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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe Palestine Hotel was my doorway to the Iraq war.\n\nI first walked in here weeks after Baghdad fell to American troops in the spring of 2003, during that fleeting moment of peace and stillness in Iraq, between the end of major combat and the beginning of the insurgency, a time that may go down as one of the most horribly squandered opportunities in American history.\n\nThe Palestine, a vintage &amp;amp;#x2019;80s hotel with miles of garish green and brown carpeting, was the bustling center of what was then the story\u2014reconstruction. The lobby was packed with journalists, soldiers, Arab businessmen in breezy dishdashas, aid workers, mercenaries, and American contractors trying to cut a deal, and at night, in Aladdin&amp;amp;#x2019;s Bar by the pool, we all would sip impossibly cold beers and talk about the new Iraq. American tanks still chugged through the streets, shell-shocked Iraqis were emerging from their homes, and money and hope were cascading in.\n\nBut no more. On one of my first afternoons back in Iraq this spring, I return to the Palestine, and as soon as I step into the lobby, my feet crunch over busted glass from a suicide bomb that blew up months ago.\n\nWires dangle from the ceiling. A few waiters with droopy bow ties hang out in the coffee shop. All those narrow outdated rooms with the ambience of a shipping container, the ones that used to go for 150 bucks a night, are empty. When I ask one of the managers how he&amp;amp;#x2019;s doing, he just stares at his shoes. &amp;amp;#x201C;Iraq is finished,&amp;amp;#x2019;&amp;amp;#x2019; he says. &amp;amp;#x201C;Finished.&amp;amp;#x2019;&amp;amp;#x2019;\n\n\n\nWhether or not Iraq&amp;amp;#x2019;s finished is the operative question now. Some people think it&amp;amp;#x2019;s too far gone to be pieced back together. The Bush administration would argue that Iraq is not lost, that the tide is turning, that Iraqis are building a strong democracy. What&amp;amp;#x2019;s not debatable is that the country I returned to is much more hellish than the one I left a little over a year ago. The sectarian war that Sunni terrorists had been working so diligently to ignite finally exploded\u2014officially with the Samarra mosque bombing in February, unofficially well before that\u2014and armed militias are now wiping out civilians in organized programs of sectarian cleansing. Two rounds of much anticipated, much touted elections have produced an increasingly religious government. Taliban-style rule is spreading in both Shiite and Sunni zones, with Islamic courts meting out medieval justice. Over 2,500 U.S. servicemen have been killed, and more than ten times as many Iraqis. American forces have again been accused of atrocities, this time of gunning down unarmed civilians, including mothers and children begging for mercy, in Haditha. Reconstruction has flattened out. Electricity is still at prewar levels. Prewar. That means that three years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, Iraqis still don&amp;amp;#x2019;t have the level of services they had under a corrupt and dysfunctional regime that had been shackled by ten-plus years of sanctions. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s true that some schools have been built, that some bad guys have been captured (the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June was indeed a substantial accomplishment), and that thousands of Iraqi troops have been trained. But that said, no one back in the States can truly appreciate how chaotic and violent Iraq has become, and what it&amp;amp;#x2019;s like to live in such a randomly lethal world.\n\nMy routine in The New York Times&amp;amp;#x2019; Baghdad bureau begins more or less like this: Each morning I wake to a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a detailed body count from the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. Most mornings, ten or twenty corpses are found on the city&amp;amp;#x2019;s streets, many hogtied, with eyes gouged out and fingernails missing, the latest victims of sectarian bloodletting. And that&amp;amp;#x2019;s just one aspect of the killing. Criminal gangs terrorize the city, kidnapping busloads of people at a time and lining them up along concrete block walls to be shot in the head. Insurgents behead collaborators along deserted highways, stacking the bodies in ever higher piles. Militias battle government forces\u2014and each other. Even family feuds are settled with the business end of a machine gun. Baghdad has become the City of a Million Ways to Die.