Iraq: if we had any idea how bad things are there, we'd get the fuck out NOW before we make it worse

1. "Today Is Better than Tomorrow": Iraq as a Living Hell -- by Dahr Jamail/Tomdispatch.com

The situation in Iraq has reached such a point of degradation and danger that I've been unable to return to report -- as I did from 2003 to 2005 -- from the front lines of daily life. Instead, in these last months, I have found myself in a supportive role, facilitating the work of some of my former sources, who remain in their own war-torn land, to tell their hair-raising tales of the new Iraq. While relying on my Iraqi colleagues to report the news, which we then publish at Inter Press Service and my website , I continue to receive emails from others in Iraq, civilian and soldier alike.

What I know from these emails is that the articles on Iraq you normally read in your local newspaper, even when, for instance, they cover the disintegration of the Iraqi health system or the collapse of the economy, are providing you, at best, but a glimpse of what daily life there is now like. After all, who knows better what's happening than those who are living it?

I thought I might just give you a taste of the sort of private communications I read every day. Take my primary interpreter during my eight months in Iraq, Abu Talat. He was finally forced, like hundreds of thousands of his fellow Iraqis, to flee to a neighboring country due to the nightmarish security situation in Baghdad. Without a regular income, he struggled even to pay the rent for an apartment in a Syrian city, and finally had little choice but to return to Baghdad to sell what was left of his belongings. On November 18th, he wrote me from there:
"I am trying to sell my car. However, prices have plummeted so low that there is barely any active automobile dealing here, or any other marketing for that matter…Life ends at around 2-3 p.m., at which point Baghdad changes into a city of horror. The sounds of mortars and clashes erupt all through the night. (Two explosions just rumbled nearby, but we can't tell the exact location.)"

The next day he wrote:

"Today, while I was arranging for the car to be sold at the highest price I could find, explosions burst almost 50 meters from the place where I was standing. I was forced to hide under the car I was selling for over 2 hours. There were ongoing clashes between the Iraqi Army and resistance fighters in broad daylight in the middle of the capital!"

Even from semi-independent, Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, often described as the most peaceful and prosperous region in the country, the news I get is bleak. A November 28th email from a Kurdish friend (who is also a U.S. citizen) went this way:

"It is worse than ever. The problem is that our U.S. government and the Iraqi ‘Government' tell the world that things are improving here when they are not. All of the rebuilding bull crap is nothing but a scam that is worse than the oil-for-food program [of the post-Gulf War I years]. We have ONE hour of electricity a day now. I have power to turn on some lights and my computer by way of a little generator that I hooked up to my office today. A gallon of gas costs over $4 now, when the salary of an engineer is less than $200 a MONTH."

Terrible as life is when Iraqis across the country find themselves essentially camping out in their own homes with few or no basic services, it pales in comparison to life in Baghdad, the country's capital and home to nearly one quarter of its population. A friend of mine, who works there as a freelance cameraman, sent me this grim summary a couple of weeks ago:

"Life here in Iraq has become impossible because of the militias, sectarian violence, and the occupation [U.S.] forces. Every day we see the dead bodies near our homes which have been killed by militias. We watch how the U.S. troops see these dead bodies and… do nothing to stop this violence. Two of my brothers just left their houses and rented a new place because they were living in a Shia area. They had to run away just because they are Sunni.

"Every day the U.S. troops raid so many houses in my area and arrest so many innocent people. Yet, when the Americans arrest one of the [Shia] militia members they release him the very next day! Why?

"I hope I can show you how the dogs have started eating the dead bodies which lie in the streets of Baghdad now. I filmed one of the dead bodies while there was a dog eating on it. The U.S. troops and Iraqi police leave the dead bodies in the streets for one or two days… I think they intend to do this because they want everyone, including the children, to see this. Three days ago my young son saw some of the Shia militia as they killed an innocent Iraqi in front of his eyes just near his school.

