A conversation with NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels
about the changing landscape of journalism
September 17, 2003 - The Grand Hyatt
MAUREEN BRENNAN, NYWICI VP-PROGRAMS: This is a very special year for New York Women in Communications in that it’s our 75th anniversary. With that in mind, we’re especially pleased to have Anne Garrels as the speaker for the Program Committee’s first event.
Anne is the senior foreign correspondent for NPR, and she’s also the author of a recently published book called Naked in Baghdad—a deeply personal account of the time that she spent covering the Iraqi war. In fact, Anne just started a national publicity tour, which will keep her busy through most of the fall. Fortunately, we were able to book her for our program last spring—well before she became a household name. We have her all to ourselves this morning. And at the end of the program, she’ll be autographing copies of her book.
And now I’d like to introduce Cathy Carlozzi, my co-chair.
CATHERINE CARLOZZI, NYWICI VP-PROGRAMS: Very few of us go to work in the morning knowing that we’re putting ourselves in danger. Yet such is the risk inherent in the beat that Anne has chosen for herself: covering global hot spots and armed conflicts, including the Soviet Union; Afghanistan; Bosnia, Chechnya, and Kosovo; the Middle East; El Salvador and Nicaragua; the Gulf War; and Tiananman Square.
In pursuit of what Anne calls “string” for weaving a story, she’s been roughed up by the KGB, expelled from the Soviet Union, caught in a sniper’s cross hairs, suspected of spying, and she’s survived bullets, bombs, and death threats.
As you heard, her most recent posting was Iraq—before, during, and after the war. We all know that Iraq has been a testing ground for journalism and its practitioners. Anne was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from Baghdad after the war began, and she was in the Palestine Hotel when U.S. shelling killed two journalists only a few floors from her room. More than a dozen of her peers have died in Iraq since March.
At NYWICI, we celebrate women in communications who change the world. I submit that Anne is a woman in communications who helps us understand a changing world. Her reason for being in Baghdad was, in her own words, “to be a witness to whatever happens and to explain how complicated the emotions are here. I am fascinated by how people survive and how the process of war affects the attitudes of all sides involved and how they pull out of it.” She clearly cares for the people she reports about and the people she works with on the ground, and she’s left part of herself in every country where her assignments have taken her.
Although a former TV journalist, Anne revels in the medium of radio, which gives her the freedom to move around without cameras and crew and to weave stories exclusively with words, sound, and nuance. She also clearly revels in being a mature female reporter to whom women in conservative societies can open up more freely. Her new book is a testament to that.
For millions of NPR listeners – and I know many of you are among them – Anne became THE trusted correspondent and THE voice of this war. We came to care about her survival, flooding the network with calls, letters, and e-mail. On a personal note, I was in a client conference when the Palestine Hotel was shelled and we heard that journalists were killed. I rushed out and found the nearest TV set to make sure she was not one of them, but somehow I knew she wasn’t.
Anne has received critical acclaim and numerous awards for her work, all well deserved. On October 16, during a luncheon at the Waldorf=Astoria, she’ll receive the prestigious Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. Her book, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, as you heard, has just been released. I can tell you that reading it is an intense experience. You’ve heard about the tour, and we’re very pleased that she’s taken time out from it to speak with us this morning. Now please join me in welcoming Anne Garrels.
ANNE GARRELS, NPR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Thank you so much. If somebody had told me in 1972, when I got out of Harvard and had no idea what I was going to do with my life, that I’d be sitting here, I wouldn’t have believed it. I wasn’t a journalist in the making. It all kind of happened by mistake. The one thing I had was a passion about the former Soviet Union. I had studied Russian, and that really was the determining factor that began the whole process. I didn’t study communications. I didn’t go to journalism school, and I actually don’t think undergraduate degrees in journalism or communications are a whole lot of good. You’ve got to know something to write about, first and foremost.
