Why We Do What We Do

The genesis of this week’s stunning cover story is pretty simple. Aparisim Ghosh–known to everyone as Bobby–our senior correspondent who has covered Baghdad for the past three and a half years, was in town for a well-deserved vacation. Bobby not only is a wonderful writer and reporter, but he also has the enviable temperament of someone who is never rattled, even by car bombs. Bobby began working for the Asian edition of TIME almost a decade ago, has covered conflicts in Kashmir and the Palestinian territories, and his remarkable voice has been guiding readers through the complexities of Iraq since before the war. The day before Bobby was to leave, a few of us were sitting around, and we asked him to describe the return trip–who would pick him up at the airport, what he would do when he arrived– just to give us a sense of his daily life. He began with the harrowing descent into the Baghdad airport, the nerve-racking drive on the Highway of Death, and as he told his tale, all of us had the same thought at the same time: Bobby should write his Baghdad diary.

His piece was composed at a time when the war between Israel and Hizballah had pushed Iraq off the front pages and out of people’s minds, even though the mounting casualties in Iraq exceeded those of Israel and Lebanon combined. It’s been said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is to keep two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time. But it’s not an easy task to keep two disturbing conflicts in one’s head all the time. Indeed, as W.H. Auden wrote in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” his beautiful poem about how life goes on in the midst of tragedy, “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” But it’s our job as journalists to do the opposite: to remind you not to turn away. To me, one of our tasks is to take you to another world, in this case, a world that while remote from many of us affects all of us. TIME’s job is to help you understand that world, to put the news of the day in context, and Bobby’s riveting story gives us insight into a moment that may influence the course of the rest of the century.

In a very personal way, Bobby’s diary conveys a sense of the nightmarish conditions that are the daily life for American soldiers. Bobby is unstinting in his praise and admiration for the courage and integrity of the American servicemen and -women in Iraq. He is well aware of the risks they are taking on a daily basis. But I believe that journalists like Bobby, with their candid reporting from the war zone, are upholding the values that our soldiers take an oath to protect: our freedom to think and believe and to act on those thoughts and beliefs. “Whenever the people are well-informed,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “they can be trusted with their own government.” Even though the press is often criticized for delivering bad news about Iraq, our job is to provide you with the information and perspective to help you do your job, which is to approve or disapprove of the government’s policies. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed–another Jefferson line–but we need to be as informed and knowledgeable as possible to make that consent meaningful. I’m not saying that Bobby Ghosh or I or everyone at TIME thinks about Jefferson every time we tap out a sentence or take a picture, but I believe this principle is what motivates us all. That is why Bobby risks his life.

Bobby is popular in Baghdad for another reason: he is a world-class cook of Indian food and is always eager to offer his skills. And whenever possible, Bobby likes to dine with his beloved wife Bipasha, who is 4,400 miles away in Singapore. If you look at the picture at the top of this page, you can see how they do it: he eats in front of the webcam on his computer while Bipasha nervously asks him how he is doing and tells him to be careful.

Richard Stengel, Managing Editor