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What I Learned in Baghdad
I am a freelance photographer, and while my work often draws from the news, not many people would mistake me for a journalist. When I went to Baghdad in September to continue a project on the "war on terror," in addition to 200 rolls of film and a bulletproof vest, I took along some rather ungenerous assumptions about the press. I expected to find reporters mainly clustered at press conferences, asking safe questions and being spoon-fed answers. I had long assumed, too, that reporters were often hampered by their own narrow worldview.
I found some support for those assumptions among the foreign press in Iraq. There were the softball questions lobbed at an Army captain after a suicide bombing outside the UN headquarters on September 22, a month after the more deadly attack there: "Does the fact that the bomb wasn't detonated inside the compound speak highly of improved security?" one reporter asked. Then there was the swarming pack lapping up a blatantly made-for-TV event when the Army handed authority for the inner-city checkpoints to the newly minted Iraqi police force.
In the refuge of the al Safeer Hotel — I considered the name a good omen because it sounded like "all safe here" — I got to know a handful of reporters with whom I became fast friends and who, more importantly, taught me some things about journalists that surprised me.
The al Safeer is only a few blocks from its better-known sisters — the Palestine, the Baghdad, and the Sheraton — which housed Western press, diplomats, and entrepreneurs, and thus were bristling with concertina wire, concrete barricades, and heavily armed soldiers. Our hotel had only light security, yet all of its windows were intact.
Over a ritualistic scotch on the al Safeer's roof, listening to gunfire, Rich Miller — a freelancer from Chicago who wore a white Panama hat "so my translator can find me in a crowd" — delivered painstakingly detailed lessons on the Iraqi oil industry, its past, present, and future. From Gert van Langendonck, a soft-spoken Belgian reporter who lives in New York, I learned more about the history of the Shia and the Sunni (and how almost anyone is approachable if you lead with respect), as we darted around the city in his battered Opel, Tupac Shakur thumping from the tape deck. Patrick Graham, a quiet Canadian on assignment for The New York Times Magazine, had been in Baghdad before the war and had an encyclopedic grasp of the country's history. He helped me understand the Iraqi logic of retributive justice, something that had seemed anarchical to me. Every time a bomb goes off in Baghdad, he explained, it is in direct response to something.
In the hotel's 24-hour Internet café, which filled up each night after curfew, as well as on the chaotic city streets, these reporters proved to be well-read, shrewdly critical, and profound listeners. They were often idealistic — which seemed out of place in Baghdad — guided not by their own prejudices, but by a sense that the truth, however complicated, was knowable. This may be best exemplified by Shimon Uchiyama, a young Tokyo journalist who was my roommate and constant companion. He came to Baghdad, he said, to see it firsthand, to "get some of it on my skin."
Most nights the residents of the al Safeer gathered around a large TV in the lobby to watch the BBC report, scrutinizing the coverage. The surreal sound bites on Iraq from President Bush and other administration officials typically elicited a collective groan. Their rhetoric, so divorced from the reality we saw each day, sounded absurd.
I'm home now, but I can imagine the reaction at the al Safeer
to the Bush administration's recent attempt to portray the coverage
from Iraq as "too negative." If reporters have an ax
to grind over the occupation, it's not one they brought with them
from home.
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