October 16, 2008
Back In Iraq
Newsday's James Rupert has returned to Iraq, joining Newsday staffers who have been there throughout the war, to assess the progress made since he left after the war ended, and will send along his observations and stories. Rupert, who joined Newsday as deputy foreign editor in December 2001, has helped lead the paper's coverage in Iraq by other correspondents since the war began in March. He spent several weeks in Jordan and Iraq during the war.
War in Iraq
Oct. 2 - Old Books to New Places
Whenever I travel to some distant place, I try to take along a book about it that was written a long time ago. So, in addition to seeing the place now, I can compare it a bit to what someone has seen before. Probably my most frequent literary guide has been Graham Greene, who floated around Haiti, Sierra Leone and Liberia decades before I got to those places as a correspondent.
Sept. 28 A Death In The Family
Tonight, many of the English-speaking reporters in Baghdad got together at the Washington Post house to say, basically, that we loved Mark Fineman. (Some newspapers are working out of hotels here, and others out of rented houses.)
Sept. 26: Paying the price for Journalists.
Someone planted a bomb outside the NBC News bureau here yesterday. All journalists in Baghdad have to worry about their security, so I stopped by today to see just how it had happened.
Sept. 25: A Death We Can't Afford
Aqila Hashimi died today. She was the remarkable woman who started this year as a senior diplomat in Saddam Hussein's foreign ministry and wound up being invited by the United States to join a new government here.
Sept 24: Hospitals Attest To Disorder in Iraq
Basra, Iraq - At Al-Faiha Hospital yesterday, emergency room workers were mopping up the blood from the latest gunshot victim to be carried through the doors. He had been shot in the head by a gang that stole his car, said an attendant, Abbas Ali Auda. Even were the hospital functioning normally, he would likely die. But Al-Faiha is having to re-use syringes, is using common staples as lancets to draw blood for tests and lacks painkillers and other basic drugs.
Sept. 19: Karrada Street
Not much is working in Baghdad's economy these days. But one sudden boom is in luxury appliances and the Internet. On the main street near the hotel where Newsday keeps its office here, cartons of refrigerators, stoves, TVs and air conditioners are piled high from the storefronts to the curb. Sometimes, you can hardly find the shop owner in the maze of cartons.
Sept. 18: We Have Gas, But No Pumps
When the 10-man crew of the Saadoun Street gas station arrived at work this morning, they found the electricity off, and the station's generator out of commission. Half went home, and the other five decided to hang around and hope for some way to make a little money.
Sept. 14: On The Street
At midday, the sun was barbecuing Baghdad, cooking people and their cars on the hot asphalt grill of the city's streets. At a big intersection in Waziriya, people also were doing a little self-cooking. From all four directions, grim drivers crammed their cars into the crossroads, with no traffic signals, no signs, no cops to bring order. With all due respect to Newsday's On The Roads Columnist John Valenti and his angry Long Island readers, this was a real traffic jam! Not bumper-to-bumper. It was bumper-to-fender, bumper-to-rear-tire, bumper-to-driver's-door-handle.
Sept. 13: The Coral Palace
Ghassan is a brave man. Last fall, as the George Bush administration ratcheted up its warnings to the government of Saddam Hussein, Ghassan, a middle-aged Lebanese businessman in Baghdad, could see the war coming as clearly as anyone. But instead of buying a ticket home to Beirut, he bought a building on one of Baghdad's main squares and began refurbishing it as a small, luxury hotel. He imported air-conditioning systems, had marble flooring and attractive woodwork put in, and called it the Coral Palace Hotel.
Sept. 11: Back to Baghdad
With so much riding on the George Bush administration's effort to remake Iraq, it's been easy for me to feel sick at my stomach in the month since bombs started blowing up people on whom America must rely to make this work. The United States needs help from Arab friends (like the Jordanians killed in the bombing of their embassy), from the United Nations, from patriotic Iraqis eager to rebuild after Saddam (like the police officers who have come under repeated attack) and from ordinary people like the Shia Muslim worshippers of Najaf. Since Aug. 7, all of these groups have been attacked by bombers whose message is: "cooperate with the Americans at your peril."
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