Sorry we can't send you one of those "bonus checks" our trusty City Council staffers were cutting each other, and forging Carol Alvarado's initials on the city check-cutting paperwork.
Yes, do let us know about the "civil war", if you find one.
One thing they keep telling us, including that Jill Whatshername who is being held by Ansar al-Sunna or somebody......is that you can't go out on the streets or you'll be shot dead. Is that true?
If you're American, you can't walk in the street without Russian ex-spetsnazy bodyguards?
How about all that? We're getting that from PBS Frontline, from Jill, from MSM media generally, from all of them.
Oh, and Bill Buckley's been poisoned by them, too -- he wrote a column last week, put up his Walter Cronkite opus. Then turned around and said that even though we've lost, we can't afford to quit. Not sure what exactly he meant by all that. But he shows pretty serious signs of media toxemia.
First, I want to get one thing really clear. Americans do not go running around Baghdad on their own whim. Not those with any sense, anyway. It's not as if there's a guarantee that you'll be shot dead, but al-Qaeda is all over the place here and we are big targets. It is a very dangerous place and I've never tried to kid anybody on that.
Just for one example, a mortar was launched right at my building a couple of days ago and exploded just outside our gate. Nobody was hurt, but they're after us.
We only travel through the city in heavily armored convoys and routes are pre-cleared. (Can't go into detail on that.) And we only travel when we have to. None of this is fail-safe, but these are good precautions.
When I was at another base (north Baghdad) in '04 and '05, we could only travel off-base by helicopter because the roads around there were extremely dangerous and very active.
So, as much as I'd love to picnic along the Tigris or snoop around the shops on the streets (I actually dream at night of doing this sometimes), we can't do those things yet.
I feel for Jill Carroll, but she was being boneheaded by gallivanting around Baghdad as if it were London or New York.
This all being said, there is no civil war here. (Had to get that in again. I love to dig at the media. LOL)