"into the abyss"

[madrchsod]

http://www.cjr.org/iraq/index.html
CJR November/December 2006 - Reporting Iraq

[Divernan]

1. Fascinating account: here's a taste.

n August 2004, CJR asked Farnaz Fassihi of The Wall Street Journal to keep a diary of her time in Iraq. Before we could print her piece, we were scooped, inadvertently, by Fassihi herself. She often sent e-mails to friends, and her September 2004 letter reflected her mood at the time: grim. “Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest,” she began, and then later, “The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed . . . as a result of American mistakes.” Somebody in the chain put the letter on the Internet, and it went around the world. Among fellow journalists the reaction was swift: some worried that an objective reporter had revealed so much; others felt she made it seem as if no reporting could be accomplished in Iraq; still others thought the e-mail was dead on. Meanwhile, something about the personal nature of the note communicated the reality, more forcefully than yards of standard prose, of what Iraqis call “the situation.” Here at CJR we wanted more, and for our forty-fifth anniversary issue we interviewed Fassihi and forty-six other journalists who have covered the war in Iraq. Out of their anecdotes and insights we constructed an oral history — the first of its kind. These people are covering the most significant story of our time and doing it under circumstances that nearly defy belief. They have lived and studied “the situation” closely, some of them for four years or more. This is their story.


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Chapter Four: Omens and Incidents

"My new Iraqi friends would ask me, “Why do Americans say ‘fuck’ so much, what’s this word ‘fuck?’” I heard that a few times. “Why do Americans spit so much?” They didn’t know about chewing dip—the tobacco thing. So they see Americans spitting all the time; they’re going into a house on a raid, and in order to stay awake they chew dip and they’re spitting constantly, spitting allover people’s yards."

On edit: As a scuba diver I have had the pretty much indescribable experience of diving down to the top of "walls" (maybe 80 to 120 feet down) and looking over them, down into the seemingly bottomless, dark "abyss" - thousands of feet down - and this is a very apt analogy to the hell we have unleashed in the Middle East.