Hi everybody,

I have to make this quick because I have a little vacation to attend to. That's right, after three months, I'm making a break from the prison that is the Green Zone. I'm running off to Jordan for a few days. I had never ever dreamed of being excited about a Jordan vacation but I am. I plan to spend a few days in Petra, the city carved into a cliff face that you might remember from Raiders of the Lost Ark. More to the point, I'll spend a couple of days in a decent hotel in Amman eating decent food (recently, perhaps due to the Turkish truckers boycotting Iraq, we've gone from fresh kiwi, pineapple, and melon at breakfast to canned fruit cocktail and applesauce.) and wandering the streets like a normal human being.

As you've probably seen in the press, things are slightly falling apart. It had been relatively hopeful since about mid-June. Fighting was dying down, people were feeling more confident, councils were meeting, rebuilding projects were moving along, and we were not getting attacked in the Green Zone. But now Allawi and Moqtada Sadr have got themselves into a huge fist-shaking and neither has an easy way to back down. So I guess we're going to turn up the volume for a while. Things are particularly bad in Najaf, but there is plenty of fighting just across the river in Sadr City and lots of other places too numerous to list. Apparently the bad guys were using the weeks of quiet to train and rearm.

Recently the Green (oops, International) Zone has been getting hit with a few rockets and mortars. Mostly they are just big bangs that make noise and cause little damage, but when they come at 3 am and wake you up, they start to get annoying. Then you add in the Giant Voice bellowing take cover take cover take cover and you feel like an idiot for lying on the floor of your tin shack while sirens are wailing and Big Voice is talking and you just wish they'd quit.

Did you all see that Iraq's Olympic soccer team won again? They might get a medal. This is really wonderful, except that every time they win, we have to take cover from "celebratory" AK-47 fire.

If I weren't already being so crabby, I'd write a bit about the huge another-milestone-in-the-road-to-democracy National Conference that is going on right now, but I have nothing good to say about it, so I just won't say anything.

My last big adventure was a trip to Abu Ghraib prison. I escorted a delegation of City Council members to visit prisoners. [see photo.] This is a pretty interesting thing to do, even when it is 115 and we're standing in the sun for three hours and the council people are talking to prisoners thru a chain link fence and I can't understand anything that they're saying except the guy who points to the stump of his leg and asks "is this democracy?"

Being in prison obviously stinks, especially if you're in prison in a (air-conditioned) tent in the desert in Iraq. (For US prisoners, it is all tents. The old prison buildings have been turned over to Iraqi control.) But the conditions seemed decent and the staff professional. They've sped up review of cases, increased family visits, and probably treat prisoners better than most prisons in the world. Can you imagine being a 20 year old MP private sent to work in Abu Ghraib? The current staff is all new, and they know that every step is being watched. To add to the pressure, this is a base where the week before our visit, the security folks had discovered two pounds of C-4 wired to a stop sign and also stopped a dump truck full of explosives that was trying to come in through the front gate.

Reading back through this message, I think that I might have written too much about the hazards, mostly because they're more fun to write about. It wouldn't be news if I wrote about our ultimate frisbee games or the ongoing battles over office space as we rearrange all the desks in the Palace. Remember, this is just another embassy and I'm just another bureaucrat who sits at a desk and writes meeting summaries many hours a day. It's all good.

Best wishes to all.

As always, wish you were here.
rob