\n\nWhen I was here before, the violence was relatively clear, with American troops and their Iraqi helpers battling insurgents. But now there are so many different vectors, so many different groups killing one another, so many grievances being acted upon that both are and aren&amp;amp;#x2019;t directly related to the American presence, that it&amp;amp;#x2019;s hard to tell, in the words of one American general, &amp;amp;#x201C;who the hell is killing who.&amp;amp;#x201C;\n\nThe ceaseless violence has created a culture of dread that even the insurgents, with their endless pipeline of suicidal jihadists, were never able to create. Each night, in thousands of bedrooms across the blacked-out city, people go to sleep visualizing their own violent deaths. Will I be riddled with bullets on the way to work? Have my throat slit in a back alley? Smeared across the pavement by a car bomb, my remains scraped into a plastic bag? This isn&amp;amp;#x2019;t hyperbole. When you talk to Iraqis, it&amp;amp;#x2019;s clear how much of their consciousness is consumed with wondering how they will die.\n\nIf gun ownership is any barometer of fear, then fear is way up. Iraqis have always had a weakness for weapons\u2014Saddam sent boys to summer camp to learn how to shoot and kill, and one of the first things American overseers did was sign an order allowing every Iraqi family to own an AK-47. But the amount of gun muscle now on the streets is ridiculous. Women ride the buses with Glocks in their laps, shopkeepers stockpile grenades, militiamen openly mass in the neighborhoods, chanting &amp;amp;#x201C;Death to America.&amp;amp;#x201C;\n\nThe 130,000-plus American troops that are still here can&amp;amp;#x2019;t do much about it. The war no longer plays to their strengths. When I was last in Iraq, I went out on patrols where teenage Marines piled into big open trucks and tore off into the countryside, annihilating every insurgent who crossed their path. It was a lead-and-gunpowder war, and the Marines were winning it\u2014or at least prevailing in combat. The evidence was the trail of smoking homes and sprawled-out bodies that stretched out behind us.\n\nBut the enemy has gotten smarter. Insurgents are now waging war primarily with roadside bombs, remote-controlled devices buried in the dirt in the dark of night. These bombs have been a tactic since the insurgency began in the summer of 2003, but they&amp;amp;#x2019;ve evolved into a much higher form of lethality. The new bomb is called a shaped charge, a canister the size of a tennis-ball can packed with high-yield explosive and fused to a copper plate. At the moment of impact, the canister explodes and instantly turns the copper plate into a fury of molten plasma that shoots up from the road and vaporizes whatever it hits\u2014tires, floorboards, doors, Kevlar vests, flesh and bone. These bombs can rip through the thickest armor the U.S. Army makes. A soldier I knew from the beginning of the war\u2014a funny older guy named Sergeant White, who was always able to score me a cot or a meal or a power strip for my computer\u2014 was killed recently by a shaped charge. The men who saw his armored Humvee afterward talked about it like it was a scene from Alien. What was weird, they said, was that Sergeant White&amp;amp;#x2019;s truck wasn&amp;amp;#x2019;t all blackened and blown-up as it would have been had it hit a normal roadside bomb. Instead, it just had these huge, Swiss-cheese holes ripped through it. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s hard to overstate how much psychic space these bombs occupy in everyone&amp;amp;#x2019;s mind\u2014that on top of all the other dangers, there&amp;amp;#x2019;s the constant fear that any car you step into is about to explode.\n\nIt&amp;amp;#x2019;s dangerous to be embedded, and it&amp;amp;#x2019;s dangerous to practice what we call &amp;amp;#x201C;unilateral&amp;amp;#x201C; \u2014 or unembedded\u2014journalism on the streets, because you can be kidnapped or shot at any time, in any neighborhood. Even before Jill Carroll got nabbed, many news outlets had already pulled out. Those of us still here spend most of our time in medieval-like forts with high walls, armed sentries, and guard towers. