September 7, 2005
SADR, BUT WISER:
Sadr City Success Story: Life is far from rosy in the Baghdad slum, but residents have seen enough progress from rebuilding efforts to give U.S. troops a chance. (T. Christian Miller, September 7, 2005, LA Times)
Men stood and waved. Women smiled. Children flashed thumbs-up signs as the convoy rumbled across the potholed streets of Sadr City.
It was a far more welcoming scene than the urban war zone of a year ago, when U.S. troops and black-clad guerrilla fighters battled in the narrow alleys of the squalid slum.
"We're making a huge impact," Gayton said as his men pulled up to a sewer station newly repaired with U.S. funds. "It has been incredibly safe, incredibly quiet and incredibly secure."
Sadr City has become one of the rare success stories of the U.S. reconstruction effort, say local residents, Iraqi and U.S. officials. Although vast swaths remain blighted, the neighborhood of 2 million mostly impoverished Shiites is one of the calmest in Baghdad. One U.S. soldier has been killed and one car bomb detonated in the last year, the military says.
The improvements are the result of an intense effort in the wake of the street battles last August with fighters loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr. Within a month, U.S. officials decided to make Sadr City a showcase for rebuilding, and increased spending to $805 million in a neighborhood long neglected under Saddam Hussein.
Having covered the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq for the last 22 months, I decided to take a measure of progress by going back to the same people I interviewed last August, in addition to talking with U.S. and Iraqi officials involved in the program.
Their stories provide insight into why the rebuilding of Sadr City is an impressive, if imperfect, accomplishment in Iraq, where many projects remain incomplete and U.S. promises unfulfilled.
The more Shi'a the better the situation--pretty easy to figure out by now.
"I decided to take a measure of progress by going back to the same people I interviewed last August, in addition to talking with U.S. and Iraqi officials involved in the program."
This guy's gonna be unemployed before too long.
I mean this isn't how journalism works.
You sit in the hotel bar in the Green Zone drinking with your fellow journos and their Baathist former MofI interpreters. You get the daily casualty report from military and you write it up.
Maybe if you're a real go-getter you hear some US troops are fighting somewhere within an hour's drive of Baghdad. When it dies down you go and get the low-down from some locals who your translator leads you to. It writes itself.
Whatever you do, don't go back to that city/village/neighborhood 6 months or a year later to see what's been done, to see why it hasn't been mentioned in the US casualty report lately.
And especially don't do it if it's in a Shia region. I mean you might find out why there's been no talk of Mahdi's and uprisings by the Shia lately, and that's just not good journalism.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at September 7, 2005 10:43 AM