friend of mine died in Iraq yesterday in a car accident yesterday.  Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe.  I didn’t know her all that well, but we had dinner many times and she was always so friendly and generous and would give me a big hug every time I saw her.  Everyone I talked to about her kept using that same word: generous.  She’s very experienced as a correspondent and would be so encouraging to those of us who are newer to this.  She’d also be very open with information and contacts and stuff.  And she was funny and gregarious and a bit loud.  I really liked her.  I just saw her the other day.  I feel so sad about it.  Last night, when I heard, I just felt awful.  I was hoping it would be like other calls I’ve gotten that friends had been killed who turned out to be fine.  But this really did happen.  I’ve heard more journalists have died in this war, on a per day basis, than any previous conflict.  I was feeling relieved that none of my friends died.  It seemed like we were more or less out of the woods.  There’s still danger, but it’s nothing like it was a few weeks ago.  It seems like this wasn’t an attack of any kind, her driver just drove in to a car rail.  Iraqi drivers are really reckless.  My driver, without me in the car, got in an accident the other day.  Before I left New York, this travel medicine doctor went over all the dangers: malaria, etc.  But she said the biggest danger of all is just driving.  Far more people succumb to car accidents than any kind of medical problem.  Fuck.  It’s really sad.

I then went to the Iraqi Communist Party.  It’s in a tiny storefront with crappy furniture.  I spoke with a very smart guy who just moved back to Iraq a few days ago from London.  He had to flee Iraq in 1992.  He seemed so honest and so earnest, it was refreshing.  Made me want to be a communist.  He said the Americans are obviously setting up a capitalist state and it’ll be run along ethnic-religious lines.  He said the big meetings the Americans keep holding with opposition figures are bullshit, since they only invite people who generally agree with American plans.  The Americans keep saying they’re creating a broad coalition of different parties to rule Iraq: but they just mean they have representatives of different ethnic and religious groups.  There is no breadth of political views.  He thinks the country should be run along secular lines with a vibrant political culture.  He said as much as he hates capitalism, he’s actually happy to have it come to Iraq if it will improve living conditions for Iraqis.  Communism will never come out of poverty and desperation.  People have to become comfortable, have good lives, and raised expectations to begin fighting for their rights as workers.  He said communists in Iraq are not agitating for a communist state in Iraq.  They realize that the US is in charge and it’ll be capitalist for a while.  They are content, for now, to lobby for workers’ rights within the new US system and then slowly build towards the communist state they want.  He said it’s just amazing to be able to sit and so openly talk about politics with his colleagues.  Most of the one’s who stayed behind were imprisoned and constantly in trouble with the regime.

The Kurds are much harder to get access to.  Barzani’s KDP has branches all over the city.  We kept driving from one branch to another trying to find the headquarters.  Most of the branches are so poor and miserable.  Some dirty abandoned storefront with mattresses on the floor where everyone sleeps.  But the headquarters are in two pretty nice hotels.  It’s a total armed camp.  Guys in KDP uniforms wielding big guns (as well as the de rigueur serious looking guys in suits with machine guns) and yelling at cars not to slow down or park anywhere near by.  At Chalabi’s place or anywhere else I go, there’s a curiosity and friendliness to reporters.  But these guys were so suspicious looking.  They told me that there is no one who can talk to me.  And they can’t tell me when there will be someone I can talk with, for security reasons.  So, I don’t know their economic vision.  They wouldn’t let my driver park within a block of the place.  They are keeping the whole area free of non-KDP cars.  My driver and translator were so flipped out by this.  They were both yelling in the car that it’s just like Saddam.  All these political parties are telling Iraqis what to do.  They kept repeating, Mamnua’.  Forbidden.  That’s what the KDP guys told them: your car is Mamnua’.  They were so angry.  I joked that they should watch it, maybe these new parties would arrest them for speaking out, just like Saddam did.  My translator said he will never be silent again.  He’s had enough of a taste of freedom of speech this last month that he’ll never be silent.  They both side they want Saddam to come back and kill all these political leaders.  Then they want to kill Saddam.

We then went by the US Central Command headquarters to find some of the Americans involved in Iraq’s economy.  I was told my one of the military press officers that now, finally, they are fully open for business.  Any reporter can come to the headquarters at the former Republican Palace and ask at the front desk for a press officer and get whatever information or interviews he needs.  The only way to reach them is to show up.  The whole press operation of the US Army here has two sat phones.  Jesus.  I have two sat phones.  I’m equal to the whole US Army in Iraq.  I know individual reporters with four sat phones.  Sat phones are on sale all over Baghdad.  Can’t the US army somehow get enough sat phones.  It doesn’t matter, because nobody remembers what the sat phone numbers are, so you can’t call anyone.  I showed up at the private at the gate said nobody is allowed past without an escort and they have no way to reach the press office to get me an escort.  They don’t even have radios.  The US press operation is so shockingly shoddy, I keep asking myself, we all keep asking ourselves, is this deliberate obfuscation or benign incompetence.  My guess is it’s both.  Things aren’t going as well as they hoped and they just want to hide from the press.  And, at the same time, they are incredibly incompetent.  I mean, any big US corporation knows how to do obfuscation reasonably well, so that it doesn’t just piss reporters off and encourage them to report bad things.  Of course, I’m sure it doesn’t matter that much.  I can’t imagine too many Americans are following the minutia of Iraq reconstruction and political development.  I’d be surprised if 3% of Americans have an opinion about it or could say if it’s going well or badly.  Even I’m not completely sure.  Everything I see tells me that it’s going really badly.  But I’m not seeing anything.  Maybe they’re doing brilliant work and it’ll all work out great.  Of course, it could all blow up really badly.  Seeing all these different parties, each with their own army, makes me think it’s not impossible to imagine serious civil war breaking out. The big danger is not Chalabi’s INC or the KDP.  They seem to be in the American pocket.  The big danger is the Shi’a leaders who are becoming incredibly well organized, have their own armed groups, and most want nothing  to do with this American process.  The Shi’a are, of course, 60% of Iraq.  They’ve never had power here and are not happy about seeing the Americans side up with Chalabi and the Kurds.  I don’t know how big the blow up has to be to get the attention of the Americans.  I can’t imagine it would be a reason people would choose not to vote for Bush.  They’d probably just blame the crazy Arabs for whatever happens.  I don’t know, it feels really bad. It feels like America can kind of do whatever it wants and not pay a big domestic political price.  They’ve already, obviously, paid a big international price but they don’t seem to care.  The war is over, so the story is over for most Americans, I assume.  We won.  That’s it.

It is so miserably hot here.  Shockingly hot.  Today would be the hottest day of any New York summer.  And it’s only going to get hotter and hotter.  It’s now about 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  My translator swears that it’s regularly 140 in August here and frequently gets up to 150. This doesn’t seem possible.  But everyone says it’s true.  And it’s so humid.  It’s just miserable.  The whole place shuts down at 2.  Under Saddam, people would leave work from 2 until the evening and then come back to work.  But it’s still so dangerous at night that people just leave at 2 and don’t come back.  Not that there’s too much work to do. I’m planning to be here another few weeks, but I feel so bad for my friends who are staying through the summer.  The last week of May, I’m hoping to drive north to Kurdish Iraq.  It’s in the mountains and is much cooler.  Also, it’s said to be incredibly beautiful: lakes, caves, streams, mountains.