And I didn’t start out by being a war correspondent. I started out covering a cold war. There was a lot of psychological pressure, but I wasn’t dealing with bullets and bombs and military on the ground. That also sort of happened by mistake. After ’91, when the Soviet Union broke apart, the wars found us. I can tell you that right now in Baghdad, there are a lot of correspondents who think they're based in London, Paris, or Moscow, only to find out that they’re not going to see those nice cities for a long time. They’re going to be in Baghdad for a long time.
The experience of being in Iraq was the culmination of a lot of things. By October, it was clear that this war was more than likely going to happen. And I had never been in Iraq, but I had reported about the issues for a long time. So I went in and stayed on and off.
By the time March came along, it had begun to tick down to President Bush’s deadline. The question for all of us who were there—and there were about 500 journalists there at that point—was whether to stay. In some ways, the hardest time was those weeks before the war. Everybody was running up to each other saying, “Are you staying? Are you leaving? What are you doing? What do your bosses say?” There were journalists who just plain lost it. There were some who were desperate that their bosses pull them out so they could leave with dignity. There were others who were defying their bosses, looking for ways to stay.
This was a big deal for NPR, which had never really done anything like this before. I asked to stay; they did not ask me to stay. It was hard to explain why this was a good idea, why I knew I would be okay, which is what they wanted to know. The poor managing editor of news cares a great deal about me, and I knew perfectly well that if something happened to me I’d be dead but he’d be left writing the eulogy. It’s a joke, but not such a joke. My gut was telling me I would be okay, but it was very hard to articulate that to him.
Every foreign correspondent’s secret weapon is his or her assistant. Wherever I’ve worked—whether it’s been Kosovo, Bosnia, the former Soviet Union, and certainly Iraq—I’ve had a remarkable local person who has helped me. In Iraq, I had Amer, who started out as my driver. A trust developed between us and we figured out ways to skirt the restraints of working in a police state. When the war happened, he was with me. And he was one reason why I knew I had a good chance of getting through this and reporting something of value. The book is, in many ways, his story as much as a snapshot of what it’s like to work as a foreign correspondent. A lot of it is just plain logistics. You’re sort of part engineer and part reporter – it’s a funny job.
I started out in television. You all represent different aspects of communication. The whole journalistic world, the whole communications industry, has changed dramatically and exploded. After a while, I realized television and I were a very bad marriage. I would come home, when I worked for ABC and briefly for NBC, and, frankly, just sob. It was frustrating; it didn’t work for me. I didn’t like the format and I’m not an anchor.
I had some absurd conversations in my time with NBC. I was known then as “the poor man’s Jane Pauley.” My husband’s a political cartoonist and I filled in for Jane when she was having her children. But I’m a terrible anchor. I’m not at ease. I don't do cooking shows well. You know, I just wasn’t chirpy enough. One of the more absurd conversations of my life was with the senior producer of the Today show, who said, “You don’t look like Deborah Norville.” And I said, “Did I ever? I mean, where are we going?” She was very much taste of the week at that point. He literally suggested that I have a little work done on my lower lip.
So I left. I had been a foreign correspondent. I’d grown up overseas. At that point, NPR’s profile was nothing like as high as it is now. My husband—who refers to my TV days as the time when I was a TV tart—didn’t watch TV; he listened to NPR. So I started listening and realized that was the place where I would be comfortable. And I have to say, since I joined NPR in 1988, it’s been the best experience of my life. I had to explain to a lot of people in those early days what NPR was. The fact that NPR had the guts to let me stay during the war makes me really proud.
NPR didn’t have that high a profile with Iraqi officials. And television doesn’t actually work very well in a police state. It’s got big feet. Organizations like the BBC or CNN, which are seen in real time by the authorities, have a big problem. Many of them pulled their punches for a long time to keep their visas.
I made a decision, early on in October, to report about the tyranny of the regime at the risk of being thrown out. I would report about all aspects as I saw them. It just wasn’t worth me staying or NPR staying to do nothing but press conferences. We could get that information a million other ways.
