The sun rises over Downtown Brooklyn. (DBP)

At the ready. (Andrew Hill/OSC)

When Tucker Reed finally stepped up to the lectern inside the new BAM Fisher Building on a Thursday morning at the end of July, the crowd could barely handle any more news about just how stupendous Downtown Brooklyn was, is and will be.

Karen Brooks Hopkins, entering her fourth decade at BAM, welcomed the crowd into the brightly lit practice space on the third floor of the two-month-old red brick theater, tucked in behind BAM’s original performance hall. This would be the linchpin of the latest, greatest cultural district in the city. Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president and cheerleader-in-chief for 11 years now, warmed up the crowd with his typical act. "Everywhere you look, things are looking up in Downtown Brooklyn," he barked. This was, is, will be the center of the universe.

Next came State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, whose grandmother grew up on Albany Street in Crown Heights. He had made sure to wear his Brooklyn lapel pin, a gift Mr. Markowitz bestows on everyone he meets. Though he was a Long Island guy, Mr. DiNapoli was an adopted son of this former outer borough, at least for the day, for the good news he was bringing: economic growth in Downtown Brooklyn had outpaced the rest of the city over the past decade, according to a new report prepared by the comptroller’s office. This was, is, will be an economic powerhouse.

On the same streets where Jay-Z had once slung crack (and would soon be headlining the Barclays Center he ostensibly helped build), legitimate businesses had replaced illicit ones, and they were thriving. Thousands of new residents had moved in, filling the striking and unspectacular condo-turned-rental-in-the-downturn towers along Flatbush Avenue. National brands including H&M, Sephora, Target and Shake Shack were replacing the pawn shops and cellphone outlets on the Fulton Mall.

It’s not your bubbe’s Brooklyn anymore. It’s Tucker Reed’s.

Having just turned 32, Mr. Reed has been making a name for himself since the middle of the last decade, when he launched the DUMBO Business Improvement District (BID). The event at BAM was his big coming out. Since January, Mr. Reed has run the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a BID of BIDs, overseeing the MetroTech office park, Fulton Mall and the Court-Livingston-Schermerhorn corridor, an L-shaped spine of older office buildings, mostly filled with government agencies and legal firms. It is the city’s third-largest business district, after Midtown and Lower Manhattan, but it is still trying to define its identity after decades of fitful, relentless redefinition and rebirth.

On this day, Mr. Reed was the man with the plan. After a little over six months on the job, he had developed a strategic framework for Downtown Brooklyn, the first major vision statement since the Bloomberg administration’s rezoning of 22 blocks along Flatbush Avenue in 2004. The partnership, with its $6 million annual budget, was created in part to oversee the development on the horizon

“Just look out this window and you can see the changes to the built environment,” he said, gesturing through the floor-to-ceiling glass. “If the first phase of the partnership was focused on facilitating the execution of public-private projects, the next phase will be on synthesizing these disparate investments into a Downtown Brooklyn mosaic.” (He has a soft spot for management speak.)

Mr. Reed smiled his broad, boyish grin, his handsome blue eyes glinting. He wore a navy suit that barely contained his impressive bulk, still in good shape a decade after his time as a defensive end ended with two torn ACLs. Under this was a white shirt, pink houndstooth tie and a crimson pocket square with blue trim. Put together, dressed to impress.

It is hard to believe that three years earlier, Mr. Reed, with his quick smile and charming character, was instead donning a flak jacket and fatigues every day to go to work. It was not the streets of Brooklyn but Baghdad he was rebuilding as an adviser for the State Department. He had traded in a war zone for lofts and brownstones. Still, the job was basically the same, except for the IEDs.

Tucker Reed grew up in Newtown, Conn., trading on both his physical and mental intelligence. When not practicing his blitz on a tackling dummy, he was practicing for the coming season’s play. Junior year, he played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

Newtown is a town of about 25,000 just outside of Danbury, where Mr. Reed spent most of his time growing up except for regular trips down to Manhattan to catch a Giants game or go to the theater or a museum. It was a journey his 94-year-old grandfather made seven days a week until about six months ago, traveling to the Illustration House, a small Chelsea gallery that he ran for the past four decades with Mr. Reed’s uncle. It was through him, and a Brooklyn-bred grandmother “who never left the city too far behind” that Mr. Reed gained much of his appreciation for New York and for the arts.

“It makes for a richer life a more well-rounded experience,” Mr. Reed said. “I never deluded myself beyond the karaoke floor that I’d have a future in the arts or entertainment, but it certainly informs a bunch of the fun work I get to do now with cultural organizations.”

Mr. Reed was raised by his mother, a fact he credits with stoking his self-reliant spirit. The family lived what he calls a modest, working-class life, which drove Mr. Reed to overachieve in his pursuits but also to want to give back. “You like to think that if you are a good person, and you are trying to do the right thing, that there are people out there to help, and for government to help as well,” he said. “That wasn’t always my experience, so I’d like to think that I have a responsibility to improve people’s lives.”

He decided to attend nearby Wesleyan, which, in addition to all the artsy kids from afar there to start electronica bands and celebrate Zonker Harris Day, attracts a number of locals looking for a good school (which is not to say that Mr. Reed shied away from the more-than-occasional drink, as a former member of the football team, who now works at a financial firm in Downtown Brooklyn, explained).

Mr. Reed not only played football to help pay his way through school but also joined the National Guard. After those two torn ACLs in sophomore year, Mr. Reed was given a medical discharge, a stroke of bad luck that may well have saved his life—Mr. Reed graduated in 2002, which would have almost certainly have put him on the front lines in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Still, Mr. Reed found time for his other pursuits, taking a role in the student government and acting in, among other pieces, 7 Minutes in Heaven, the first original piece by his dormmate Lin-Manuel Miranda, who later achieved fame with In the Heights. During the summers, he ran an ice cream shop on an island off the coast of Maine with another college buddy.

After graduating with a bachelors degree in government, Mr. Reed spent a year on the island teaching high school social studies while also making time to travel to India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The following year, Mr. Reed arrived in New York on a Coro public service fellowship, which took him through a number of internships at City Hall and the community lending division at JPMorgan. In 2004, Mr. Reed officially joined the Bloomberg administration in the Department of Small Business Services. He spent a little over a year there integrating two older departments that had now been combined into one while also focusing on expanding and reforming the Workforce1 career centers.

It was Rob Walsh, commissioner of the department, who recommended Mr. Reed to Jed Walentas, the DUMBO scion and up-and-comer in his own right taking over his father’s empire in DUMBO. The Bloomberg administration had become staunch advocates of businesses improvements districts—their number has nearly doubled in the past decade—and Mr. Reed was tapped to launch this latest effort. “He has this rare understanding of both the public and private sector and how to get them to work together,” Commissioner Walsh said.

Mr. Reed used to jog over the Brooklyn Bridge many mornings from his apartment in Carroll Gardens, and he was always struck by how many tourists would walk over from Manhattan and immediately turn back around. “My goal was to put DUMBO on the map,” Mr. Reed said. In the span of two years he had, converting a nonexistent advocacy group into one of the foremost BIDs in town.

He built the first pedestrian plaza in the city, at Pearl Street, opened the archway under the anchorage to the Manhattan Bridge, formerly a DOT storage lot, and launched a program to install free wifi in the neighborhood. He presided over a landmarking of DUMBO that preserved its character, then pivoted to a rezoning that carved out room for new development.

“He just has an instinctual understanding of how urban spaces work,” Mr. Walentas said. Meanwhile, a tech sector blossomed and a residential market boomed into the poshest in the borough.

For all the good Mr. Reed had done in the city in his five years here, he still had a longing for greater fulfilment. “I felt like everything that was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan was really the challenge of my generation, and I wanted to be a part of that in some way,” Mr. Reed said. He found a posting for an adviser to a provincial reconstruction team, a small group of 100 civilian and military experts assigned to Division Headquarters in Baghdad.

Mr. Reed arrived in Iraq in May 2008. After five years of war, the situation on the banks of the Tigris was unspeakably worse than along the East River, yet both had undergone a considerable building boom that now needed managing.

“The mandate was, get as many projects built as possible, and let's really start to demonstrate that the tide was turning and and conditions were improving,” Mr. Reed said. “But it was like community development gone wild.” He said it was common for a local battalion commander to be out on patrol, run into a sheikh, ask him what they needed, and voila, a school or hospital would materialize out of nowhere—with no one to run or even necessarily fill it. This not only created underutilized resources but a new vulnerable infrastructure that if not defended and put into could use could become a nest for insurgents.