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s impossible to go anywhere without your own private militia of hired security hands backing you up, and the reality is that even with protection, your movements are frustratingly confined. Needless to say, the social life sucks. We used to meet up for pizzas or frequent the few decent restaurants in town, like this Italian place where a ma&amp;amp;#xEE;tre d&amp;amp;#x2019; in an ashtray-smelling tux would throw sizzling steaks in front of us, but now we almost never go out for fun. The result is a stir-craziness among the correspondents. I do laps around our compound just to get a little ercise. Some others in our bureau have adopted stray dogs and cats, and as the gunfire rattles around us, they quietly pet these animals and pick ticks from their fur.\n\nThe press is so atomized that a military briefing in the Green Zone in mid-March, the kind that used to draw dozens of journalists from the biggest media companies in the world, was attended by exactly two people\u2014me and some guy from Newsweek. The two of us sat there and watched in speechless awe for about an hour as a two-star general, the voice of the entire American enterprise in Iraq, paced the carpet of the enormous deserted conference room in shin-high suede cavalry boots, delivering a security update and barking out orders to a pair of privates to switch up display maps. The two privates then performed a stiff map-switching dance, one lifting the map off the easel while the other stepped forward with a new map, and then they changed places lickety-split. The general, who seemed oblivious to the fact that we were the only people in the room, showed us kill zones across the country, with all the red stars clumped exactly where we were sitting. The murder rate in Baghdad had shot up to thirty-three killings per day, he said, and those were just the ones the Americans knew about. He looked at the two of us, sitting just a few feet from him with our notebooks and tape recorders, and boomed as if addressing a roomful of anxious troops: &amp;amp;#x201C;Baghdad is the battlefield!&amp;amp;#x201C;\n\n\n\nThere was a time when we stepped into this battlefield, when we covered gun battles while the bullets were still flying and rushed out to suicide bombings to wade through the muck when it was still gooey and wet. Iraq used to be a place where you had wonderful access to things you should never see. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s completely different now. We dispatch translators to bomb scenes in order to interview victims. We rely on stringers to provide reports from places that are too dangerous for us to visit. Not that it&amp;amp;#x2019;s much safer for them. The Iraqis working for American companies are considered traitors by the insurgency, and several of our translators have been threatened. Last year, Fakher Haider, our stringer in Basra, was killed. There&amp;amp;#x2019;s a profound weariness etched into the faces of our young staff that I didn&amp;amp;#x2019;t see the last time I was here. They&amp;amp;#x2019;re totally worn-out from looking at too many bodies, tracking down too many widows, and then worrying about whether or not, at the end of a very long day, they&amp;amp;#x2019;ll make it home alive themselves.\n\nOne afternoon a 23-year-old translator name Omar, whose hair has already started to go gray (Baghdad years go by like dog years, aging you prematurely), rides with me into Sadr City, a Baghdad slum that has always been a hotbed of Shiite street power. We just got a tip that vigilantes strung up four Sunni terrorists from lampposts. The moment Omar and I clear the first checkpoint and pass a pack of young, heavily armed men glaring through the car windows at us, we realize we&amp;amp;#x2019;re in trouble. Gone are the American tanks that used to guard the corners; the streets are now ruled by teenagers wearing shiny soccer jerseys and carrying machine guns. They poke their heads into cars and yank men and women out at will. We have a Post-it note stamped by a Shiite cleric that says we&amp;amp;#x2019;re journalists and it&amp;amp;#x2019;s okay for us to be here, but some of the kids can&amp;amp;#x2019;t read the pass. We run into a group of 8-year-olds &amp;amp;#x201C;manning&amp;amp;#x201C; a checkpoint. They&amp;amp;#x2019;ve put chunks of concrete in the road to block cars. Some of them are toting toy guns; others have real ones. Whatever they&amp;amp;#x2019;re packing, these four-foot-tall militias make me nervous.\n\nOmar&amp;amp;#x2019;s dark eyes keep darting back and forth, and his mouth has become so dry he can barely talk. He knows that if the Shiite militiamen ask for his ID, it could get ugly. Omar is Sunni; his name is one of those in Arabic that is an indicator of sect. The history goes back hundreds of years, but the short explanation is that Omar was one of the ancient Arab leaders who beat out Ali to succeed the prophet Muhammad as head of the Muslim community. That rivalry led to the Sunni-Shiite split that today imperils much of the Arab world, including, of course, Iraq, where Shiites make up the majority but Sunnis used to hold power.