60 Months in the Red
Zone
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Sharon
sent this along: it's from the New York Observer, and I
have put Michael's quotes in bold print:
60
Months in the Red Zone
Five
Years Later, the American Press Corps in Iraq Is
War-Weary and Depleted—Also Committed, Engaged and
Desperately Seeking a Narrative to Wake Up Readers;
‘The Press Redeemed in Baghdad,’ Says George Packer,
‘What It Missed in Washington’
“It’s
the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first
casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad
correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this
war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to
you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi
government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The
militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even
the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s
confusion and exaggeration. The truth is the most
elusive thing in war, particularly in an
insurgency.”
Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language
of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only
language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous,
brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips
from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news
starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes;
a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty
lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and
then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that
metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists
(according to a November 2007 study by the Project
for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a
dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story
to sell to Americans. As the American press corps
gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and
more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths
that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned
about the war in Iraq.
Chief among them is that even if you grab hold of a
part of the truth, it has a way of becoming false.
Second: If you manage to find a true story, don’t
depend on anyone back home wanting to hear it.
Bob Reid, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Associated
Press, filed this June 1: “U.S. military deaths
plunged in May to the lowest monthly level in more
than four years and civilian casualties were down
sharply, too, as Iraqi forces assumed the lead in
offensives in three cities and a truce with Shiite
extremists took hold.
“But many Iraqis as well as U.S. officials and
private security analysts are uncertain whether the
current lull signals a long-term trend or is simply a
breathing spell like so many others before.”
Mr. Reid has been covering conflicts for over 30
years, in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, the Sudan, the
southern Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bosnia. But
this, he says, is different.
“Someone the other day told me that they thought Iraq
had gone through a sea change,” he said by phone from
Baghdad a little before midnight, June 9. “All of us
who have been longer know that there is a cyclical
quality to the violence here.”
Mr. Reid was sitting in the small house his wire
service keeps in the Red Zone of the city, finishing
work and planning to go to bed after a workday that
started around 8 a.m.
He calls his life “Groundhog Day.” He goes to bed in
the same building he worked in—with a book or, if
he’s lucky, an English-language movie on Arabic
satellite television—falls asleep, wakes up and
starts all over again. Like the war, it has its
predictable, grinding rhythm, and yet, like the war,
every day is completely different.
“Iraq has receded,” said John Burns, from a ferry off
the Isle of Man, England, where he’s covering a
motorcycle tournament. Mr. Burns was perhaps the Iraq
war’s best-known correspondent, who from 2003 to July
2007 was the chief of The New York Times’ Baghdad
bureau. “War is surprisingly easy to cover,” Mr.
Burns said. “I always said this. The story dictates
itself. There’s never one morning when you get up and
wonder what you’re going to do today.”
But it’s not a war anymore; it’s an occupation. And
for many reporters, one thing that is missing is a
narrative, a frame of reference to describe the
events they report but can’t quite explain.
“The Best and Brightest was written 5 or 10 years
after the events it described,” said George Packer,
who has covered the war for The New Yorker. “Books
will come out 5 or 10 years from now telling us
things we don’t know now. Right now we’ve probably
pushed it about as far as it can go from the limited
point of view of a Western journalist in the middle
of the events he’s describing.”
“For a long time, there was a single thrust of
narrative,” said Damien Cave, who went from The New
York Times’ Newark bureau to Iraq in July 2006 and
returned in December 2007. “Now I think it’s harder
to figure out what the narrative is. You’re trying to
figure out: What features speak to the news? And
because Iraq has become more fragmented, the
narratives are more fragmented. A story in Basra is
different from a story in Mosul and that’s definitely
different from a story a few years ago.”
“I think there are a lot of people who really want
information and that’s why we’re there,” said New
York Times Baghdad bureau chief James Glanz. “But
when somebody asks if it’s getting better? It’s a
fine place to start a conversation. But the thing
about Iraq, it’s about double exposures and overlays
and things like that. It’s a complicated place. It’s
a place where if you really want to boil it all down,
then the complexities of the systems have defeated
all these solutions. And you really can’t think about
it any other way. There’s no simple story line.”
Richard Engel of NBC News acknowledged the recent
drop in violence, and said it gave reporters more
room to report.
“How much you can move is impacted by the level of
danger. … I recently went down to Najaf, which is
south of Baghdad. I was walking around the city doing
interviews, without any kind of security protection
or back up at all. That felt great. I hadn’t done
that in years. A Chinese restaurant, takeout, just
opened up down the street from our bureau. There were
no businesses opening in ’06 and ’07. People are
getting out more. You see more people on the streets
going to markets. When I go to do interviews, I can
stay longer.”
