September 1st, 2004

It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about.

August 26th, 2004

I’ve been in New York a week now, watching the city prepare for the Republican National Convention and the accompanying protests. Much is predictable: tabloid hysteria about an anarchist siege; cops showing off their new crowd control toys; fierce debates about whether the demonstrations will hurt the Republicans or inadvertently help them.

July 29th, 2004

Last month, I reluctantly joined the Anybody But Bush camp. It was “Bush in a Box” that finally got me, a gag gift my brother gave my father on his sixty-sixth birthday. Bush in a Box is a cardboard cutout of President 43 with a set of adhesive speech balloons featuring the usual tired Bushisms: “Is our children learning?” “They misunderestimated me”—standard-issue Bush-bashing schlock, on sale at Wal-Mart, made in Malaysia.

July 7th, 2004

There is a remarkable scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 when Lila Lipscomb talks with an anti-war activist outside the White House about the death of her 26-year-old son in Iraq. A pro-war passerby doesn’t like what she overhears and announces, “This is all staged!”

June 25th, 2004

Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the $18.4 billion in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can meet. Sure, electricity is below prewar levels, the streets are rivers of sewage and more Iraqis have been fired than hired. But now the PMO has contracted with British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from “assassination, kidnapping, injury and” — get this — “embarrassment.” I don’t know whether Aegis will succeed in protecting PMO employees from violent attack, but embarrassment? I’d say mission already accomplished. The people in charge of rebuilding Iraq can’t be embarrassed, because, clearly, they have no shame.

June 15th, 2004

In Baghdad, every encounter we had was a bit like going through customs.

“American?” was the inevitable first question.

“No, no, Canadian,” our over-eager reply.

Sometimes our word wasn’t good enough and our interrogators wanted proof.

We’d pull out our passports for inspection.

May 13th, 2004

In 1968, the legendary U.S. labour organizer Cesar Chavez went on a 25-day hunger strike. While depriving himself of food, he condemned abusive conditions suffered by farm workers. The slogan of his historic union drive was “Si se puede!” Yes, we can.

April 28th, 2004

Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn’t mired in a bog or a marsh in Iraq (quagmire’s literal meaning); it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: Who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump?

April 9th, 2004

April 9, 2003 was the day Baghdad fell to U.S. forces. One year later, it is rising up against them.

Donald Rumsfeld claims that the resistance is just a few “thugs, gangs and terrorists.” This is dangerous, wishful thinking. The war against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by regular people defending their homes and neighbourhoods — an Iraqi intifada.

April 5th, 2004

I heard the sound of freedom in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, the famous plaza where the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled one year ago. It sounds like machine gun fire.

March 31st, 2004

“Do you have any rooms?” we ask the hotelier.

She looks us over, dwelling on my travel partner’s bald, white head.

“No,” she replies.

We try not to notice that there are sixty room keys in pigeonholes behind her desk-the place is empty.

“Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?”

She hesitates. “Ahh No.”

March 25th, 2004

In London, they unfurled a protest sign on Big Ben, in Rome a million demonstrators filled the streets. But here in Iraq, there were no such spectacular markings of the one year anniversary of the invasion a sign, the BBC speculated, that Iraqis are generally “pleased” with the progress of their liberation.