All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

CBS News reported this week that despite millions of dollars flowing out from Iraq's rich oil resources every day, some of the country's social services, including basic hospital care, are sorely neglected. You can read the story here. Larry Doyle, our Baghdad bureau chief, saw the effects of this firsthand, when his friend and neighbor needed care. What follows is his story, told by Doyle.

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It was about 120 degrees the day I met Alfred. One of those furnaces-like Baghdad days that come blazing in every June. Alfred had found about the only relief on our rock-covered dirty street. He looked pretty comfortable in a worn, formerly white plastic chair propped in a little shade supplied by a 12-foot-high concrete blast wall.

Damn, I whispered, I’m melting. Why isn’t that chair?

“Salaam alaikum,” I sweated out in fractured Arabic.

“Sit, my friend, please sit,” was the perfect English response. And that simple exchange started a great friendship.

Almost exactly a year later, Faried Yacob George lay in an emergency room in Baghdad Hospital, one of five in the Medical City complex.

Faried was my friend Alfred. I never wrapped my tongue around his real first name so we decided “Alfred” would do just fine. Actually Alfred was in the emergency room two days and nights and eventually was given a saline IV the second day because he was dehydrated. Sitting a long time in a sweltering room will do that to you. It will do that to a healthy 20-year-old. My friend was 76.

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Jeff Glor is a CBS News correspondent reporting from Baghdad.

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The bus pulled up this morning and a man named Labib Abu Ali got out. He'd just completed the long ride from Syria, along with his wife and four kids. His brother was waiting for him, and they embraced — a warm embrace that was a long time coming. Abu Ali smiled the whole time.

For the rest of the day, that smile never went away.

There's a good reason why. For the first time in six months, he's back home, back in place he feels he belongs. He's in Baghdad.

Since the U.S. troop surge reached its peak, thousands of people have returned to the capital city. They're returning, residents like Abu Ali, because they feel safer. They don't see the same kind of violence that was destroying this city last year. They feel comfortable bringing their families here. That's worth noting.

That, finally, is good news.

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Baghdad-based CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey just filed a Reporter’s Notebook reviewing some of the dynamic of diplomacy -- or lack thereof -- that leads up to this weekend’s regional conference on Iraq in Istanbul.

Here’s a taste:

Diplomacy, it has been famously written, is the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the journey. The regional conference on Iraq in Istanbul this weekend is an example of how the Bush administration’s predilection for replacing that art with a bludgeon can come back to haunt.

The meeting was supposed to be another step along the way in the development of Iraq’s economy and place in the region. Instead, it will be dominated by the struggle between the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) and Turkey.

Keeping that simmering witches’ brew from boiling out of its pot will be a major part of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s job, made all the harder by the fact that among the players who could be useful is the one participant Washington consistently tries to keep out of the mix, Iran.

Just click here to mosey on over to our Reporter’s Notebook section to read the rest of Pizzey’s report.

The sickening images from a Baghdad orphanage this week are horrifing reminders that sometimes the casualties of war are its most innocent victims.

Click the monitor for more.

Four years ago today -- April 9, 2003 -- Iraqis pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein, and Baghdad fell. But what happened after the fall?

Just click the monitor to watch.

Allen Pizzey is a CBS News Correspondent based in Baghdad.

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Someone once said that the job of president (or prime minister, or any other kind of national leader) should not be given to anyone who actually wants it. That being unrealistic, perhaps there ought to at least be a rule that says no one should be allowed to seek such employment unless they demonstrate a grasp of reality greater than the reach of their own ambitions.

Case in point, at least from the perspective of Baghdad, which is, after all, the epicenter of the issue that dominates the U.S. presidential "race", is Senator John McCain's recent analysis of the situation here.

According to transcripts of his appearance on CNN's "Late Edition", the senator confirmed that he had made the following statement: "There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods today."

He went on to add "General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee." Apart from the fact that he probably meant "unarmored", the statement displays a woeful ignorance of the news from here.

Even those who buy the argument that the media "reports only bad things," can hardly deny that there is bad news. Surely that ought to count double for someone seeking a job that includes the description of commander-in-chief for a war he says may not be over by the time the position next becomes vacant...

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As America marks the beginning of the fifth year of the Iraq war, many at CBS News and CBSNews.com are pausing to look back -- and look forward. You'll find some interesting coverage around this site, from the United States and Iraq and all points in between.

