Not to get all Nation magazine here, but this is wild. This is a memo sent to Rice from the US Embassy in Baghdad. It details paragraph after paragraph just how badly the situation has decayed there. It's becoming a theocracy of course; everyone knew that wouldd happen. Fuel, clothing, threats, kidnappings, daily funerals; it's all here. And anyone who can is getting out of the country fast as hell for Egypt or Jordan or wherever they can get.
Download
the actual pdf of the memo here:
Much credit to
Washington Post for putting this out.
from WaPo: "Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked "sensitive" and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."