“There was a lot of the best intentions that were meeting just a kind of discoordinated effort, and not through the fault of anyone specifically, but, I think, through the fault of being in a war zone,” Mr. Reed said. It was a year after the military surge, and things had begun to improve, but untold amounts of work remained to be done. Mr. Reed makes mention of 18- to 20-hour workdays.

“He’s kind and generous, but holds people accountable for their actions,” Lou Ann Linehan, a diplomat in the Basra consulate who was Mr. Reed’s superior in Baghdad, said in an email. “He fills up the room with his personality. He does not suffer fools.”

One of his fondest projects—something only a New Yorker could cop to—was helping to rebuild the sanitation network. “You’re working on trying to restore the most basic level of service where you’re training people to follow a set route, come at a dependable time each day to build the trust of the customer so they know if I go and put my garbage out at 5 o’clock it’s going to be picked at 5 o’clock, and that’s the most basic level of service because the place had evolved into complete chaos,” Mr. Reed recalled. “People aren’t really caring about garbage when you’re worrying about if you’re going to get blown up.” Yet that is part of the reason regular trash removal was so important—the ubiquitous piles of garbage were a popular hiding place for IEDs.

This was a matter of personal import, as well, since Mr. Reed was venturing out into these same streets three to four times a week from the relative safety of the Green Zone. In talking about his time in Iraq, Mr. Reed is careful to be matter-of-fact, not wanting to sound boastful or self-important. His posting is something he felt obligated to do, but it was also just another job to do and do right. “There was the physical danger aspect to it, which, when you're in the situation, you kind of push to the back of your mind, because if you don't, it will drive you crazy,” Mr. Reed said of the challenges of working in a war zone.

When he got homesick, he would watch Rick Burns's New York documentary, and it helped inform his view of the city when he returned. “I watched the whole series while I was over there again, there is some quote in there from Fitzgerald talking about how New York burns with all the effervescence of the sun,” he said. “With all that ligh,t how could you not want to be a part of it?”

After only six months, Mr. Reed had been promoted from an adviser to chief of staff, but after seven more, he found himself exhausted. It was time to return home to the bright lights.

The day after his big announcement, a clear, muggy Friday morning, Tucker Reed was giving a tour of his downtown domain, strolling through the leafy confines of the MetroTech Plaza, having just walked over from the noisy scene on the Fulton Mall. The two are closer than even locals realize, and in many ways they remain worlds apart, though upscale developments on both sides—a French bistro recently opened in MetroTech—draw them ever closer. Mr. Reed considers this his top priority.

“For me, one of the big things is the Downtown Brooklyn experience,” he said. “We want to create a destination, with everything so close together, but it can be very confusing since there’s not a grid, there’s no easy path.” Everything from smartphone apps to digital kiosks is in the works.

After returning from Iraq, Mr. Reed spent a few wayward months figuring out exactly what to do with himself. He moved into his girlfriend’s Midtown studio—she had departed their Carroll Gardens apartment when he headed overseas—and mostly spent his time decompressing, visiting with family and friends and traveling around the country. He passed the foreign service exam and considered moving to Washington, but eventually took his old friend Jed Walentas up on an offer to join Two Trees.

He spent two years as a project manager working on everything from the new Mercedes House project on the Far West Side to liaising with City Hall and managing philanthropic efforts on behalf of the Walentases. Much as he enjoyed his work in the private sector, he jumped at the opportunity to take over the partnership when Joe Chan, its founding director, stepped down last fall.

“I had met him during a tour with Jed once, and I remember being impressed, but when he came in for an interview for the job, we knew immediately he was our guy,” Forest City Ratner executive vice president MaryAnne Gilmartin said. “His resume just blew us away.

It was a tumultuous time at the BID, where competing interests among the areas long-time developers often ran up against each other. On top of that, a scathing report from City Comptroller John Liu charged the partnership with mismanagement of funds, spending lavishly on executives while local needs were ignored.

Much as he did in Iraq, Mr. Reed focused on finding common ground among the competing parties, stressing their shared interests: let’s capitalize on the 56,000 college students, more than in Cambridge; better wayfinding, connectivity and open space are key; tech, tech, tech. He made of point of meeting with all 120 partnership members, not just the big shots on the board, though he has also conscripted them into monthly one-on-ones.

If there are any skeptics, they are among the groups that have long been critical of the partnership, most notably Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. Mr. Reed met the group within the first few months of taking over and even agreed to go on a walking tour of the neighborhood, which impressed the member of FUREE. But when he released the strategic plan, they were disappointed. "We worry it's largely lip service," Patrick Gomez, a FUREE board member said. "So far these policies have mostly benefited the luxury developers, and the elite business interests that dominate the boards of the Partnership. We look forward to working with the Partnership to promote development that uplifts the long-time residents, local small business owners and workers who have contributed to the area's success."

While Mr. Reed is willing to work with local groups, he was clear that it is not his first priority. “We are not a city agency, a housing advocate, a workforce development provider or an enforcement organization,” he responded

Despite such objections, Mr. Reed is upbeat. At the end of the tour, standing in front of Shake Shack—regarded by some as the clearest sign of the changes to Downtown Brooklyn—Mr. Reed surveyed his domain. “Within 10 or 15 blocks, it’s really all here, from Brooklyn Bridge Park to the BAM to the Barclays Center,” Mr. Reed said. “We have to think about how to knit it together. It’s not about going to the office or going to the Fulton Mall anymore. You’re coming here to see a show, to shop, to work, to live. You really don’t have to leave the area—you can do it all.

Mr. Myers, a former Bush White House reporter who has been reporting from Iraq since February, will become the Times' fourth Baghdad bureau chief in just over two years (Jim Glanz left the bureau to work for the investigations unit; John Burns left to go to London). Rod Nordland, the former Baghdad bureau chief for Newsweek, and who has been contributing to the Times for the last few months, will be his no. 2.

Recently, the Times has been refocusing its attention to Kabul from Baghdad, and Ms. Rubin will begin covering the military's presense in Pakistan and Afghanistan from Paris after she takes time off. She will also cover the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Back in April, foreign editor Susan Chira told us the Times would be bulking up its Pakistan coverage.

“This is obviously the war that the president is focusing on,” said Ms. Chira then. “And troops are being shifted to there so we intend to gear up. We’re not going to abandon the war in Iraq—there are a lot of troops there, and we’re going to cover it. Yes, we’re ramping up in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we’ve had a strong commitment there, which thankfully the Pulitzer judges recognized. But we won’t leave Baghdad.”

She also told us that many veterans of The Times’ Iraq coverage, including CJ Chivers, Sabrina Tavernise, Richard Oppel and Dexter Filkins, would be turning their attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well.

This has been a continuing trend in media. Felix Gillette wrote in The Observer, "In recent months, as the focus of the U.S. military operations overseas has shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan, [NBC's Richard] Engel and other seasoned foreign correspondents are increasingly following their military sources back to America’s other war."

An ABC News producer in Iraq had just posted some breaking news from Baghdad. According to a press release from the U.S. military, five American troops had just been shot and killed inside Camp Liberty. The names of the dead were being withheld. The incident was under investigation. Details were fleeting.

Just a few weeks earlier, on her 20th reporting trip to Iraq, she had spent an afternoon at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, interviewing soldiers for a piece she was still working on about the recent dramatic spike in the number of suicides in the U.S. military.

Reading the post at her home in the Washington, D.C. area on Monday morning, Ms. Raddatz had a hunch. Yet another U.S. soldier might have snapped. She shot back an email to her colleagues. “This is a big deal,” she wrote. “Sounds like either a soldier shot fellow soldiers, or a contractor or a local.”

In the end, Ms. Raddatz’s instincts turned out to be correct.

Some nine hours later, on the evening news shows, CBS’s Katie Couric, NBC’s Brian Williams and ABC’s Charles Gibson all reported that—in the worst case of soldier-on-soldier violence since the start of the war—an unnamed American was now in custody after killing five of his colleagues and wounding three others. The killing spree, they reported, had taken place that afternoon inside a clinic dedicated to treating soldiers with psychological problems.

On Monday evening, CBS illustrated the story with a computer animation of a soldier bursting into a room and blasting away with a handgun. It looked like a video game. On NBC, Brian Williams fleshed out the story by interviewing a celebrated war veteran about the stress of combat in the studio in New York.

ABC News, on the other hand—in an impressive display of news-gathering—showed actual footage from inside the clinic. As it turns out, during her recent trip to Baghdad, Ms. Raddatz had spent an entire afternoon interviewing the clinic’s staff members for her report on how the military was coping with the recent uptick in suicides.

