Too Late For Baghdad?

CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan files this reporter's notebook from Baghdad.

It is the middle of the night in Baghdad, and from my window I can see the city lying in darkness. The night is quiet.

But I think about all the homes where a bed is lying empty, that terrible empty space where someone used to lie before they disappeared — another person kidnapped, another person who disappeared on the way to somewhere and hasn't been seen nor heard from since. Another family waiting in pain.

This is how it works. Iraqis say: "If they haven't found the body, then they are probably still alive. Then you can still hope." That's the only way most people have any idea about the fate of their disappeared loved ones and friends.

Sometimes they know immediately. When the lock is broken in the middle of the night and they walk into your home, through the rooms where your children sleep, and drag your sons from their beds and tear your husband out of your arms — then, even before the bodies are found, you know the men you love most likely are never coming back. Many say the men wear uniforms — police uniforms. The police say these uniforms are stolen or bought and have nothing to do with them.

It doesn't matter anymore.

The damage is done. The police are dominated by Shiites, who make up more than 60 percent of Iraq's population. The Sunnis believe the police are an instrument of Shiite revenge for years of Sunni brutality under Saddam Hussein. Very often they are. But the killing is on both sides. No one is safe.

This is a time of sadness in the Iraqi capital.

It seems the streets here now run with blood, even after the burning wreckage of a car bomb has stopped smoldering, even after the blackened debris has been swept from the streets and pieces of charred flesh washed down the gutters. Long after the bodies have been carried to the morgue where no one will ever come to claim them.

That's the way it is for Sunnis in Baghdad now. Most don't dare go to the morgue to claim the body of a loved one because there are eyes waiting, tongues ready to talk, hands ready to kill again. Shiite militias watch the morgues to see who comes for certain Sunni bodies, then they follow those relatives and murder them, too. It has happened over and over — so often now that many Sunni bodies remain unclaimed, lying on the cold, over-crowded concrete until they get shipped off en masse to a Shiite cemetery in the southern city of Karbala. This is a final insult to Sunnis — that their loved ones' eternal resting place be in ground sacred to Shiites, far from home, beyond the reach of their family.

There is talk that the hospitals are the same. Some Sunni patients have been yanked from their beds, dragged screaming through the corridors and executed in front of doctors, nurses, patients, families. It's even been written about in a few newspapers. But only a few people know for sure — and they are not saying if it's true or not, or how often it's happened. It's virtually impossible for journalists to find out. As one U.S. military officer put it, "Iraq's entire health care system has been hijacked by the Mehdi Army militia, (belonging to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr), the Health Minister won't even talk to us."

So this is the point that has been reached in Baghdad. Elements of the Iraqi government prefer not to deal with U.S. officials. The capital is fracturing and dividing along ethnic lines as Sunni and Shiite flee mixed neighborhoods in terror and every day the streets run with fresh blood.

The Iraqi Security forces — armed, trained and equipped by the U.S. — are showing signs of the party and militia loyalties that have existed from the start but were less evident when the sectarian violence was not as widespread. Now even Sunnis in Baghdad, who always supported the Iraqi resistance against the "American occupation," are asking those very same occupying forces not to leave.

My old Iraqi friend stopped me in a darkened corridor one afternoon. He is both Sunni and Shiite, like so many here — a product of an Iraq where those differences did not matter to many people. His face is pallid with months, years now, of anxiety and stress. The hours and hours of nights spent struggling for sleep that doesn't come, the constant struggle not to give in, always on your guard — stay aware to stay alive. The spies are everywhere now. Everywhere. It is like a time they knew before, under Saddam, only now, he says, the Shiite intelligence is even better than under Saddam because there are more of them.

"What will happen if the Americans pull out?" I ask, already knowing the answer.

He looks past me, out of the window, into the water of the Tigris River that flows through the city, and past that to a city and a country at war.

"That river will run with blood, Sunni blood. That's it."