"Oh Dahr, I don't know what to say about my wounded country. Every Iraqi wants to bomb himself because of this shit life. Now Iraq is nothing like it was when you were here last, as bad as it was then. It has become very difficult to find someone who smiles. Everyone is sad and crying. This is true and this is our life now.

"The problem is that I know everything because I am filming so many people who are suffering."

Then there are the emails I get from American soldiers or their family members. In late October, I received one from a mother whose son is a Marine stationed in Ramadi where the fighting between U.S. forces and Sunni insurgents has been fierce and ongoing these last months.

"Many, many atrocities on both sides," she writes, "because of course the town has deteriorated into nothing more than a horror flick. His emails are few because his outpost was mortared and he lost computer connection with me. He has to go to the Army side of the city and try to send email from there. I've gotten one email. The marines are not supplying the boys with working satellite phones. Instead they give those, along with money for bribes, to the Iraqis in hopes of obtaining information. So our marines sit there (only 400 patrolling half of Ramadi, a town of 400,000… talk about war crimes). This is such a nightmare. If my son survives, he'll be embittered forever...This is a portion of his angry email....I found it very disturbing....please excuse the spelling, he's in a hurry and exhausted when he writes....his point is to kill the Iraqis before they kill him. Now it's just a race for life. Insane."

Her son's email reads in part:

"I was gonna call you but the phone is broken. I hate this place more than anywhere else i've been. I guess is a compilation of all the time I've done overseas fighting. Bullshit fights, its really bringing me down. I can't wait till all this is over…I'll be the biggest anti-war person this country will have… at least against this war in Iraq....Let's go fight a different one somewhere else cause this one is lost. I swear i wish you could spend a week over here…you would know it's lost. You can't stop ‘holy warriors,' especially in their territory. Tonight we are about to go drop off generators to the enemy (Iraqi civilians) hoping they will give us info about the enemy (bullshit storys). The shit your tax dollars go to would make you puke. You really would puke. I almost do when i think about it..... thomas jefferson would have a heart attack if he saw all the shit goin on today. Oh well. I really hope it changes soon when Bush is out…but i doubt it. I thinks its all Gods plan…he runs the show no matter what. Fate and all that…its good to trust him.

"…I'll keep the machine gun lubed in hopes of killin em all at the first opportunity for you. I love you ma and i know that no matter what you support me. I hope you don't find this email burdensome. Just hit delete if that's the case."

His mother added:

"You can see how the war is destroying my son's morale, and whittling away at his spirit. Now it's just a killing game."

On November 29, I received the following email from Abu Talat in Baghdad:
"In the early morning, explosions woke me up in this apartment in the center of Baghdad. It was just before 5:30 a.m. when I heard four mortars exploding in their very horrendous voices. The Ministry of Health was hit the day before yesterday by not less than five mortars. This was followed by clashes which continued for less than an hour. The fighters were using all kinds of guns, starting with rifles and ending with real heavy weaponry.

"Another battle took place here after this. Since we are in a guarded area near a police station and on the fourth floor, I had the advantage of watching this entire battle from my balcony. It was a complete war battle, guns being fired from all directions. All kinds of weapons were used by the militia fighters who are also the "Iraqi security forces," including the American helicopters which were hovering at a low altitude (just for moral support?). As if they are only for monitoring not for fighting! The mortars spread to the morgue area which is exactly behind the Ministry.

"Iraqi life has changed into some kind of hellish disaster. Sectarian feelings are following us everywhere. Everywhere around Baghdad that you stop at any of the checkpoints, which are spreading all over, the men hold their guns in their hands. I assume each man knows how to use it, but the problem is: Is this guard a Sunni or Shia? You cannot tell. The clashes I've been seeing haven't spared any of the areas in the city, whether they are Sunni or Shia."

Keep in mind that we're talking about the capital of Iraq. Think Washington D.C. and try for a moment to imagine such daily scenes.