“It was just days ago that Lieutenant Colonel Beth Salisbury showed ABC News the very same combat stress control center where today’s horrific shooting took place,” Ms. Raddatz reported on Monday evening. “Salisbury, who runs the center, was not hurt in today’s shooting. But of the dead, two were on her clinical staff, and three were soldiers waiting for treatment.”

Ms. Raddatz went on to break the news that the soldier in custody was on his third deployment. “The sergeant being held for the murders is married and based in Germany,” she added. “ABC News has learned he had been having problems during his deployment. Initial indications are that he did not seek mental health treatment voluntarily, but that his unit had referred him for care.”

The gripping footage, accompanying her report, showed Ms. Salisbury, dressed in combat fatigues, walking past a concrete barrier into the clinic, past the check-in desk, past the waiting room and down a narrow corridor with fluorescent lights and plywood walls decorated here and there with what looks like the artwork of patients.

“Their weapons are taken for safety,” Ms. Salisbury tells the camera. “And we secure those here for the safety of our staff and themselves.”

When The Observer caught up with Ms. Raddatz by phone on Tuesday morning, those words seemed to be haunting ABC’s veteran war correspondent.

“You look back on these transcripts, and what they were saying at the time—the part about the guns?” said Ms. Raddatz. “To me, that was one of those moments where I was like, oh my gosh. This is the only place on the base where they wouldn’t have weapons. Where they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves.”

One eerie aspect of war reporting is that if you do it long enough, sooner or later the violence of battle is likely to catch up with some of your past subjects. Such has been the case for Ms. Raddatz recently. “When I left Kabul last time, I had interviewed the head of training for the Afghan army,” said Ms. Raddatz. “I interviewed him in his office at the base in Kabul. The next day there was a suicide bombing there. It blew out all the windows in that room and the paintings on the walls.”

On Tuesday afternoon, while continuing to report out the developments in Baghdad, Ms. Raddatz learned that one of the soldiers captured by ABC’s footage inside the clinic (footage which had not yet aired)—a naval commander with a Ph.D. in social work—was one of the victims killed in the shooting.

Ms. Raddatz found herself looking at a January 2009 entry on his classmates.com profile. “I have begun another deployment this time to Iraq where I will work in a combat stress center,” he apparently wrote. “Our son returned from Iraq in October. … Our son-in-law is in Iraq expecting to return late Feb early March.”

“I imagine he treated the guy,” said Ms. Raddatz. “And the guy probably stormed right back into that very office.”

Then she excused herself. She needed to finish her follow-up story for World News that night.

fgillette@observer.com

During the four-day trip, the executives met with, among other officials, General Nasier Abadi, Iraqi Armed Forces’ vice chief of staff; Marc Wall, coordinator for economic transition in Iraq; and Ralph Steen, officer in charge of the national fiber network installation project. Outside of the Green Zone, they wore military helmets and flak jackets and met local Iraqi leaders. They sat at roundtables with elite students from the University of Technology and the University of Baghdad to discuss how they use Facebook and which videos they like on YouTube. After coffee and tea with the deputy prime minister, Twitter’s Mr. Dorsey convinced him to start his own account on the microblogging platform. He could use his iPhone to update the page.

“The goal was really to listen and see if there was a way we could help, go there and come up with a list of things that we could do in a matter of weeks, not years,” Mr. Liebman, the Howcast executive, told The Observer in a phone interview after his return to New York.

The delegation confronted a myriad of connectivity problems in Iraq. Power grids are on the fritz. Only about 5 percent of homes have Internet access, according to the group, and although an estimated 80 percent of the population own mobile phones, infrastructure is crippling under the demand.

“We were on the phone with the deputy prime minister before we met him and the phone [call] dropped five, six times,” Mr. Liebman said.

The group was escorted by a security team, and “always felt safe,” according to Mr. Liebman, but with suicide bombings a not-infrequent occurrence, everyday safety is a constant concern for Iraqi citizens; reliable phone and Internet connections are vital to their daily lives.

Mr. Heiferman returned to his Meetup office last week to a sign hanging in his office that his coworkers made. It read: “Mission Accomplished.” But there is still lots of work to do.

“They’ve got real issues,” Mr. Heiferman said about Iraq. “Some say, ‘How do you think about Internet infrastructure when you need a sanitation infrastructure? How can you think about Internet connectivity when there isn’t clean water?’ And that’s very valid. But it’s not a matter of either/or. There’s parts of the rebuilding effort that can look at different things.”

The delegation—the first of its kind—was organized by Jared Cohen, the 27-year-old Stanford graduate who became the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff in 2006. “We all know the story of challenges in Iraq,” Mr. Cohen explained during a digital video conference with State Department reporters last Wednesday. “We’ve been hearing that story for a while. But increasingly, we’ve been hearing stories and reporting from our embassy and elsewhere about opportunities, in particular with regard to technology. So we had been exploring ways that we can embrace those trends and leverage those trends to try to look for new opportunities to use technology to support our objectives in Iraq.”

During the trip, the group used a Twitter hashtag (#iraqtech) and worked on a sharable document (using Google Docs, of course), according to Mr. Liebman, to chronicle the ways in which they may be able to help—from training government officials on using online tools to foster transparency to teaching students how to use Twitter.

On April 21, the group got a tour of the Iraq National Museum, which recently reopened and has become an important symbol for both government and citizens for their history and culture. They met with Faeza Al Ubadi, the museum’s chief engineer, who is trying to build a Web site for the institution. “He was talking about things like Norton AntiVirus and all these things just to get email up, and we were like, ‘O.K., you can use Google Apps. It’s free, it takes two seconds, you don’t need to build your whole email server, right?” Mr. Liebman said. They plan on helping Mr. Al Ubadi build a robust Web site for the museum. One of their goals is to educate Iraqis on the free platforms, from Google to YouTube, that are already available to them.

The group also hopes to organize a delegation of Iraqi government officials and community leaders for a visit to Silicon Valley, and possibly New York’s tech community. They are also brainstorming ideas for an online, centralized information portal for Iraqi citizens, according to Mr. Liebman. “We’ll have more announcements in a few months,” he said.

“Someone on my team, at Meetup, they were kind of skeptical of the trip,” Mr. Heiferman told the Observer. “And they said, ‘Wow, so this is just America doing some sort of cultural imperialism on this country.’

“But the point of the trip wasn’t to bring some American Internet brand into the country; it’s about the raw piping for how people connect with each other in ways that just literally don’t compute if you’ve been in the Saddam dark ages for a bunch of decades,” Mr. Heiferman continued. “This isn’t bringing McDonald’s to Iraq. It’s bringing some of the rawest ideas of how technology helps them be more themselves.”

THE GROUP can’t necessarily build Internet infrastructure in Iraq with their own hands, but they can spark another important initiative—using the Internet to empower the Iraqi people.

“This is one of the most exciting areas of conflict-resolution work going on today,” said Sheldon Himelfarb, who specializes in technology and media tactics for post-conflict peace-building and development for the D.C.-based United States Institute of Peace. “What this medium is allowing them to do is get a sense of confidence, connection with the rest of the world, and not only connection with the rest of the world but communities in their own countries.”

Marc Lynch, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who chronicles new-media and technology advances in the Middle East on his blog, Abu Aardvark, describes a “total free-for-all, new-media space” for young people to build upon. “It [is] more about them themselves and forming ideas, forming relationships, trying to figure out ways of engaging with a society that seemed to have no place for them,” Mr. Lynch said during a discussion last week at the Open Society Institute titled “The Political Impact of New Media in the Middle East.” “The new ideas, the fact that they become different kinds of citizens, empowered in different ways and with different expectations of each other, of their government, of other societies”—this is what could make a major change in the Middle East.

As far as the Iraqi government’s commitment to building a stronger tech infrastructure and understanding the power of the Web, Mr. Heiferman said it “was a mixed bag” among officials. “Sometimes you’d think the commitment was there, and sometimes you’d think not, depending on who you’re talking to.”

There also seemed to be a cultural disconnect—most Iraqis aren’t hyped up on Twitter, for example. “There was comedy in seeing Jack Dorsey talk to a bunch of bearded 60-year-old Saddam-era Iraqis about how important it is to hear about your sister eating a sandwich,” he said.

“But we sort of take for granted how valuable Craigslist is for our lives and Google is for our lives and YouTube is for our lives," Mr. Heiferman said.