The conventional wisdom has always been that a
reporter can’t stay in one place for more than 20
minutes—the amount of time security experts think it
takes for eyewitnesses to report their whereabouts to
potential kidnappers, and for the kidnappers to lay
their trap. Journalists are routinely increasing
their stays to 45 minutes or more.
The BBC’s John Muir visited the National Archive,
which is currently being patched back together after
the war, for an hour and a half. But his security
people were not happy about it.
“In general terms, it has made life a bit easier,” he
said. “Six months ago, I was able to go to one of the
worst Sunni neighborhoods, a place called Ameriya,
which had been a really, really rough neighborhood.
But you could go there because one of the
developments, which has fed into the security
improvement, is that a lot of the young Sunni guys
have turned away from Al Qaeda and have signed up to
fight them alongside the Americans. In that sense
it’s expanded the range of stories you can do, and
the places you can go with relative security. …
Violence is down, but it’s down to like more than 500
Iraqis being killed violently every month rather than
2,000. Those levels are still not very nice.”
“There’s no question it’s not the same front-page
story it was last year,” said Tina Sussman, the
Baghdad bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times. “It
just needs to be approached differently. It’s
human-interest-oriented. … That’s the way wars work.
They go in ebbs and flows. In March and in the first
half of April, we were on the front page frequently.
It’s inevitable. It doesn’t mean the story is over,
but, O.K., if the daily news isn’t grabbing
attention, then what is? What’s another way to tell
the story?”
“There’s a marked drop-off in the appetite for
stories from Iraq,” said ABC News correspondent Terry
McCarthy. “That’s partly due to the election, partly
because of fatigue, and partly because things have
started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs,
the massive attacks, you just don’t see them anymore.
A drip, drip story that’s getting a little bit better
day by day doesn’t make a headline. We have to
struggle to get more stories on the air. We have to
do more feature-type stuff. The news of the day is
not really here anymore.”
“It’s not difficult to judge what’s going to be on
page one,” John Burns said. “We had a rhythm of
stories like that for three or four years. It was a
journalistic high.
“It’s a lot more difficult now. The reporter in Iraq
finds himself similar to the problem of the reporter
in Paris and London and Hong Kong. You’ve got to show
enterprise. You’ve got to dig for the story, and very
often it’s a feature. And then you’ve got to compete
on an equal basis to get that story on the front
page.”
“We will be more likely to go ahead and file a story
on military activity around the country that doesn’t
rise to the level of top of the foreign news page,”
said Mr. Reid of the AP. But, “our editors are
showing increasing interest in features and a
decreasing interest in ‘Iraqi troops capture x amount
of people and five bombs went off,’ unless it really
does rise to the level of a huge explosion or
something like that.”
The question is, what level of risk makes a story
like that worth reporting?
“We
could almost sit on a downtown bus, the entire
Western press corps these days,” said Mr. Ware of
CNN. “Other organizations will keep the bare bones of
a bureau in place, but often it won’t be fully
staffed. We only see visiting
correspondents.”
According to Paul Friedman, senior vice president of
CBS News, CBS keeps a bureau in Baghdad, including
one full-time producer/bureau chief there, six months
on, six months off, but no full-time correspondent.
There is a pool of correspondents for CBS, including
Lara Logan, who show up to do stories over there. “We
cover the story when it changes in some significant
way,” said Mr. Friedman, who confirmed reports that
CBS News had had talks with CNN about using its
resources and reporters. The deal fell through
because of “rights issues.”
“It’s very hard to send people into dangerous
places,” said Mr. Friedman, “knowing that the
likelihood of what they report getting on the air is
low.”
THREE CASTLES
There are three large compounds that house many of
the American journalists still working in Baghdad.
“It’s almost like little castles,” said NBC’s Richard
Engel, who has reported in Baghdad since the
beginning of the war.
All three are in what’s called the Red Zone, outside
of the protective checkpoints that define the city’s
Green Zone.
NBC is in one of the three “castles,” along with some
other American media outlets.
“We happen to live right next to The Washington Post,
USA Today, L.A. Times and Time magazine,” said Mr.
Engel. “We are all in one compound. It’s a hotel
surrounded by some houses. We’ve put around some
perimeter security. Iraqis live within that compound
as well.
“We’re quite close. It’s a media center. We live
together. They’ll come over to our place for a
barbecue. Or I’ll go over to The Washington Post for
a drink or a barbecue. It’s very easy. We can walk.
