The LAT ran a painfully poignant column today from a 54-year-old [tag]Iraq[/tag]i reporter in The Times’ Baghdad Bureau. His name was withheld in order to protect his safety, but after reading the column, one wonders whether anyone in Baghdad has any realistic shot at safety anyway.
On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western [tag]Baghdad[/tag] when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.
As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn’t dead. The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn’t dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.
I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.
Five minutes later, a white Volkswagen pulled up, a passenger got out of the car, shot the victim three times, and drove off. “No one did anything,” the writer said. “No one lifted a finger.”
This is not because the people are callous or heartless; it’s because people in Baghdad have no choice. They’re living in a nightmare in which “fear dictates everything we do.” He added, “Bringing someone to the hospital or to the police is out of the question. Nobody trusts the police, and nobody wants to answer questions.”
As recently as a year ago, the writer said he did not intend to leave Iraq. Now he’s almost desperate to do so: “Things are going from bad to worse, and I can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.”
It was just one of a number of important Iraq stories from the morning papers.
The New York Times reports on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s inability to lead Iraq, and his at least partial responsibility for the instability throughout his country.
Senior Iraqi and American officials are beginning to question whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has the political muscle and decisiveness to hold Iraq together as it hovers on the edge of a full civil [tag]war[/tag].
Four months into his tenure, Mr. Maliki has failed to take aggressive steps to end the country’s sectarian strife because they would alienate fundamentalist Shiite leaders inside his fractious government who have large followings and private armies, senior Iraqi politicians and Western officials say. He is also constrained by the need to woo militant Sunni Arabs connected to the insurgency.
Patience among Iraqis is wearing thin. Many complain that they have seen no improvement in security, the economy or basic services like electricity. Some Sunni Arab neighborhoods seem particularly deprived, fueling distrust of the Shiite-led government.
Bush, at least publicly, expresses strong support for Maliki, but behind the scenes, the president’s top aides are pessimistic. “The thing you hear the most is that [Maliki] never makes any decisions,” said a former senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. “And that drives Bush crazy. He doesn’t take well to anyone who talks about getting something accomplished and then refuses to take the first step.”
And then there’s Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command, who dismissed earlier rumors about a modest drawdown in U.S. troops before next spring and said conditions in Iraq necessitate the current levels.
The U.S. military is unlikely to reduce forces in Iraq before next spring because the current contingent of more than 140,000 troops is battling sectarian violence that could prove “fatal” to the country if not arrested, the top American commander for the Middle East said yesterday.
“This level will probably have to be sustained through the spring” amid aggressive operations to stabilize Baghdad, said Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command. “I do believe that the secular tensions, if left unchecked, could be fatal to Iraq . . . and the center of the problem is Baghdad. It’s the main effort,” he told defense reporters.
In a sober assessment, Abizaid, who has overseen the U.S. military strategy in Iraq since July 2003, said he had hoped six months ago for the withdrawal of several thousand U.S. troops from Iraq by now. “We clearly did not achieve the force levels that we had hoped to,” he said, citing sectarian unrest, ongoing weaknesses in the capabilities of Iraqi security forces — in particular the police — and the five-month political void in the country after the December 2005 national elections.
Asked point-blank whether the United States is winning in Iraq, Abizaid replied: “Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we’re winning the war.”