Several people told me that the Green Zone's name was derived from military parlance: when a soldier clears the chamber of his M-16, he is said to have his weapon "on green," while "red" means that a rifle is "locked and loaded" and ready to fire. Hence, this relatively safe zone occupied by American "liberators" came to be known as the Green Zone, while everything else outside, where weapons were ubiquitous and gunfire was almost incessant, came to be known as the Red Zone.
When one first lands "inside the wire," as the world inside the Green Zone is known, one has the feeling of having gained access to some large resort in which soldiers have been turned into staff. Walking among the trailers, modular offices, generators, shipping containers (filled with thousands of items of equipment), PXs, fast food outlets, swimming pools and other recreational facilities, and seemingly inexhaustible supplies of American soft drinks, even the sight of the former palaces and buildings of Saddam Hussein and rows of date palms is not enough to jolt one back into Iraq.
The Green Zone houses almost everything that matters in Iraq: the so-called U.S. embassy, which has taken up residence in Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace; other favored foreign legations (the British, but not the French, who remain across the river on their own); a remnant U.N. mission; the offices of big construction firms like Kellogg-Brown-Root and Bechtel; American military command centers; a Pizza Inn; a bar called the Bunker; and CNN and the Wall Street Journal. All have sought haven here in the Green Zone. There is also the Convention Center, future home for the new Iraqi parliament, as well as important offices of the new Iraqi government. Just as the foreign "concessions" in cities like Shanghai once allowed "Westernized" Chinese to live inside them, together with ex-pats enjoying extraterritorial rights, select Iraqis are protected in the Green Zone.
It is here also that the Combined Press Information Center, known as CPIC, is located and where it holds its Thursday press briefings, which remind some veterans of the surreal "Five o'clock Follies" held each day at 5:00 PM in the windowless JUSPAO (Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office) theater in Saigon. There, an earlier generation of "press information officers" gave journalists briefings, complete with four-color overlay charts tabulating "body counts," "targets hit," "structures destroyed," and "villages pacified" in a war that seemed to be getting statistically won, even as it was actually being lost.
It is to CPIC that arriving journalists must go to be photographed, finger-printed, and accredited. Indeed, without the official CPIC plastic badge, it is virtually impossible for a reporter to survive in the parallel universe of American installations that, with few exceptions, provide the country's only working systems of transport, food delivery, overnight quarters, communications, and emergency medical care.
Inside the Green Zone, one encounters a world that is nowhere to be found outside. The zone has its own taxi service. There are women joggers; men in rakish safari hats; 30-year-olds in neckties who have vaguely described jobs "advising" the Iraqis on political and administrative matters; sweating women in halter tops, short skirts, and flip-flops. And almost everyone has an identity pouch hung around his or her neck with double transparent windows for all those important plastic ID cards. If most of the wearers weren't so tall, white, and overweight, they might be confused with those tagged refugees who are found in U.S. airports waiting in groups to be put on mercy flights to a new host city.
These oversized badges are prominently embossed with the words "International Zone," part of an ongoing, multipronged U.S. government public relations effort to "rebrand" the Green Zone. This January, following the legislative elections, nominal control over some 20 buildings in the zone was passed over to Iraqis in a ceremony that featured a brass band and a chocolate cake.
That the Bush administration keeps trying to change the Green Zone's name is only one of its many battles over language. Its tireless use of didactic labels -- "Coalition Forces," "Operation Iraqi Freedom," or "The 27 Nation Multi-National Force" -- only seems to end up creating an ever-widening gulf between official language and the reality of the actual situation in Baghdad. While official language is relentlessly upbeat, the already nightmarish reality has been getting worse with each passing day. As the Green Zone has become safer and ever more tightly controlled, and as the government's language continues to project a bright future for the U.S. effort in Iraq, much of the rest of the country has descended into an ever more violent maelstrom. Meanwhile, during their tours of duty here in Iraq, only a very few American missionaries of democracy learn Arabic or ever touch an Iraqi dinar, buy anything Iraqi except in the trinket shops within the Green Zone, or share a meal in the house of an Iraqi citizen.
"A critical mistake was made," observed the American security analyst Anthony Cordesman as early as September 2003. "By creating U.S. security zones around U.S. headquarters in Central Baghdad, it created a no-go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the U.S. into a fortress that tends to separate U.S. personnel from the Iraqis."
Since then, the insurgent attacks on the U.S. forces and Iraqi government and the sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Shiites have become destructive beyond what most journalists have been able to convey. Every morning, the residents of Baghdad find piles of bodies, hands manacled, skulls riddled with bullet holes, that have been dumped without identity cards beside some road. Insofar as there is any semblance of government control, it is all too often by the new Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, which remains in Shia hands but is widely suspected of complicity in the sectarian killings. According to official announcements, the ministry is supposed to be carrying out a comprehensive new plan by U.S. Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey and Major General Joseph Peterson to construct a reformed national army and police force. In fact, as I was told by those few Iraqis I was able to meet, the Ministry of the Interior has a deserved reputation for lawless, Shia partisanship. Until Edward Wong's story on the ministry in the New York Times of March 7, no journalist I know of has been able to show in any detail just how the ministry works and what relations it may have with the Shia militias.
The unraveling of Iraq into incipient civil war took another ominous step forward when on Feb. 22, Sunni partisans dressed as members of the Iraqi military blew up al-Askariya, the sacred Shia Golden Mosque in Samarra. In retaliation, some 20 Sunni mosques were then attacked. The Washington Post of Feb. 28 was the only American newspaper I've seen which reported that "more than 1,300 Iraqis" were killed in the days that followed. The claims of President Bush to have calmed violence by talking with Iraqi religious leaders sounded ever more hollow as dozens more people were killed in the following days. Although it is difficult to imagine Baghdad in an even worse state, as such violence escalates, this strife could plunge Iraq into a widening conflict that may eventually overshadow both the daily violence against Americans and the already intense anti-American nationalism.
Adnan Pachachi, the much-respected politician in his mid-80s who has long been in exile but was recently elected to Parliament and so moved back to the well-to-do Mansur neighborhood of Baghdad where he lives sequestered in his own compound, with a private militia of bodyguards and a diesel generator, represents a saner but probably unrealizable vision of Iraq's future. Pachachi is a Shiite Muslim who deplores the rise of sectarian violence, and like some other well-known exiles, he did not anticipate it. "The Iraqis are known as the least religious people in the Middle East," he says. And so, he adds, "It was a great disappointment that 80 percent of Iraqis voting did so according to sectarian affiliations, not political beliefs."
What is needed, says Pachachi, is "a new federal allegiance ... some time for the country to stabilize." But he told me that "there is so much violence, fear and distrust, that my optimism is dwindling. We seem to be descending into a situation of civil strife between sects ... organized killings on each side. Three years ago when the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled, no one thought the situation would now be as bad as it is."
It may well be that the besieged American press in Iraq will find that the main story is not about Americans fighting Iraqi insurgents, but Americans standing powerlessly aside in their armed compounds, Green Zone, and military bases, watching as Iraqis kill other Iraqis and the country disintegrates. It would be all too ironic if this were the result of the invasion of March 2003, which was promoted as a critical step in bringing peace to the Middle East.
About the writer
Orville Schell is the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and a contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as Tomdispatch.com. His most recent book is "Virtual Tibet, Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood."
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