My translator and driver were telling Saddam jokes.  They said there were Saddam jokes during the regime, but you’d be very careful about who you tell them to.  They are hearing more and more Saddam jokes.  One is this: a man dreams at night that he, not Saddam, is President of Iraq and his neighbor, Abu Ali, is vice President.  He tells some friends about the dream in the morning.  A few hours later the Mukhabarat secret police come by and arrest him.  In interrogation, they say ‘how dare you dream this dream.’  He says, ‘I can’t control what I dream.  It just comes to me.’  ‘No.  You must control your dreams.’ Then they ask for details of his dream.  When they learn that Abu Ali was Vice President in the dream, they go out and arrest Abu Ali (This is when Iraqis start laughing).  Abu Ali says, ‘What can I do?  It’s his dream.’  (Big laughs).

I’m so impressed by the veteran correspondents who set up such a nice life wherever they are.  I feel like I’m still living out of suitcases.  They keep telling me: you can’t live like you’re just in a hotel room.  A hotel room is your home and you have to treat it like that.  I went over for dinner with some friends.  They found all this food, their fridge is stocked, their cupboards full.  They have a full compliment of booze, wine, and beer.  These guys walk in to a hotel room and in moments they’ve transformed it in to a real home.  They hang pictures.  The first priority is setting up their computers to play music.  They know how to live on the road.  Because they spend most of their lives on the road.  There are different approaches.  One guy–the most veteran one I know–always gets two twin beds, sleeps in one and sets the other up with all sorts of well organized piles so he always knows where everything is.  Other people put everything away right away. I felt like they know how to create a pleasant, nice place to come home to.  I’m still working on that and that might be part of why I feel so taxed and exhausted.  Although, even the people with better set ups are pretty exhausted, too.

At dinner were two people who had such unbearably awful experiences this war.  One guy was shot up (well, his car was) by Iraqis on the third day of the war and then spent a night wandering the Iraqi desert trying to get away from Iraqi soldiers.  Another was imprisoned by the Iraqis for 8 days during the war.  I don’t know what to write about this.  Except I’m surprised by how open, even excited, they are to talk about their experiences and how exciting it is to sit with them and hear the details.  And also how little macho bullshit there is.  They are really not showing off.  They’re not impressed by their own near-death experiences.  They want to talk because it was a big deal and scary and all.  But they regret it and wish it never happened.  They said when they get back home to the US, they don’t talk about this stuff because people just seem kind of bored and freaked out.  Overall, dinner was so easy and pleasant, it really was shocking to think, every once in a while that we’re in Baghdad, we’re still in the middle of all this. It felt just like a dinner party back home.  Then we’d hear lots of gunfire outside the window and we’d all look at the window and then get back to dinner.  Then, right at midnight, the power went out and I had to walk down six flights of stairs with a candle.

Then I went to my driver’s (yes, I have a driver and a translator and feel very colonial) house for lunch.  This has been a big plan all week and it obviously was a big deal for them. Like every Arab lunch I’ve been to, the women prepare the meal in the back and you never see them, and then the men sit down and eat.  (Not entirely true, more westernized, wealthier Arabs eat pretty much like we do, women and men sitting at the table, even drinking wine or beer.)  We sit down on the floor, on a big beautiful rug, like every Iraqi has, and eat with our hands.  It was kind of awkward and boring.  They had no questions for me at all.  My driver put on music videos on video CDs. These are very popular here and they’re a strange mix of just regular music videos from MTV, Arab music videos, and then some of them were just popular American songs while the video was scenes from violent American movies.  I mean, they’d play some Michael Jackson song and have that scene from the Matrix where Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss go into the building and shoot all the security guards.  Or there was some other soft love song and the video is from some crappy sci-fi film where all these people get cut up into pieces by lasers and their bodies fall apart in front of you.  Very odd.  My driver, who is this totally typical macho Arab guy (very nice) is always playing Madonna and Michael Jackson in the car.  His favorite.  My translator, also a typical macho Arab guy, is obsessed with Mariah Carrey. Anyway, lunch was great.  Typical Iraqi food: lots of vegetables stuffed with rice, great chicken.  Lots of side dishes–yogurt and cheese and salad. There was Masguf, the favorite Iraqi fish, which I found so fishy and salty and inedible.  But everything else was great.  I’m off my only-eating-MREs kick.  I’m eating local food all the time and enjoying it very much and never getting sick.  Knock on wood.  My driver’s dad was the coach of the Iraqi Olympic Wrestling team, but he said it paid so badly that he quit and got a job paving roads. He never got to go to the Olympics.  I don’t really have anything to back up what I want to write, but it feels like Iraqis have really had the life beaten out of them by Saddam.  There is just a lot less curiosity, a lot fewer questions, a lot less liveliness here than in other Arab countries.  People are amazingly interesting when I draw them out. They all have great stories. But there is a deadness to Iraqis that I see everywhere.  I mean, they’re very energetic and entrepreneurial.  They’re not slow and depressed or anything, in general. They go about their business and their lives.  But there is such limited conversation, such dull conversation most of the time.  I guess it’s the decades of Saddam combined with the horrible situation now where everyone is just worrying about having enough food this week to eat or worrying that looters will attack them or their house.  Also, everyone at lunch seemed really nervous.  I thought it was because I’m American or something.  But then I realized that I have become the lifeblood of this family.  My driver is the only one in the entire extended family who is working.  Before he met me, he was driving a cab and some days making $10.  I’m paying him $35 a day and often give him extra.  With that he supports his mom and dad, wife, kid, three sisters, a brother-in-law, who knows how many nieces and nephews.  Jesus.  It is a very odd feeling to suddenly realize this.  I mean, when I travel to people’s houses in other countries, I feel like I can just be a sort of observer. Just a nice guy from the US who wants to know how they live their lives. Then, boom, I realize I’m this colonial lord or something.  It feels good and bad.  It feels good that I’m making their life better.  It feels lousy that everything is so awkward.  I don’t understand the rules, but somehow, after lunch, the women started coming in to the living room.  They came one at a time, like five or ten minutes apart. Maybe they were finishing up their work in the kitchen and coming out when they were done.  Or maybe there’s some rule that women can only come out at certain intervals.  I don’t understand it.  My driver’s wife is young and quite pretty and dynamic and is the only one in the family who speaks English well.  She’s so clearly smart and strong and it felt absurd that she had to be in the kitchen most of the afternoon and that she almost never leaves the house and just stays there raising her 17-month-old kid and waiting to have eight more.  After lunch, my driver put on a documentary in English (with Arabic subtitles) about Saddam.  It was a really brutal documentary that laid out how horrible Saddam and his family are.  Everyone was watching it like it was just a thing on TV.  Blank faces.  Sometimes laughing.  I don’t know, I wanted more.  Tears?  Anger?  Some reaction.  Afterwards, I asked my translator if seeing Saddam now made him miss the old guy.  He said it does.  He misses Saddam.  Saddam could be charming and funny and he’s a real Iraqi. But then he thinks of all the horrible things Saddam has done and he’s glad he’s gone.

