Too Late For Baghdad?

A Glimpse Of Life, Death, Hope And Despair In Iraq's Capital

(CBS)  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.

[Syndicate]

Perhaps we should let saddam out of jail so he can run his country. It would apear the Iraqi people are not worthy of freedom and had the government they deserved.

[brianp55]

Nice going, George.

[patriotic9]

I am really sick and tired of hearing from the republicans that we are making great progress in Iraq like the kids going to schools and people got electricity.The people of Iraq don't pay tax to our government.We don't have money to run our city schools here in U.S.Why should our tax money be spent on Iraqis.It's none of our buisness.If Saddam Hussain has killed his own people because they wanted to establish a Radical Islamic State based on hatred against us,it was none of our buisness to remove Saddam and bring extremist Shias and Sunnis in power.Is it justified for any other country to invader or bomb USA for the liberation of those innocent American boys who've been molested and sodomized by American preist in the American churches.

[clestes-2009]

May I remind you CbsCrash07 that the Iraqi people did NOT ask for Saddam to be removed, did NOT ask for US troop to be let lose in their country and certainly did not ask for the civil was that now rages.

Who are you to judge whether they are "worthy of freedom"? Are you God in disguse as some racist, uninformed, fool who thinks running off at the mouth to show how ignorant you are, is cool?

[gggranroth]

Pope Benedict was quoting a Christian Emperor of the 14th Century but, judging from the way that Sunnis and Shiites are treating each other in Baghdad, then everything that Emperor said is more than a propos today.
JeanKuu17

[alphaa10-2009]

Bush opened a Pandora's box when he unilaterally started a bogus war, a fraud on the American people and the world. Bush will carry this awful and shameful legacy to his grave, along with the accusing fingers of the hundreds of thousands killed, maimed and orphaned-- American and Iraqi.

Over the last six years, this Texas miscreant and GOP co-conspirators already have blackened the party's claims to any sense of integrity. Even Bush now is forced to admit he sees no connection between Iraq and 911-- and 911 is the only basis for the AUMF, the original basis Bush claimed to justify doing whatever he pleased.

While the original Pandora's box also contained hope, despite all the evils released, even that hope is denied by imbecilic US policies which have (1) no future except more chaos and a widening civil war and (2) further destablize Iraq, making partition of the country more likely than ever. Bush cannot even keep order in the streets, and never has, visiting a nightmare equal to Saddam on the Iraqi people

[edjohn66]

So why isn't Lara Logan the anchor for CBS Evening News?

I'd rather real journalism -- like what Logan engages in -- was the norm instead of a rehashed Good Morning America.....

[osidebear]

So the question remains, "What do we do?" President Bush has left us, and especially the Iraqis, in a situation that has no solution. What happens if we stay? The bloodbath continues, possibly for years, and American forces run the risk of becoming involved in a full-fledged civil war.

What happens if we leave? The bloodbath continues, possibly for years, and American forces may be required to return in order to oppose the rise of a Taliban-like regime.

President Bush speaks of victory, when there can be no victory for us. We are now just trying to figure out what the loss looks like.

[tulcak]

Edging toward civil war? Where have you been. There's been civil war in Iraq at least for the past 2 years! The US never should have invaded Iraq and we need to get out NOW.

[siddin-2009]

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein

[siddin-2009]

My pacificism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of people is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Albert Einstein

[polypsprings]

Anyone with half a brain will immediately associate himself or herself with Edjohn's trenchant comments--both in regards to Lara Logan's journalistic brilliance and to Katie Couric's apparent intention to turn the "CBS Evening News" into "Access Hollywood" or "Access Anything But Iraq And Afghanistan."

There are scores of people being killed and maimed there every day because--and only because--America chose to invade these nations. It doesn't matter anymore whether one believes that Bush and Cheney were right or wrong on either front--or whether they botched them both. It still does matter whether we get the most important coverage of crucial events every evening, and as much of it as we can, from the networks' venerable and once virile flagship broadcasts.

Poor Ed Murrow. Albeit for very different reasons, every time Lara or Katie appears on screen these days, he must go on some serious subterranean maneuvers.