October 19, 2004

NORMALCY:

Iraq's separate peace (ANNIE SWEENEY, 10/19/04, Chicago Sun-Times)

On a Saturday afternoon in Iraq, between Baghdad and Camp Anaconda, the countryside looks a little like Wisconsin. There are farmers tilling fields and women walking on roads. Freight trains and major highways.

This wasn't exactly what I expected when I left for the war-ravaged country the first week of September. And initially, it made me feel lousy.

Here in Chicago I tend to cover breaking crime stories where the action is intense -- grieving victims, burned-out buildings, angry neighbors.

I expected this type of human drama in Iraq, and apparently others did, too. When I came back after three weeks, all everybody wanted to know was how scared I was.

Iraq was hot and smelly. It was dirty and dusty. Mortars sometimes boomed in the distance.

But I can't describe it as scary. I didn't see the hard-core stuff, and a lot of soldiers who live and work there don't, either.

That's not to say the kidnappings, bombings and airstrikes from U.S. planes aren't wreaking havoc on both Iraqis and American troops.

It's just there's another side -- a side where the ebb and flow of the day-to-day is so normal, it's almost jarring.


Chicago has 600 murders a year--does John Kerry think we should give up on it?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2004 12:21 PM
Comments

In one short post you have given us the clearest picture of the pathology that is journalism: "...normal...(is)...jarring."

Posted by: luciferous at October 19, 2004 12:55 PM

Gee, Chicago in the 70s.

How quaint.

Not a picture the press wants to portray.

Posted by: Sandy P at October 19, 2004 1:22 PM

Chicago has 600 murders a year--does John Kerry think we should give up on it?

He thinks that murders, well tragic for the victim, are a nuisance to the community at large; that this is a low-grade issue; that we've got to respond to each one; that it is more productive in the long run to work with the community to ameliorate the causes of murder than to inflict harsh punishment on each individual murderer; but not fool ourselves that we'll ever get rid of murder entirely.

Posted by: David Cohen at October 19, 2004 1:27 PM

"while tragic", of course. I type what I hear in my head, and my elocution is awful.

Posted by: David Cohen at October 19, 2004 1:28 PM

"Chicago has 600 murders a year--does John Kerry think we should give up on it?"

Well, now that the Trib has come out for Bush...

Posted by: H.D. Miller at October 19, 2004 1:53 PM

This is exactly the point I made recently to a visiting Brit. If you formed an opinion about Chicago from only watching the evening news, you wouldn't ever come here. Truly, if it isn't bleeding, burning or a car wreck, it isn't on the news. Except for sports and weather which are both other kinds of disasters.

Posted by: Rick T. at October 19, 2004 3:08 PM

The mayor of Chicago can leave his mansion and have some hope of living to return.

The proconsul in Iraq could not and did not.

You guys gotta get over body counts. Vietnam is history.

Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 20, 2004 2:19 PM
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