Mods: This was a live on-the-ground report from Baghdad from Robert Fisk aired on Flashpoints last night.
http://www.kpfa.org/cgi-bin/gen-mpegurl.m3u?server=209.81.10.18&port=80&mount=/data/20040720-Tue1700.mp3Robert Fisk pointed out that few journalists are willing to leave Baghdad, and said he didn't blame them for that, but that he did blame them for not telling their readers and viewers that they won't drive outside Baghdad. Then he said:
"24 hours ago I got in a car with my drivers, Iraqi's all of them, on the road to Najjaf, which is about 150 miles south of Baghdad. We had to drive down highway 8, which is one of the most dangerous roads in the country, because on this road at least 15, possibly as many as 25, westerners have been murdered by insurgents. We drove right down this road to Najjaf. And it was like a screen was pulled aside and I could see a reality. In the first 70 miles, every police checkpoint was abandoned. The road was littered with shot-through Iraqi police vehicles and burned American military petrol tankers.
There was a short period when there were some Iraqi police and soldiers on the road, and when we approached Najjaf,
the police stopped us and said we can't go any further, at which point I was handed over to al Sadr's Mehdi army which is the Shiite militia controlling the center of Najjaf. A young man took me into the holiest Shiite shrine <..beautiful shrine..> and in an airconditioned office there I met the righthand man of Moqtada al Sadr. He produced a map of the ceasefire between the US forces and Shiite forces in Najjaf. It was an American map, a US military map, upon which he had drawn several lines. And HE had drawn the lines whereby the Americans could use these roads, these particular roads, to resupply their bases, but the Americans otherwise had to stay in the bases, and THAT was the ceasefire plan.
It was quite extraordinary and very humiliating, I suppose, militarily, that a Shiite man should be able to give me a U.S. map showing the restrictions on the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq. And more than this, he then complained that the US troops had broken the ceasefire agreement, and said, 'The ONLY issue outstanding in the ceasefire negotiation is that the charges against Moqtada alSadr of killing Assayed (a very vulnerable and prowestern cleric in Najjaf last year) should be lifted.'
So what I realized -- I did a 350 mile round trip and I don't carry security with me, I had one Shiite cleric in my car -- was that the central authority in Baghdad controls only Baghdad -- just like Afghanistan, where Karzai controls only Kabul. The central government which was set up and controlled by the U.S. controls only Baghdad. We know that the cities of Aquba, Samarra, Ramadi, Fallujah in the Sunni areas are outside government control. Now I learned that 70-100 miles south of Baghdad, by traveling there and seeing with my own eyes, is outside government control. Alas, our journalists prefer to stay in the hotels, and they talk about the new Iraq, and they go to press conferences in carefully concealed areas of Baghdad where American-appointed officials say things are getting better."
(There's more from Fisk, but this was the part that was really news and not analysis.)