In the final months of the Coalition Provisional Authority, its administrators and spokesmen – the people journalists rely on to get official views but privately refer to by the dismissive term “flack” – expressed frustration that the press seemed to be missing many of the successes inside the country. Never mind that a dramatically deteriorating security situation, by the assessment of a number of senior CPA officials, had dramatically undercut Iraq’s long-term prospects of democracy. Thousands of schools had been reconstructed, sewers restored, and thousands of Iraqis had been added to the country’s slowly reconstituted military and police. The long litany of accomplishments, delivered as if being read from a
script, was usually recited in a slightly pained tone by the flack of the moment, as if average correspondents (who are, in turn, privately referred to by frustrated spokesmen as "hacks") were insisting on missing the forest for the trees.

By any objective measure, the CPA’s press effort was a failure. Reporters tended to feel they were given inaccurate and incomplete information at briefings, and as time went on, adversarial feelings developed
between some on both sides. Of course, it’s everyone’s job to maintain his or her objectivity, and I’ve tried to keep my own frustrations in check, but it hasn’t been easy. Faced with statements of "fact" that proved to be deeply misleading, it grows harder to view any official statements as credible. Though certainly not as bad, comments were occasionally made to journalists that echoed the Vietnam War’s famed "5 O'Clock Follies."

To be sure, the CPA was staffed with idealistic officials who were, in a dedicated fashion, working to make Iraq a better place. Historians and academics will be pulling apart the mistakes made for decades, but mistakes are certainly not evidence of bad intentions. However, part of the problem was, from the CPA spokesman’s podium, no mistakes were ever admitted to have been made.

In April, with an all-out US assault taking place on Fallujah, top US military spokesman Gen. Mark Kimmitt was asked about reports that large numbers of civilian casualties were being generated in the intense urban combat. Rather than acknowledge that such casualties are a regrettable part of war in that environment, he denied that anyone but insurgents was being killed by US forces. Asked about video evidence to the contrary obtained by Arab satellite channels like Al Jazeera, General Kimmitt asked the press corps and the Iraqi people to ignore the pictures. “My solution is change the channel,” he said then. “Stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children, are not legitimate news sources, that is propaganda.” While of course the intent of American troops wasn’t to kill innocents, the pictures spoke for themselves of the burdens of war.

More typical was an exchange between me and a senior aide to US administrator Paul Bremer in a background briefing that took place about a week before the June 28th handover. I asked the official if, in hindsight, the CPA regretted the May 23, 2003 decree signed by US administrator Paul Bremer that dissolved the Iraqi Army. This decree produced a battle-ready cadre of former officers and enlisted men that resented the US occupation, and left a major security vacuum inside the country. It has been widely called one of the CPA’s biggest mistakes by people ranging from Iraq’s new US-installed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, former CPA officials, and Jay Garner, the man Mr. Bremer replaced. The official’s response? That, in effect, the decree wasn’t really relevant. In his view, the Iraqi Army had completely dissolved on its own and was impossible to recall in any event. The decree simply formalized an irreversible status quo.

His response ignored a large amount of evidence to the contrary. Retired Gen. Jay Garner had arrived in April and gotten in touch with generals from Saddam Hussein’s army, who told him that the most battle-ready units could be easily recalled and were eager to participate in stabilizing Iraq and preventing the looting that devastated what was left of Iraq’s public infrastructure. Mr. Bremer’s decree – which he apparently signed on orders from civilians at the Defense Department who believed that all elements of Mr. Hussein’s fallen regime were rotten to the core – blindsided US officials and Iraqi partners.

Another problem was the confusing, often contradictory information provided on reconstruction. Key in the CPA recitation of successes was the power supply, which CPA officials insisted time and again had improved dramatically since the US invasion. In June, senior CPA construction officials said that power generation was averaging over 4,500 megawatts a day, better than Iraq’s prewar levels. But to residents of Baghdad, this didn’t make much sense. Everyone knew the lights were on more often under Hussein. At another background briefing in mid-June, a top official on the electricity side explained away this puzzle. He said Hussein systematically deprived most provinces of power to ensure that Baghdad and two key Sunni
strongholds of support – Fallujah and Tikrit – had large amounts of power. He said those were probably the only three cities in Iraq that still had less electricity than before the war. What’s more, steady progress was being made, he said. I dutifully included this in the story that I filed.

Then a few weeks ago, the US government’s General Accounting Office came out with an assessment of the Iraq reconstruction effort. Its assessment of the electricity situation was dramatically different from what I and other reporters were told. According to the GAO, 16 of Iraq’s 18 provinces had at least nine hours of power a day before the US-led invasion. As of May 2004, only 10 provinces had at least nine hours of power a day. Before the war, fully seven of Iraq’s 18 provinces had more than 16 hours a day; in May 2004, that number had dropped to one.

While there had been some months of marked improvement – including March 2004, when all 18 Iraqi provinces had at least nine hours of power a day – the GAO found accelerating rates of sabotage were making the job tougher, not easier, as time went on. That’s something I’ve since been able to confirm, with US sources saying that insurgents seem to have developed lots of inside information from Iraqi electrical workers, and had grown smarter at targeting key and poorly guarded aspects of Iraq’s distribution system.

