“The situation is very bad”

Last updated on: October 4, 2004 at 3:20 pm by Fred Clark

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“The situation is very bad” 2004-10-04T15:20:12-04:00 Fred Clark

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Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Baghdad, sends a long, forthright e-mail to a few friends about the reality of the liberation of Iraq.

Those friends forward it along to some others, etc., and eventually it ends up posted on Poynter's forums.

And then it gets excerpted here:

It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to 10 percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are things?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. …

Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.

A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped. He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was supposed to love America for liberating Iraq. …

The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day. The various elements within it — baathists, criminals, nationalists and al-Qaida — are cooperating and coordinating. …

America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date — and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly. …

Who did this war exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up and al-Qaida is running around in Iraq?

Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler. I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad. …

For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle.

President Bush would point out that this is typical liberal media bias.

What Fassihi describes as "terrorism, chaos and mayhem" is really just evidence that the insurgency is getting desperate. This is hard work and the dead-enders are likely to increase their violence temporarily until Saddam is captured … in the wake of Saddam's capture … until the transfer of sovereignty … until the elections in January.

We must stay the course, the president says, the light at the end of the tunnel is just half a league, half a league, half a league onward.

Update: Laura Rozen finds that Fassihi will not be writing about Iraq for the WSJ again until after the Nov. 2 election.

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