BAGHDAD, 6 October 2004 — There’s some dispute among correspondents here as to who thought up the analogy first, but most agree that it’s fitting, almost perfect: ``We’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a beaker.’’
In other words, the safety of foreign journalists in Iraq has been dissipating during recent weeks and months in a steady, incremental way that creates a new normality every few weeks, a normality that gets progressively more dangerous. The temperature rises a little; the frog adjusts.
I returned to Baghdad this week after several weeks away and the change struck me as radical, shocking. Being away for a while, in a genuinely normal place, helps you see that the latest version of normal in Baghdad is not normal at all.
It’s helpful to look back a bit to understand just how bad things have become here for foreign journalists, and by extension for the whole country.
More than a year ago, I was in downtown Baghdad when I got a call that there had been a shooting in Fallujah. I drove out there, reported how American soldiers had killed more than a dozen protesters, talked with the angry Iraqis, had some lunch in the city’s famous kebab restaurant and drove home to my unguarded hotel. It was one of many safe, if increasingly tense, visits to Fallujah. A visit there now would be almost certainly suicidal.
In January, I moved into a house in Baghdad rented by a reporter friend. With Iraqis as neighbors, we lived a happy communal life. By the time I left Iraq in February, we were growing increasingly concerned about our safety in the house: An Iraqi employee of a major American newspaper, whose rented house was nearby, had been attacked, presumably by insurgents.
In April, fighting erupted in most cities in Iraq. Many journalists retreated from their rented houses to hotels that were better defended. Now, we go out of our guarded homes or hotels only if we have to. A photographer friend of mine says: ``No news, no cruise.’’
Our drivers and translators lie to their friends, neighbors and families about who they work for. Going anywhere outside Baghdad is extremely risky, as is going to certain parts of the city. Even the formerly safe parts feel dangerous now.
I travel with my translator and driver and rush from my car into buildings where I have appointments. I often don’t make appointments — I just show up hoping the right person will be there — because I can’t trust the people I want to interview not to alert kidnappers to my imminent arrival.
Going shopping is something I either ask our local staff to do for me or it’s a similar dash in and out of a shop, into the car, hit the gas and see if anyone’s following us. I would think hard before visiting an Iraqi friend in his or her home now — for their sake, mostly. No Iraqi wants to be suspected of collaborating with or even associating with Americans or other foreigners. It’s an alarming, circumscribed way to live and it’s a frustrating place to do journalism. Reporters like to nose around places and crowds, pick up unexpected ideas from apparently inconsequential conversations or happenings. We like to cruise when there’s no news. Stories beget stories. Hours spent in hotel rooms do not beget stories.
Sometimes, or often in the case of some news organizations, we rely on our Iraqi staff to be our eyes and ears, to go out and ask our questions and see the places and people we want to visit. I’ve done that only once on this trip, though; like any reporter, I want to hear the inflection in someone’s voice when they’re speaking, see their facial expressions, notice what they do with their hands as they talk. But I’m sure I’ll be using our Iraqi proxies a lot more. It doesn’t feel good.
To keep working the streets and homes of Baghdad, many news organizations have adopted security measures that are, I believe, unprecedented in their scope, sophistication and magnitude.
Of course, it’s not just journalists who face these dangers. Foreign aid workers, contractors, truck drivers and diplomats are all apparently fair game for kidnappers and militants. A senior US official on Friday explained to a group of reporters that a large chunk of the $18.4 billion appropriated by Congress to be spent on the reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure — $1.8 billion — is being redirected from ramping up Iraqi security forces to improving the country’s sewage system, power supply and oil industry.
Further money would be spent on armored cars and guards to protect the engineers and other reconstruction officials, he added. Kidnappings, bombings and shootings affect ``our ability to get out and solve problems and move things along,’’ the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The situation has worsened, according to the American official. ``The insurgency is more intense now,’’ he said.
In this new environment, reporters are essentially living and working in the same streets as apocalyptically minded killers who have seized people, including friends of many of us, from their cars and homes. In Iraq, foreign journalists have no immunity from these dangers, as they often do in conflicts.
In Vietnam, journalists had a relatively safe country to rest in when not with American troops. In Sarajevo, reporters had firm friends among the Bosnian Muslim population. During the Kosovo war few reporters were ever in harm’s way. In Beirut, intermediaries seeking the release of hostages knew whom to talk to. In Afghanistan, journalists were either outside the country or with US allies north of Kabul. In Israel, for the most part, neither side has an institutionalized desire to harm journalists.
The chaos of Somalia, a short war not in the scale of Iraq’s, seems like the best comparison. In that conflict, foreign journalists usually traveled with armed guards. Perhaps Chechnya is what Iraq will become, though — a war so dangerous for foreign journalists that few dare even to visit.
My deep hope is that Iraq does not become a country so mired in violence and fear that foreign journalists can cover it only by embedding with U.S. soldiers. Reporting alongside the barrel of an American gun does not provide sufficiently broad insight into a country that is and will remain deeply intertwined with the future of the United States. That would seem like failure to most journalists I know. We’re pretty determined to keep reporting the story. The water may be pretty hot right now in this beaker, but the frogs aren’t leaping.
