Inside The Green Zone

Excellent post in Mother Jones of just another week in Iraq.

'You have to understand the Arab mind,' Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. 'The only thing they understand is force - force, pride and saving face.'

Baghdad is again blinking off for hunks of the day, while those gas lines are once more stretching toward the horizon, partially because of constant sabotage of oil pipelines.

Time magazine, on the basis of numerous meetings with the Iraqi insurgents (one of its journalists even seems to have gone out on an operation against an American base), reports on an increasingly well organized guerrilla movement.

If we destroy the houses of "suspects," enclose towns (remember the "strategic hamlets" of Vietnam?), arrest relatives of wanted insurgents, recruit Saddam's feared former intelligence officers for "manhunts" (as Donald Rumsfeld evidently loves to call them), and turn our military into so many air and land-based assassination squads, you tell me what we are.

"In Elzain Elzain's Baghdad, they serve peanut butter, lobster and ice cream. The cell phones have a 914 area code. The television sets show Monday Night Football. The people speak English. And the strictly enforced speed limit is 35 mph. 'It's like I never left America,' said Elzain, an artist from [Washington] who works as an interpreter for the U.S.-led occupation government…

Simply to leave the Zone "is not just a chore, it's a feat. Forms must be filled out explaining the reason for the outing, requesting transportation and a protective detail."