UC Berkeley Journalism School dean Orville Schell has a fascinating piece in the April 6 issue of the New York Review of Books. Well worth reading, particularly in light of today’s news out of Iraq. Here’s a snip, via tomdispatch blog:
There is undeniably a Blade Runner-like feel to this city. The violence is so pervasive and unfathomable that you wonder what people think they are dying for. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the everyday violence is horrendous, it does not take too many days before the deadly noises and the devastation everywhere seem to become just part of the ordinary landscape. Soon, quite to your surprise, you find yourself paying hardly more attention to the sounds of gunshots than a New Yorker does to the car alarms that go off every night… until, that is, someone you know, a neighbor, or just someone you have heard about, gets blown up, shot on patrol, or kidnapped by insurgents.
Just a few days after I left Baghdad, Iraqi newspapers carried a short notice that a well-to-do Iraqi banker, Ghalib Abdul Hussein, had been kidnapped from his fortified house by gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms. Five of his personal guards were shot execution-style in his yard. This is just one of thousands of such occurrences. But except for obeying the security guards responsible for you (if you have them), there isn’t much else you can do.
Driving through the streets of Baghdad, one now sees members of the newly created, blue-uniformed Iraqi Police Service, extolled by the Bush administration as another hopeful sign of “Iraqization.” But because police recruitment stations, training schools, and district precincts are favorite targets of the insurgents, many of these new police are afraid of being identified as collaborators with the Americans or the new Iraqi government. Their remedy is to wear black stocking caps with eye, nose, and mouth holes pulled down over their faces so they look like so many bank robbers. One sees these sinister-looking protectors of the peace at traffic circles and intersections, or brandishing automatic weapons in the back of American-bought pickup trucks, which makes them seem far more menacing than reassuring.
Link. (Thanks, hoodster)
Image (AFP/Shawan Mohammed): “An angry demonstrator shows blood on his hand during riots in the Iraq northern Kurdish town of Halabja. A 14-year-old boy was killed when Iraqi security forces fired into a massive crowd of Kurds rioting in Halabja on the anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s gas attack on the Kurdish town.”