A couple noteworthy items:

National Security correspondent David Martin puts the war in a military context:

Coming up on the 4th anniversary of the war in Iraq, it no longer seems worth the effort to argue about who made what mistakes. The relevant question now is the one General David Petraeus asked in the opening days of the invasion – "tell me how this ends."

It is one of history's minor ironies that as the new commander in Iraq, Petraeus is now in charge of answering his own question. He is pursuing a classic counterinsurgency strategy – a surge of troops to protect the citizens of Baghdfad from violence and buy time for the Iraqi government to get its act together. But as both U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon now acknowledge, this is not a classic insurgency.

Meantime, his frequent collaborator, producer Mary Walsh remembers the early days of covering the war:

Just after the city fell David Martin and I toured Baghdad neighborhoods with Col. Ted Spain, who was basically the chief of police at the time. He had 900 American MPs for a city of 5.5 million. Was that enough? "I would like to have more, Spain said. "I would always like to have more."

As I look to the future in Iraq, I can't help looking back. I think of Col. Spain that day in May 2003 surrounded by young Iraqi men. "We hate you Americans," they bluntly told him. They also told him they had no work and if he could help get them jobs the sting of defeat would not be so bad.

There's more, much more, both sobering and insightful. This is a good time to think of where we've been. And wonder about where we may be headed.

Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan has seen it all during her time in Iraq. But, she reports, some images, and some memories, are impossible to forget.

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The man was lying in the middle of the road. I didn’t see him at first, I just heard a soldier cry out, “there’s a body in the road, other side!”

And there it was.

He was young, possibly in his early twenties. And he’s been shot three times. It was hard to tell at first, because of his clothes, but I could see the small bullet hole next to his nose. Funny how the entry wound often doesn’t look like much, it’s the exit wound that tells the real story of how much damage that bullet has done. That’s where it gets really messy.

We weren’t allowed out of the vehicle – “Sergeant says no way,” his lieutenant told me. “It’s way too dangerous here, this is where the Iraqis got hit by an RPG and one of them killed and there’s always IED’s along here”. So that was that – forced to make television through the armored glass of the humvee, pushing the lens to try overcome the distance and objects in between the camera and the action.

I could see the Iraqi soldiers running with a black body bag – moving as fast as they could to get the body inside before an attack. We were on the main road running through Ameriya, the most dangerous Sunni insurgent neighborhood in Baghdad where these mostly Shiite Iraqi soldiers are constantly targeted – and hated by the local community. It got messier as they tried to lift the body into the bag but they managed, just the four soldiers out exposed while everyone else watched from inside the vehicles and the gunners up top scanned the surrounding area for any sign of movement.

It seemed heavy, and took forever to heave the bag into the trunk of the vehicle but eventually it was done and the armored top of the trunk slammed down over it’s bloody human cargo.

As we started to move away, I stared at the chunks of human remains and the long trail of blood smeared across the tarmac. He’d traveled quite a distance along the road, ‘they must have been going really fast when they threw him out’, I thought to myself. ‘I wonder if he was already dead when they opened the car door…I hope so’.

It was only a few minutes later when we pulled into an Iraqi police station that’s housed in the next neighborhood over – it’s too dangerous to have a police station in Ameriyah itself. There I watched as the Iraqi soldiers pulled the body bag out of the trunk and laid it down on the floor. A policeman stepped forward as soldiers and police crowded round. He unzipped the bag, and for a moment, everyone just stared, not really saying anything...

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Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan has filed this notebook from Baghdad. Anyone who is interested in life in that troubled city will want to read her gripping account. - Ed.


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 lay before they disappeared — another person kidnapped, another person who disappeared on the way somewhere and has not been seen or heard of 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.

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 are most likely 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...

Check out the full story here.

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Our colleague Mark Strassman is in Baghdad. How are the soldiers holding up? He sent us this dispatch early this morning.

“We’re at war, America’s at the mall.”

That’s how a lieutenant colonel here in Baghdad summed up his frustration last week. I had asked him, given the chance, which Iraq-related issue he would raise with President Bush. We were standing in the dust of a makeshift landing zone, on the edge of a fortified Baghdad neighborhood, waiting for a Blackhawk to airlift us somewhere.

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