When I look back at the experience, it was even more valuable than I anticipated. Because I saw I had one window. I was in Baghdad. There were lots of other people covering different aspects of this story. My job, as I saw it, was to document how Iraqis—whether they were Saddam’s people, people, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, you name it—perceived themselves, the prospect of an American war, the inspectors, or whatever.
When I look back now, I realize the Iraqis knew themselves extremely well. There were those who told me they would fight the Americans to the end. And I believe that many of those people I spoke to may well be doing so. They were Sunnis, they were close to Saddam, or they had benefited by his largesse over the years.
There were others who desperately wanted an end to the regime but were terrified of the aftermath. They knew the society would fragment. They knew where the fault lines were. They were terrified of looting. They knew that with a security vacuum, Iraq would become a dangerous place. All of that has come to pass. And they told me all of this—and not just me, but other reporters—in the months going up to and during the war.
There was evidence of foreign fighters as Saddam’s people made common cause. I do not happen to believe—and I don't think we’ve seen any hard information—that Saddam was working intensely with Al Qaeda. But as the American threat intensified, the regime allowed in and controlled foreign fighters from Syria, Tunisia, and Algeria. I saw them. I got caught in a firefight where they were participating. And now the borders are utterly unmanned, so opportunists from all around are coming in.
I just went back for six weeks and there’s one picture I have in my mind. When the troops first came in, they were not prepared for the looting. They did nothing. The looting was conducted by poor Iraqis. It was also probably done by Saddam’s people in order to make it that much harder for Iraqis in the future, and certainly for the Americans, to run the country. One ministry after the next was destroyed. The only place where the Americans were in those early days was the oil ministry—the one ministry that was not destroyed. It reinforced in the eyes of many Iraqis that we were there for one reason only.
To this day, the Americans are hiding behind coils of barbed wire and walls of sandbags, whether in the Republican Palace—one of Saddam’s palaces, where Bremer and the civilian administration are—or elsewhere. The American contractors, civilian officials, and some military are living in my former home, the Al Rashid Hotel. It’s an armed fortress. I’ve just been told that the new United Nations complex will be an armed fortress. You can't rebuild a country that way. Because of the security vacuum, there really isn’t much choice at the moment. But the question is, “Why?” We should have known.
A lot of Iraqis who are now working for the Americans are being threatened. I knew two translators who are now dead. They were assassinated because they were collaborating with the Americans.
The military is stretched really thin. They’re the only ones really out there. They’re being asked to do things they have little or no training to do. They’re doing grassroots democracy, humanitarian aid—everything, because everybody else is too afraid to go out on the streets. They’re a very blunt instrument. I’ve seen extraordinary officers who are deft, brilliant, politically astute, and have defused potential problems. But I’ve also seen troops who don’t know where they are. And they only began to do cultural training with some of them in August. So a lot of mistakes alienating local communities were made unnecessarily.
The troops are scared, naturally. They’re dealing with an invisible enemy now. And they had been told this was going to be a cakewalk, so many of them were psychologically ill prepared for what they’ve now found and for being there for a year.
The civilian administration is very thin and not adequate to the job. As officials there told me, Paul Bremer is one person thin. There are very few people who have any experience in the region—who have come out of places like Kosovo, Bosnia, and Afghanistan and know what it is to rebuild. Most of them are there on one- or two-month contracts at best. So as soon as they get a grip on something, the problem moves on.
It’s really hard. And security is the issue. Many Iraqis are nostalgic for the past. It’s not unlike the former Soviet Union—maybe even sort of like when Stalin died. When this hideous man who had killed millions died, people wept because they were afraid of the future without him. And that’s what a lot of Iraqis fear now.
When I look at the comments by Rumsfeld and Powell, I’m amazed that they sort of don’t deal with the fact that there are Iraqis. And there’s one other complication in this. The 25-member governing council inevitably is an unwieldy group of people, many of whom are exiles supported by the U.S. These exiles haven't been in Iraq for 30 years! The country has changed dramatically since they were there. It is not the dynamic society where education was on the upswing, where the economy was getting better – albeit under Saddam, and these people left because of the tyranny of Saddam. But the society at that point was moving fast.