I’ve been having this on-going conversation with my translator about sexual politics. He has a fiance and a girlfriend. To get married, he has to have enough money to build a house or an addition to his parents’ house (that costs about $1500) and he has to have enough to show her parents that he can take care of her and give her money if they get divorced (another $1000 to $1500).  He’s been saving for years for his marriage and he has $500.  I told him that I’d make sure that before I leave Iraq he has enough to get married. I asked him what the deal is with having a fiance and a girlfriend.  He said that his girlfriend is just for fooling around with. (I switched hotels today, but kept my old room for an extra day so he could bring his girlfriend there).  I asked what he does when he fools around.  Do they have sex?  No.  Is it true what I heard, that Iraqi girls have anal sex but not vaginal sex so they can be virgins? No.  He doesn’t have anal sex. Oral?  No.  What do you do? I play with her boobs. (That’s a direct quote). It’s so hard to get time alone with her that he can only see her for an hour or so every few weeks.  He’s never been alone with his fiance, there’s always lots of family around.  And he would never think of even kissing her before they get married, let alone play with her boobs.  He’s 30, never had sex, doesn’t know any unmarried people who have had sex. I said I’m sure lots of young people are having sex.  Probably, he says, but he doesn’t know them.  He says that women are very fragile, delicate creatures and they must be protected.  I asked if he wants to have sex.  He said of course he does, but if he had sex with a woman he would find the whole thing disgusting, the woman disgusting, it would be awful.  For days I’ve been trying to explain that it’s good that we in America have sex before marriage.  That women of my generation feel empowered (at least sometimes) by choosing to have sex. But it never comes out right, somehow.  I always just confirm his view of things.  I even went in to this long explanation of the changes in sexual politics since the 1960s.  I went on and on, and he kept agreeing with me that women are weak and must be protected.  I was not saying that. I was saying the very opposite, but it went nowhere.  He said men must control women.  I said that it’s OK if a couple makes decisions together.  He said, yes, it’s sometimes nice to ask the woman’s opinion.  But the man must decide everything.  I’ve heard from so many people that this is all bullshit.  That in most Arab families, the women run the show, but the men act all bossy around guests to prove they’re real men.  I told him that I hate how in Baghdad there are so few women in public.  You almost never see women walking on the street or in restaurants.  He said it’s not true. Women are everywhere.  I keep pointing out to him–on a street or in a restaurant’that there are no women here.  It’s all men.  He keeps saying, no there are many women.  (There are never any women).  You do see women occasionally.  But I’d say 95% of the people you see out in public are men.

I’ve been meaning to write that sometimes I feel like everything I write is full of shit. I mean, it’s honest, as far as I can tell, and true to what I see.  But this place is so overwhelming and confusing and so much is going on and I really don’t know the big picture.  Maybe this is obvious.

I like my new hotel. It’s actually somewhat clean and functional.  I have a suite with a nice living room.  I have my data sat phone back, so I’m not begging from friends all the time.  Life is good.  It makes me realize how stressful it was having a dirty, crappy room in a horrible hotel. When it seemed like the only option, I didn’t think about it.  Also, it was the only hotel surrounded by massive US forces.  But the army is pulling out and the hotel is so disgusting, I’m so happy to have left.  This place would be definitely third rate in the US.  But it’s deluxe living here.  I’m even going to leave for Amman for a long weekend to get some supplies and money and to sleep and relax and float in the dead sea. I’m so excited.  It’s still amazing being here, but it’s too damn much, sometimes. Last night at this ABC TV party, I was talking to a reporter everyone calls robo-hack. He’s a really good guy, but so serious.  When the Israelis were getting ready to invade Arafat’s compound, he slept on the ground next to the tanks, so he’d be the first one up when it happened.  He’s always gung-ho. And when he told me he’s overwhelmed and exhausted and is taking a couple day’s off, I realized I could give myself a break.  I’m taking tomorrow off.

Next stop was the Ministry of Oil.  This is the only ministry that wasn’t looted and raided by Iraqis.  This is because American troops protected the building from the first days. This has encouraged the belief, widespread about Iraqis as well as people everywhere (though not me), that this war was all about oil.  A soldier told me I can’t go in.  There is a meeting there.  There’s always meetings there.  But reporters can’t cross the concertina wire outside.  I was told, again, to come back Saturday.  I will.  I was getting frustrated.  It seemed like every day: go around and be told that the Americans don’t want anyone to talk to anyone.

We drove on to the oil refinery in Baghdad, the Daura Refinery.  There were American troops at the entrance, so I figured I’d be sent away. But they didn’t even look at me or talk to me.  Iraqis are in charge there.  I was told I could go in and meet with the general manager.  On the way in, I talked with an army guy from the civil affairs division.  These are the folks who are supposed to be doing the first phase of reconstruction.  The way army press people sell the civil affairs brigades you’d think they’re everywhere in Iraq, rebuilding the country by hand.  But every time I meet a civil affairs guy, like this one, they’re doing something really small and don’t have any idea what’s going on.  He kept asking me questions about oil in Iraq.  He was there to buy a truckload of oil so they could spray it on the dusty airfields they’re using to keep the dust from blinding pilots.  When I asked what they’re doing to help the Iraqis–like give them spare parts or technical advice or something–he said they’re still in the assessment phase.  This is what I always hear from these guys.  It’s the assessment phase.  I feel like I made plenty of assessments in the first day or two in Baghdad and there are some obvious things that need to be done.  But the army is a big bureaucracy and they need to assess for a longer time than I do.  I just wish all these assessors seemed to understand anything about what is going on.  I’ve been so unimpressed.  The guy, a Major in the reserves, was really nice.  A big public radio fan and excited to talk.  He said he’ll be here one or two years.  He won’t be able to go home to see his family that whole time.  If he’s lucky and he gets a week R&R during the first year, he’ll have them fly to Israel and meet him there.  But he doesn’t know if he’ll have any time off.

The general manager really impressed me.  I have to say I’ve been impressed by all the financial and technical Iraqi professionals I’ve met.  Saddam was a bastard and much of the state apparatus was geared towards spying and torturing and building ornate palaces.  But there are all these ministry technocrats who were actually running a surprisingly well-functioning government.  This guy said he’s had very minimal contact with Americans.  They did ask him to draw on a map where all the gas stations are in Baghdad so they can put troops at them to keep order.  And he’s been told that American companies will come in soon to rebuild all the oil infrastructure and bring up to 21st century standards.  He said he’s really excited about that.  And he’s excited to learn about all the changes that have happened in oil technology since 1980.  he doesn’t know anything about that.  What surprised me the most is that the entire oil ministry is running almost entirely normally.  None of the other ministries are functioning at all. But the oil ministry is working well.  They are well below their full capacity of 3 million barrels a day.  But all the equipment is functioning fine.  They can go full bore any day.  The problems are these strange technical things.  Like his refinery can put out 110,000 barrels a day.  But they can only do 20,000 barrels now.  When you refine crude oil, you heat it up and crack it (I think this is right, don’t quote me) into all sorts of component parts.  Hot crude oil is made up of all sorts of different oil products.  So, heating it, breaks the products up and you can separate out kerosene and car oil and fuel oil and Vaseline and all sorts of products.  Right now, their fuel oil tanks are completely full.  They can’t refine any more crude until the fuel oil tanks are emptied.  The fuel oil is supposed to go to the electricity generating stations.  But the stations are operating at one tenth their capacity because there are so many problems in the wires along the way and if they went to full capacity, they’d overload the system.  Once the electric plants are fully running, the fuel oil can start flowing, and this refinery can start putting out 110,000 barrels.  He said they can get up to the 3 million barrels a day nationwide quite soon, once all these little glitches are worked out.  The goal is to get up to 6 million barrels a day, but that will take years and lots of new equipment, which the Americans are promising.  He said it only costs a little less than 2 dollars to dredge up and refine a barrel.  So, if oil continues to cost $25 to $30 a barrel internationally, Iraq will make a lot of money.  Even now, the oil ministry is self-sufficient.  They are producing oil, even if it’s less than normal, and selling it to gas stations and using the money to pay their staff.  Refineries like this one are getting orders from the same people in the oil ministry who ran things before.  I found this just stunning.  Nothing is working here.  Nobody is getting paid.  The other ministries are waiting until the Americans start giving people $20 a month salary–less than they made before.  But the oil ministry is working just fine.  He said there are 100 gas stations in Baghdad and 80 are now open.  They are supplying one tanker to the government run stations a day and one tanker to the private ones every other day.  This is less than half of the demand of Baghdad and that’s why there are so many problems with oil in the city.  Oil is amazingly cheap here.  It costs 50 dinars a liter, that’s about 2.5 cents.  I don’t know how many liters in a gallon, but it can’t be too many.  So, let’s say a gallon costs 10 cents.  Cheap.  It costs three times that much to refine the oil, but the government kept the price low through subsidization because people can’t afford oil even at these cheap rates.  He said there’s no way to increase the price until peoples’ salaries go way up.  I know the American administration loves the idea of ensuring that all third world people pay a real cost for things like oil and water and medical care.  I think it will be a disaster if they do that too quickly here.

We then went to the actual refinery part.  Now, in Iraq, like everywhere in the Arab world, every time you move to a different office, you walk in, shake hands with everyone there, sit down, drink some tea, have some small talk, and then get to business.  The plant manager at the refinery was a great guy.  He looks like a short Anthony Quinn (he denied this) and has an amazing deep voice and speaks great English.  Like many older Iraqi technocrats, he was sent to England for education.  He said when he was coming up, the oil ministry would pick the 40 best high school students in the country and send them to England and then they’d come back and work.  He said that he does know about the advances in oil production.  He’s been getting technical magazines and catalogues since 1998.  He pointed to his forehead and said it’s all up here.  We need the equipment now.  We talked about the common Iraqi fear that the Americans will take all the oil revenues for themselves.  He said it’s impossible.  It’s too much money and people would notice.  I think that’s right.  I think the US would like to have long-term influence on what happens with Iraqi oil and there’s probably a strong plan to use Iraqi production to lessen the power of the Saudis and OPEC (though Iraq is part of OPEC).  I’m sure there are all sorts of long-term strategic schemes in DC to deal with Iraqi oil. But I don’t think it’s going to be as crude as just taking all the revenue for ExxonMobil or something.  They have to let the money go in to Iraqi coffers.  Half a million barrels a day are for domestic consumption.  The other 2.5 million are traded internationally.  Once sanctions are lifted and the refineries improved, it’ll be 5.5 million barrels a day.  That works out to more than $40 billion a year.  This country could use the money.

He took me to the refinery itself.  He laughed and explained that everything there was built by Americans in the ’50s.  Mostly by Kellogg and Brown & Root, which are now owned by Haliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company.  We laughed a lot about Cheney and how he made money off of every aspect of Iraqi oil. This isn’t entirely fair, since I don’t think he was a major shareholder in the ’50s.  But it is odd.  He said, and I don’t understand how this is possible, that some Haliburton people came to the refinery in the late ’90s and couldn’t believe the machines were still running.  They should have been scrapped 20 years ago.  The man said he was very proud of this, since it shows how great their maintenance is.  But he can’t wait to scrap it all and get new high-tech equipment.  I was at an Amoco refinery in Illinois a few years ago, and it’s so high-tech.  Like a scene from some futuristic movie.  All these clean, colored tubes going everywhere and lots of computers watching everything.  This place is run by hand.  No computers that I saw anywhere.  And so primitive, it seemed.  A big room to heat up the oil.  A big stack to refine it.  Nothing more.  He said there is no unleaded oil in Iraq.  All the car oil has lead in it.  I never even understood what unleaded means, but I’m sure it’s pretty bad for the environment and I guess it fucks up your car.  I’m from New York and we don’t know anything about cars in New York.

We then drove to a gas station.  You can’t believe these stations.  There are lines that go for miles.  Entire streets are closed down because so many people are waiting at these stations.  The other day it took about an hour to drive one long block through the mess created by the stations.  The one we went to today had the usual absurd line.  I talked to a guy about half way through and he said he had been there since 10 am.  It was 3 pm.  I told him he might have to wait another 5 hours or more.  He was quite calmed and good natured and said he doesn’t have anything better to do.  He works for a ministry that isn’t working, so he might as well wait here.  And maybe he won’t get any oil.  You can get black market oil from guys selling it out of jerrycans on the street.  They charge 1300 dinars for 5 liters.  That’s about 5 times what you pay at a station, but still really cheap.  I told him he could do that and not waste a day.  He said he can’t afford the black market stuff.    We walked to the front of the line and there was no oil being pumped at all.  Hadn’t been for three hours.  People were screaming that the manager won’t pump oil because he’s waiting for nighttime when he’ll sell all the oil to black marketers for inflated prices.  Then one pump started and the whole crowd was dancing and whistling and clapping.  Then the pump went off.  Right then, these two American soldiers came up.  It was all very surreal and amazing timing.  The soldiers were really tall and had very clean uniforms, they were a colonel and a major and I’m sure work in a command center somewhere.  They don’t look like fighters.  The Major was incredibly tall and well built, maybe 50 years old.  He walked in to the middle of this huge screaming crowd and started yelling out in Arabic (he’s an American guy named Newman from Texas, his Arabic has a strong American accent but is very good, my translator said).  He told everyone to be patient.  And he quieted them down right away.  It was incredible watching someone take command like that.  The manager came up to him and they talked in half-English, half-Arabic.  The major told the man to start pumping oil.  The man said he needs army security.  So, the major said he would provide security for an hour if the guy pumped gas. (The colonel told me later they were just driving by on their way to a meeting when they saw this big angry crowd and decided to help, they have no mission to protect gas stations.) Then the manager said that he doesn’t want security to pump gas, he wants the army to get all the people out of the station because he just doesn’t want to pump any more gas that day.  All his workers went home because they’re sick of getting beat up by angry drivers.  So, he can’t pump anything.  The soldiers, then, just left.  It was very odd.  They came like they were going to solve everything and then they just walked away.  The crowd was very angry and surrounded the gas station office.  I went in to the office where the head manager was sitting looking exhausted.  I felt kind of scared, all these people surrounding this little office.  So, I left.  The crowd was so angry, but they weren’t doing anything to me.