Recently, an Iraqi colleague and I wrote a news story about the abominable conditions in Iraq's medical system -- or what's left of it. Upon reading the piece , a doctor in Baghdad, another of my contacts, sent me this:

"I haven't written to you for awhile…but your last dispatch about the health conditions in Iraq incited me to do so. I write you while holding in my mind and heart a lot of sorrow and pain for all the innocent people I am encountering every day as victims of this blind violence. I have sorrow and pain for a steadily vanishing future which once I had thought of as hopeful -- even after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Let alone my sorrow for the future of my one-and-a-half year-old daughter.

"The Iraqi health system has never been this bad before, and it is growing worse day by day. The Saddam regime always tried to show that the [UN] embargo affected the health system to the bone. That regime tried to show the shortage of medicines, equipment, and the high mortality rates of Iraqi children. Saddam used to emphasize the bad conditions through the media, and especially the western media, in an attempt to affect international public opinion.

"But what is happening today is the total opposite of this. The government is practicing a marked suppression of any revelation of the reality of the health system. This is obvious through the government's underestimation of the figures of victims of violence and sectarian killing. It can also be exemplified by their prohibiting any workers in the health facilities from speaking to the media unless authorized. In many situations the government will give an optimistic view of our disaster in a time when there are no signs for a favorable view.

"During Saddam's era we used to see western or even local media reporters visiting hospitals, conducting interviews with patients and doctors. I wonder why we can hardly see any now. It is a big question. Nobody now is aware of the critical situation in our health institutions -- once huge attractors of therapeutic tourism in the Middle East. There has been a massive exodus of senior consultants and junior doctors which means a great absence of experience. There is a grave shortage of necessary medicines and other important logistics.

"Sectarian tension has its own enormous impact. Sunni people are afraid to attend hospitals run by the Mehdi Army [Shia Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militia] which leaves them with very limited options. I have encountered many Sunni patients in the hospital who use an alias to conceal their identity so that they could have some help. Hospitals are heavily infiltrated by active cells of Shia militias, which are ready to abduct anyone they do not like. Everyone here from the manager of the hospital down the administrative pyramid must have the approval of the Sadr officials. What adds to the disaster is that these people are not qualified; they only have the privilege of being loyal to their political party.

"The latest trend of mass abductions and kidnappings puts me under great pressure of fear and apprehension that someday I might be a victim myself. What happened in the raid on the Ministry of Higher Education [up to 150 academics, staff, and visitors were abducted on November 14th when roughly 80 gunmen stormed a research institute] is always echoing in my mind. Today the media announced two officials of those who were kidnapped were found tortured, blindfolded, murdered, and dumped in Baghdad.

"The burden of violence and terror is further intensified by the very bad performance of our hospitals. Now, many innocent people can't find the proper care and the majority are fleeing to Iran, Syria, or Jordan for care. One of these is my uncle, who couldn't find a working machine for lithotripsy for his kidney stones in all of Baghdad, so he was advised to go to Syria.

"We doctors are under unbearable stress. Aside from the scores of injured people we see daily, factors like limited experience and the horrible shortage of supplies have caused many doctors problems. When faced with a complicated case, doctors often refuse to handle the case and try to refer it elsewhere since a doctor has reason to fear reprisal actions from the family if he fails to manage the case successfully.

"One week ago, I was called to examine a 22 year-old college student afflicted with 60% burns after a blast injury. He had his face and limbs mutilated. One eye had been lost. Nearby was standing a decent-looking gentleman. His eyes were full of tears with breaths full of throes. He was the boy's father. He was murmuring, ‘Those criminals targeted me but hit my boy. Why didn't they just kill me instead?'

"It was an uneasy situation and I felt speechless. What kind of words would mitigate his pangs? I thought to myself, but I couldn't find any to say to him. So I couldn't do anything except have my long, plaintive face reflect my condolences. That gentleman was a college professor and he explained to me, ‘I will not remain for a second. I just want my son to be fine so that I can take him and leave this wrecked country.' I nodded my head agreeing with him and replied, ‘Right, it's a country that you and I can't live in anymore.

