Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Richard Miller
Dispatch from Iraq, No. 1

7 March, 02:50

It's Zero-Dark-Thirty in military parlance, and a group of contactors mill around, smoke, and swap war stories in front of KBR's [Kellogg, Brown and Root's] "villa" at Kuwait City's Hilton Resort Hotel. A service road is lined with a string of these wishfully named low-rise apartments, most available by week or weekend to families who seek a beach, a massage or good eating. But KBR's business here is longer-term. The Texas company can be found wherever the U.S. military is based in Kuwait and Iraq. Among a thousand other services, KBR is responsible for delivering contractors, officials and the occasional reporter to an airport within Kuwait. From there a U.S. military C-130 will fly them to Baghdad. Perhaps it's the wee hour, or the middle age of most of the contractors waiting for final processing, but the comfortable breeze wafting towards the warm waters of the Persian Gulf seems to bear a weariness that sifts through shadows cast by the yellow fluorescent lights.

Weary-that's it. The word sags like the current mood and provokes the inevitable recollection. "Not weary" was what I remembered of OIF-I, watching the fighters launch from the USS Kitty Hawk's deck. I remember wondering at the time whether the pending liberation of Iraqis was at all comparable to the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, set to be celebrated at Passover then just a few weeks away. When I embedded last exactly one year ago, I remember feeling wary, not weary. Things then seemed to be at some tipping point but were hopefully tipping our way. Improvised Explosive Devices might be everywhere and enemy snipers still took the occasional pot shots. But Fallujah had been retaken in Operation Al Fajr, elections loomed, and hope might be found even among the more reasonable opponents of the invasion.

In the year since, I've joined many other Americans in simply growing weary. Civilian fatigue is a common phenomenon of long wars, and one has to be careful not to confuse emotional states with convictions about their country's interest. Nevertheless, the vacuum that the Realpolitikers had warned of-the one that was predicted to occur should Iraq emerge as a weak or failed state-is being filled (as predicted) by an obnoxiously resurgent Iran. When I planned this current embed, its purpose was to report on American troops on a tactical level-how they fought, how they communicated during battle and other aspects of military life in a combat zone. What one would expect of a military historian. And that remains on the agenda. But now another question has rudely elbowed its way on to my list: Is there a "there-there" to this thing we call Iraq? Or is "Iraq," as some have argued no more than three former Ottoman provinces bolted together during the 1920s by the British Foreign Office and sustainable only by the thuggery of a Saddam Hussein?

If Iraq-the-Nation is sustainable only by thuggery, then the U.S. effort is much like trying to inflate an already punctured balloon. We may exhaust ourselves to no end. I've always been more optimistic about the situation, but never at the expense of trying to understand matters as they stand. And one indication of how they stand can be drawn from my seat on this long bus, noisily making its way along the dark highways of Kuwait towards an airport that journalists are forbidden to name. We are to meet a flight for Baghdad whose take-off and landing times are classified for perfectly good reasons of security.

This was true last year as I was en route to Fallujah and nothing has changed since that time. The war is approaching its fourth year. So this morning we prepare to enter Baghdad, not quite like the conquerors we briefly were in April 2003; nor like the Viceroys we imagined ourselves briefly being in the months afterwards. Instead, we will steal into Baghdad in the dead of night, too fatigued to feel afraid and, lest I forget, very, very weary.