Saad Khalaf of the LA Times’s Baghdad bureau has a very interesting post over at the LAT’s Mideast staff blog, Baghdad & Beyond. It recounts a helicopter visit he recently made over portions of his city, Baghdad.
He writes,
- This was the first time I had ever seen Baghdad from the air, and it was strange to see my home city looking deserted.
The city also looked wounded and traumatized. From above, Baghdad’s scars are even more obvious.
I saw the concrete blast walls and roadblocks that crisscross one of the Arab world’s great cities. Buildings that were damaged in the war five years ago still sat unrepaired. Piles of garbage filled the streets in neighborhoods such as Ghazaliya and Ameriya, which had witnessed recent street battles.
It all made me feel sad and frustrated. I felt like there were very few tangible results to show from the last five years of bloodshed…
Khalaf writes about the considerable misgivings he’d had about going along on this trip, which was organized by the U.S. Army. He and his American bureau chief were going along to accompany Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division who was visiting soldiers at a pair of U.S. bases south of Baghdad. He wrote that his wife of one year had asked him not to go but he told her, “No, I want to see this.”
I can understand why.
These days, most residents of Baghdad are trapped inside one of the huge cantonments that those big blast walls have carved into the city. They cannot soar above it looking down at the whole, as Khalaf was briefly able to do. (You can see his picture gallery from the trip here.)
As for someone like Gen. Lynch, he can criss-cross the city by chopper from time to time. But he will never really be able to understand the concerns, frustrations, and tempo of life of people living (if that’s really the word?) inside the city’s walled-off cantonments.
Different ways of seeing the city.
Imagine if Palestinians trapped in, say, Bethlehem or Nablus or Gaza could also take helicopter rides over their small country and see what has happened to it after 41 years of occupation.
I can understand the concerns of Saad Khalaf’s wife, and I can understand that he, too, may have had qualms about about traveling around so evidently in the entourage of the army that’s occupying his country. But I think the observations he wrote, based on the trip, are truly fascinating.
Let’s all work hard so that one day as soon as possible, Iraqis and Palestinians will all have the opportunity to soar freely into the skies above their respective countries and look down on its much-loved geography– from helicopters (noisy and polluting), or hot-air balloons, or whatever.
And that their skies are quite free of the military helicopters, fighter-planes, and attack drones with which, today, foreign occupation armies help maintain their system of violent control over each country’s rightful citizens.
In Vietnam the method of choice for controlling the population was to put them in “strategic hamlets” — strat-hams — which was quite a shock for the Vietnamese people in the delta who had lived alongside their canals for years. Nothing much changes. And now, we don’t even have an approved name for them. They’re not strat hams, these walled communities. They’re “cantonments?”
General Lynch will be able better to understand the people living under his helicopter skids just as soon as they get the Stinger missiles that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. There have been reports of as many as four helicopter downings in Iraq with Stingers, which the Sunnis may have gotten from the Taliban. More Stingers would change everything.