Being There

Nir Rosen, who is slowly becoming the Baghdad correspondent, offers a raw glimpse into the New Iraq:

    Hundreds of Iraqis were emerging from the smoke, running away in every direction from the smoking ruin. Hundreds more were just standing in shock, crying, screaming. A woman walked past me, carrying the inert body of a child. American Humvees began arriving in twos and threes, as did Iraqi police cars, and a few dozen Iraqi police and American soldiers tried to take control of the chaos. Jumpy and confused U.S. soldiers tried to turn back the crowd of Iraqis rushing to help, or just to see. “There are many dead people,” one Iraqi man shouted, running from the hotel’s wreckage and asking for aid. The soldiers swung their guns from side to side, looking for an enemy, as Iraqi police with weapons drawn tried to push back the throng. …

    In the hours after the devastation of the Mount Lebanon, the ‘Iraqi Street’ was blaming it on a missile — meaning the Americans — and everybody had a friend or a friend of a friend who swore he had seen the missile hit a car outside the hotel. That’s the way it is in Baghdad these days. Sunnis and Shi’ites are united — like never before — in the belief that the Americans and the Jews are responsible for all the sectarian attacks. They reason that the Americans want to remain in Iraq and are trying to provoke a civil war to serve as a pretext for staying. The Jews are blamed simply because they’re the Jews. In Iraq, ‘the Jews’ are everywhere — feared and loathed. The Jewish hands are always working their evil, the Jewish fingers reaching into every nook and cranny, selling drugs and pornography, defiling Islam. …

    The pace of the violence has become so constant, it’s almost normal, almost mundane. Unless an explosion is perceptibly close, it is just an echo, and nobody pauses in mid conversation or stops chewing his kabob. None of the Iraqis in Baghdad really seems to care much about the American soldiers dying on a daily basis. And it seems like few of the American officials care much about the far greater number of dead Iraqis.

But surely someone painted a school or dug a well this week, no? Read the whole thing.