letter from friend of Anne Garrels (NPR-Iraq)

[realFedUp]

letter from friend of Anne Garrells NPR-Iraq

To All...........
(intro deleted) Life in Baghdad has suddenly gotten much uglier.

³By Any Measure a Setback²..........this is the way Annie ended her piece on the oil fires ( coincidental accident or sabotage ?? ..... it remains unclear ) that shut down the vital Iraq - Turkey pipeline on the 16th. But the description holds for almost all of the dozen or so pieces that she has aired since returning to the blast furnace that is Baghdad at the beginning of the month.

In sum, her pieces present a grim, grimy and dangerous picture of growing Iraqi resentment toward the heavy-handed incompetence of their ³liberators², a growing nostalgia for the devil they so recently knew, and a willingness on the part of those opposed to foreign occupiers to go after ³soft² as well as ³hard² targets ....... that means the UN, that means aid-workers, that means Iraqis who cooperate with us, that also means the western press. She has had a real sense over the days before the UN bombing that time is running out on our attempt to nation-build on the cheap with the ³B² Team....... It is not that there hasn¹t been any progress and she has been careful to report on the positive when she has found it ....... the reinstatement of the Iraqi Supreme Court ( Saddam had dissolved it in the early 90¹s ), the efforts to expeditiously adjudicate claims of noncombatant injury and damage inflicted on Iraqi
civilians, and the quick response of a competent US commander to diffuse a potential tinderbox incident in the Shia dominated ³Sadr
city² neighborhood of Baghdad that could have gotten very ugly very
quickly. But the preponderance of her pieces have only underscored the unpalatable reality that the US planning and force structure for the post-invasion phase was arrogantly conceived, appallingly inadequate and crudely implemented. Mix that with the wildly exaggerated Iraqi expectations of what the American superpower could accomplish and you have a poisonous and volatile concoction......the lack of security for the local population has been woefully under reported because no one knows or no one cares or no one is telling. How many Iraqis have died at the hands of scared and jumpy US kids in uniform is not a figure that the Coalition Press Office wants to see published ( see below )......... the water supply has been, at best, sporadic and now the exposed mains are being sabotaged ..... the supply of electrical power is precariously fragile........ far more so than anyone imagined. It will
take at least a year to return the grid just to prewar levels. It will take at least two years and several billion dollars to restore the system to full capacity ........ and even that is based on the optimistic assumption that the security forces can keep the pylons from being blown up and the copper wire extruded for export and sale abroad. The total amount of power delivered to Baghdad has been reduced to begin with in order to redress the prewar imbalance of power delivered to the Shiite south. The 147 substations within the city are supposed to be on a 3 hour on/ 3 hour off cycle, but this schedule is continually being disrupted by armed neighborhood gangs who force the substation operators to keep the
power flowing to them at gunpoint.

The unknown loss of Iraqi civilian life gnaws at her. Caused either by indiscriminate US military action ( check points are often poorly marked and those manning them don¹t first ask questions ) or now by the growing number deliberate assassinations of Iraqis who work with the Coalition ........ these deaths may go unreported in the west, but not among the population. Anecdotally, in the small circle of Iraqis that work for her....... drivers, interpreters and office help etc. ....... at least 10 relatives or close friends have been killed since her arrival. Quietly, she says, if this goes on, we won¹t have friend left standing.

Annie has not been uncritical of the behavior of some of the US military which is often arbitrary and high-handed, but she has great compassion and praise for most. They are in an impossible situation. Individually impressive, trying their best and constantly having to improvise, they are still little more than kids in a very scary foreign place...... Her unfettered vitriol, however, is reserved for the layer of the US civilian team beneath Paul Bremer and his immediate associates whom she knows and respects. The veterans in this business, those from Kosovo and Bosnia, who have done this kind of thing before, are conspicuous by their absence. In their place is a phalanx of young ex-Bush campaign political
appointees who are in the process of undermining whatever good has been accomplished. Testosterone-ladened, rude, arrogant, and incompetent, but with back-channels to Washington and resumes that need notching they are doing their best to run Iraq operation as if it were a campaign stop in the 2004 US election. This is particularly of the Press Office which in the struggle to convince the Iraqi population that we are not what we appear to be, is absolutely vital. Manned by hacks ( the underlings are all Brits who are even worse ) they go out of their way to insult and impede Annie and her colleagues every chance they get. You sort of can tell where things are going If after 5 months into this thing their standard response to the press is still a screamed ³Fuck you². They treat the Iraqis even worse. Not so quietly, she says this is a public
relations disaster in the making.

I would like to leave you with some little nugget of humor, some upbeat glimmer of hope but, quite honestly, from our conversations or from her pieces that barrel seems pretty empty What is left all have, at best, a bitter sweet taste...... On the subject of broadening the touted international make-up of the coalition, for example, there is the report that an NPR colleague in northern Iraq came across a ragtag unit of Ukrainians wearing tennis sneakers commanded by some Italian officers wearing cute little hats festooned with feathers. Since no one expects our usual allies in situations like this ...... the French, the Germans, the Indians etc. ...... to be in country anytime soon, this unit presumably will soon be taking their rightful place alongside units from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras who are reportedly sending troops to broaden the international tone ........ where is Esperanto when you need
it............. And lastly, Annie relayed to her American audience some useful if tongue-in-cheek advice from some Iraqi friends on how to deal with power failures. It more or less boiled down to taking lots of showers, wrapping up in wet sheets, getting up onto the tops of buildings at night, using car batteries to power fans blowing over ice, making babies, and getting someone other than the Americans to fix your grid.