I got back to my hotel and ran in to a friend who asked if I heard about the big explosion at a gas station.  I ran out and found a translator and we took a cab.  My friend said the explosion was near the National Museum.  It took me a while to realize that my new translator doesn’t speak much English and thought a Museum is a theater.  I realized this after we drove by our third theater and there was no gas station explosion.  We finally saw massive smoke in the distance and followed it.  It’s a huge fire.  The army surrounded the place and wouldn’t let anyone, especially press, near by.  I couldn’t get any information.  I was ready to just leave, but my translator said we could find a better way to see things.  It was now pretty dark out, my first time being out at night in Baghdad, and this was a poor neighborhood.  My friend who was there earlier said the crowd got very ugly and some Iraqis told her she should leave for her safety.  So, I was nervous. But we walked down this dark alley and found some people who took us up the very dark stairs of their house to their roof where I could see everything.  It was so massive a fire.  Two big gas trucks and a whole building on fire.  15 cars burnt to shells.  I saw one body lying in the street.  The Iraqis were saying 60 or more people died.  One guy said hundreds.  The soldiers said it was only 4 who died.  This is typical here.  You don’t know.  The general story was that electricity came back on in the neighborhood and, as often happens, people shot guns in the air to celebrate.  One of the bullets hit a gas tank and the explosion happened.  The Iraqis on the roof were very angry.  They said that Americans can put out a fire in 10 minutes, why are they letting this one burn.  The Americans weren’t actually doing anything to stop the fire.  They were just doing crowd control.  Local fire trucks were handling the fire.  Handling it badly as far as I could tell.  Every ten minutes or so a new truck would come by and shoot foam at the fire. But they kept shooting too high and not hitting the fire at all.  Maybe this is a technique, but it seemed like a fuck up.  The people on the roof with me yelled at them to shoot lower, and then they’d shoot too low.  When they left, the fire was just as ferocious.

One sign of the massive need is on display in front of the hotel all the time.  This man, Mohamed Zubeidi, declared himself mayor of Baghdad a few weeks ago.  He was just arrested by the US forces and is no longer acting as mayor.  I spent some time with him on Saturday and he seemed like a sleazy, lying politician.  Telling everyone: no problem.  And having no solutions, no suggestions for how to solve any problem.  Anyway, when he first declared himself mayor, he created this one page job application form.  It asks your name, your former occupation, your association with the Ba’ath party.  There’s this grid where you can fill out what hours of the week you are free to work.  I find that grid funny, since everybody in Iraq is unemployed right now, I assume pretty much everyone is free to work any hours anyone asks them to.  He handed these forms out for a day or so and it got out of hand.  People started Xeroxing the forms and selling them for 250 dinars, about 10 cents.  There are people all up and down the street in front of my hotel, the Baghdad Ishtar Sheraton (Zubeidi’s city hall was in the coffee shop here), selling these forms.  And there are thousands and thousands of people all day every day buying and filling out the forms.  They would try to hand them to Zubeidi’s people, but he long since stopped taking them.  Now they hand them to the US Army guys guarding the hotel.  They have huge piles of them.  I asked a soldier why they’re taking the forms, and he said he didn’t know.  They keep handing them over, so he takes them.  But nobody is going to look at these forms.  They’re thrown out every day.  But every day, more and more people come to fill them out and hand them over.

Speaking of crowds and soldiers.  There is barbed concertina wire surrounding the hotel in every open space.  On the inside of the wire are a bunch of soldiers and some tanks.  On the other side of the wire are thousands of Iraqis calling across to the soldiers asking for something.  A lot are doing the job application thing.  A lot want to talk to someone in charge, anyone in charge.  I don’t know what else they’re doing.  The crowd is a mix.  When I’ve asked a few people who they are, some are former high level people in ministries.  Most are just young guys who are trying to get something.  It’s really hard to leave the hotel, because you have to push your way through this massive crowd.  Several reporters have been pickpocketed.  Women are constantly felt up by these guys.  It’s unpleasant.  But it doesn’t seem especially dangerous.  Every other day about, there’s a big protest.  There’s been pro-Zubeidi and anti-Zubeidi marches.  There has been a few Shi’ite marches which I didn’t understand.  Yesterday there was a protest that became a massive prayer session with all these people getting down on the road and praying.  When I talk to the soldiers, some are kind of freaked out by all these people.  One female soldier just stared at me and said: you’re going out into that?  Some soldiers seem to be really trying to figure out what these Iraqis are all about.  The other night, ABC tv threw a party and there were some soldiers there saying it’s sad to watch other people drink, but they can’t.  So, I took a bunch of beers to my room and they came over and we drank and talked.  It was three kids, and they seem to be working very hard trying to understand what the Iraqis on the other side of the wire want.  They let some in to their side and talk to them.  They say they’ve made some friends.  They said they were against the war, never understood why we’re fighting it.  But they feel glad that these people are free now.  And they’re upset that these free people are so mad at the US.  But these three guys seemed to be working hard to figure the place out.  They said they like peace-keeping, which most soldiers tell me they hate.  They were all in Kosovo and said that was fun.  One guy said he’d love to stay here a year and really get to know it.  That’s very surprising.  Everyone else just wants to go home.  Most soldiers hate this place.  I’m writing all this because there was that incident yesterday where 15 Iraqis were killed by US soldiers at a protest in Fallujah.  The US says the crowd fired on them.  People in the crowd say no, the soldiers just started firing.  I don’t know what happened.  But it is so easy to imagine the soldiers just freaking out.  Around the same time as that protest, I came across a protest at one of the Presidential Palaces.  There were all these pro-Zubeidi people yelling across concertina wire at a bunch of soldiers.  I didn’t even pause before I went in to the middle of the protest crowd to get across the wire to find this Marine Captain I was looking for.  The people were protesting loudly, but it didn’t seem scary at all.  But when I got across, the soldiers were freaking out.  Their commander said he couldn’t talk to me because he’s fully focused on force protection.  The soldiers had their guns up and across their chests, fingers on the triggers.  It seemed absurd.  They should just ignore these people.  When I got ready to leave, the commander said “you better stay right here until this thing dies down.  For your safety.”  I waited a minute just to be polite and then went out through the crowd.  I’m reasonably sure they aren’t actually pro-Zubeidi anyway, they just got paid to be there.  But my point is that the troops have this heightened sense of terror about crowds of Iraqis and especially Iraqis with guns.  But all Iraqis or most Iraqis have guns.  It’s not a big deal.  I was on the street where dollars are traded for dinars and every few minutes someone would shoot a gun in the air.  I don’t know why.  But it’s just normal.  It seemed embarrassing that the soldiers were so out of touch with the reality of the situation.  I guess they have to be vigilant and everything, but shouldn’t somebody explain to them basic things about Iraq.

