“While Al-Qaeda in Iraq is now surrounded by enemies and has seen its base of support dry up, there has been no corresponding decline in the fortunes of militias like the Mahdi Army. Sadr declared a cease-fire at the end of August after his militia took the blame for fighting in the holy city of Karbala. But it retains its ability to fight other militias in southern Iraq. It is also still active in Shi’ite neighborhoods of Baghdad, even though its leaders have held back from fighting American troops for control of the streets. In fact, the cease-fire may have allowed Sadr to consolidate his fragmented and often unruly organization.
Meanwhile, Sadr’s militia may be asserting mafia-like control over the poor Shi’ite areas where it has long provided the services and security the government has not. “What you do have is, the Mahdi Army, Inc.,” said Petraeus, backing up an earlier assessment by U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The militia has come to dominate not simply by force, but also by controlling staples like fuel and electricity.
Thus, in contrast to AQI, the Mahdi Army enters 2008 with its military capability and its base of support largely intact. If the political or military dynamic changes in 2008, the militia’s leadership could just as easily choose to once again unleash its fighters. By mid-summer the surge will be over, and U.S. troop strength will be back where it was in late 2006. So, if the cease-fire does end, the U.S. will not be fighting with the 30,000 reinforcements that contributed to the gains of 2007. It will also face an adversary with strong support in Shi’ite communities and elements of the Iraqi government. At that point it may be the U.S., rather than its foe, that will have to make a tough choice about whether it can or should continue to fight.”
“Every profession needs what academics call an “occupational mythology” to sustain it, a set of personal and social dramas, arrangements, and devices, as sociologist Everett Hughes put it, “by which men make their work tolerable, or even make it glorious to themselves and others.” As hard drugs are to the hard-rocker and tattoos are to the NBA player, so booze is to the journalist—even if he doesn’t drink.
The journalist likes to think of himself as living close to the edge, whether he’s covering real estate or Iraq. He (and she) shouts and curses and cracks wise at most every opportunity, considers divorce an occupational hazard, and loves telling ripping yarns about his greatest stories. If he likes sex, he has too much of it. Ditto for food. If he drinks, he considers booze his muse. If he smokes, he smokes to excess, and if he attempts to quit, he uses Nicorette and the patch.
Today, praise goes to the “courageous” newsroom alcoholic or druggie who enters a company-financed rehab program. Today’s newspaper will fire you for taking mood-altering drugs in the workplace unless, of course, they’re prescription antidepressants paid for by the company health plan. And in the old days, great status was bestowed upon the foulest mouth in the newsroom. Today, that sort of talk will earn you a write-up from HR for creating a climate of sexual harassment. Paradoxically, the language and subjects now banned as inappropriate inside the newsroom are routinely found inside the pages of the newspaper.
The wise editor understands that quality journalism requires a bad attitude, foul words, a brawl, and sometimes a drink afterward.
I love that even a press critic is romanticizing journalism.
Writer Jon Lee Anderson is recovering from a major cardiac episode. I hope he’s OK, and wish him a speedy recovery. His long Afghanistan-opium story in the New Yorker was 2007’s best magazine feature. In the piece, Jon Lee came under attack by Taliban. He wrote of it with a coolness so smooth it reads like he was receiving a massage not in a 90 minute firefight:
“As I walked along a trail between the poppy fields, gunshots rang out. Men began running, taking cover, and looking up toward the village on the bluff; the firing seemed to be coming from the mud-walled compounds there. Kelly, the ex-cop from Arizona, yelled at me to take cover. I headed toward a stand of trees with Aaron Huey, the photographer who was travelling with me; from there we could no longer see any other Americans. A group of six or seven Interior Ministry policemen—almost all of the local police had disappeared as soon as the shooting started—ran past with their guns drawn, and we followed.
Moments later, we were in an open section of the village, and under fire. There were now twenty or so policemen, in small groups bunched up against mud walls, shooting in various directions. One of them had been shot in the shoulder and was bleeding. I tried, with Huey, to make a run for where I thought the American convoy was, but we were turned back by gunfire.
Some of the policemen began pointing at a distant farm compound.
“Dushman!”—enemy—one yelled. They fired an R.P.G. at the compound. The grenade exploded, sending up a large black burst of smoke and dust.
Major Khalil appeared, leading a few of the policemen and a prisoner in a brown robe; they had tied his hands behind his back with his own shawl. Huey and I joined them as they made their way down an alley and toward the fields. When we were in the middle of the poppy field, Khalil screamed, “Taliban! Get down!”
Then he and his men, firing their guns, advanced, with us among them.
