Mike Tharp: How Iraq breaks your heart

BAGHDAD -- Hope is not a plan.

That's the title of a book by Thomas Mowle, a series of first-person accounts by senior U.S. military officers in Baghdad in 2004-2005.

It's also the mantra of troops serving now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it should've been in the front of my mind last Wednesday as I conceived a story, slugged "One Week." It was going to be about the relative calm throughout Iraq the first week after U.S. combat forces withdrew from major Iraqi cities June 30.

The numbers supported the idea. Our Baghdad bureau compiles and keeps a running account of Iraqi casualties, the Daily Violence Report. It's based on their own reporting as well as that of stringers stationed strategically across the country. The number of dead and maimed, apart from a horrific bombing in Kirkuk on the pullout date itself, had declined year-to-year.

An American officer responded to my request about U.S. casualties during the first week of the new security arrangement. Unlike Vietnam, where enemy body counts (often noncombatants) and U.S. losses were calculated almost as they were reported, the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't publicize losses -- ours or theirs. Or the innocent victims/collateral damage.

Before he retired in August 2003, Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of Coalition Forces in Iraq during the invasion, once famously said, "We don't do body counts."

Even so, this week the U.S. officer directed me to two Web sites that proved extremely useful in determining that June 30 to July 7, no U.S. military people had died in Iraq; the number of wounded also was dramatically lower than the first week of July a year ago.

Then Mohammed, one of our Baghdad reporters, and I took a taxi ride. He said it was a first for a Baghdad bureau chief or, like me, a rotating correspondent for McClatchy. That's because, for security reasons, we travel in a car with one of our bureau drivers, always trailed by a "chase" car in case the fit hits the shan.

Riding in a taxi -- even if the safety numbers looked good -- meant rolling the dice. Putting yourself in the hands of a stranger. But we rolled 'em. Taxi driver Shakir Mahmoud drove us through the International Zone (IZ, or the so-called Green Zone), a heavily fortified area of Baghdad housing the huge U.S. embassy, senior military and Iraqi officialdom.

(Mohammed called in the driver's name and license plate number to the bureau, just in case.)

For two hours, including an hour in the taxi, we drove around central Baghdad. Where once American soldiers had manned checkpoints, sped through traffic by forcing Iraqis to the curb and jammed intersections with long convoys, it was quiet. No signs of Americans. Iraqi national police and army officers stood at the checkpoints. Private security guards monitored IZ posts where sergeants and specialists once stood guard.

The story was looking smarter.

It looked and sounded good, in fact, right up to 8 p.m. Baghdad time, 9 a.m. in Merced. I'd already written and filed it.

Then Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, blew up. Literally. At least six bombs exploded around the northern city, killing 14 and wounding 44 more. I'd written that the lull may have been just that -- a lull.

How I wish that CYA line, standard in journalistic stories, hadn't been needed.

So I rewrote the top of the story to reflect the spasm of violence. It got worse today. In Baghdad and two other northern cities, suicide bombers, car bombs and other weapons of local destruction killed and injured hundreds more.