There are no security restrictions.”
But he doesn’t socialize much with journalists
outside of his “castle.”
“You have to move through the badlands from one to
another,” Mr. Engel said. (To avoid targeting by
suicide bombers and kidnappers, the locations of all
three are generally not made public; but each is at
least a mile from the next.) “I go out every day
reporting. But it’s not really worth it to go and
organize security and take risks to go on a social
call to visit people at CNN or Fox.”
Jamie Tarabay, formerly chief of the NPR bureau,
lived “across the badlands” from Mr. Engel. “We have
a garden where we live,” she said. “We have barbecues
every now and then. CNN. ABC. Fox. CBS. Every now and
then there’s a block get-together, especially in the
summer. It’s nice. Because you’re all alone. But
you’re alone together. It’s nice to be able to share
your frustrations and chill out and relax.”
“We’re in an undisclosed location,” said Fox News’
Courtney Kealy of Castle Number Two. “We refer to it
as the concrete media village. I refer to my place as
an armed fortress, which it is. We have nice brief
respites where we can visit each other, and have
barbecues, within somebody’s compound.”
“We’re not in the Green Zone. We never have been. The
vast majority of the press has not been. If we are
accused of hotel journalism, fair enough. But when we
lived in the hotel, we were under siege just like the
rest of the city was. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, yawn, I
want to order room service because I don’t want to go
outside.’ We have a really great gym. We have a
massive amount of DVDs and books. And there is a
local Iraqi guy that made us a pool table, which is
great. But … a card game, or watching TV, or sitting
outside and having a barbecue is pretty much the
relaxation you get—with hopefully a couple times at
the gym, because you literally aren’t going anywhere
else. The irony of this war is that you gain weight.”
“In a limited way, yes, if you’re in one of these
enclaves, you can hang out with the people there a
little bit,” said The Times’ Mr. Glanz. He was
sitting at an outdoor table at the bistro Le Monde in
Morningside Heights. He’d been in New York for two
weeks and would be here for a few more. Fifty-one
years old, his hair is graying; he drank two café au
laits and fielded a phone call from a neck
specialist.
“But you can’t move from place to place. … I used to
go shopping in Baghdad, and I used to go to
restaurants. Then at a certain point we started
asking ourselves, O.K., if I’m out with my friend
Dexter Filkins and a bomb goes off—as it did one
night with The Washington Post a few years ago—and
let’s say Dexter gets killed. So I’m going to go back
to Dexter’s parents, let’s say, and say, ‘In the line
of duty, Dexter was killed.’ And they’ll say, ‘What
was he doing?’ And I’ll say we were out having kebab
at a restaurant. And they’ll say, ‘My son died while
you’re bureau chief because you were at a
restaurant?’
“You can’t do that anymore. You can’t do that. I
can’t say that he was out there carrying out the
mission of reporting, and we didn’t realize there was
this presence, there was an unfortunate incident
where there was this person there and he came from
around the corner, and blah blah. I’m the one who has
to call the wife, the brother, the sister, the
father, the mother, and say, you know, ‘Your son or
daughter is dead.’ I’m the one who will have to
explain what was going on at the time. … If I let
someone go into harm’s way for no journalistic
reason, I’ll never be able to justify it.”
THE WAR AT HOME
“I flew out on like the 16th of December,” said Jamie
Tarabay of her exit as the NPR’s Baghdad bureau chief
near the end of 2007. “And on the 18th, I was in New
York trying on my wedding dress. In January, we got
married. Then we went to Paris for a bit.
“It is a head trip leaving,” she said. “In any case,
wherever you go, being able to walk along a footpath
by yourself without an escort is great. Having
electricity 24 hours. Being able to pick what you
want to eat.”
But Ms. Sussman, the L.A. Times reporter, does not
feel she comes home a hero for her reporting.
“The level of ignorance is distressing,” she said.
“It shows people aren’t paying any attention to the
stories. They’re asking me about details like, ‘Do
you go out, do you go to the Green Zone?’ And I tell
them, ‘Just read the stories!’ If you just read the
stories, they wouldn’t have to ask. They say they’re
paying attention, but they don’t. If they ask you
what the situation is like, they’re not reading. The
New York Times, Reuters, the AP, the Los Angeles
Times, they produce a lot of copy! It’s so easy to
criticize the mainstream media for not covering the
story, but there’s a lot of coverage.”
And if you do try to retell the story, it’s not
always so warmly received.