"By nature I am not always morose like this, but sometimes a man is pushed beyond his will."

The fact is, for most Iraqis, there is little hope left, though polls show that over 70% of them still want all occupation forces out of their country. I've long since abandoned asking myself the question: How much worse can it get in Iraq? My Iraqi friends and colleagues tell me that one of the more popular sayings in Baghdad nowadays is, "Today is better than tomorrow."

(Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reported from Iraq for over eight months from 2003-2005, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan. His reports have been published by the Independent, the Guardian and the Sunday Herald in the U.K. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service, as well as for Tomdispatch.com, and is currently finishing a book about his experiences in Iraq.)


2. The Time Is Now -- by Bob Herbert/NY Times

On Wednesday, as if the release of the Iraq Study Group report needed some form of dramatic punctuation, 11 more American G.I.’s were killed in this misbegotten war that just about everyone, except perhaps the president, now sees as a complete and utter debacle.

Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon who supported the war, delivered an emotional speech on the Senate floor Thursday evening in which he said:

“I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.”

If the U.S. is ultimately going to retreat in Iraq, he said, “I would rather do it sooner than later. I am looking for answers, but the current course is unacceptable to this senator.”

The primary value of the Baker-Hamilton report is that it embodies, in clear and explicit language, the consensus that has emerged in the U.S. about the current state of the war. It’s not so much a blueprint for action as a recognition of reality.

“The level of violence is high and growing,” the report says. “There is great suffering, and the daily lives of many Iraqis show little or no improvement. Pessimism is pervasive.”

With the situation in Iraq deteriorating, and support for the war in the U.S. having all but collapsed, the only real question on the table is how long the U.S. is going to drag out its inevitable pullout of combat forces. And the inevitable moral question that is inextricably linked to that slowly evolving set of circumstances is how to justify the lives that will be lost between now and the final day of our departure.

There is something agonizingly tragic about soldiers dying in a war that has already been lost.

The scale of the debacle is breathtaking. According to the study group: “In some parts of Iraq — notably in Baghdad — sectarian cleansing is taking place. The United Nations estimates that 1.6 million are displaced within Iraq, and up to 1.8 million Iraqis have fled the country.”

Americans, including the members of the study group, continue to insist that the key to an American withdrawal over the next couple of years is the improvement of Iraqi security forces to the point where they can successfully step into the breach. That is a complete fantasy, as a reading of the study group’s own assessment of the Iraqi forces will attest.

The study group found that, among other things, the Iraqi Army units “lack leadership ... lack equipment ... lack personnel ... [and] lack logistics and support.”

“Soldiers are given leave liberally and face no penalties for absence without leave,” the report said. “Unit readiness rates are low, often at 50 percent or less.”

The report went on: “They lack the ability to sustain their operations, the capability to transport supplies and troops, and the capacity to provide their own indirect fire support, close-air support, technical intelligence and medical evacuation.”

Other than that, they’re fine.

So what’s next? The Bush administration has lost all of its credibility on the war. What is needed now are leaders with the courage to insist, perhaps at the risk of their reputations and careers, that it is wrong to continue sending fresh bodies after those already lost, to continue asking young, healthy American troops to head into the combat zone, perhaps for their third or fourth tour, to fight in a war the public no longer supports.

In a foreword to “The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam’s chronicle of the Vietnam fiasco, Senator John McCain wrote:

“It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.

“No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”

The United States lacks that resolve when it comes to Iraq. It is time to pull the troops out of harm’s way.

(Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. In 1990, Mr. Herbert was a founding panelist of "Sunday Edition," a weekly discussion program on WCBS-TV in New York, and the host of Hotline, a weekly issues program on New York public television.)


3. The Sunshine Boys Can’t Save Iraq -- by Frank Rich/NY Times

In America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.

