Time cover story: 'Life In Hell - A Baghdad Diary'

RAW STORY
Published: Sunday August 6, 2006

"In this week's cover story, TIME senior correspondent Aparisim 'Bobby' Ghosh provides a stunning personal account about what it means to be a civilian surviving amidst the escalating battles between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites in Iraq," according to a TIME press release received by RAW STORY.

"For the most part, ordinary Iraqis, although sympathetic to their coreligionists in Lebanon, have shown little interest in a conflict that seems both far away and from another era--a leftover war from the 20th century," writes Ghosh. "Not only are the protagonists familiar, but so too are their tactics and weapons: Israeli artillery, Hizballah rockets."

"Those looking for parallels in Iraq will find few," the article continues. "The war in Iraq is about 21st century issues, like terrorism and extremist Islam. The very survival of a nation hangs in the balance."

"And the Iraq war is far deadlier; on almost any given day, casualty figures in Baghdad alone dwarf those in Lebanon and Israel combined," Ghosh writes.

Excerpts from TIME article:

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At the house TIME uses as its base in Baghdad, our staff of 25 Iraqis snort disdainfully as news broadcasters announce the daily death toll in the Levant. "They count their dead in dozens. We count ours in hundreds," says Ali al-Shaheen, our bureau manager. Only when Israeli bombs killed 28 people in the Lebanese village of Qana did it register on al-Shaheen's radar. Watching the images of the carnage, he declares, "Now they know how Iraqis live."

Every so often, something happens that causes the Iraqi government and the Bush Administration to announce that a turning point has arrived for the beleaguered country. In the month that I was away from Baghdad, there were two such events: the killing of terrorist Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi and the appointment, after weeks of political haggling, of new ministers of Defense and the Interior. The ministers, a Sunni and Shi'ite, respectively, had been touted as independent and nonsectarian--new brooms to brush away the rampant corruption in the two crucial security ministries. Interior, in particular, would be cleansed of the Shi'ite militias that had infiltrated all levels of the police and other security forces and turned them into instruments of Shi'ite vengeance against their former Sunni oppressors.

The ministers were the last bricks on the façade that is the all-party national-unity government of Prime Minister al-Maliki. Earlier in the year I had watched from close quarters as U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad worked tirelessly to make that government possible, pleading, cajoling until all the political factions--Shi'ite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular--agreed to get in the big tent together. Relieved, the Bush Administration announced that the participation of all groups, especially the recalcitrant Sunnis, would allow al-Maliki's government to succeed where the U.S. military had failed, in bringing to heel both the Sunni insurgency and the rising might of the Shi'ite militias. Never mind that the Prime Minister was himself a Shi'ite partisan until his nomination--whereupon he sought to reinvent himself as a nonsectarian leader--and that his party had stronger ties to Tehran than to Washington. An ornery figure, al-Maliki is a backroom politician plainly ill at ease in public; few Iraqis had even heard of him, and few are convinced that his rancorous all-party government can last the year, much less its full four-year term.

Already, U.S. officials are finding it hard to keep up the optimistic spin.

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FULL TIME ARTICLE AT THIS LINK