The US and Iraqi governments insist that this isn't a civil war. If they are right, then how do you describe so much fear, destruction and death?
Last Friday was a moderate day in Iraq: the kind of day you don't see any- thing about in the newspapers or on television, because not enough people were killed for it to be worthy of note. Between 20 and 30 people died: slightly under this year's average of 36 a day. (The daily average in the first year after the invasion, according to the organisation Iraq Body Count, was 20; last year it was 31.)
The incidents on Friday that could be investigated were as follows. Eight bodies, most of them handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the back of the head, were discovered beside a road in the Bagh- dad suburb of al-Amiriya. Two car bombs went off in Samarra, killing three people. At least 11 people died in Fallujah when a truck laden with explosives blew up beside a line of cars waiting at a checkpoint. Among the dead were three members of an Iraqi family, an Iraqi soldier and an American marine.
These things take up a few lines of type and fit into a conventional pattern. We've all heard them dozens of times, read out by a newsreader between items about bad weather in Scotland and Tony Blair's difficulties over education. Iraq has become Newzak: at most, we shake our heads at how bad things are there and forget about it. And yet, if you're there on the spot and see a bomb attack for yourself, you will never forget it as long as you live. That's the difference between news and reality.
When I left Baghdad the other day, I was driven to the airport by two BBC security men. Normally I would have been flown to the airport in an RAF helicopter from the relative safety of the Green Zone, the huge US base and Iraqi government centre. It's relatively easy to get there from our bureau out in central Baghdad - "the Red Zone", the Americans call it, slightly disapprovingly. But the helicopter was fully booked, so I had to make my own way to the airport. Two things happened along the road. The bodyguards protecting an Iraqi government minister lost their rag when their convoy got snarled in traffic, and started firing into the air to force a way through the jam. Then a suspected bomb on the airport road left us stuck in the kind of queue that was attacked at Fallujah on Friday.
I'm not presenting this as some sort of amazing brush with danger. On the contrary: the two ex-SAS men who accompanied me never even reached for their guns. For them, it was a normal airport run. That is a measure of life in Baghdad today.
A few days earlier, I asked one of the Iraqi staff at the BBC bureau to get me some tinned mackerel to vary our good but slightly monotonous diet of chicken and salad. He sent his brother out to buy it from a nearby grocer and the brother missed being killed by a car bomb by minutes. When he reached the shop, they were still taking bodies out of it.
It was a revenge attack for a revenge attack. The shop was in a Shia area, and there had been a car bomb a couple of days before in a Sunni area of Baghdad. Merely by asking for a couple of tins of mackerel, I nearly brought about the death of someone I didn't even know. No one would have blamed me if he had died; that's the kind of thing that happens nowadays.
Iraqi politicians and American officials don't like you to call this a civil war. Indeed, President George Bush has congratulated the Iraqis on avoiding civil war. Still, when 36 people are dying every day, it's not a bad description. In the past three weeks, hundreds of people living in mixed areas of Baghdad have fled their homes for the safety of Shia or Sunni enclaves. It's not yet a flood, but it's certainly a pretty clear indication. Here is another: in 2002, approximately one wedding in 20 in Baghdad was be-tween Sunnis and Shia; today scarcely any are mixed marriages.
I have made eight visits to Baghdad in the past year or so and on each occasion the situation was worse than the previous one. This time I left our fortified street in central Baghdad only once. It was Friday, and the government had decreed a curfew to try to prevent attacks on people attending their mosques. The streets of central Baghdad, usually noisy and gridlocked, were silent. A couple of police cars and a horse and cart passed us as my cameraman knelt to film the empty roadway. A crisp packet floated across in front of his lens like tumbleweed.
Then we drove to the Baghdad mortuary. It has been the subject of controversy ever since the Washington Post reported that 1,300 bodies had ended up there in the few days since the Samarra bombing. The American and Iraqi authorities insist that fewer than 400 died in the aftermath. Outside we found a large refrigerated truck: the Americans had lent it to the mortuary to take the overflow of bodies. We spent only 20 minutes filming at the mortuary, because it's in an area controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr: not very healthy for westerners. But in those 20 minutes, three more bodies were brought in.
By the time we had finished filming, the curfew was over. The late-afternoon traffic was as bad as ever and we drove home in our anonymous minibus keeping our heads down, anxious not to be spotted. As in 1980s Beirut, westerners are valuable commodities. You can make good money kidnapping them and selling them on to some extremist group for a televised execution.
There were several loud explosions in Baghdad a day or so later. Police headquarters could only give out details about one of them, a roadside bomb in the Sunni neighbourhood of al-Jihad. The other explosions couldn't be investigated, they said, because it was too dangerous for the police to check them out.
Even the brave Iraqi cameramen from the two big western television agencies, Reuters and Associated Press Television News, have to be cautious nowadays. People connected with journalism in Iraq have become prime targets. One of the directors of al-Iraqiya Television, the state channel, was murdered last Saturday, and as a result the Iraqi journalists' union asked the government to let journalists carry weapons to protect themselves.
And yet I doubt that, simply driving along the streets, you would realise quite how bad things are. The shops are open, people throng the pavements, the air is full of exhaust fumes and the sound of car horns and badly tuned radio sets. The electronics shops, the jewellers, the butchers, the grocers, are bursting with good things. The tea houses are crowded.
But this is what a modern civil war is like. There are no front lines, no artillery shells and no armies, and the only tanks are those that the Iraqi army posts at crossing points in the feeble hope of deterring car bombers. Life continues as normal, except for the terrible moments when a sheet of flame erupts in a street and chunks of metal fly around at 2,000mph, and the groaning victims lie shocked and helpless in the roadway.
Someone should do something to stop this, the onlookers scream after each bombing; the government is too busy negotiating jobs for its ministers to care, they say. And anyway, there is still no government in place, 90 days after the latest election. Where is the army? Where are the Americans? But the Americans know their presence at the site of an attack often makes things worse, and they are less in evidence now than they used to be. So why are they in Iraq at all, people ask.
The US ambassador, the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, a clever man who shows greater realism the longer he stays in Iraq, gave an interview to al-Hayat newspaper the other day. He wanted to send this message to the Iraqi resistance, he said: the Americans had no intention of staying in Iraq long. Somehow, though, this was scarcely noticed. In an incipient state of civil war most Iraqis now seem to think the Americans are irrelevant.
No one seems to have told that to General Peter Pace, the fresh-faced, eager-to-please new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Things in Iraq were "going very, very well, from everything you look at", he announced on Sunday. I don't think I'd like to be in Iraq when things were going badly.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor
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