I really have a bad feeling about the reconstruction effort here, as I write all the time.  A friend of mine talked with some of the people on the ORHA team’that’s the group of Americans who are recreating Iraqi government and infrastructure.  The ORHA people said it’s a total mess.  It’s the opposite of a power grab.  Every group is trying to take as little responsibility as possible: the US Army, USAID, etc.  They’re all terrified and asking everyone else to take control.  The ORHA people told my friend they have absolutely no plan.  They came to Iraq with no idea about what to do.  Jay Garner, the head of ORHA, looks and acts like what he is: a retired Grandpa from Florida who is playing at running a country.  It’s so depressing.  I’m sure I’m wrong and they’ll figure it out somehow and it won’t be as fucked as it looks. But it sure looks fucked.  A big part of the problem is that their public relations effort is without question the worst I have ever seen in my life.  Every reporter says the same thing.  There are a few thousand reporters here covering reconstruction.  Most are staying in one of two hotels right next to each other.  And ORHA–just like the US Army–has no public relations contacts at the hotel.  Every once in a while, they’ll post a flier on a window.  That’s about it.  This is probably the biggest US foreign policy stories in a long time, and they’re just not making contact with us.  Which is idiotic, I think.  They’re trying to give the impression that they’re running things very smoothly, but we have no way of contacting them.  A few have sat phones, but they never ever answer them.  I’ve been calling for days and I’ve never reached anyone.  So, I drive around the city and interview Iraqis about how fucked everything is.  Garner says they have contacts at all the ministries.  So, I drive to the ministries and meet high level people who tell me they’ve never spoken to any Americans.  Nobody is helping them in any way.  I’ve spent a lot of time with the director of research for Iraq’s Central Bank–he’s just hanging out in this house with a lot of other central bankers, doing nothing–and he said nobody has contacted him or anyone he knows.  So, I report all this.  Which is bad for the US.  A lot of people listen to the radio show I work for.  And I’m just one reporter.  We’re not reporting what they want us to be.  And if they have just had some idiot at the hotel sitting at a desk, I’d be obliged to put in some quotes from him about how they’re on top of everything and everything is going really smoothly.  But I can’t find anyone from ORHA to comment on anything.  They’re fucking the press operation up so badly, maybe they’re doing a brilliant job at everything else, but it doesn’t seem likely.  The other thought I have is that they’re not fucking up the press operation, they’re keeping us out of the loop on purpose.  Bu the conclusion, then, is the same: the operation is not going well.

Monday was the most frustrating day for a lot of us.  ORHA was holding it’s second big meeting of Iraqi tribal, religious, and political leaders.  It’s at this convention center right near the hotel.  I showed up there, and the army guys explained that press can’t drive in the main entrance, but has to go around the back.  This is not far.  Like a block away.  But the army has closed off so many roads, that we literally drove for two hours to get that one block.  We had to drive 15 minutes out of Baghdad to get on this other road that comes around to the back.  This is insane.  They should want reporters covering this event. It’s good news for them.  But more than that, why do they cut off so much of the city.  If it pisses me off, imagine how an Iraqi feels just trying to get to his house.  When I made the two hour trek around town and got to the checkpoint, they said only 8 media people are allowed to cover this massive event.  Somehow, I got past the check point, but they turned away the New York Times and the Washington Post and who knows who else.  But I wish I had been turned away.  Because making it past the checkpoint only meant I got to sit in a parking lot for several hours waiting.  They wouldn’t let anybody in to cover the actual event.  They wanted us all to sit there and we’d be able to do a 15 minute press availability at 6 in the evening.  At 2:30, I left.  Everyone who stayed said it was such a disaster.  It took several hours to screen all the reporters and then they wouldn’t let them report anything, just take pictures of random unidentified Iraqis speaking in Arabic.  Didn’t we liberate this country for freedom?  Isn’t freedom of the press an important one of our freedoms?  I don’t know, man, it pisses me off.

Despite all this stuff I’ve written, Baghdad just feels like a normal, poor city now.  Most stores are open.  Most restaurants, too.  Traffic is horrible.  You do see bombed out, looted buildings.  But for the most part, it doesn’t seem like a place reeling from war or a place with no government, no laws.  It’s true that if you ask any one of the many people wandering the streets you will quickly realize this place is in crisis.  But driving around, it doesn’t seem that bad.

I’ve been avoiding local food, because almost everyone has gotten sick.  Yesterday, a friend asked if I wanted to go to this great restaurant.  I felt like it was time to get over my paranoia about food, so I went with him.  And of course, I’m sick.  Not horribly, not the many days in bed feeling agony that friends have had.  But I am kind of sick and it’s unpleasant and I’m taking the day off and I’m going to stick to eating MREs.