We don't finish the conversation. It can't go beyond that. You either believe or you don't.

I spent many hours talking to Shiites in Sadr city, the large Shiite slum in the northeast corner of Baghdad that was more like a prison than a neighborhood under Saddam Hussein's vicious rule. They don't believe.

"There won't be a civil war." they told me, over and over. Never. Not in Iraq. Not here. "Inshala" — God willing.

But you wonder anyway if they mean it, if they are telling the truth, if they really believe it. One old woman, her head and body covered in the traditional, black abaya that all women must wear in Shiite areas, can't hide her contempt.

"They won't come here," she spits, meaning no Sunnis will come to Sadr City, where we sit on a dirty pavement outside the social service offices of Moqtada al-Sadr. No wonder she's bitter. "Sunnis forced me from my home in abu Ghraib," she tells me, referring to the Sunni-dominated area west of Baghdad that still echoes in the minds of the world as the place of America's greatest shame in Iraq.

"The Sunnis were killing us, we had to leave our houses and run. We brought nothing, all that I have is these papers you see here, papers. Nothing else." While she is talking, a young soldier in Sadr's Mehdi Army militia interrupts her — "no mother, don't say Sunnis, just say 'those that killed our neighbors and the people." He's not aggressive — just chiding her. The Mehdi Army has a message, and it's this, for now: We are all Iraqis, we are not in a civil war, this is not our war. This is the work of Americans who want to use civil war as a reason to continue their occupation of our country; they are the ones arming the terrorists, they give the bombs to the foreigners of al Qaeda to place in our markets and kill our people. They are behind all the killing.

It doesn't matter if that is true or not. Here, on the streets of Sadr city where at least 3 million Shiites live, they believe it. And that's enough here to make it true.

What Americans believe doesn't matter to these people. They are the group calling most loudly now for an American withdrawal. They don't represent all Shiites — there are factions and splits and rivalries. And still the streets run with blood, fresh blood, every day. American blood mixed with Iraqi blood. Sunni and Shiite still sometimes dying together.

An American general says they're making progress. Another general wants to share the "good news story" that's not being reported by the media. I listen intently, paying attention to every word, waiting for it. I will tell it. Let me tell it. We wait. Lots of talking, words, "we are moving in the right direction, definitely."

And there it is. Nothing. Some talk about security being better in the neighborhoods where U.S. forces are present in great numbers — followed by an admission that violence is worse in areas where they are not present. Doesn't that cancel out the good? Make it meaningless? It's the same pattern seen over and over in Iraq for more than three years now — when U.S. forces move in, violence goes down — when they move out, it goes back to what it was, sometimes the same, but often worse. "Are there enough troops to secure the whole capital? Why can't you do that, general? Do you need more troops?" No answer. Lots of words, no answers. Who can touch that issue and still hold on to their military career?

"We're making great progress." More words and numbers. "We have moved more than 100,000 cubic yards of trash from the streets and neighborhoods". 100,000 cubic yards of trash — who measured that? The transcript notes every word the generals have said. There's a line about what they hope to achieve in six neighborhoods in Baghdad that have been secured under the month-long security crackdown, and there, at the top of the list:

"To improve electricity potential to 3,000 homes."

Electricity potential. Potential. Repeat the words. That's what's on offer? Electricity potential. To 3,000 Iraqi homes, in a city of 6 million.

Most of the Iraqi capital enjoyed 24-hour power under Saddam Hussein — that's what Baghdad's residents expect. Today, they're lucky to get four hours per day. And there are a million reasons U.S. officials can give you for that — most of them legitimate: infrastructure decay, sabotage, poor systems — it goes on. But you can't win hearts and minds with reasons. You just can't.

And it's hard to understand the impact of living constantly without power when you live on a base or inside the international zone which has 24-hour electricity from generators that never run out of fuel. You might be able to understand it intellectually, but how can you feel the rage?

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