“Our whole purpose here is to listen and try to understand the way they kind of are looking at the possibility of investing in Internet infrastructure and having a discussion of the need that people have. We tried to explain the basic notion of having a private sector, the basic notion of being a democracy, and that the Internet will be increasingly vital if they’re going to participate in the larger world.”

greagan@observer.com

“It turned out I’d been on a patrol with one of them in Western Baghdad,” Mr. Engel emailed The Observer recently. “We sat down and had tea and talked about Iraq and mutual friends on this very remote Afghan mountain.”

Since the start of the conflict more than seven years ago, Mr. Engel has made numerous trips throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan and the tribal areas in between. Along the way, he’s been embedded with the U.S. military, survived firefights and reported on the resurgence of the Taliban.

But last month, on his most recent trip to the region, Mr. Engel did something he had never done before. He began scouring the capital city of Kabul for a good location to set up a new Afghanistan bureau for NBC News.

“We have some local staff who have always worked for us there,” said Mr. Engel. “Now we’ll have a fully staffed and operating bureau.”

“We’re still covering Baghdad,” Mr. Engel added. “We’re not downsizing Baghdad. But I’m going to be spending a lot more time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

He’s not alone. In recent months, as the focus of the U.S. military operations overseas has shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan, Mr. Engel and other seasoned foreign correspondents are increasingly following their military sources back to America’s other war.

“I just got off the phone with a Canadian TV network, and they’re scouting out network office space in Kabul,” said Mr. Engel. “There’s a big migration. I’m starting to see some of my old friends—military people and journalists—I knew from Baghdad. It’s a lot of the same press corps as in Baghdad.”

As a result, in the coming weeks and months, American news audiences can expect to see more and more top writers and correspondents popping up there, from the mountains of Tora Bora to the poppy fields of Helmand.

On Monday, April 20, NBC News announced that Ann Curry would be traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on how the countries are being reshaped under the Obama administration. At the end of the month, ABC’s senior foreign affairs correspondent, Martha Raddatz, plans to return to Afghanistan. And a recent email to C. J. Chivers—The New York Times’ veteran war correspondent—returned an out-of-office reply: “I am traveling in the Caucasus and Afghanistan and will have infrequent email access until I return in May.”

The New York Times—which this week won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its coverage in Afghanistan and Pakistan—has maintained a bureau in a house in Kabul with multiple beds throughout the war. Immediately after Sept. 11, The Times had a big team in Kabul. Eventually, many of the reporters switched over to Iraq. Reporter Carlotta Gall has remained in the bureau for essentially the entire time.

Foreign editor Susan Chira said that The Times now plans to fill those extra beds in the coming months. Many veterans of The Times’ Iraq coverage, including Mr. Chivers, Sabrina Tavernise, Richard Oppel and Dexter Filkins, will soon be filing stories from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“This is obviously the war that the president is focusing on,” said Ms. Chira. “And troops are being shifted to there so we intend to gear up. We’re not going to abandon the war in Iraq—there are a lot of troops there, and we’re going to cover it. Yes, we’re ramping up in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we’ve had a strong commitment there, which thankfully the Pulitzer judges recognized. But we won’t leave Baghdad.”

At the same time, U.S. broadcast networks will be hustling to set up shop. “We have all known for months that the focus was shifting from Iraq to Afghanistan,” Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News, recently told The Observer. “We’ve all budgeted for it, and we’re all trying to figure out how best to get it done.”

Mr. Friedman said that back in the fall of 2008, CBS began talking with other U.S. news organizations, including NBC News, about the possibility of opening a joint facility in Kabul, which would allow everyone to share the costs of housing and providing security for their people. According to Mr. Friedman, the talks are ongoing.

“It would be preferable for us to be able to get the expenses down far enough that we can get our own people in there,” said Mr. Friedman. “I think the cable guys are talking about going their own way because they have different demands than we do.”

Tony Maddox, the executive vice president and managing director of CNN International, told The Observer that CNN first began scouting for a bureau in Kabul in the fall of 2007 (as part of a broader initiative to set up more foreign correspondents in cities around the world). These days, CNN maintains one full-time correspondent in Kabul and regularly rotates other reporters through the bureau.

In Iraq, the major U.S. news organizations house their bureaus in a handful of heavily fortified clusters scattered throughout Baghdad’s Red Zone. In Kabul, no such external fortifications are currently necessary. 

“We live in a house that serves as an office and a residency in Kabul in one of the better districts,” said Mr. Maddox. “It’s not got anything like in Baghdad. It doesn’t have any of the obvious outward security.”

A DIFFERENT WAR...

In obvious and in less obvious ways, covering Afghanistan is a very different proposition from covering the conflict in Iraq.

“In Baghdad you had a situation where half the city was Sunni, the other half was Shiite, and the two were firing mortars into each others neighborhoods and we were stuck in the middle,” said Mr. Engel. “In Kabul, the residents are almost all Sunnis. You don’t have a civil war situation. You have an insurgency that’s trying to impose its will and topple the government.

“It’s a different dynamic,” he added. “Right now you can move around Kabul without these long armored convoys and security consultants. In Kabul, it’s like the city is in the eye of the storm.”

Once you leave the city, however, the immediate reporting environment gets much more treacherous. The Taliban regularly set up impromptu checkpoints on the highways leading out of Kabul to the south and to the east, making driving around the country extremely dangerous for reporters. 

Another constant challenge of covering Afghanistan is trying to figure out how to report on the mountainous tribal region along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Engel said he recently rented a house in Pakistan and believes in reporting the story from both sides of the border.

“You need to cover all three areas,” said Mr. Engel. “The only way to do it is to be on both sides.”

Nic Robertson, a senior international correspondent for CNN—who was one of the few Western TV correspondents in Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2001—said that changes in Pakistan have made it harder to report on the tribal region from that side of the border. It’s a shift in the regional dynamic that, in turn, has arguably increased the strategic importance of having a base in Kabul.

“It’s harder to get there from Pakistan now because the Pakistani government has to give you permission to cross through the tribal areas,” Mr. Robertson told The Observer. “During the days of the Taliban, for example, we used to go through Peshawar. You would get an escort from a couple of policemen from Peshawar through the tribal region up to the border point of Torkham. And then cross into Afghanistan. It was standard practice for any Westerners traveling through that region.”

“Now if you are going to, say, Jalalabad in the east—which might geographically seem logical to go from Pakistan—I think most people would go from Kabul,” he added. “Crossing the border area from Pakistan has become a much more troublesome thing for the Pakistani government to organize for Westerners.”

Back in February, ABC News’ Ms. Raddatz headed to Afghanistan to file a series of dispatches from the region. Before arriving in the country, Ms. Raddatz had planned to meet up with a neuroscientist from San Diego who was doing some work in schools near Jalalabad. 

The two cities are separated by a mere 95 miles of highway—making a trip by car tempting. But when Ms. Raddatz arrived in Afghanistan, her foreign editor said that there was no way she could drive to Jalalabad. It was way too dangerous.

A few days later, Ms. Raddatz flew up to Torkham on the border with a military embed. On the way back to Bagram, their flight stopped in Jalalabad to refuel. On the spur of the moment, Ms. Raddatz and her producer jumped out on the tarmac. As a result, Ms. Raddatz was able to spend the next several days in the field, visiting a bombed-out compound where Osama bin Laden used to live, and traveling to some remote villages by raft.

“It is a huge logistical feat to plan these trips,” said Ms. Raddatz. “You really need a great deal of help trying to get around on those helicopters, and you never really know. We got weathered out on an embed when I was there in January. Snow, fog, you name it. That’s a real challenge in covering the story. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to get anywhere. You might be sitting there for weeks.”

In March, Margaret Warner, a senior correspondent for The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, traveled to Afghanistan for the first time for PBS, where she spent three weeks reporting on everything from the U.S. military strategy to the rights of Afghan women.

“Here we are doubling down on troops and it seemed like a good time to go over and take a snapshot of where Afghanistan is right now after seven years of U.S. engagement,” Ms. Warner told The Observer. “What is the benchmark from which the Obama administration will now be judged? That was our overall concept.”

In Kabul, Ms. Warner hired a British security expert, who warned her not to stay in the capital’s five-star hotel, the Serena. “He felt to stay there was foolish,” said Ms. Warner. “It’s a bomb magnet.”

Instead, she set up shot in a private guesthouse. Reporting in Kabul, said Ms. Warner, went relatively smoothly. She landed interviews with General David McKiernan and with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Later, however, when she prepared to venture out of the capital to do a story about a U.S. heroin-eradication program in the violent Helmand Province south of Kabul, things went haywire.

