"The Green Zone is a lot less green these days."

A Somber Return
By Melinda Liu

A familiar blast of hot air hit me as I stepped off the plane in Baghdad. It seemed for a moment as if I'd never left Iraq. The arid, dusty wind that sucks your lungs dry. The cumbersome (or reassuring?) weight of body armor while riding into town from the airport along roads littered with debris from IED blasts.

But many things have changed since 2005, the last time I worked in Iraq. The old, familiar Humvee has morphed into a demented, humpbacked narwhal on wheels, surmounted by an elaborate super-structure enveloping the gunner on the roof. Protruding out front is a device that looks like a square ping-pong paddle with a long, attenuated handle. Called a WARLOCK, it emits electronic countermeasures to block signals that can trigger IEDs.

The Green Zone is a lot less green (meaning a lot less secure) these days. Inside this fortified enclave, rocket attacks killed four foreign contractors late last week. It was the third straight day of rocket or mortar attacks on the Green Zone (officially the "International Zone" or IZ). "Compared to your last stay here, things are worse and worse and worse," one Iraqi friend told me.

The day after I arrived, a video showing Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, circulated on the Internet. His tone was triumphal and sarcastic. He mocked the Bush administration's claim that its new Baghdad security plan was a success. And he evoked the suicide bombing of Parliament on April 12: "Lest Bush worry, I congratulate him on the success of his security plan, and I invite him on the occasion for a glass of juice, but in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament in the middle of the Green Zone!"

(snip)

The most sobering thing about all this, to me anyway, is that Baghdad was once a sort of cosmopolitan city--at least by the standards of 1990, when I first reported from here on the eve of the war to liberate Kuwait. Before Desert Storm, before economic sanctions, Iraq was a relatively modern place (so different from Afghanistan, which was virtually medieval before the Taliban's ouster in 2001). Now Iraqis feel like they're headed back to the Stone Age. "People are using more mule carts now, to carry things like propane tanks, than they did in 1990," said one Iraqi colleague. "We're going backwards." He chuckled when he said it, but in his eyes I could see the anguish and the pain.

More: http://checkpointbaghdad.talk.newsweek.com/default.asp?item=594763

good article.

I think the American people are going to get more and more unhappy now that "force protection" is no longer part of the plan.

:cry: