U.S. not seeing carnage in Iraq

ROBERT FISK
BRITISH COLUMNIST

BAGHDAD -- What has happened to the "Coalition Provisional Authority," also known as the occupying power?

When you go to the manicured lawns and villas of the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad, you get this odd, weird feeling; that here is a place so isolated, so ostentatiously secure -- it is not secure of course, since mortars are regularly fired into the compound -- that it has no contact with the outside world.

Here U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer lives in Saddam Hussein's former palace. There are fewer than 100 days before he supposedly hands over the "sovereignty" of Iraq to America's own new handpicked Iraqi government that will hold elections at an unknown date. And so within the palace walls, the occupying power believes in optimism, progress and political development.

When someone asked -- just a few hours before last week's horror -- about the deteriorating security in Mosul, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt snapped that this was only "an assessment that you may be making."

As for the Iraqis down in Anbar province, where a bomb also killed five U.S. soldiers and where at least four foreigners were murdered, Kimmitt stated on Wednesday -- and here is a quotation to remain in the history books -- that the U.S. Marines in Falluja "are quite pleased with how they are moving progressively forward."

Every week, it is like this. From the hot, dangerous streets of Baghdad with their electricity cuts and gunfire, we make our way through palisades of concrete drums, U.S. Army checkpoints and searches, into a vast, air-conditioned conference center, a cavernous Saddamite built in 1981 for presidential summits.

Next to Kimmitt always stands the rather more spectral figure of Dan Senor, spokesman for the "Coalition Provisional Authority" who with his frameless glasses, unsmiling demeanor and his occasional, fearful glances at the general when the latter faces a dodgy question, resembles the kind of doctor who clears his throat and quietly advises his patients to settle their affairs. That's how it was when Senor was asked if the editor of the Shiite newspaper Al Hawza -- shut down by dozens of police and U.S. soldiers last week -- had been warned in advance that it might be closed. Under CPA law, it was not necessary to issue warnings to newspapers, Senor huffily replied. More than 200 newspapers had sprouted up since "liberation" but the authority would not "tolerate" anyone who encourages "violence against coalition forces."

But of course, it was, as usual, supposed to be Good News Week last week.

Bremer had been discussing the ministry of education's 2005 budget and been to a "town hall" meeting of Iraqi schoolchildren. The same Iraqi ministry had been holding a symposium of 200 Iraqi civil and religious leaders on the development of the educational system, and nearly 35 miles of rail track was being upgraded between Basra and Um Qasr.

In Baghdad, "Coalition Forces" -- i.e., U.S. forces -- had conducted 620 patrols, in the north-central zone 254 patrols, one raid and the arrest of eight "anti-Coalition suspects" (sic). U.S. forces -- this from Kimmitt -- were "continuing to conduct precision operations" against "anti-Coalition elements and enemies of the Iraqi people."

The latter sounded positively Soviet. Didn't the Red Army used to conduct operations against "anti-socialist elements and enemies of the Afghan people?"

But Kimmitt defined the Fallujah gunmen as "insurgents." After Westerners were dragged dead through the streets of that Sunni Muslim city last week, I doubt if he will use that word again.

And here lies the problem. From inside the "Green Zone" on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything.

But at least it's on Planet Earth. The trouble is that the real world in which Iraqis live is nasty, brutish and potentially short. When we point this out, we are abused as pessimists, as journalists who want failure.

And when a bloodbath occurs on the television screens, we are asked to censor out the worst carnage. Hence the dragging of the mutilated, fried corpses through the streets of Falluja last week was not shown on Western television; only a truncated, heavily censored version was broadcast because of "images too gruesome to show."

But the Iraqis see these scenes. So do we. They looked like Somalia. The best the authorities can say is that they were "particularly brutal." Particularly? They were an outrage.

Green Zone, dream on.