We could see the helicopters flying over the village and the river, seeming to leave the area. Several of the policemen asked me why they weren’t firing at our attackers. I didn’t know what to tell them. (Later, I learned that they were evacuating the television journalists.)
As we approached a steep hill, from which the Afghan policemen were firing rockets and Kalashnikovs into the village, Khalil told everyone in our group to lift our hands and weapons in the air, and he began calling out loudly, identifying us to the policemen above us, telling them to hold their fire. As they covered us, we climbed the hill to join them.
It had been about ninety minutes since the shooting began. As we looked for cover on the hill, Khalil directed his men to fire into the village. Bullets came cracking at us. The prisoner, his arms still bound, crouched next to me. There was a plume of black smoke; the men said that it was one of our vehicles burning. Khalil, seemingly panicked, ordered everyone to run. (He later told me that he had seen movement below and feared that the Taliban were about to surround us.) We headed for another hill, from which I was finally able to see the convoy, about a half mile away, across a wadi.
A group of men had gathered in a large foxhole at the summit of our hill, and I spotted Mick Hogan, who was looking through his gun’s scope at the village below. I crawled up to him. Below us, I saw a man dressed in black move quickly through the village and dodge out of sight behind a wall. The men in the foxhole pounded bullets in his direction.
Hogan told us to get to the convoy; the Americans wanted to pull out right away. As Huey and I headed down, one of the Afghans came running past us, pointing to a hole in his trousers where a bullet had just missed his leg. I congratulated him on his good luck. Then I spotted Kelly driving one of the white pickups and we got in with him.
We had to get back across the river, but the route we had used that morning was too dangerous; some Afghan policemen had just been ambushed in an attempt to head that way. Our way to the river cut between two walled orchards, and the convoy, a long line of slow-moving trucks, was taking fire from both sides. Kelly called the helicopters on his radio, and soon we heard the grinding sound of the helicopters’ miniguns—.30-calibre machine guns that fire up to four thousand rounds per minute.
When we reached the river’s edge, we saw that one of the white pickups was stranded in the water and some of the A.T.V.s were submerged. Men were clambering about—trying to hold on to vehicles, calling for towropes—and returning fire. Kelly stopped midstream to help them. Two of the A.T.V.s were towed out, but the others, and the pickup, were abandoned. The DynCorp men ripped the radio out of the pickup so that the Taliban wouldn’t take it. Kelly managed to get his truck to the other side, where the shooting continued.
Nearby, a DynCorp crew had opened full automatic fire on a group of gunmen who had moved from deeper in the orchard to the treeline on the opposite bank and were shooting at us. Aaron Huey and I took cover behind a truck as Kelly joined the fight. Rockets exploded near the Diablos, and then the choppers disappeared. (They had both been hit several times, but made it back to the base in Tirin Kot, one with a fire on board.) After a few more minutes, the decision was made to retreat.
The road was almost obscured by the dust kicked up by the trucks in front of us. We passed another orchard, and, again, there were gunshots from both sides of the road. In the back of our truck, Bulmaro Vasconcelos, a machine-gunner from Hemet, California, fired into the orchard with a heavy machine gun. I saw a military cap in the road in front of us, and then a man lying face down. We couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead, and swerved to avoid running over him. It was one of the Afghan policemen. Kelly yelled for the truck behind us to pick him up.
A few seconds later, the window on Kelly’s side exploded and he yelled, “Shit! I’ve been hit!” He grabbed his leg, but kept driving, feeling the leg with one hand. He looked at the hand: there was no blood. The bullet, evidently slowed by the metal door, had not pierced his skin. “I’m all right,”he said. A bullet hit my side of the truck, and another struck the back. A minute or two later, we were out of the orchards and into more open territory, headed toward the camp. For the first time in four hours, there was no shooting.
About ten minutes after we got back to camp, we heard loud explosions coming from the river. The Dutch had dispatched an Apache helicopter to destroy the abandoned pickup with a Hellfire missile.
In addition to the man we had found in the road, who had been shot in the head and was barely alive, four Afghan policemen had been shot, of whom two were critically wounded. One was spouting blood from the femoral artery in his right leg. Another had been shot in the lung and the liver. Sylvester Pocius, known as Sly, another goateed DynCorp contractor, had been grazed on the neck by a bullet that ricocheted off the bolt of his gun. The wounded were rushed into camp for emergency treatment and driven to the Special Forces hospital. (A month later, the policeman who had been shot in the liver died of his wounds.) wounded and eight killed during the attack. There was conflicting information about the identities of the dead, and uncertainty about whether the reports were accurate, but the victims were said to have included an old woman, or possibly an old man, and a twelve-year-old girl.
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