July 14, 2004
COURTESY OF THE CRUSADERS:
Street life revives in Iraqi capital: A reporter sees brisk watermelon sales, and other signs of normalcy on a hot July night. (Dan Murphy, 7/15/04, CS Monitor)
I climbed into Adnan's sedan two nights ago, after a failed attempt to meet with a leading Sunni cleric. As the Monitor's longtime driver, he must have sensed my frustration.Posted by Orrin Judd at July 14, 2004 8:21 PMRather than zipping along the highway back to my Baghdad hotel and its cloistered compound, Adnan took me on a detour - to see something that I hadn't seen since arriving last September.
I had been down these major shopping streets before. But tonight they were teeming with Iraqis escaping the summer heat of their homes. Cars were parked two deep. The traffic crawled, while people leaned out their windows to haggle over the enormous watermelons that have come into season. On the sidewalks, people struggled to finish ice cream before it melted, or chatted with friends over tea served on card tables. There's been some street life for over a year now, but nothing like this.
On every other street corner, Iraqi police in new US-supplied sports utility vehicles seemed to be flying the flag and directing traffic - a powerful sign of a domestic security presence. In our 30-minute drive, I was struck by another fact: there was not a US humvee in sight.
Adnan, whose English is rough but effective, said he wanted me to witness the greater degree of optimism on the Iraqi streets since the US handover of power to an interim Iraqi government.
More deceptive reporting from the VRWC. It's a quaqmire, the NYT told me. (Sarcasm off).
Posted by: AWW at July 14, 2004 8:35 PMI was listening to All Things Considered on NPR on Tuesday (7/13) and Anne Garrels ran this story on women in Iraq under the new government. She told the plight of these two young women in a family in a populated region of Iraq. The girls were complaining about their lack of freedom and the lack of security for them. They were saying that under Saddam, they had great lives. About 3/4th of the way through this story, Anne Garrels made an off-hand remark that these girls were Sunni Muslims. Anne Garrels failed to mention that Sunnis were the privileged class in Iraq. I bet if she asked a Shia or a Kurdish woman how they liked life under Saddam, I think it would have been a different story altogether.
Ah, NPR.
Anne Gerrels has been in Iraq for over a year (I think), and knows less about it than we do by keeping current on the Internet.
Posted by: jim hamlen at July 14, 2004 10:41 PMCan't be, good news???
Posted by: Sandy P at July 14, 2004 10:51 PMThis is good news but over at Rantburg we see there was a car bomb in Baghdad killing 10 and the new governor of Mosul was killed. Iraq is still pretty unstable but at least the Iraqis are the ones trying to settle it down.
Posted by: AWW at July 14, 2004 11:14 PMHope Ann at least had the good sense before she did this interview. Muslim nations aren't too fond of women showing a lot of skin in public, whether or not they're NPR correspondents.
Posted by: John at July 15, 2004 12:24 AMLike all the anti-war types and Kerry/Edwards are saying worldwide: Saddam and his totalitarian national/Socialist party should have been left in power. They weren't bothering anyone anymore. Not even the U.N.
Posted by: genecis at July 15, 2004 11:01 AMAll watermelon sales, anywhere, are always brisk.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 16, 2004 2:00 PM