After 12 or 13 years of sanctions, it has become a much more conservative Islamic country than it was 20 years ago—at least in Baghdad. The countryside was always traditional, tribal, and conservative. But literacy rates were on the upswing in ’88. You saw 85-88% literacy. By ’91, before the Gulf War, it was already down to 45%. And women took the biggest hit. So you’ve got a society that doesn’t even know what it is.
On what it was like to be a journalist there, a new trend started in Afghanistan. Suddenly, the number of foreign correspondents exploded. There is this huge, unwieldy mass now. I know most of the Americans, and we’re very close. For the most part, they’re a really good group of people—talented and dedicated.
I’m often shocked when people say journalists are not doing a good job. I think the standards among foreign correspondents are probably as good as they’ve ever been, if not better. These are really, really talented people for any number of news organizations.
News comes in different forms, though. The networks give you a minute-and- a-half pop. In a highly nuanced, complicated situation, you’re not going to get everything in that format.
The constraints now and the dangers are probably greater than they were for me during the war, frankly. It’s easy for me to say now that the worst didn’t happen. I wasn’t bombed, although that wasn’t what I was afraid of. In ’91 and ’98, we’d seen the U.S. bombing. It was accurate. And, frankly, it was extraordinarily accurate during this war. You knew the targets in advance and there was very little collateral damage.
In fact, I think a couple of the worst incidents of civilian casualties were not caused by American bombs this time. I have good reason to believe they were caused by Iraqi anti-aircraft or rockets that went awry. Iraqis have told me this. In one case, I picked up shell casings and Amer, who was with me, looked and said, “That’s not American. That’s from an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile.”
So it wasn’t the bombing. It was the question of possibly being taken hostage. There were some reporters—not from mainstream organizations but four people who had come in on odd visas—who were sort of skulking around. More power to them for trying to report as freelancers or be out of the control of the Iraqis. It was such a police state, especially in the days before the war, and the city was blanketed with Baath Party members. You couldn’t move anywhere without them knowing where you were. These four journalists were taken during the war, held for eight days, and then, happily, released. They had put themselves at some risk. The rest of us could also have been taken. The authorities viewed us all as spies or potential spies. Happily, that did not happen.
I was lucky I had Amer. I think it’s a little naïve of me to think I could have disappeared and found a safe house. But I knew that he was with me and would do everything possible. And he had his ear to the ground and good sources.
During the war, I went out as much as I could. But there were days when I was locked in. I would give Amer a tape recorder and questions and tell him whom I wanted to see. I already knew he was a superb witness and highly accurate. He would go out, then come back and tell me what had happened and give me the tape. I had learned this technique over the years from having worked in the former Soviet Union under the Soviet regime, when I was doing television. I’d give Super-8 cameras to Soviets, who collected footage—and, at that point, interviews with Andrei Sakharov, who was in Gorky in exile. You figure out some way to get the story whatever the conditions.
Now you have completely different players than you used to. You have a much larger international press corps. You have Al Jazeera and others that are playing to the Arab world: not necessarily pro-American; not necessarily good journalists, frankly; more propagandists half the time than not. But they’re a real factor.
Satellite television is a real factor. BBC and CNN are seen in real time, so we’re all forced to report immediately. I have a satellite phone—and there’s a lot in the book about hiding it because the authorities were likely to confiscate it—which meant I could broadcast like that. And I was very well aware of what had happened to CNN in ’91, when they were accused of being used by the Iraqis. When you can broadcast immediately, it’s difficult. You want to get the facts right but can't always get them right that fast. Mistakes are made that way, and it puts a lot of pressure on the reporters. That’s just a fact of life now.
In the end, there were just 16 of us who were Americans. Everybody looked out for each other. It was a great group of people. We didn’t work together very much because we all had different schedules. I had to do Morning Edition newscasts and All Things Considered. I had a very different schedule than, say, John Burns for The New York Times, who basically was filing once a day. So we all went our own way. And, once again, I had Amer. I was very lucky. I don't think most other people had as wonderful an assistant, savior, as I did.