On the morning Ms. Warner was to leave, the State Department called and said they had a credible threat of a suicide bomber in the region. The trip was postponed. The next day, she was cleared to go. But again, her flight was delayed because the pilots were worried about having to spend too much time sitting on the runway in an area rife with unpredictable attacks.  

By the time Ms. Warner arrived in the province, it was too late in the day to go out with the eradication team. She settled for an interview with a local U.S.-backed governor in the area. Even then, her private-security team remained nervous.

“They carried major weapons and had a whole procedure about what to do if there were attacks on the car,” said Ms. Warner. “It was much more heavy than we had in Kabul. They were very cautious. We couldn’t just get out and stroll down the street and talk to people.”

...AND A DIFFERENT NEWS BUSINESS

If the conflict is different from the one that began just six years ago in Iraq, so is the news. In that short period, technology has caught up, and the economy of the news organization has sputtered.

Ultimately, whether U.S. broadcast executives end up forming a partnership in Kabul, the bureaus they set up there are unlikely to look much like the bureaus of the recent past.

“In the traditional bureau model, you’d have a reporter who would have a producer who would have a camera person,” said CNN’s Mr. Maddox. “Then you need a driver. Then you would need someone to administrate all the costs, and then you hire a bureau chief. And suddenly you have six people in a long-term property commitment, when really all you wanted was a reporter somewhere.”

Those days, said Mr. Maddox, may be done. “It used to be that you couldn’t really operate a bureau without an engineer because of the equipment that was needed,” said Mr. Maddox. “We can now set up a bureau with the amount of equipment that you can carry in a backpack.”

He said that the lessons of Baghdad—that is, how relatively small, relatively inexpensive bureaus could evolve over time in a deteriorating security situation into massively expensive and perilous operations—would not be lost on executives trying to figure out their strategy in Afghanistan.

“I think there is an anxiety among many people who are going there: What can we do to avoid getting bogged down like we did in Baghdad?” said Mr. Maddox. “What happens if the temperature in Afghanistan goes up again? I think everyone now is going into the relationship with Afghanistan with a view to how they can eventually get out of it.”

fgillette@observer.com

According to Mr. Mnookin, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs The Times "upwards of $3 million a year." He goes on to quote Times executive editor Bill Keller as saying:

As for that internecine warfare, Mr. Mnookin quotes photographer Ashley Gilbertson saying that in the early days of the war, "It was Iraqi and American politics by day and New York Times politics at night."

One example (among many) Mr. Mnookin recounts is the conflict between John Burns and James Glanz, which:

Just last week, The Times sent out a memo announcing that Mr. Glanz was appointed to the paper's Investigations desk.

In June, The Observer spoke to several reporters from The Times and other news organizations about life during wartime. (And in 2007, Politico's Michael Calderone, then of The Observer, wrote about Messrs. Burns and Glanz.)

Also, this week in The Times' Play Magazine, Dexter Filkins talks about how watching and listening to football got him through his Iraq experience, which Mr. Mnookin describes in Vanity Fair as a "collection of close calls [that] sounds like a horror-film montage."

Last night, Mr. McCarthy reported one such "believe it or not" feature for World News with Charlie Gibson. The story was about booming housing prices in Baghdad.

"With security improving and virtually no new construction in Baghdad for five years, prices on existing properties are shooting up," says Mr. McCarthy in the report.

"One other difference from the U.S., there is no likelihood of a mortgage crisis here," he added. "That's because there are no mortgages. Houses are paid for in cash."

You can see the whole report here.

The life of a foreign correspondent can be an isolating job; but that is nowhere as true as it is for the reporters covering Baghdad.

It’s rare that you ever leave your bureau at all. When you do, you’re taking one giant risk. So is it really worth it to grab your buddies in the bureau, corral security detail and some translators all so you can share a glass of wine with another reporter?

And if you did … where would you go?

"This is the single worst war I’ve ever had to cover in terms of after hours," said Terry McCarthy, bureau chief for ABC. "There are no bars here. We can’t really go out at night. You really only socialize with the people in your own compound. It’s not fun."

"Once you are in Iraq you have to live it 24 hours a day," said Michael Ware of CNN. "It’s not as if you can stroll down to a restaurant. It’s not as if there is anything of an ilk of a great Saigon bar."

"It’s the most confining story I’ve ever covered," said Bob Reid, the AP’s bureau chief, and 31-year veteran of foreign assignments. "I find actually it’s quite limiting. When you talk to other reporters, it’s good to bounce off ideas and some perspective. It helps you round your opinion of what’s going on and that’s very difficult in an environment like this."

There are stories of occasional mingling. The Times hosts dinner parties at its house, and can seat up to 15 people along their old, long wooden dinner table.

But if you go out for dinner, the threats are many: there’s the random suicide bomber; a kidnapping; an errant rocket falls at the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Even though security has improved for Iraqis, there is still a significant kidnap threat for foreigners," said Mr. McCarthy. "We're worth a lot of money to them. I see that as something that's going to last, frankly, for some time."

"I told you about risk and reward, right?" said Jim Glanz, the Times’ bureau chief. "I used to go shopping in Baghdad, and I used to go to restaurants. Then at a certain point we started asking ourselves 'OK, if I'm out with my friend Dexter [Filkins] and a bomb goes off—as it did one night with The Washington Post when they were out for a party out in Baghdad a few years ago—and let's say Dexter gets killed. So I'm going to go back to Dexter's parents let's say I say, 'In the line of duty, Dexter was killed.' And they'll say 'what was he doing?' And I'll say we were out having kebab at a restaurant. And they'll say 'My son died while you're bureau chief because you were at a restaurant?'

"I'm the one who has to call the wife, the brother, the sister, the father, the mother and say, you know, 'Your son or daughter is dead,’" he continued. "I'm the one who will have to explain what was going on at the time. And so, what I have to keep in mind, as we go over there is with the understanding to carry out a certain mission to tell this enormously important story, is that we all take risks. If I let someone go into harm's way for no journalistic reason, I'll never be able to justify it."

"It’s tempting to say, ‘It’s really nice so lets go buy ice cream!’" said Tina Susman, the bureau chief for the L.A. Times. "But then you have to say, wait a second, it’s not just me going. It’s my translator, a couple security guards come with me, my driver, and you’re putting them all at risk. And you always have to remind yourself that maybe it’s not worth it even if it seems really nice and calm right now. Is it really worth it to push the envelope?"

It’s a calculated decision, of course. By all measures, things are getting better, however incrementally. But it’s all just so unpredictable.

"We do takeout," said NBC’s Richard Engel, who said a new Chinese restaurant opened around the corner. "It’s good. I go. But I wouldn’t go and order dumplings and sit there for an hour."

Once upon a time, before the invasion, Baghdad was a glorious Middle East paradise! There were restaurants, there were parties! Right?

"The first time I came here was in October 1982," said Mr. Reid. "I have some perspective and trust me this was never Damascus or Cairo and certainly never Beirut or the mega-money cities. It’s always been a shabby, rundown place that lacked a lot of comforts and diversions. I suppose what I’m trying to say is even if you went out there were a limited number of places where you’d want to go out. There’s a lot of mythology here—there’s a line of fish restaurants along the Tigris! Sure they were there, but let’s not go too far in saying how many and how lively they were."

Instead: "You could go wherever you wanted if you were in Lebanon and Syria," said Mr. Reid. "Baghdad was a dump."

Certainly it hasn’t gotten any better and if there isn’t much reason for socializing outside of their Baghdad newsrooms today, for better or for worse, there’s plenty of it going on in the inside—with the people they see all day, every day, several weeks and months over and over.

"Our hotel has a swimming pool," said Mr. Engel. "We socialize with the others who are in our compound. That’s about it. We occasionally watch DVDs."

"We have a little yard in the front, we can have a barbecue from time to time," said Bobby Ghosh, the former Time bureau chief.

"We’re all on the same floor," said said Ms. Susman. "It’s something of an adult university dorm."

"I’m lucky that I went to boarding school and I was in the army!" said Mr. Reid. "If you don’t adapt to that kind of communal living, it creates stress on you and everyone around you."

The complaints in the AP bureau, especially, are extensive: "So and so spent too much time in the shower! So and so left his toothpaste on the table in a communal shower. Turn down your TV at night, I can’t sleep! Why did you leave your plate here, the ants are gonna come!"

Sounds lovely.

"What are you doing on a day off when you’re living and working the same building!" he continued. "There are no diversions! People come here, they work long hours and they work seven days a week. You can do that for six or seven weeks before your brain completely fries and then you take some time off."