The report of the 10 Washington elders was rolled out like a heartwarming Hollywood holiday release. There was a feel-good title, “The Way Forward,” unfortunately chosen as well by Ford Motor to promote its last-ditch plan to stave off bankruptcy . There was a months-long buildup, with titillating sneak previews to whip up anticipation. There was the gala publicity tour on opening day, starting with a President Bush cameo timed for morning television and building to a “Sunshine Boys” curtain call by James Baker and Lee Hamilton on “Larry King Live. ”

The wizard behind it all was the public relations giant Edelman, which has lately been recruited by Wal-Mart to put down the populist insurgency threatening its bottom line. Edelman’s vice chairman is Michael Deaver, the imagineer extraordinaire of the Reagan presidency, and “The Way Forward” had a nostalgic dash of that old Morning-in-America vibe. In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that “immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long” might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra.

Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990’s he famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. “The Way Forward” is its apotheosis.

This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we’re “not winning” in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush’s “ absolutely, we’re winning ” of late October, it’s hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.

That’s what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage in his parting memo listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public expectations for success be downsized so we would “therefore not ‘lose.’ ” By putting the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we’ve done. The illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood.

The Iraq Study Group takes a similarly disingenuous tack. Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a “ grave and gathering danger ” in September 2002 has devolved into a “grave and deteriorating” catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.

Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country’s warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to “influence events” for America’s benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas.

The group’s coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there’s no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is.

By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn’t plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact a charade of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain, for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. The tip-off to the cynical game can be found in a single sentence: “We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq, as stated by the president: ‘an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.’ ” This studious group knows that even that modest goal, a radical devaluation of the administration’s ambition to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, has long been proven a mirage. The Iraqi government’s ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group’s members visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb) daring to leave the Green Zone . The Bush-Maliki rendezvous 10 days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman.

The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however evanescently, come not from “The Way Forward” but from its critics on the right who want significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that a true counterinsurgency campaign would “ require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police, ” not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John McCain.

Since these troops don’t exist and there is no public support in either America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can’t satisfy the hawks even if he chooses to do so. Since he’s also dead set against a prompt withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many “reviews” he conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to keep us from thinking we’ve “lost,” until the whole mess is deposited in the lap of the next president.

But as Chuck Hagel said last week , “The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can’t quite calibrate.” It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to suppose that the world will stand still while we dally. The Iraq Study Group’s insistence on dragging out its deliberations until after Election Day for the sake of domestic politics mocked and undermined the urgency of its own mission. Meanwhile the violence metastasized. Eleven more of our soldiers were killed on the day the group finally put on its show. The antagonists in Iraq are not about to take a recess while we celebrate Christmas. The mass exodus of Iraqis, some 100,000 per month, was labeled “ the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world ” by Refugees International last week and might soon rival Darfur’s.

THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war’s violence boiled over soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in our coalition of the willing — Thailand, the Philippines, Australia — had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training of South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on its performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men (from Dean Acheson to Omar Bradley) was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement.

But there the stories of Vietnam and Iraq diverge. Those wise men, unlike the Iraq Study Group, were clear in their verdict. And that Texan president, unlike ours, paid more than lip service to changing course. He abruptly announced he would abjure re-election, restrict American bombing and entertain the idea of peace talks. But as Stanley Karnow recounts in “Vietnam: A History,” it was already too late, after some 20,000 casualties and three years of all-out war, for an easy escape: “The frustrating talks were to drag on for another five years. More Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had died there previously. And the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.”

The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.


4. Baghdad's Morgues Working Overtime -- by CHRISTOPHER BODEEN and QAIS Al-ABSHIR/Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Baghdad's morgues are full.

With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries. Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.

In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi. The city's network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says.

Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.

"We can't remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again," al-Obaidi said. "We simply don't have the staff."

Al-Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden.

"Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They're all looking for their dead sons and I don't know how the computer or we will bear up," he said.

While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered on city streets or floating in the Tigris River.

The United Nations estimates about 100 violent deaths daily and the Iraqi health minister last week put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about 150,000 _ close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000-50,000.