I’ve been quoted—I can't actually remember saying this—as saying that I would never do this again. But, of course, I’ve already gone back to Baghdad and will keep going back to Baghdad. The only thing I’ve told my husband I won't do is North Korea.
There’s one image I have in my mind. In addition to protecting the oil ministry, when the troops came in they, they went to the Al Rashid Hotel, which had been my home for many months and home to all the visiting journalists and dignitaries. About 13 years ago, the Iraqis had embedded—our new word!—a mosaic of a scowling President George Bush and the phrase “Down With USA” on the threshold of the hotel.
Everybody going in and out had to walk over this, which is a highly insulting gesture in the Arab world.
The first thing the troops did was come to the Al Rashid. I mean, there’s looting going on everywhere but they obviously had been ordered to remove this mosaic. They tried to take it out in one piece. I think, like many of us who had lived at the Al Rashid, they were trying to figure out whether they could auction it on eBay. There had been lotteries among us to see who would get it!
Anyway, they had to chip it out bit by bit. And even when they got the entire mosaic out, the image of George Bush was still there in the cement, sort of like the Shroud of Turin. Since then it has been cemented over. There is no indication of what was there. But it’s sure as hell not going to be that easy to cement over the past and rebuild Iraq. And we certainly know the price tag is going to be high in lives and money. Thank you.
Now, I realize I’ve jumped all over the place, but I think questions are usually much more interesting anyway.
GINNY POULOS: Anne, thank you so much. I would like you to speak a little bit more about how your assistant was chosen for you—or how you chose that person—and how you built this trust that you spoke about.
ANNE GARRELS: Well, I met him in October—I found him through somebody else—and he became my driver. He was not my minder. He was not assigned to me through the Information Ministry. I had arrived the day after Saddam had released all—or said he had released all—the prisoners from the prisons. We were driving to a water-treatment plant to look at the effects of sanctions. The minder was in a different car, so it was just Amer and me. And we were kind of feeling each other out—just chatting.
Suddenly, we saw hundreds of people on the side of the street in what was clearly a silent demonstration. I didn’t know where in Baghdad I was. I’d never been there before. But you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know something odd was going on. Amer kept driving and said, “Families of political prisoners.” It was extraordinary for him to say that. It was clear that this was going to be an unusual relationship.
He then laid out the rules for me: when the minder was in the car, I was not to ask him to translate, not to speak to him. I was to pretend he was a dumb driver. We went and saw the water-treatment plant. On the way back, he deliberately drove past so I could see this demonstration again. He didn’t tell me until this last trip that he had been called in for driving me past this. We couldn’t stop. When he dropped me off at the hotel, I grabbed a taxi, went back to the demonstration, and just waded through the crowds hoping somebody could speak some English. I didn’t take my tape recorder, although on other occasions I would take it, just let the tape run, and then go back and have Amer translate. This situation was too loaded.
It was a very dicey thing to have done, because I could have been arrested and thrown out. But I needed to do the story. I needed to find out what was going on.
So I walked through and people just said, “Husband, gone 12 years.” “Brother, seven years”—enough broken English for me to get a sense of what was going on. And it was the beginning. Nothing like this had happened in Saddam’s Iraq before, where people had dared to come out.
The relationship grew from there.
UNIDENTIFIED QUESTIONER: I was in Syria during the Gulf War with the family of the president of the Syrian Red Crescent, which was building refugee camps for the Iraqis. And I did go to Lebanon. I was also driving a jeep in Chiapas when the Central American war was developing. I’ve taken copious notes. I was in these places for a variety of reasons as a civilian, so people trusted me and opened up. I would like to be able to tell their stories, but I’m afraid of what will happen to them, exactly as you said about Amer. They’re still living in a police state and there could be repercussions. How do you tell the story without jeopardizing other people?
ANNE GARRELS: That’s always a problem. From the very beginning, when I was living and working in the Soviet Union for many years, I always had to explain to people that it was dangerous to know me. They needed to know that. You can't protect people completely, but you can try and there are ways.
