The question: Just how bad is it now?

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

April 22, 2004

How bad is it? This question hangs in my mind as I fly to Iraq amid the violent news of recent weeks. This will be my third reporting trip to Iraq since the war began, and my first in six months.

After my last travel around the country, for several weeks in September and October, I left uncertain whether America's well-meaning enterprise is stabilizing Iraq -- or destabilizing it.

Now, from a distance, things are looking worse. April has been a month of uprisings. U.S. forces tried to arrest the hardline Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who lives in Najaf. And they wanted to capture those in Fallujah responsible for killing the four American men working for a private military company. In those cities and others, Iraqis have erupted in rebellions that have left hundreds dead. Gunmen of unknown loyalties have kidnapped foreigners as hostages.

So a year into America's occupation of Iraq, what does this deterioration mean? "You're going to have good days and bad days," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on April 7. This month of violent uprisings "is a moment in Iraq's path towards a democratic and a free system," he said

I want to believe that. But for every person killed, for every life scarred by this month's violence, there will be an effect. Can we end these uprisings without massive bloodshed and can we heal sufficiently the injuries that are left, so that the violence of April does not beget anger, hatred and more violence in May?

Or is this month's violence more than a "bad day" for America and Iraq (and thus everyone else)? Is it, perhaps, the ominous step in which we have felt ourselves suddenly sink a degree deeper into a dangerous quagmire? That's what I'm coming to Iraq to try to understand.