And, mostly, never come back.

Mr. Dehghanpisheh, who's been in and out of Iraq since 2003 in rotations that usually last two months at a time, sounds pretty upbeat as he talks about the challenges of reporting a war that in five years has gone through so many different phases. "In '03, '04 movement was pretty much unrestricted, I guess self-restricted," Mr. Dehghanpaisheh says through a slight delay. "You'd jump in a car and go to Fallujah and report a story. You could get away with a pretty bare bones security set up in those early days. Maybe just a guard. But in general, relatively low-key."

Back then it was possible for journalists to file stories like this one from The Wall Street Journal, which began, "Basking in the sun by the Al Hamra Hotel swimming pool, a Spanish journalist complained to me that 'all my editors want is blood, blood, blood. No context. No politics.'"

The Hotel Al Hamra was the place to be in those pre-invasion days. According to a 2005 story in The Atlantic by William Langewiesche, the hotel was like a spring break destination: "Think barbecues, bikinis, and beer. This was a war in which a large number of women were involved, both as correspondents and as aid workers. The men and women tended to be unattached, unafraid, and young. As a result, at the Hamra there was a lot of shacking-up going on. There was a lot of casual sex."

That era came to a swift end.

"With the beginnings of the elections in '05, it actually got worse. The violence actually came to Baghdad," says Mr. Dehghanpisheh. "It made people more wary of not only traveling outside of Baghdad, but within Baghdad itself. People got a little more cautious. A lot more kidnappnings, a lot more unpredictable violence. It wasn't only the threat of getting caught in some sort of attack, an IED, or the —"

Silence on Mr. Dehghanpisheh's end. The satellite connection cut out.

A few minutes later, he calls back and explains that there was a sandstorm. "Whenever it happens, it makes the phones function crappier," he says, matter of fact.

At least it was only a sandstorm. Newsweek's bureau, which at any given time has fifteen employees including security, is located inside the Greenzone after a suicide car bomb attack near their old bureau in Western Baghdad shook a lot of people up. According to Mr. Dehghanpisheh, there are "pluses and minuses" to being inside. Besides, "all foreigners in Iraq these days are living in some sort of 'green zone.' It may not be the actual Green Zone but, you know, you can bet it will be some sort of well-protected compound or something like that."

Take for example Time's Baghdad bureau. According to Aparisim "Bobby" Ghosh, Time's former Baghdad Bureau Chief (Mr. Ghosh is now the magazine's World Editor; the Baghdad bureau currently does not have a chief), security in the cluster of houses and hotels they share with NBC, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times is incredibly tight.

"Cars are all stopped and checked. Strangers are patted down. We make sure nobody brings any weapons into the compound," Mr. Ghosh said from New York.

Being outside the Green Zone has allowed Mr. Ghosh a little more mobility. He's reported from Baghdad starting from before the invasion and has shared the house with as many as five journalists and three photographers for the magazine as well as a contingent of Iraqi translators and fixers. Sometimes he can actually go grocery shopping with his Iraqi staff. "Shopping in Iraq is a little bit of a crapshoot. You get what you get."

Mr. Ghosh, who is Indian, would bring spices with him from New York and make Indian food. His bureau would host barbecues in their yard. An Italian photographer who lived in the bureau brought a suitcase loaded with cheese, pasta, and olive oil, leading Mr. Ghosh to boast, "I think it's generally accepted that the Time house is the best place for a meal."

After meals, those who didn't cook did the dishes. "It's a fairly democratic system," he says.

Together they'd watch satellite TV or DVDs: Mr. Ghosh enjoyed light entertainment like Bollywood music videos (the Iraqi staff loved it, too). He had no tolerance for violent films.

Someone from Time's London office sent over a Monty Python DVD, which Mr. Ghosh says saved his life. "Are you kidding me?" He enthuses. "It was fantastic to have that."

Lest you think it's all Italian feasts and British comedies, Mr. Ghosh says that the compound was attacked by suicide bombers on two occasions. The second attack was a double-whammy: A truck followed by a car. "Our blast walls held up okay... They take most of the brunt of the shock but they're not completely fool proof." According to Mr. Ghosh, two or three people died in the attack.

"We're glad we had the walls."

Mr. Ghosh doesn't think the journalists were the primary target in the attack. The hotels on the compound attracted contractors who were, in Mr. Ghosh's words "traveling large."

"Very aggressive postures," he said. "They swaggered about a bit." The contractors rarely mixed with the journalists.

"When they left, we've had fewer incidents."

Despite the danger, Mr. Ghosh wouldn't trade it for the relative safety of the Greenzone. "That's the last place in the world I ever want to live. That's the most sort of surreal, artificial place you can ever imagine."

Recently, Time has scaled back its bureaus across the board, including in Baghdad. "There are layoffs in every bureau," Mr. Ghosh says. A spokesperson for the magazine says, "Time remains committed to covering the important story of the Iraq War and will continue to support a bureau in Baghdad for the forseeable future. However, like many other news organizations, we have reduced staffing levels there in recent months."

The high cost of reporting from Baghdad is also a problem for magazines that don't have bureaus in place. Patrick Graham, a Canadian journalist who first reported from Iraq for The National Post in 2002 and has written for Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Maclean's, and The Guardian, remembers what it used to be like. "I used to go and hitchhike around Fallujah. That really ended in the spring of 2004. After that, it became harder and harder to get around... It shut down after that and became a really expensive game."

"For a freelance magazine writer, it's just hard. It's expensive," he says.

George Packer, who went to Iraq six times for The New Yorker and wrote the book, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, says he brings "A lot of money. Thousands of dollars." He also uses an RBGAN (Regional Broadband Global Area Network) satellite modem. "It's sort of the best way to get online in the middle of nowhere... I don't even know how much it is [per minute] because The New Yorker has an account and I
'm not paying for it. But it's a very expensive proposition. My God. And that's not even counting guards which in the past, I haven't used. I only began to travel with arm guards on my last two trips."

Mr. Packer was lucky enough to stay at The New York Times bureau ("They've been absolutely fantastic. I couldn't have done it without them," he says) and Mr. Graham spent some time in the Guardian house. Early on in his reporting, Mr. Graham spent a lot of time with Sunnis who were telling him as far back as Fall 2003, "This country is falling apart."

"But it never made it into the papers," he says now.

Asked how independent reporters—those without the infrastructure of a bureau—get around, Mr. Graham was unequivocal: "You don't. I don't know how anybody could do that. The only way to freelance is to embed."

Phillip Robertson, who reported from Baghdad for Salon, says that the dangers are even greater for freelancers like himself. "We get kidnapped at a higher rate. We don't have this support structure."

Mr. Langewiesche, who reported on Iraq twelve or thirteen times ("I wasn't counting") for The Atlantic and now Vanity Fair and has been embedded a few times, says, "Walking around is something you don't do very long in Baghdad."

Mr. Langewiesche, who has stayed in several hotels in Baghdad, says that a reporter can get around by knowing the terrain. "It's a big city. There's lots of streets. You could move with unpredictability and anonymity through the grid."

That doesn't mean he hasn't encountered danger. "I've certainly been shot at. Mortared. I lost a house to rockets. I lost a hotel to a truck bomb. I've been chased through the streets, followed, you name it. I've had stones thrown at me."

Mr. Langewiesche prefers not to write about such things. "It's a question of taste. It's like, So what? If you choose to go to a war zone—which in the case of journalists is always a choice—I think it's sort of somewhat distasteful to overplay your own personal drama."

That kind of circumspection seems to characterize a lot of reporters' experiences in Baghdad. Few seem comfortable placing themselves at the center of the story, putting to rest any lingering image readers might have of the swaggering "gonzo" war correspondent. Time's Ghosh says that there's no room for anyone, in his words, "batshit crazy."

"You can't survive Baghdad if you're an adrenaline junkie. Those people are least equipped to survive in that sort of environment. And the way news organizations operate now, it's irresponsible not only to yourself but everybody with you. When I leave the house in Baghdad and go anywhere, I know that I'm traveling with a bunch of Iraqis and possibly a photographer as well, and I'm conscious of their safety."

Mr. Graham would agree. "Your life is governed by your security detail," he says.

That doesn't mean there weren't a few "gonzo" moments. In 2003, Salon's Phillip Robertson couldn't get a visa so he smuggled himself into Iraq via an inflatable boat on the Tigris from Syria. "I won't say that it was never fun," he says. "It had extraordinary moments."