That’s one reason, frankly, why TV is not a great instrument in these kinds of conflicts. People are afraid to be on camera. The wonderful thing about print and radio is that at least you’ve got a fighting chance to tell stories and protect identities a little bit more. Television is very noticeable. They drive around in big land cruisers. They’ve got crews, equipment, whatever. It’s interesting to see that television crews working in Baghdad now have security companies working for them.
In my case, we lived in a very modest hotel. There were only two of us. I didn't have a producer, engineers—nothing. In fact, I started working with a lavaliere mic instead of a handheld so it wouldn’t be that noticeable.
On this last trip, I was asked to bring Goo Gone. Under most circumstances, protection was having “TV” written on your car. Well, in Iraq, that’s no longer a source of protection. So everybody took off the gaffer’s or duct tape they were using to spell out “TV.” Unfortunately, all the glue was left on the windows and you could still see what had been there!
Removing it also means that the military doesn’t necessarily know who you are. And their checkpoints have not always been particularly visible. It’s very easy to inadvertently run one and risk getting shot. They’re beginning to change their rules of engagement, but a lot of innocent Iraqis have been killed this way: either by bad or invisible checkpoints or raids that have gone bad, where they haven't put up checkpoints at all.
We have a new driver and translator. They live in their neighborhoods and are great sources of information. One day, our translator was visibly desolate. I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “Well, my cousin” – that’s almost like a brother in this society – “was killed by the Americans yesterday.” “What happened?” I asked. “Well, there was a raid,” he replied.
A hundred troops went to one house. Turned out it was bad intelligence in the first place. While they were at this house, they did not set up checkpoints on either side of the block. People were coming home from work and families were going by in their cars. It was dusk, 132 degrees, and the electrical pylon blew. This happens all the time. The system is put together with paper clips, and lines explode in the heat. It’s common, but it sounds like a bomb.
The troops started firing. I got there the next day and there were shell casings everywhere. They had been shooting at everyone, but as it turned out, there was no enemy. A family with three kids was killed in one car. My translator’s cousin was wounded in another car. Iraqis tried to rescue him but the American troops wouldn’t let them pull him out and he was cremated in the car.
In this case, it was clear: they should have set up checkpoints. It was a raid that went badly wrong. And the problem is, this sort of thing happens a lot. So the very people we’re trying to win over end up wanting to avenge the deaths of their relatives. At the very least, this creates questions in people’s minds about why the Americans are really there. Whose interests do they have at heart? One Iraqi, who’s actually quite pro-American, looked at me and said, “Annie, make us believe in you. Please make us believe in you.”
UNIDENTIFIED QUESTIONER: There’s a lot of talk about trying to establish an international force to go in there. If that’s able to happen, what do you think they would need to do to gain acceptance and credibility and to become effective?
ANNE GARRELS: This is unfortunately all too little too late. We’ve lost four months! On one hand, the Bush administration says they don’t need more troops. On the other hand, they’ve made it more than clear they’re stretched thin. And certainly they don’t have enough to continue a rotation.
The coalition—at NPR we don’t use that word—I mean the British have training in this sort of thing. They’re in a much easier place to work from—Basra, in the south—than the U.S. is. And they’re doing a good job. But there are 20,000 in the coalition and only about 10,000 of them are British. The rest are Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Poles, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians. I saw them arriving in tennis shoes and ancient equipment. We’re going to have to fund these people and equip them. That’s one reason why there’s been this shift from the administration. It’s dodgy.
If the Turkish troops come in, where are they going to go? Are they, in fact, going to be working with the Kurds or will they be deployed somewhere else? Are we just creating another problem? What other troops? How fast can they get there? This is going to be a long time in the making. You’re not going to have a Security Council resolution and then, bingo, the troops are there!
In the meantime, security is just a huge issue. Iraqis need to begin to assume more and more responsibility for their lives. But they’re frightened. The ministries were destroyed. There’s nowhere for people to go and work. There are no phones. Electricity is sporadic. The whole complex of issues is making rebuilding—which is a misnomer—extremely difficult.
