Iraq policy

Bush administration supporters regularly accuse the media of reporting only bad news from Iraq and filtering out more positive stories. But just hours before American television screens began to be filled with upbeat clips of President Bush’s surprise trip to Baghdad last week, the US embassy there cabled back a far grimmer picture of the mounting difficulties faced by its Iraqi employees.

The cable told of embassy employees running a daily gantlet of religious dress-code enforcers and harassment by militia-style security guards. When the Iraqi employees return to their homes, they face sweltering neighbourhoods without regular electric power, daylong gasoline lines, and families torn by religious and ethnic tensions and mounting fears for the future. The cable relays a report from an Arab editor that “ethnic cleansing” is going on “in almost every Iraqi” province. A Sunni woman reports that “most of her family believes that the US is punishing populations as Saddam did.”

We can only guess what daily life must be like in besieged Sunni cities like Ramadi or the militia-ruled Shiite towns of the Basra area, some now too dangerous for reporters to venture into regularly. Now that he’s home, Bush needs to take a hard, unfiltered look at the more disturbing picture relayed by America’s embassy. — The New York Times