Taking the day off allows me to actually have thoughts that seem semi-coherent.  Which is why I’m writing so damn much today.  This story has turned.  We’re all monitoring how media are covering Iraq these days and noticing that it’s just not the big story anymore. It’s kind of depressing.  I check Reuters first, and yesterday was the first time they didn’t have a special Focus on Iraq page on their website.  They only had two stories form Iraq.  Everyone seems interested in this SARS thing, which I have not followed and only sort of understand.  The New York Times–as you probably know’stopped their Nation at War section and only has one or two Iraq stories on the front page now.  My friend watched the BBC yesterday and for the first time the first ten minutes had no Iraq coverage.  I had a story last week that never aired.  That’s a first.  They said it was very good, but got bumped for more pressing local events and SARS stories.  Fuck SARS, man.  Journalists are leaving here in droves.  The photographers are most eager to leave.  They say the story is no longer visual.  It’s all about meetings now and meetings just aren’t interesting to photograph.  Every day some friends leave.  Every day people ask: how long are you staying?  When I say at least another month, people groan.  How could you stand it?  There are still new people arriving every day and people say it’s now the B-team coming in. The star reporters are leaving.  One major paper, where I have a lot of friends, is sending some metro reporters with no foreign experience.  Iraq is now for the trainees.  It’s also harder and harder to get stories.  The first week or so, I just walked out of the hotel and stories hurled themselves at me.  Now, I drive around and around and many days I find nothing.  Things are still fascinating, but I can’t do a story every day about how the whole country is fucked.  I can’t do a ‘there is no government’ story every day.  Can’t do a “People are broke and miserable” story.  The palaces are so cool, but that’s been done to death.  Now I wish I wasn’t doing daily stories.  It now feels like it’s more a lengthy magazine story place.  But I have to feed the daily machine and I’m just too tired and overworked to do anything else.  And things are so inefficient. It’s so hard to work without telephones.  Without knowing where people are.  I wish I could just find some family or some neighborhood and just sit and drink tea with them and go deep.  But I can’t afford the time for that.  The TV networks have someone sitting at a computer all day checking the wires. But I can’t do that.  So, most days, I don’t know what’s happening in the city until the end of the day, when it’s dark and too dangerous to go back out.  I was going to write that I’m not complaining. But I am complaining.  It is frustrating.  I had a big fight with my editor.  I yelled at her and said I’ll just leave.  We worked out this arrangement where I call her at 6:30 every night, she reads me the wires from the day and I have one hour to go get a story related to the day’s stories.  I said I don’t want to chase wire stories.  I don’t want to do what everyone else does.  But I have to some days and then other days I can do longer pieces that are my own.  It’s such a stark education in how the media works.  A story is hot when it’s very hot and everyone comes and then it gets cool and there’s just a lot less reporting done.  I know that some of my friends are doing great work.  And I’m sure there will still be lots of stories coming out of here.  But it’s not the same.  I think it would be better if there was a bigger commitment to doing these stories in-depth for a longer time.  But that just won’t work, somehow.  We’d still be reading lots of Rwanda and Kosovo and Afghanistan stories.  And what about other parts of the world that haven’t been hot for years: Central America or whatever.  We can’t hold focus attention on every story forever.  I feel mixed.  I’m very impressed by a lot of the reporters here.  They dig and find amazing things.  But I also have the feeling that we’re not getting the real essence of Iraq somehow.  We report on the day’s events and we report that the Shi’ites are doing something big, organizing and protesting and that’s going to be something important to deal with some time soon.  We all have the sense this thing could get very ugly.  That there will be suicide bombers against American troops some day soon.  Maybe a year, I don’t know.  That there will be some clash caused by the Kurds and the Shi’ites and the Sunnis.  That Iraq will experience unbearable turmoil transforming from a basically pre-modern state into a what?  A liberal democracy?  A theocracy?  A civil war?  I don’t know.  Just changing the economy from socialist (Saddamist, some people called it) into capitalist will be massive and will cause huge disruptions.  I keep feeling like if I was paying more attention, if I was digging more and getting more in-depth, I could do a better job preparing for what the future will become.  How many reporters in 1967 were able to predict the next 36 years of misery in Israel and the West Bank.  How many reporters at the end of World War I were able to lay out the turmoil that would be the Middle East for the rest of the century.  Maybe a lot did, I don’t know.  I feel like a lot of us just have a sense of the chaos and the stakes, but we don’t know where it’s going.  It’s funny.  There are such differences between different kinds of reporters.  A lot of the daily news reporters have such strong opinions and strong analysis.  They say things so definitively.  But I just feel confused and overwhelmed.  A friend of mine who left the other day who is a great magazine writer was telling me he goes to all these places and the daily reporters always seem to know everything, they talk like they have definitive answers to all the questions.  But he just looks around and doesn’t know what the fuck is happening.  He just feels overwhelmed.  And he writes about that.  There are also the adrenaline/war-junkies who just want to be around the hot hot story, the bang-bang, they call it, and don’t have any interest in going in depth.  The photographers, in general, are like that.  So, this is torture for them now.  They just want to go home and wait for North Korea or Syria or who knows what to heat up and then they’ll go there for a few weeks.  We were talking the other day about what the next big thing will be.  People seem to think Syria won’t be a war.  Neither will North Korea.  So, they don’t know when we’ll all do this again.  One photographer friend told me that I’m really different from everyone here.  He’s never met someone like me in the field.  Curious about the deeper, longer term story, not interested in bang-bang, not interested in getting on top of the day’s story.  I find I just don’t care about the specifics.  I don’t care about getting the exact number of dead and wounded or being the first to report something Jay Garner is doing or getting up at 5 in the morning to drive to a hospital in Falluja and piece together exactly what happened between the American soldiers and the Iraqi protestors.  I just want to sit with people, not especially important people, and figure out how their lives used to work and how they work now.  This seems like showing off or something and I feel embarrassed to write this, but I made a promise to myself to just type what’s on my mind and not worry about it.  A friend just called, as I wrote this, telling me there was more shooting in Falujah and Donald Rumsfeld is here and she drove all over town hunting him down.  I do get this panicky feeling whenever I hear something like that.  Like, fuck, I’m not on top of the story.  I’m missing everything.  I’m such a bad reporter.  I have that feeling at least once a day.  What I really want is to sleep for two weeks and then come back and only have one magazine story to write.  Maybe I can work that out some day soon.  It’s so hard to get perspective.  I took today off, but I’m still so wired and I can’t take a nap.  I can’t focus on a book.  I’m just watching movies (The Longest Yard) and the Simpsons on my computer and playing solitaire. I play a lot of solitaire.  An embarrassing amount, I must say.

That’s what happened today, but that’s the kind of thing that’s happened every day.  Yesterday, I went to my translator’s neighborhood because he told me there are a lot of former Ba’ath party officials there and lots of powerful people and I thought I could begin to unravel the complex ways power worked under Saddam.  But I ended up spending several hours in a room full of young men who didn’t know anything about power and had a lot of questions about the Americans.  They threw every conspiracy theory at me.  Only one of them was saying life was better under Saddam.  This one guy, saying that he loves Saddam.  Saddam was a great leader.  All his friends made fun of him and laughed a lot and said they always hated Saddam and are glad he’s gone.  But nobody wants the Americans here.  I gave this big room a lecture.  I was so sick of the constant conspiracy theories.  I told them that they had to learn how to analyze information, it’s one of the most important things in a democracy–if they get a democracy.  They were raised on the lies of Saddam’s media.  They were taught that everything is a big conspiracy and that everything is either all good’the regime–or all bad–America, Israel, etc.  I told them life doesn’t work that way.  Things are more complex than that.  I don’t like Bush, I said, but I don’t then decide that every single thing he does is horrible.  I analyze the information.  Like, they were saying that they, like most Iraqis, believe Saddam now lives in the US, protected by the CIA.  I said that’s crazy, because if that were discovered it would be the end of Bush and the end of the Republican party for a long time.  And that we have a vigorous free press that would find that out and report it.  I told them that these ridiculous conspiracy theories allow them to believe whatever they want, without any basis in fact.  And that’s dangerous.  They have to consider evidence and come to realistic conclusions.  It felt absurd talking like that.  They have no experience of a free press.  They can’t imagine what one would be like.  They can’t imagine trusting anything that’s reported.  So, they go on and on with whatever jackass idea they hear from their friends.  I know I’ve written a lot about these conspiracy theories.  They are so prevalent and they are so dangerous.  Because it really makes you feel that it doesn’t matter what the US does, what Israel does, what anybody does.  Arabs will go on believing these stupid, unforgiving ideas.  How are they going to pick reasonable leaders.  They’ll just vote for whoever spouts the most bullshit.  I really liked most of those guys.  They seemed so nice and friendly and curious.  They had a lot of questions.  But I’m pretty sure that today they believe their conspiracy theories more than anything I told them.  I just turn off usually when people talk like that.  It’s just not fun or interesting.  I love having good conversations with people where there are challenging ideas being argued and new perspectives.  But most conversations in the Arab world are just listening to someone saying the exact same idiotic theory you heard fifty times.  And you hear the same ideas from educated people and from uneducated, young and old, rich and poor.  I once joked that any six Israelis have more opinions than all the Arabs in the world.  It’s not true.  I can’t come up with six different opinions I hear in the Arab world.  There’s one or two that you hear over and over.  There are some who don’t like Islamicization, but that’s rare.  There are a few Iraqis who say it’s good the Americans are here, but that’s also rare.  There are many Sunni who say Shiites are not really Muslims and are bad people.  There are Christians who don’t like any of the Muslims. But when it comes to having a take on the politics of the Middle East, there is really one opinion.  All the Arab leaders are terrible.  They’re terrible because the US wants them to be terrible, because the US only wants oil and wants to keep the people down.  And the US wants Israel to be safe, so they want to keep the Arabs weak.  (Sometimes, someone will add that the US wants to destroy Islam.)  The more the US says they don’t like someone’saddam or Osama bin Laden or Arafat, say’the more Arabs know those people are employees of the CIA, doing the US’s bidding.  This is all because the Jews want to rule the world and already control the US Congress and the US president.  The conclusion to all this is that any one Arab can’t do anything.  There’s no personal responsibility, because they are up against the world’s only superpower and its Jew minions.  Or the Jews are the superpower and the US is its minion.  Look, I know Bush is an asshole.  I don’t like him, I think he’s stupid and stole the election and all that.  I think they’re fucking this Iraq thing up pretty bad so far.  And I know the CIA has done all sorts of crappy things and that as vital as our democracy is, we don’t know everything the government does or why it does it.  I don’t trust Wolfowitz or Perle or Cheney or Rumsfeld.  I don’t think the response to conspiracy theories is to be loyally pro-American or anything.  But, these theories are not intelligent engagements with the issues.  They’re an abdication of thought.  And it’s really dangerous.  The Arab world is just very fucked up right now.  You have 300 million people living under varying degrees of dictatorships, feeling humiliated and poor and wanting so much that they don’t have and you do get the feeling things could start blowing up even worse than they already have.  And I want there to be leaders here who have good, reasonable thoughts that are practical and grounded in reality and can help the people do what needs to be done.  Basically, they have to do what at least parts of Asia and Latin America have done (I know lots of parts haven’t) which is stop being third world idiots and develop modern economies that allow wealth to be created by the people, not by the government for the government.  They need free speech and civil society.  They need democracy.  But there are none of those voices.  Well, very few.  The loudest, most compelling voices are the Islamists.  They say the perfect government is the one Mohammed established in Mecca in the 600s.  And we just need to go back to that.  No.  You don’t.  You can’t.  That was a tiny, tribal, pastoral culture in a pre-modern world.  Those rules don’t apply anymore.  Become Sweden.  Don’t become Mecca.  Oh, it makes me angry.  And it makes me scared.  And more importantly, it’s just so fucking boring.  I know I’m ranting and not particularly coherently.  I probably have sun stroke and am exhausted and annoyed by a lousy week.  But what I’m saying is true.  There are, of course, educated Arabs who have a reasonable and intelligent take on everything.  But it is so rare to meet them.  Really uncommon.  And they complain much more angrily than I am about the state of Arab thinking.