The 25-member governing council spends more time fighting internally. It’s an inevitable process though. Different sectors of the society finally had to be represented. There is a preponderance of exiles, which has created some problems. Iraqis don’t know who this 25-member group is, because its members are hiding. They have no personal security. They’re frightened.
Some of them are now playing an interesting game. They’re now saying, “We need more power to be effective and put an Iraqi face on this and get credibility.”
The problem is that, so far, they haven't used the power they do have effectively. They’ve only just named ministers. That’s a critical first step. Those ministers will be at the ministries working with the Americans. Until now, it’s really been the Americans more or less running the ministries. So it is a step forward, but there’s a lot of jostling at this point.
UNIDENTIFIED QUESTIONER: What would you say, from having seen and studied other rebuilding societies or societies on this side of some terrorist regime, are the most critical elements in getting rid of the concept that “the best devil is the one you know?” I thought your comparison with what happened in the Soviet Union when Stalin died was a great one. What do you think will do that in Iraq?
ANNE GARRELS: It’s going to be a long process. Every society sort of does it in its own way. There’s the whole question of de-Baathification. Iraqis themselves will have to come to terms with who can or can't have jobs in the future.
There are issues of what happened to the military. U.S. officials told me they thought that the Iraqi military units would just turn themselves in. But, of course, what happened was that the Iraqi military just dissolved. And in the looting, a lot of the bases were destroyed. So it would be very hard to reconstruct the military, and they’re now starting from scratch. Unfortunately, that means there are 400,000 unemployed officers and soldiers out there. The officers are getting a stipend, but that isn't a job. They’re sitting at home.
Now the U.S. civil administration is looking at ways to use some of the officers. You have to have a security force of some kind. And many people in the army weren’t bad guys. That was different from the intelligence operations. And you need a police force. They’re only just getting it. Unfortunately, because of the looting, which wasn’t stopped, the police don’t have weapons and cars. Imagine living in a city where you’ve got no traffic lights. It’s chaos!
In Kosovo, you had the same situation. But in Kosovo, for the most part, you were talking about Kosovars. The Serbs were a tiny minority, most of which fled. In Iraq, you have a very complicated society with a huge amount of resentment because the Sunnis and the tribes related to Saddam got huge advantages. The Shiites—60% of the population is resentful. And now there are dangerous divisions developing among the Shiites. There are fundamentalist figures who don’t represent the majority but are working very effectively underground and stirring up people. And people see that their lives aren’t getting better under the occupation.
It’s not entirely the fault of the U.S. that it’s not getting better, but there is an explosive combination of resentment against the occupiers plus inflated expectations of what the Americans could do. I mean, beforehand we made it all seem so simple. And now, because of either the lack of security or the nature of the system, the Iraqis are having trouble kick-starting themselves. So it’s easy for them to say, “Hey, you’re the occupiers. It’s your fault, your problem. You fix it.”
As security improves, that will change. Iraqis are extraordinary people. They’re highly educated. Many want to use this opportunity to build a decent country. They know what it’s like to live under a Saddam and they don’t want to do it again. But will it work? I’m not in the business of predictions. But it’s very dodgy.
CORINNA SAGER: Christiane Amanpour of CNN said last weekend that CNN felt they were somewhat careful in their news coverage, censoring themselves because they didn’t really want to go too much against the Bush administration. Does that apply also to radio or not so much?
ANNE GARRELS: Well it’s a concept I don't quite understand, because it isn’t my job to be a commentator. My job is to be a witness to how people perceive themselves and the events around them. I don't say, “The military is stretched thin.” I say, “The military—commanders, people on the ground—tells me it’s stretched thin.” I report facts as much as I can and back them up with interviews. The issue of censorship—to be for or against the administration—that’s not my job. For CNN to say something like that is shocking. That’s not the way journalists operate. It’s a patently absurd comment from them, on the face of it.
