Retro Iraq: 'Baghdad Britneys,' Kidnapped Journos

As David (and everyone else) mentioned, we're now at the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. Forgive me if I don't join in the collective look back. I'm no longer interested in rehashing, for the umpteenth time, how this fight started. I'd like to know how it ends -- and whether the
United States is prepared for similarly unconventional conflicts, in the future.

But there has been one retrospective that's been particularly compelling. All week, the* New York Times' *Baghdad Bureau blog has been featuring recollections from the amazing array of reporters who have covered the war for the paper. Many of them are heartbreaking, and beautiful. Two stand out from the rest, however. First, John Burns' tale of kidnap and liberation:

At the outset, for me, the approach of American troops to Baghdad was an issue of intense personal concern, as much as professional. The
Army and Marine units that arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad in the first days of April 2003 were viewed, then, by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis as liberators from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. But they were my liberators, too.

Ten days earlier, Saddam’s thugs had come for me in the middle of the night in my room at the Palestine Hotel beside the Tigris River in the heart of the Iraqi capital, during a lull in the American bombing.
I had been expecting them; in the last weeks before the invasion, the menacing character who acted as ringmaster for the foreign press in
Baghdad in his capacity as the regime’s information director, Uday al-Tai’ee, had taken to mocking me as “the most dangerous man in Iraq”
for stories I had written

about Saddam’s merciless terror on his own people, and I had understood the code.

“Brave fellow, aren’t you?” al-Tai’ee seemed to be saying. “But just wait. You can insult Saddam with impunity now, because you know we won’t kill a reporter for The New York Times as long as there’s a chance of avoiding this war. So you’re shooting from behind a blind, and that doesn’t take so much courage. But once the war starts, and we’re free to do what we please, that’ll be a different matter. Then we’ll see how tough you really are.”

Second, Jeffrey Gettleman's memories of Baghdad, circa January 2004:

All across Baghdad, office buildings were going up and bridges were getting fixed and children were streaming into schools that smelled of fresh paint. The city’s best eateries, like Saa’ah on Ramadan Street, which served gigantic cheeseburgers and stubby fries, were open again and packed with girls with dyed hair and tight jeans –Baghdad Britneys we called them — coyly sipping pomegranate juice. Every week women marched shoulder to shoulder around Firdos Square with cranky old megaphones and the glow of newly discovered power. Even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the suspected terrorist leader who was later killed by
American forces, lamented in an intercepted letter to Osama bin Laden that the resistance in Iraq was fading fast.

• Back then, journalists could roam the country and dip into Iraqi lives and do some good stories without worrying about getting their heads chopped off... Sometimes we would bitch about the heat and the dust and the barbed-wire wasteland that was our new home. One night a bunch of us were sitting around the dinner table, picking at cold kebabs and mayonnaise salad, when one of the other correspondents, Ed Wong, asked,
  “Why couldn’t we have invaded Thailand?”*

• ...In mid-March things began to shift. The normalcy disappeared.
  Foreigners became part of the equation, getting killed and kidnapped.
  We felt like we were being hunted — which we were — and started sticking to our frat house more. We still ducked out to cover the carnage and bloodstains on the sidewalk. I was never so conscious of the simple fact that what can separate life and death is how much of your blood stays in your body and how much spills out. I started thinking we’re all just plastic bags full of precious fluid, waiting to get stuck.*

(Photo: NYT)