George Packer: Planning for Defeat

How should we withdraw from Iraq?
by George Packer September 17, 2007
The New Yorker

An Iraqi whom I will call Ahmed lives in Saidiya, an area in south Baghdad where, in the nineteen-eighties, the regime of Saddam Hussein built large houses for well-connected Army officers, most of them Sunnis. After the American invasion, in 2003, Saidiya became a base of Sunni resistance, but since last year vicious sectarian fighting has divided its streets between Sunni and Shia, with front lines crisscrossing the district; the highway separating Saidiya from the Shiite area of Bayya, to the northwest, now marks an impassable boundary. “It’s just like the Great Wall of China,” Ahmed said, during a recent phone conversation. A graduate of Baghdad University, with a degree in English literature, he worked before the war as a news translator for Iraqi state television.

Saidiya has one of the highest rates of sectarian killings in the city. Eighty-four unidentified corpses were found there between mid-June and mid-July, according to Zeyad Kasim, a researcher at IraqSlogger.com, a news-gathering Web site. Ahmed said that the number actually represents an improvement—earlier this year, he saw bodies lying in the streets even more frequently. The U.S. military “surge” launched this spring, in which thirty thousand additional American forces arrived in Baghdad, has helped to stabilize Saidiya’s sectarian borders. The Americans don’t often patrol Ahmed’s neighborhood, but, when Iraqi Army forces call in air support, Apache attack helicopters can reach Saidiya within minutes.

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Accompanying Packer's article is a list of assessments of Iraq, here.