I really like this, "direct from Baghdad, no BS," blog.
Bagh Blog
Saturday, July 31, 2004
Taxis without seatbelts, AK's without permits, and commentary without edits. A freelancer's life in Baghdad, by Charlie Crain
Yesterday was supposed to be a day off, but instead Colin Powell ruined it by making a surprise trip to Baghdad and holding a press conference. I was in the conference room with the rest of the media by 1:45, but for security reasons the main event didn't start for a couple hours after that. The delay was expected, so I'd brought a book of magazine articles and short fiction by James Ellroy. Even better, my friend Dave Enders had episodes of the Simpsons on his laptop. We watched one of the Halloween specials while we waited:
"So, everything turned out for the best."
"What do you mean? Bart's dead!"
"Well, me saying sorry won't bring him back."
"The gypsy said it would."
"She's not the boss of me."
This was much more amusing with Bob Callahan, Negroponte's PR guy at the embassy, sitting six inches from the speakers. A soldier walked over, and I expected we'd be told to turn it off. Instead he said that next time we should figure out how to project the Simpsons onto the big plasma screens that flank the podiums in the conference room. Apparently soldiers treat themselves to movie nights every once in a while.
Movie night is a better use of the space than press conferences. Earlier this week I went to one announcing this weekend's National Conference, which by tomorrow night will have selected 100 people to act as an interim Iraqi legislature. Why haven't you been reading about and watching TV coverage of the National Conference? Because Thursday afternoon (after saying Tuesday that delaying the Conference would be both illegal and a blow to Iraqis' confidence in the political process) they held another press conference announcing they'd bumped the thing back two weeks. There are minor details to work out with that extra time--like fraud and intimidation in the caucusing process, and objections that smaller parties are being frozen out in favor of the groups that dominated the Governing Council and already dominate the interim government. Thursday's press conference--which included castigations of "the media" (the Iraqi media, I inferred) for not doing a good enough job of informing the Iraqi public about the National Conference--ended with the conference organizer walking out of the room while the Iraqi media desperately shouted questions at his back.
I went to the Powell presser mostly because I'd be shirking my obligations to USA Today if I skipped it, and partially because sometimes you go to this sort of thing because you'd have a hard time explaining to your friends why you missed a chance to see Colin Powell in person ("I just felt like lying around my hotel room reading..."). I basically knew what I was in store for--a well-respected public figure who was much more influential a few years ago putting on an act that's technically proficient, but no longer quite convincing. It's the geo-political equivalent of a Rolling Stones concert, and I accept free tickets to those, too.
Before Powell arrived the traveling press arrived--State Department beat reporters who go on trips with the Secretary of State. They seemed to be in a better mood than their Iraq-bound counterparts. They were also marginally better dressed. A few of them, in their Mid-Atlantic yuppie summerwear, looked like they'd been kidnapped from an East Hampton lawn party.
As for Powell's actual remarks: John Burns struggled heroically to make it seem like news that the Secretary of State re-emphasized America's commitment to a free and democratic Iraq, its opposition to the insurgency, and its sincere desire to get reconstruction money pumped into the Iraqi economy. For me the press conference was notable mostly for the chance it gave me to confirm, in person, that Powell wears a suit better than any other member of the Bush cabinet.
This was in stark contrast to the Iraqi politician I interviewed Thursday in a hotel restaurant. He walked in with his coat jacket over his arm, his thin white cotton dress shirt undone to reveal his tank top undershirt, his tie flapping free, and a pistol jammed into the waistband of his pants. As he complained about the disorganized and exclusionary nature of the conference he perched his stocking feet on the corner of the table and looked at me, exhausted, over the lenses of his glasses. He's a better visual indicator of the state of the political process here than Secretary Powell.
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