But he also says, "You end up traumatized. Your friends die. I've lost two. It's a tremendous heartbreak."

"I came out of it really messed up. I was messed up to begin with. It didn't fix me at all. I became a much better reporter. But that's a 'Be Careful What You Wish For.'"

"The opportunities for ambition were limited in Iraq," says Mr. Langewiesche. "It was basically people doing calm, serious work. And who knew after a while they weren't advancing their careers."

"This is very, very serious work being done," he continues.

"Overall, the quality has been incredibly good. I'm not talking about my own work because I've always just been a magazine guy. But the ordinary frontline daily newspaper reporters: I had this feeling that, God, these people are so admirable. They're so smart, they're so dedicated, they're so brave, they're so educated about this situation and if only the American public could get over the idea that these guys are a bunch of prejudiced schmucks with an agenda, always reporting the bad news and all that stuff. I often felt it was like delivering pearls of work, of understanding, to a population that was, in those days, essentially lazy. I was always much, much impressed by reporters there in Iraq."

Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous, brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes; a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists (according to a November 2007 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story to sell to Americans. As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq.

Chief among them is that even if you grab hold of a part of the truth, it has a way of becoming false. Second: If you manage to find a true story, don’t depend on anyone back home wanting to hear it.

Bob Reid, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Associated Press, filed this June 1: “U.S. military deaths plunged in May to the lowest monthly level in more than four years and civilian casualties were down sharply, too, as Iraqi forces assumed the lead in offensives in three cities and a truce with Shiite extremists took hold.

“But many Iraqis as well as U.S. officials and private security analysts are uncertain whether the current lull signals a long-term trend or is simply a breathing spell like so many others before.”

Mr. Reid has been covering conflicts for over 30 years, in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, the Sudan, the southern Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bosnia. But this, he says, is different.

“Someone the other day told me that they thought Iraq had gone through a sea change,” he said by phone from Baghdad a little before midnight, June 9. “All of us who have been longer know that there is a cyclical quality to the violence here.”

Mr. Reid was sitting in the small house his wire service keeps in the Red Zone of the city, finishing work and planning to go to bed after a workday that started around 8 a.m.

He calls his life “Groundhog Day.” He goes to bed in the same building he worked in—with a book or, if he’s lucky, an English-language movie on Arabic satellite television—falls asleep, wakes up and starts all over again. Like the war, it has its predictable, grinding rhythm, and yet, like the war, every day is completely different.

“Iraq has receded,” said John Burns, from a ferry off the Isle of Man, England, where he’s covering a motorcycle tournament. Mr. Burns was perhaps the Iraq war’s best-known correspondent, who from 2003 to July 2007 was the chief of The New York Times’ Baghdad bureau. “War is surprisingly easy to cover,” Mr. Burns said. “I always said this. The story dictates itself. There’s never one morning when you get up and wonder what you’re going to do today.”

But it’s not a war anymore; it’s an occupation. And for many reporters, one thing that is missing is a narrative, a frame of reference to describe the events they report but can’t quite explain.

“The Best and Brightest was written 5 or 10 years after the events it described,” said George Packer, who has covered the war for The New Yorker. “Books will come out 5 or 10 years from now telling us things we don’t know now. Right now we’ve probably pushed it about as far as it can go from the limited point of view of a Western journalist in the middle of the events he’s describing.”

“For a long time, there was a single thrust of narrative,” said Damien Cave, who went from The New York Times’ Newark bureau to Iraq in July 2006 and returned in December 2007. “Now I think it’s harder to figure out what the narrative is. You’re trying to figure out: What features speak to the news? And because Iraq has become more fragmented, the narratives are more fragmented. A story in Basra is different from a story in Mosul and that’s definitely different from a story a few years ago.”

“I think there are a lot of people who really want information and that’s why we’re there,” said New York Times Baghdad bureau chief James Glanz. “But when somebody asks if it’s getting better? It’s a fine place to start a conversation. But the thing about Iraq, it’s about double exposures and overlays and things like that. It’s a complicated place. It’s a place where if you really want to boil it all down, then the complexities of the systems have defeated all these solutions. And you really can’t think about it any other way. There’s no simple story line.”

Richard Engel of NBC News acknowledged the recent drop in violence, and said it gave reporters more room to report.

“How much you can move is impacted by the level of danger. … I recently went down to Najaf, which is south of Baghdad. I was walking around the city doing interviews, without any kind of security protection or back up at all. That felt great. I hadn’t done that in years. A Chinese restaurant, takeout, just opened up down the street from our bureau. There were no businesses opening in ’06 and ’07. People are getting out more. You see more people on the streets going to markets. When I go to do interviews, I can stay longer.”

The conventional wisdom has always been that a reporter can’t stay in one place for more than 20 minutes—the amount of time security experts think it takes for eyewitnesses to report their whereabouts to potential kidnappers, and for the kidnappers to lay their trap. Journalists are routinely increasing their stays to 45 minutes or more.

The BBC’s Jim Muir visited the National Archive, which is currently being patched back together after the war, for an hour and a half. But his security people were not happy about it.

“In general terms, it has made life a bit easier,” he said. “Six months ago, I was able to go to one of the worst Sunni neighborhoods, a place called Ameriya, which had been a really, really rough neighborhood. But you could go there because one of the developments, which has fed into the security improvement, is that a lot of the young Sunni guys have turned away from Al Qaeda and have signed up to fight them alongside the Americans. In that sense it’s expanded the range of stories you can do, and the places you can go with relative security. … Violence is down, but it’s down to like more than 500 Iraqis being killed violently every month rather than 2,000. Those levels are still not very nice.”

“There’s no question it’s not the same front-page story it was last year,” said Tina Susman, the Baghdad bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times. “It just needs to be approached differently. It’s human-interest-oriented. … That’s the way wars work. They go in ebbs and flows. In March and in the first half of April, we were on the front page frequently. It’s inevitable. I
t doesn’t mean the story is over, but, O.K., if the daily news isn’t grabbing attention, then what is? What’s another way to tell the story?”

“There’s a marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq,” said ABC News correspondent Terry McCarthy. “That’s partly due to the election, partly because of fatigue, and partly because things have started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs, the massive attacks, you just don’t see them anymore. A drip, drip story that’s getting a little bit better day by day doesn’t make a headline. We have to struggle to get more stories on the air. We have to do more feature-type stuff. The news of the day is not really here anymore.”

“It’s not difficult to judge what’s going to be on page one,” John Burns said. “We had a rhythm of stories like that for three or four years. It was a journalistic high.

“It’s a lot more difficult now. The reporter in Iraq finds himself similar to the problem of the reporter in Paris and London and Hong Kong. You’ve got to show enterprise. You’ve got to dig for the story, and very often it’s a feature. And then you’ve got to compete on an equal basis to get that story on the front page.”

“We will be more likely to go ahead and file a story on military activity around the country that doesn’t rise to the level of top of the foreign news page,” said Mr. Reid of the AP. But, “our editors are showing increasing interest in features and a decreasing interest in ‘Iraqi troops capture x amount of people and five bombs went off,’ unless it really does rise to the level of a huge explosion or something like that.”

The question is, what level of risk makes a story like that worth reporting?

“We could almost sit on a downtown bus, the entire Western press corps these days,” said Mr. Ware of CNN. “Other organizations will keep the bare bones of a bureau in place, but often it won’t be fully staffed. We only see visiting correspondents.”

According to Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News, CBS keeps a bureau in Baghdad, including one full-time producer/bureau chief there, six months on, six months off, but no full-time correspondent. There is a pool of correspondents for CBS, including Lara Logan, who show up to do stories over there. “We cover the story when it changes in some significant way,” said Mr. Friedman, who confirmed reports that CBS News had had talks with CNN about using its resources and reporters. The deal fell through because of “rights issues.”

“It’s very hard to send people into dangerous places,” said Mr. Friedman, “knowing that the likelihood of what they report getting on the air is low.”

THREE CASTLES

There are three large compounds that house many of the American journalists still working in Baghdad.

“It’s almost like little castles,” said NBC’s Richard Engel, who has reported in Baghdad since the beginning of the war.

All three are in what’s called the Red Zone, outside of the protective checkpoints that define the city’s Green Zone.

NBC is in one of the three “castles,” along with some other American media outlets.

“We happen to live right next to The Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times and Time magazine,” said Mr. Engel. “We are all in one compound. It’s a hotel surrounded by some houses. We’ve put around some perimeter security. Iraqis live within that compound as well.

