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Back in Iraq, things seemed bleaker than the picture Petraeus was painting. CBS' Lara Logan (in the middle of the Bob Schieffer videostream), for example, offered an alternate explanation to reconciliation, inspired by the surge, as the cause for a decline in Baghdad's sectarian violence: in many neighborhoods "there are no Sunnis or Shia left to kill--the area has been ethnically cleansed." And traveling outside Baghdad with the USArmy's First Cavalry, NBC's Jim Maceda warned that civil war "is truly brewing."
Both ABC and NBC relied on outside news organizations to round out their reporting. ABC filed an update of its Where Things Stand nationwide opinion poll that it conducts with the BBC. The last poll was in March. This time Tim McCarthy pointed out that "as a sign of how divided Iraq has become many of our pollsters carried two forms of identification--with a Sunni and a Shiite sounding name--in case they were stopped by militias." This latest 2200-strong found that the surge had improved security somewhat: in Baghdad 58% felt "not safe at all"--an improvement from 84% six months ago; in al-Anbar Province, 38% felt "security is good," up from 0%.
NBC devoted a full five minutes of airtime to a videotape chronicle of Baghdad neighborhoods by reporter Damien Cave of The New York Times. He showed us children returning to Zawra Park zoo; the few surviving boutiques of Mansour; Huriyah, ethnically cleansed of Sunnis, now run by the Mahdi Army's mafia; the anti-American hotbed of Sadr City; the heavy military presence in Dora. "Baghdad remains a city still paralyzed by sectarianism and distrust," Cave concluded. "Trash is everywhere and millions have been displaced from their homes--a mass migration that has continued during the surge."
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