In morgues across Iraq where capacity stretches beyond thin, bodies are even being turned away.

"We have to reject them," Hadi al-Itabi of the morgue in Kut, southeast of Baghdad, said he told men who turned in the bodies of six slain border policeman last week. "We just don't have enough cold storage."

Iraq's bureaucracy of death is overwhelmed. The task of identifying and interring bodies is all the more difficult because of the clandestine nature of the killings: Increasingly, Iraqis are being killed far from home and in secret, the victims of kidnappers and sectarian death squads.

With nowhere else to look when a friend or loved-one goes missing, family members first check the local morgue.

Abbas Beyat's joined the line outside Baghdad's central morgue after his brother Hussein disappeared a month ago while driving through the mainly Sunni town of Tarmiyah, 30 miles north of Baghdad. The family had already paid a $60,000 ransom to an intermediary who then disappeared with the money.

"There were three piles, each with about 20 bodies," Beyat, 56, said, describing the scene inside the morgue.

"The clerk told me to dig through them until I found my brother. I had to lift them off until I found him," he said. Like many of those abducted, Hussein Beyet bore the marks of torture, with holes from an electrical drill visible in his skull, Beyat said.

Others never find their loved ones' bodies at all.

The fear of leaving the bereaved without a corpse to bury is so strong that some Iraqi men now tattoo their names, phone numbers and other identifying information on their upper thighs, despite Islam's strict disapproval against such practices.

On the day he turned away the border policemen's bodies, Al-Itabi said Kut's morgue had already buried 15 unidentified corpses pulled from the Tigris River, all of them bound, bullet-riddled, and heavily decomposed.

The government cemetery in Kut, opened on Sept. 24, already holds the graves of 135 unidentified victims.

Hundreds of such bodies have been fished ashore at the town of Suwayrah where they are snagged in nets stretched across the Tigris to prevent river weed spreading into the surrounding canal network.

Most of the dead are mutilated by torture, a practice common on all sides, but especially prevalent among Shiite murder gangs that have snatched thousands of Sunnis from their homes and neighborhoods since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Health Ministry officials are discussing how to handle the overflow of bodies. One proposal under consideration is the use of refrigerated trucks, manned by staff entrusted specifically to help identify bodies.

"That would solve a big problem for us," al-Obaidi said.

With government unable to handle the load, the task of burial usually falls to Islamic charities and other social groups that rely on public donations.

One of the biggest, the organization of powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has buried more than 3,000 unidentified bodies outside the southern holy city of Karbala since Sept. 1, according to an al-Sadr aide, Raad al-Karbalaie.

Trucks from the capital arrive several times a month carrying loads of 50 or more bodies each.

"They've already been photographed and have numbers attached, so hopefully the families can identify them someday," al-Obaidi said. "Then they're free to exhume them for reburial."

Mosques affiliated with the organization take up special collections at Friday prayers to fund the burials, while the men who inter them donate their time and labor, he said.

Um Amir's trip to the Baghdad morgue came too late.

One month after her brother Adnan Hussein disappeared while selling plastic sacks in western Baghdad's Bayaa neighborhood, the 56-year-old Sunni housewife identified him from a picture stored on the Baghdad morgue's computer.

"The clerk told me he had already been buried," Amir said. "They needed the space for new bodies."


4. The Americans Don't See How Unwelcome They Are, or That Iraq Is Now beyond Repair
The main purpose of Bush invading Iraq was to retain power at home
By Patrick Cockburn/The Independent UK

During the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the 19th century, eunuchs at the court of the Chinese emperor had the problem of informing him of the repeated and humiliating defeat of his armies. They dealt with their delicate task by simply telling the emperor that his forces had already won or were about to win victories on all fronts.

For three and a half years White House officials have dealt with bad news from Iraq in similar fashion. Journalists were repeatedly accused by the US administration of not reporting political and military progress on the ground. Information about the failure of the US venture was ignored or suppressed.

