Iraq, Unfiltered

NYT Editorial

Bush administration supporters regularly accuse the news 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 United States Embassy there cabled back a far grimmer picture of the mounting difficulties faced by its Iraqi employees.

The cable, reprinted by The Washington Post, told of embassy employees running a daily gantlet of religious dress-code enforcers and harassment by militia-style security guards — even at checkpoints surrounding the fortified Green Zone, where the embassy is located. When the Iraqi employees return to their homes, they face sweltering neighborhoods 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. The embassy itself suspects that Shiite governmental authorities in Baghdad may be deliberately evicting Kurdish households in response to Kurdish evictions of Arabs in other parts of the country. A Sunni woman employee reports that "most of her family believes that the U.S. — which is widely perceived as fully controlling the country and tolerating the malaise — is punishing populations as Saddam did."

The cable is only a raw snapshot of the daily experiences of embassy employees, not a systematic nationwide survey. Yet embassy employees are in many ways better off than most Iraqis. At least they have jobs and someone to turn to for help. 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.

Mr. Bush's six-hour visit to Baghdad was mostly spent inside the Green Zone, where he made much of what he had been able to learn from looking Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki "in the eyes." Now that he's home, Mr. Bush needs to take a hard, unfiltered look at the more disturbing picture relayed by America's embassy.