The small Royal Jordanian Fokker F-28-4000, which makes daily trips to Baghdad, sits out on the tarmac away from the jetways as if some airport official feared it might prove to be an airborne IED (improvised explosive device, a US military acronym). Those of us on this hajj to the global epicenter of anti-Western and Islamic sectarian strife are an odd assortment of private security guards, military contractors, US officials, Iraqi businessmen, and journalists; a young man in a sweatshirt announces himself as part of the “Military Police K-9 Corps” (bomb-sniffing dogs).
Read more…Baghdad: The Besieged Press by Orville Schell | The New York Review of Books