Manipulation of facts was often very crude. As an example of the systematic distortion, the Iraq Study Group revealed last week that on one day last July US officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. In reality, it added, "a careful review of the reports ... brought to light 1,100 acts of violence".

The 10-fold reduction in the number of acts of violence officially noted was achieved by not reporting the murder of an Iraqi, or roadside bomb, rocket or mortar attacks aimed at US troops that failed to inflict casualties. I remember visiting a unit of US combat engineers camped outside Fallujah in January 2004 who told me that they had stopped reporting insurgent attacks on themselves unless they suffered losses as commanders wanted to hear only that the number of attacks was going down. As I was drove away, a sergeant begged us not to attribute what he had said: "If you do I am in real trouble."

Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was "largely unchallenged" in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush's response was: "What is he, some kind of a defeatist?" A week later the station chief was reassigned.

A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency's senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: "It's robust, it's well led, it's diverse." According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: "Is this guy a Democrat?"

The query is perhaps key to Mr Bush's priorities. The overriding political purpose of the US administration in invading Iraq was to retain power at home. It would do so by portraying Mr Bush as "the security president", manipulating and exaggerating the terrorist threat at home and purporting to combat it abroad. It would win cheap military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would hold "khaki" elections in which Democrats could be portrayed as unpatriotic poltroons.

The strategy worked - until November's mid-term elections. Mr Bush was victorious by presenting a false picture of Iraq. It is this that has been exposed as a fraud by the Iraq Study Group.

Long-maintained myths tumble. For instance, the standard stump speech by Mr Bush or Tony Blair since the start of the insurgency has been to emphasise the leading role of al-Qa'ida in Iraq and international terrorism. But the group's report declares "al-Qa'ida is responsible for a small portion of violence", adding that it is now largely Iraqi-run. Foreign fighters, their presence so often trumpeted by the White House and Downing Street, are estimated to number only 1,300 men in Iraq. As for building up the Iraqi army, the training of which is meant to be the centrepiece of US and British policy, the report says that half the 10 planned divisions are made up of soldiers who will serve only in areas dominated by their own community. And as for the army as a whole, it is uncertain "they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda".

Given this realism it is sad that its authors, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, share one great misconception with Mr Bush and Mr Blair. This is about the acceptability of any foreign troops in Iraq. Supposedly US combat troops will be withdrawn and redeployed as a stiffening or reinforcement to Iraqi military units. They will form quick-reaction forces able to intervene in moments of crisis.

"This simply won't work," one former Iraqi Interior Ministry official told me. "Iraqis who work with Americans are regarded as tainted by their families. Often our soldiers have to deny their contact with Americans to their own wives. Sometimes they balance their American connections by making contact with the insurgents at the same time."

Mr Bush and Mr Blair have always refused to take on board the simple unpopularity of the occupation among Iraqis, though US and British military commanders have explained that it is the main fuel for the insurgency. The Baker-Hamilton report notes dryly that opinion polls show that 61 per cent of Iraqis favour armed attacks on US forces. Given the Kurds overwhelmingly support the US presence, this means three-quarters of all Arabs want military action against US soldiers.

The other great flaw in the report is to imply that Iraqis can be brought back together again. The reality is that the country has already broken apart. In Baghdad, Sunnis no longer dare to visit the main mortuary to look for murdered relatives because it is under Shia control and they might be killed themselves. The future of Iraq may well be a confederation rather than a federation, with Shia, Sunni and Kurd each enjoying autonomy close to independence.

There are certain points on which the White House and the authors of the report are dangerously at one. This is that the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki can be bullied into trying to crush the militias (this usually means just one anti-American militia, the Mehdi Army), or will bolt from the Shia alliance. In the eyes of many Iraqis this would simply confirm its status as a US pawn. As for talking with Iran and Syria or acting on the Israel-Palestinian crisis it is surely impossible for Mr Bush to retreat so openly from his policies of the past three years, however disastrous their outcome.