“We’re quite close. It’s a media center. We live together. They’ll come over to our place for a barbecue. Or I’ll go over to The Washington Post for a drink or a barbecue. It’s very easy. We can walk. There are no security restrictions.”

But he doesn’t socialize much with journalists outside of his “castle.”

“You have to move through the badlands from one to another,” Mr. Engel said. (To avoid targeting by suicide bombers and kidnappers, the locations of all three are generally not made public; but each is at least a mile from the next.) “I go out every day reporting. But it’s not really worth it to go and organize security and take risks to go on a social call to visit people at CNN or Fox.”

Jamie Tarabay, formerly chief of the NPR bureau, lived “across the badlands” from Mr. Engel. “We have a garden where we live,” she said. “We have barbecues every now and then. CNN. ABC. Fox. CBS. Every now and then there’s a block get-together, especially in the summer. It’s nice. Because you’re all alone. But you’re alone together. It’s nice to be able to share your frustrations and chill out and relax.”

“We’re in an undisclosed location,” said Fox News’ Courtney Kealy of Castle Number Two. “We refer to it as the concrete media village. I refer to my place as an armed fortress, which it is. We have nice brief respites where we can visit each other, and have barbecues, within somebody’s compound.”

“We’re not in the Green Zone. We never have been. The vast majority of the press has not been. If we are accused of hotel journalism, fair enough. But when we lived in the hotel, we were under siege just like the rest of the city was. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, yawn, I want to order room service because I don’t want to go outside.’ We have a really great gym. We have a massive amount of DVDs and books. And there is a local Iraqi guy that made us a pool table, which is great. But … a card game, or watching TV, or sitting outside and having a barbecue is pretty much the relaxation you get—with hopefully a couple times at the gym, because you literally aren’t going anywhere else. The irony of this war is that you gain weight.”

“In a limited way, yes, if you’re in one of these enclaves, you can hang out with the people there a little bit,” said The Times’ Mr. Glanz. He was sitting at an outdoor table at the bistro Le Monde in Morningside Heights. He’d been in New York for two weeks and would be here for a few more. Fifty-one years old, his hair is graying; he drank two café au laits and fielded a phone call from a neck specialist.

“But you can’t move from place to place. … I used to go shopping in Baghdad, and I used to go to restaurants. Then at a certain point we started asking ourselves, O.K., if I’m out with my friend Dexter Filkins and a bomb goes off—as it did one night with The Washington Post a few years ago—and let’s say Dexter gets killed. So I’m going to go back to Dexter’s parents, let’s say, and say, ‘In the line of duty, Dexter was killed.’ And they’ll say, ‘What was he doing?’ And I’ll say we were out having kebab at a restaurant. And they’ll say, ‘My son died while you’re bureau chief because you were at a restaurant?’

“You can’t do that anymore. You can’t do that. I can’t say that he was out there carrying out the mission of reporting, and we didn’t realize there was this presence, there was an unfortunate incident where there was this person there and he came from around the corner, and blah blah. I’m the one who has to call the wife, the brother, the sister, the father, the mother, and say, you know, ‘Your son or daughter is dead.’ I’m the one who will have to explain what was going on at the time. … If I let someone go into harm’s way for no journalistic reason, I’ll never be able to justify it.”

THE WAR AT HOME

“I flew out on like the 16th of December,” said Jamie Tarabay of her exit as
the NPR’s Baghdad bureau chief near the end of 2007. “And on the 18th, I was in New York trying on my wedding dress. In January, we got married. Then we went to Paris for a bit.

“It is a head trip leaving,” she said. “In any case, wherever you go, being able to walk along a footpath by yourself without an escort is great. Having electricity 24 hours. Being able to pick what you want to eat.”

But Ms. Susman, the L.A. Times reporter, does not feel she comes home a hero for her reporting.

“The level of ignorance is distressing,” she said. “It shows people aren’t paying any attention to the stories. They’re asking me about details like, ‘Do you go out, do you go to the Green Zone?’ And I tell them, ‘Just read the stories!’ If you just read the stories, they wouldn’t have to ask. They say they’re paying attention, but they don’t. If they ask you what the situation is like, they’re not reading. The New York Times, Reuters, the AP, the Los Angeles Times, they produce a lot of copy! It’s so easy to criticize the mainstream media for not covering the story, but there’s a lot of coverage.”

And if you do try to retell the story, it’s not always so warmly received.

“It’s a conversation stopper,” said Phillip Robertson, a freelance reporter who covered Iraq for Salon. “It’s not dinner-table conversation. Digging up bodies in mass graves. Even the people who didn’t see a lot saw way too much. That has a real effect.”

“Because the press put out all that stuff in the early days in 2003, the press is now blamed,” said Courtney Kealy of Fox News. “People say to me, what’s the real story in Iraq? I say, read the books that have come out and won Pulitzers. Look at my friends’ articles. Look at the stories I’ve done. They’re not looking, and they’re not reading; they don’t want to. And now the press corps gets a whole heck of a lot of, ‘Well, you’re just hotel journalists.’ I come home, people say to me, ‘What’s it like, have you been brainwashed?’ People who like Fox have said, ‘Well, I like your stuff, but I won’t read that paper.’ I say to them, anybody who has covered Iraq for a serious time frame, they’re a solid reporter. You can pretty much trust and read their stuff and forget about thinking there’s some great media conspiracy that we’ve all been co-opted by some right-wing or left-wing agenda. But no one can get their heads around that anymore.”

“There is a chance for this place to remain quiet. There is a chance for the Iraqi army to get better. There is a chance for a timetable for withdrawal that could work. The only issue I have is when I talk to people in the States … they really just ask me, what should we do, have we won or lost, how long are we staying? I think that winning and losing should be struck from the lexicon right now.

“I just try and stay away from, ‘What’s a good news story, or what’s a bad news story, or why did we come here?’ It’s like people who are 35 and can’t stop talking about their childhood. No matter how bad your childhood was, at some point you have to take responsibility for it and deal. Whether we were supposed to come here or not, we’ve been here for five years. History books have already been written.”

But the networks and, in many cases, the print media are keenly aware of the questions their readers and viewers want answers to. They are not always that complicated, and they don’t always require live reporting from Iraq.

“I have to say that’s an appalling indictment of the media,” said CNN’s Mr. Ware. “This is the Vietnam War of our generation. This conflict is going to have repercussions that far exceed that of an Indo-Chinese, essentially, civil war. Yet for a litany of reasons, which may or may not be legitimate, from cost to security to audience fatigue, the media has dropped the ball on this conflict. It is a tragic indictment on the Fourth Estate.

“Obviously, the media is a business at the end of the day,” said Mr. Ware. “There are advertisers to attract. We’re also about much more than that. We don’t always have to follow the market. Sometimes we have to lead it. And illuminate it. That’s where the media is failing the longer this drags on. How many people cut their teeth in conflicts in Vietnam? This is the war of this generation. Where is the graduating class of this conflict? That is something that has long saddened me. Not enough of our breed has picked up the cudgel of this war.”

“The press has not gotten the credit it deserves from the broad public,” said Mr. Packer of The New Yorker. “The idea that there was a group of people in Vietnam who were really changing the nature of journalism and its relation to the government. … I guess the mythologizing of those guys was more successful than this group. And I think it’s partly the sense that the press no longer has the clout and credibility it did. You don’t look to three or four people for the truth the way you once have done. There just is too many ‘truths’ out there.

“And second, I think it’s because the press is just part of the war, whether it wants to be or not.

“The press did discredit itself in the lead-up to the war. But I think the press redeemed in Baghdad what it missed in Washington. I’m not sure the public even knows that.”

“I think this is the story for my generation, the way that Vietnam was the story of the generation before us,” said Mr. Burns of The New York Times. “It’s the defining moment. I think, if I ask myself, what was the most challenging? At which story did I need to draw upon all the lessons I learned along the way? Iraq was it. I was not just a reporter, but I also had the good fortune of being a bureau chief. I don’t want to sound too pious here, but to see young people come into that bureau with little experience and no experience at all with the world at war and see how they prospered—and I think I helped them—was really extremely rewarding. It was the toughest and hardest assignment.

“It’s always hard to come into war when the trajectory has changed—and it isn’t so dramatic. For a reporter now, it is tougher. It was a lot easier. But this war is a long way away from over. We may be taking the temperature of this a little too soon. The numbers will come down and the surge will end and the Iraqis themselves will become less assured of an American presence, and there will once again be a great risk of the politics of ethnic schism in Iraq. We may not have seen the worst of it yet.”

fgillette@observer.com, mhaber@observer.com, jkoblin@observer.com