Blogging on Meds

(Maya Alleruzzo, AP, 2007)
For almost 5 years, John Burns ran the New York Times Baghdad bureau. He helped build the world’s largest foreign newspaper compound, a $2 million a year operation in a bunkered out mansion on the Tigris. With his wife handling the loggies (ligistics in KBR speak), Burns—a tall, thin Brit with a silver afro—ran the editorial content for America’s biggest news gathering operation (the Times’ annual newsroom budget is around $200 million). He never got a third Pulitzer, though he certainly deserved one. Actually some of Burns dispatches were better than anything Kapucinski ever wrote, and if Kapu was on the Nobel Prize shortlist maybe Burns should be too. (Wait, did I just recommend a newspaper writer who’s never done a book for the Nobel Prize in literature?) Burns has since left Baghdad and taken a position in London.

Maya Alleruzzo is still in Baghdad. The photo above was taken in 2007 and ran with Burns’ story. Maya, a 30-something DC post-punk, is likely the only female photographer who’s been in Iraq for the entire war.

Yesterday Burns offered a look back . Here’s how the piece ends. Both Obama and Hillary would benefit from reading this:

My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

Burns explains the invasion may have been doomed from the beginning:

On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.

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