Transitions

I have been very lucky to work with some very talented people during my time in Iraq. Last night was a farewell to a good friend; a Black Hawk lifted off and sunk into the sky, chopping air and sliding over the city into the night. We've worked closely over the past year on tracking the issues affecting Baghdad; part of our jobs involved writing the official State Department reports on the status of Baghdad. This required us to piece together a vast collection of information from Iraqi leaders and citizens, US military assessments, development specialists and information gathered from a number of other sources. When I started to get into political reporting a colleague told me that one guiding principle to understand is this: everything happens for a reason. It is one thing to see the events play out before you; it is another to piece together the 'why' of it all and make sense out of the noise. Not to get fixated on the dominoes as they fall, but to see the hand that nudged them. You may be aware that there has been an uptick of violence lately, first in Basra and now in the Sadr City district of Baghdad. This is an incredibly important development. The Government of Iraq, under Prime Minister Maliki, has made the decision to go on the offensive against the militia groups that seek to undermine the credibility of the government. Many of these militia actors are, or claim to be, affiliated with the Sadrist movement, a Shia movement that encompasses a broad assortment of militant, social and political components. What we are witnessing in Iraq is now one of the existential issues that will determine the future of Iraq; namely, whether the aims of this Sadrist movement can be incorporated into the legitimate political discourse defining Iraq's governance system or not. As with all issues here, this is complex. There are elements within Maliki's government that want to completely wipe out the Sadrists; there are those who seek some sort of accommodation. As for the Sadrists, there are those who desire only outright domination of the government, and there are those who see the movement playing the role of legitimate political party within a democratic system. In the midst of this, the fundamental question of US presence in Iraq is also being debated, as well as questions about the broader balance of power among Iraq's Middle Eastern neighbors. Many may be war-weary after five years of what is called the Iraq War, and the day-to-day violence that is reported, without context, may appear senseless and just more examples to justify the rightness or wrongness, depending upon one's political persuasion, of the original decision to invade in 2003. But this conflict has evolved and continues to evolve as some fundamental political issues are debated in the form of violence. As a political reporter you do not seek to justify any form of violence, only to understand the motivations behind it and the conditions that may bring about its cessation. The decision by Prime Minister Maliki's government to pursue their objectives has brought about many hardships for many people, but may in fact, in its results, lead to greater stability and security for the people of Baghdad over the long run and set the conditions for a reduction in US military presence in Iraq. I am (once again) looking at the end of my tour here in Baghdad; I am scheduled to depart in a matter of weeks. It is easy to say that we are once again in a period of fundamental change here in Iraq; in an environment of constant evolution there is always something 'different' about the here and now that was not so before, however; you do yourself, and our efforts here, a disservice to not look a little closer at the nature of this conflict and try to understand that 'everything happens for a reason' and what is happening in Baghdad right here and right now is the result of forces trying to create a certain outcome in the right here and right now.