Before I relocated to Baghdad to participate in the reconstruction effort, several friends said they didn’t want to see me paraded on television in one of those natty orange boiler suits pleading for American and British troops to withdraw from Iraq with a rusty Swiss Army knife at my throat. Not a very original joke and I was grateful for their concern, but this beheading thing has sown a disproportionate fear among otherwise rational people. Yes, it’s extraordinarily dramatic and gruesome, hence the headlines all over the world that the terrorists so crave, but statistically it hardly figures. By my calculation, of the approximately 200,000 Coalition forces and foreign contractors working in Iraq, perhaps half a dozen have been beheaded, giving a ratio of something like three per 100,000. Unpleasant, certainly, and it concentrates the mind, but let’s keep things in perspective. Baghdad has seen all this before, and on a much greater scale.
issue 18 September 2004
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