The Incident on 'Death Street'

Are there any statistics from Iraq in recent weeks which don't indicate trouble?

Oil production, which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once swore would fund the reconstruction of a democratic Iraq, is now crippled and well below prewar levels, while attacks on oil pipelines and facilities have risen sharply; American deaths are on the rise (53 for just over half of September) as are the numbers of our wounded, as are attacks on American troops, which are now averaging more than 80 a day, "four times the number of one year ago and 25 percent higher than last spring"; while the strains on American Guard and Reserve units, being called up ever more frequently, grow greater by the week; Iraqi civilian casualties have soared in recent weeks; and on the rise are the killings of Iraqi policemen, targeted by the insurgency, but also of translators, cleaning women, clothes washers, carpenters, anyone in fact who works with the occupying forces; "no-go" areas for American troops have been increasing steadily as parts of Iraq simply blink off the American map; the kidnapping of foreigners has risen as evidently has the under-the-table payment of ransom demands; the number of car-bombings has gone up and they are being ever more carefully coordinated; estimates of the numbers of insurgents and their supporters have been rising rapidly; more mortar shells are being dropped on U.S. bases; desertions from and the infiltration of the Iraqi battalions the American military has been training are high and possibly on the rise; the sophistication and deadliness of guerrilla attacks is on the rise; the number of CIA agents in the country has risen; American air strikes on heavily populated neighborhoods of Iraqi cities are on the rise; the fighting is still spreading (as the battles around Tal Afar, near the Turkish border, indicated last week); more schoolchildren are dropping out of school at ever earlier ages to help support their families; more highways are too dangerous to drive; the number of countries supporting the "coalition" with even handfuls of troops has been falling as have the numbers of troops in allied contingents; the number of articles in leading American newspapers announcing that large swathes of Iraq have passed from American control is on a precipitous upward curve; the number of military experts ready to declare the war in Iraq in some fashion lost is also on a steep upward climb; while – and nothing could be more devastating than this – on advice from its new staff and ambassador in Baghdad, the Bush administration has gone back to Congress to switch $3.4 billion in Congressionally mandated reconstruction funds from two of the most important areas of daily life – the generation of electricity and the purification of water supplies ("'Maku Karaba, Maku Amin' – no electricity, no security – is still the cry of Iraqis on the street") – largely to "security"; that is, to the creation of Iraqi forces that will nominally fight under the banner of Iyad Allawi's regime but essentially under American command. (Does no one remember Richard Nixon's disastrous "Vietnamization" program?) The only number in this last month that seems not to have risen precipitously, but has remained doggedly at zero is the number of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological or chemical) in Saddam Hussein's possession before the invasion began.

But let's turn from the large and statistical to a single incident that made the news repeatedly last week, an incident on Baghdad's Haifa Street, known locally as "Death Street" for the regular ambushes that take place there. The thoroughfare, part of a Sunni neighborhood in the capital that has been a hotbed of opposition to the Americans, lies across the Tigris river from, but only several hundred yards away from what's now being called the "International Zone" (as in neocolonial Shanghai) but is better known as the Green Zone, the highly fortified area where the U.S. embassy and the Allawi government have existed, until recently, in air-conditioned (relative) splendor.