“It’s a conversation stopper,” said Phillip
Robertson, a freelance reporter who covered Iraq for
Salon. “It’s not dinner-table conversation. Digging
up bodies in mass graves. Even the people who didn’t
see a lot saw way too much. That has a real effect.”
“Because the press put out all that stuff in the
early days in 2003, the press is now blamed,” said
Courtney Kealy of Fox News. “People say to me, what’s
the real story in Iraq? I say, read the books that
have come out and won Pulitzers. Look at my friends’
articles. Look at the stories I’ve done. They’re not
looking, and they’re not reading; they don’t want to.
And now the press corps gets a whole heck of a lot
of, ‘Well, you’re just hotel journalists.’ I come
home, people say to me, ‘What’s it like, have you
been brainwashed?’ People who like Fox have said,
‘Well, I like your stuff, but I won’t read that
paper.’ I say to them, anybody who has covered Iraq
for a serious time frame, they’re a solid reporter.
You can pretty much trust and read their stuff and
forget about thinking there’s some great media
conspiracy that we’ve all been co-opted by some
right-wing or left-wing agenda. But no one can get
their heads around that anymore.”
“There is a chance for this place to remain quiet.
There is a chance for the Iraqi army to get better.
There is a chance for a timetable for withdrawal that
could work. The only issue I have is when I talk to
people in the States … they really just ask me, what
should we do, have we won or lost, how long are we
staying? I think that winning and losing should be
struck from the lexicon right now.
“I just try and stay away from, ‘What’s a good news
story, or what’s a bad news story, or why did we come
here?’ It’s like people who are 35 and can’t stop
talking about their childhood. No matter how bad your
childhood was, at some point you have to take
responsibility for it and deal. Whether we were
supposed to come here or not, we’ve been here for
five years. History books have already been written.”
But the networks and, in many cases, the print media
are keenly aware of the questions their readers and
viewers want answers to. They are not always that
complicated, and they don’t always require live
reporting from Iraq.
“I
have to say that’s an appalling indictment of the
media,” said CNN’s Mr. Ware. “This is the Vietnam War
of our generation. This conflict is going to have
repercussions that far exceed that of an
Indo-Chinese, essentially, civil war. Yet for a
litany of reasons, which may or may not be
legitimate, from cost to security to audience
fatigue, the media has dropped the ball on this
conflict. It is a tragic indictment on the Fourth
Estate.
“Obviously, the media is a business at the end of the
day,” said Mr. Ware. “There are advertisers to
attract. We’re also about much more than that. We
don’t always have to follow the market. Sometimes we
have to lead it. And illuminate it. That’s where the
media is failing the longer this drags on. How many
people cut their teeth in conflicts in Vietnam? This
is the war of this generation. Where is the
graduating class of this conflict? That is something
that has long saddened me. Not enough of our breed
has picked up the cudgel of this
war.”
“The press has not gotten the credit it deserves from
the broad public,” said Mr. Packer of The New Yorker.
“The idea that there was a group of people in Vietnam
who were really changing the nature of journalism and
its relation to the government. … I guess the
mythologizing of those guys was more successful than
this group. And I think it’s partly the sense that
the press no longer has the clout and credibility it
did. You don’t look to three or four people for the
truth the way you once have done. There just is too
many ‘truths’ out there.
“And second, I think it’s because the press is just
part of the war, whether it wants to be or not.
“The press did discredit itself in the lead-up to the
war. But I think the press redeemed in Baghdad what
it missed in Washington. I’m not sure the public even
knows that.”
“I think this is the story for my generation, the way
that Vietnam was the story of the generation before
us,” said Mr. Burns of The New York Times. “It’s the
defining moment. I think, if I ask myself, what was
the most challenging? At which story did I need to
draw upon all the lessons I learned along the way?
Iraq was it. I was not just a reporter, but I also
had the good fortune of being a bureau chief. I don’t
want to sound too pious here, but to see young people
come into that bureau with little experience and no
experience at all with the world at war and see how
they prospered—and I think I helped them—was really
extremely rewarding. It was the toughest and hardest
assignment.
“It’s always hard to come into war when the
trajectory has changed—and it isn’t so dramatic. For
a reporter now, it is tougher. It was a lot easier.
But this war is a long way away from over. We may be
taking the temperature of this a little too soon. The
numbers will come down and the surge will end and the
Iraqis themselves will become less assured of an
American presence, and there will once again be a
great risk of the politics of ethnic schism in Iraq.
We may not have seen the worst of it yet.”