This minor rant of mine isn’t to denigrate the effort. Literally billions of US dollars are being spent on Iraq’s electricity, and ongoing upgrades of Iraq’s generators can only be to the country’s benefit in the longer term. But it was another case where full candor was lacking, and that limits the amount of faith reporters like me will be able to put in future official pronouncements.

There is an eternal tension between hacks and flacks, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In open political systems, truth tends to be found in the middle. Between spokesmen trying to put everything in the best possible light and reporters seeking to poke into every dark corner, something approaching the truth is usually found. But from where I sit, I can’t help feeling that US interests would always be better served by full and open accountings of what’s really going on.

Annia Ciezadlo - Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

I hear it time and time again, even in my own head: “Why does everything have to be so negative? Why don’t you write about some of the positive things that are happening in Iraq?”

You hear that question a lot in this business, or read it in letters to the editors of newspapers. There’s more than a hint of resentment in it – not only against journalists, perpetual bearers of bad news, but against Iraqis themselves. “Why aren’t they grateful," people seem to be asking, "after all the good things we’re doing, not to mention the billions we’re spending?”

Really, there’s only one way to answer this question. Whenever I see such a letter, or hear such a comment, I think how much I’d like to invite those people to Baghdad. I’d give them a tour of the “Red Zone” – all of Baghdad outside the coalition's high-security compound, known as the "Green Zone" – that they would never forget: They would see raw sewage flowing through the streets and piles of garbage basting in the sun outside people’s houses. I’d take them inside the houses of poor families who lost all their humble possessions to the flood of human waste that flowed into their homes after the sewage pumps, powered by electricity, shut off. And I’d introduce them to the grieving families of people kidnapped or assassinated or just randomly blown up in the violent chaos that is the new Iraq.

But I think I understand why people ask this question. It's because you hardly ever hear about the rest of life.

What do Iraqis do when they aren’t being bombed, or extorted, or tortured in prisons? What are they saying when they aren’t standing outside Abu Ghraib or sitting around watching Al Jazeera and cursing the Americans – all the things we journalists write about in our stories?

Surely Iraqis aren’t all as we see them in stories or on TV – a constant angry mob, waving rifles and chanting ‘Death to America,’ with one or two peeling off to issue an angry threat or demand for revenge? Surely there must be times when they do other things like get married, go to school, check out a movie? And surely there must be some hope in such small, simple pleasures?

I was sitting in an open-air tea shop, talking to a group of Iraqi men, when one of them made a comment that summed it up beautifully. I was interviewing them about two stories at once – the car bombing that killed Governing Council President Izzedine Salim, and the looming court-martial of Spc. Jeremy Sivits, the first of seven soldiers to be tried in Baghdad for abusing Iraqi prisoners. It was hot, but not too hot, and a gentle breeze whipped the cloth awning we sat under, which filtered the harsh sunlight into a gentle blue.

We chatted desultorily about the court-martial, which they saw as a pointless show trial, and the day’s bombing, which they scarcely cared about (what had the Governing Council ever done for them?) They bought me a cup of tea, and politely recited the stock anti-American responses, but I got the sense their hearts weren’t really in it.

Then one man stood up, struck by a sudden epiphany. “Why are we talking about these things?” said a stocky businessman with grizzled hair and a joking manner. “Who cares about the court-martial? What I want to know is, when are we going to get our electricity back?”

Forget Abu Ghraib. There is no one topic that arouses anti-American passion, inflames conspiracy theories, or just plain enrages Iraqis more than the electricity question. People who experienced last summer’s blackout in the northeastern US got a brief taste of what it’s like to be without electricity for a couple of hours, maybe half a day. Now imagine living like that for a year and two months, in one of the hottest countries in the world. And all the time hearing that you’re supposed to be grateful because the most powerful country in the world has come to bring enlightenment to your darkened land.

And I think that’s why you hear so little about normal life in Iraq these days. Because, during war, there's no such thing as normal life. Basic services are disrupted, personal security is no longer taken for granted, and even getting from point A to point B is difficult. It’s the awful limbo that you live in between the bombings and the assassinations that makes it so hard, and so depressing, to be a civilian caught in the middle of a war.

In the tea shop, everybody agreed: The court-martial, the prisoners, the bombings (which most Iraqis believe the Americans are staging), were all just a sideshow, a plot to distract them while the Americans steal Iraqi oil and ship it off to the United States. It’s a common response, the punchline to many a conspiracy theory: If the Americans are really here to help us, then why haven’t they turned the electricity back on? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that question.

"It's because of the movies," shrugged my translator, a 23-year-old artist with an unearthly insight into human nature. "We've grown up seeing American movies, and we think of America as such a powerful country, that we cannot understand why it cannot do such a simple thing."

Maybe it’s time to update an old "war room" slogan: It’s the electricity, stupid.