The Baghdad Follies

Sites, a forty-one-year-old surfer from California with reddish-brown hair and a goatee, is preparing to do a one-minute live shot from the NBC studio -- a set of black curtains rigged with a small opening that offers a view of the city. The scenic backdrop gives his broadcast a you-are-there feeling, but Sites is frustrated: He has spent the day at his desk in the hotel, assembling news gathered by others. "God, I hate these," he says, peering into the camera and fixing his hair. "In so many ways we're just giving headlines." He squints at a cheat sheet taped to the side of the camera and begins to read: "Today's violence reaches in nearly all directions. . . ."

Sites says he envies print journalists who, unencumbered by heavy gear and private guards, can move about more freely. David Enders, a twenty-three-year-old freelancer, takes taxis around Baghdad, lives in an unfortified hotel and has many Iraqi friends. Instead of traveling with armed goons, he relies on a much cheaper form of protection: He tells people he's French. "No one wants to kill French people," Enders says. "Plus, they charge you less if they think you're French. My taxi bills have been cut in half."

But Enders is the exception. Outside the Hamra, veteran war photographer Robert King lounges by the pool. He and Josh Hammer are awaiting an embed in Fallujah. "Basically, Baghdad sucks," he says. "It's just a bunch of white guys sitting around their hotel rooms, drinking beer. In every other war -- Rwanda, Chechnya, Kosovo, Afghanistan -- the fighters were more than happy to take you to the front. They respected you for it. Here, the U.S. soldiers will accuse you of being a liability if you want to see what's going on. We just want to cover the reality -- which is not them handing out candies to little kids. The reality is that people are dying here every day because of this war."

For some reporters, the only foray out of the hotel is what they jokingly call the "Five O'Clock Follies" -- the daily press briefing by the Coalition Provisional Authority held at the Baghdad Convention Center. To get to the briefing, journalists leave their fortress and enter another fortress. First there is the drive across the Tigris from the hotel compound to the Green Zone, the headquarters for the American occupation. Then there's a military checkpoint, where signs warn, in both English and Arabic, that "deadly force is authorized." Past the razor wire, sandbags, camouflage nets and several more checkpoints, you arrive safe within a compound some call the Bubble.

The convention center is the nerve center of the CPA's propaganda machine. In Conference Room Three, where the briefings are held, two plasma screens project upbeat messages in English and Arabic. Interspersed are photos of happy-looking Iraqis interacting with U.S. soldiers. While everyone waits for the briefing to begin, lite jazz is occasionally piped in to serenade the room. "I used to laugh at people who'd come to these," says Karl Vick, a Washington Post correspondent. "Now, I'm one of them."

John Burns, bureau chief of the New York Times, strides into the room. Standing more than six feet tall, with a mane of wild, curly gray hair, piercing blue eyes and a hawk nose, Burns walks among his lesser colleagues like a king. The Bush administration seems to believe that journalists are little more than anti-war activists in disguise, ready to take up placards to oppose the war. But Burns, the son of a NATO general, supported the war. "The United States has been overwhelmingly a force of good in the world," he says. "This is very unfashionable talk, but I think this ought to be remembered here. I grew up in a world where the survival of democracy depended on the military and economic power of the United States. If that power became less credible here, I think the world would be a lot less safe. The stakes are extraordinarily high. I think this is a tipping point in the fate of the American empire."

Shortly after five, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt delivers the exact same line he uses to open virtually every briefing. "Good afternoon," he says. "The coalition continues offensive operations to establish a stable Iraq in order to repair infrastructure, stimulate the economy and transfer sovereignty to the people of Iraq." If Kimmitt were given the option of being stuck on an iceberg off Antarctica, you get the feeling he'd prefer it to the podium of Conference Room Three. His pronouncements often sound like something out of Dr. Strangelove. In response to a question about Iraqi children being frightened by the sound of low-flying U.S. helicopters, Kimmitt replied, "What we would tell the children of Iraq is that the noise they hear is the sound of freedom."