Another thing that bothers me is that I finally checked my email after a long time away.  I got a lot of very nice notes.  But some of them mentioned Robert Fisk, the British reporter who lives in Beirut and writes on the Arab world.  I used to respect him, he seemed like a fresh, brave voice.  No.  He’s not.  He’s a liar.  Every single reporter I’ve spoken to who has worked with him says he makes everything up.  They go out and report the same story and then read what he writes and what he writes just didn’t happen.  He regurgitates these conspiracy theories and makes them palatable for readers of Z magazine or whatever.  Don’t trust this man.  Don’t trust Chris Hedges either.  He’s even worse than Fisk.  I also was upset to get some emails from Americans that equated Saddam with Bush.  I’m no fan of Bush.  But that is simply absurd.  The evidence we’re seeing here shows that Saddam was much worse than we even realized.  It looks like he killed at least 3 million and maybe 8 million Iraqis for everything from actual political opposition to just praying or selling bad meat or being the brother of a guy who was heard on a bus complaining about the regime.  Or no reason at all.  There are only 24 million people in Iraq.  I haven’t done the math, but I’m guessing Saddam will turn out to be the worst mass murderer of his own people on a percentage basis in the history of the world.  Leave aside how he amassed a level of personal wealth and a string of hundreds of palaces that boggle the mind in one of the poorest countries in the world.  Leave aside the total terror every Iraqi lived under.  Someone equated Saddam’s media operation with Fox News.  That’s absurd.  I watched Fox News in Kuwait on the war and they are obviously absurdly biased.  But while I was watching or while you’re watching, we don’t live in terror that someone will knock on the door and take us away to jail for looking at satellite TV or toss the body of our mother on our front doorstep because she sold some Ba’ath party official meat he thought wasn’t as good as he expected.

Yesterday, I went to the first press conference of Jay Garner, the new American governor of Iraq.  He’s this straight-talking former General with a down-home southern accent.  He sort of shrugs and acts like, hey, we’ve got a tough job, but we’re doing it well.  We’ll take care of this mess.  I don’t know.  He says they’ll start putting the new Iraqi government in power next week.  I have a very bad feeling about all this.  He keeps saying the Iraqis will rule themselves.  The Americans will not run the country.  But he also says things like–if we mess up (i.e., if the Iraqis mess up) we can just start all over (i.e., the US will put someone new in power).  I guess there’s a chance he can pull this off–bring an actual vital democracy to Iraq that feels, to Iraqis, like it’s their own.  But the chances of it going bad seem much greater than the chances of it going well.

A bunch of us reporters were joking the other night about the lines to use to pick up women when we get back home.  I have this friend, a photographer, who is so funny.  He says he hears them all the time.  “I’m so tired; it’s just so exhausting” (I use that one on this site constantly).  “It’s very difficult to talk about the things I’ve seen.”  With the possible add-on: “But I feel so open with you, for some reason.”  “It’s very hard to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and realize today could be the day that you’ll die.”  “People here just don’t understand (the Middle East, or Bosnia, or Rwanda, or whatever).”

Baghdad feels more and more normal every day.  Last week, the only things being sold were food and soap and guns, for the most part.  Now, you see so much being sold: sneakers, Satellite dishes, TVs, clothes, stationary.  The electricity is still out in a lot of parts of the city and people complain about there not being water, but I see water everywhere.  The other big complaint is that almost nobody has gone back to work and even the people who have, haven’t been paid yet.  I don’t know who is doing it, but a lot of the blown up tanks and cars and rocket launchers have been cleaned up.  There are far fewer US troops on the streets.  They were everywhere last week.  Yesterday, I had to interview some soldiers and I drove for 20 minutes before I found any.  They are still certainly a presence, but now it’s a bit surprising to see them, like they don’t belong.  When I first arrived, the city felt like an armed camp.  There is still gunfire, but far less.  Maybe a few shots a day, rather than a few shots every ten minutes.  I hear the streets are safer after dark, though I don’t go out at night and very few reporters do.  There are still armed bands looking to rob.  It does seem like once the electricity is fully restored and there is some kind of government installed, maybe, just maybe, the place will just feel like a fully normal city.  There are a few more major moments that will happen.  Most people are convinced Saddam is still in Baghdad somewhere and that he will get caught.  That will be huge, of course.  The Shiites are up to something.  They are so well organized and getting more and more so every day.  They are running their own schools and hospitals and police.  It seems likely they will start fighting either each other or the new government.  But the biggest question is just what will this new government be.  Will it be Iraqis or exiled Iraqis who are tight with the US, or will it be a puppet regime.  How will it be accepted. And how do you build a democracy, free press, civil society, in a country that hasn’t had any of that.  Iraqis are constantly asking me what the future will be. I always say the same thing.  Actually, now my translator just answers without asking me. I say that their material quality of life will improve dramatically.  They’ll have more money, the infrastructure will be improved, they’ll have McDonald’s and cell phones and everything other countries have.  But the political future is completely mysterious.  I don’t think anybody knows.