\n\nDespite all the U.S. pressure on the new government to crack down on militias, the reality is that Shiite militia leaders remain close to Shiite politicians in power, and thus the militias continue to do their dirty work, and very few murders are investigated. In many cases, we&amp;amp;#x2019;re told, police officers actually help in the killings. How else do you explain pickup trucks full of dead men just showing up at busy intersections in Baghdad, when there were checkpoints everywhere and a dusk-to-dawn curfew?\n\nSlowly, strangely, the two main groups have switched places. A year ago, Sunnis were the bad guys and Shiites the victims. Now Sunnis, who used to be the most anti-American group in Iraq, are begging the Americans to stay. They&amp;amp;#x2019;re outnumbered two to one by Shiites, and they know that without American protection they&amp;amp;#x2019;ll be an endangered species in the new Iraq.\n\nThat said, Sunnis dominate the insurgency and can strike back with car bombs and ambushes, which is exactly what they are doing. A big part of my job is covering this cycle of violence. A suicide bomb blows up in a Shiite market, killing dozens. The next day, scores of sadistically tortured Sunni men are found dead on the streets. Iraqi troops flood the area, an uneasy lull follows, then another big bomb attack against the Shiites, more hog-tied Sunni bodies on the streets, and so on. Most Iraqis think it&amp;amp;#x2019;s absurd there&amp;amp;#x2019;s even a debate back in the States about whether or not this is civil war.\n\n&amp;amp;#x201C;Of course it&amp;amp;#x2019;s civil war,&amp;amp;#x201C; Abu Ows, the custodian of a Sunni mosque in Baghdad, says one day. &amp;amp;#x201C;If I go into a Shiite neighborhood, they&amp;amp;#x2019;ll kill me. If they come into my neighborhood, we&amp;amp;#x2019;ll kill them. What else do you call that?&amp;amp;#x201C;\n\nThe government&amp;amp;#x2019;s response is denial. Shiite politicians blame the violence on &amp;amp;#x201C;foreign terrorists&amp;amp;#x201C; without being more specific, a simplistic, politically motivated explanation that is similar to the way that American officials tried to blame &amp;amp;#x201C;foreign terrorists&amp;amp;#x201C; at the beginning of the insurgency.\n\nI spend days poring over records kept by Sunni groups that detail the killings. There are grieving relatives all across the city I need to meet. But instead of going to them, I have our translators bring the relatives to me. Our bureau, with its living room that resembles a Jordanian version of Pottery Barn, becomes a full-fledged grief salon. The family members who meet me there share one sickening tale after the next. One woman talks about her nephew Mushtak, a law student nicknamed Titanic because of his Leonardo DiCaprio good looks. Mushtak was kidnapped the day after the Samarra shrine bombing. A week later, his body turned up. His fingernails had been pulled out, his face splashed with acid, his handsome head chopped in half. The aunt who helped identify him through a new video system at Baghdad&amp;amp;#x2019;s central morgue, developed in recent months because of the burgeoning demand, didn&amp;amp;#x2019;t have the heart to tell his mother what really happened. She said Titanic had been shot.\n\nThere&amp;amp;#x2019;s one story that sticks with me more than the rest, about a young Sunni man named Mohannad who made his living selling birds. Mohannad raised his own nightingales, pigeons, and doves, and as the violence intensified in his mid Shiite-Sunni neighborhood, he withdrew deeper and deeper into his birds. On a day when Shiite mobs were rampaging Baghdad, he was still at work, sprinkling seed into his cages, until he was kidnapped, brutalized, and killed.\n\nOne afternoon I meet the bird seller&amp;amp;#x2019;s brother Hassan, who has joined the others in coming to our bureau to sit in nice chairs and sip cold soda and talk about death. Our guards frisk him when he enters the compound, and he hands over his pistol and then presents to me a small bag he has brought with him. Inside is a sheaf of autopsy photos that show drill marks on his brother&amp;amp;#x2019;s thighs and purple welts all over his body, his face frozen in an openmouthed death mask. &amp;amp;#x201C;I cannot live without vengeance,&amp;amp;#x2019;&amp;amp;#x2019; Hassan says.\n\nWe talk about his brother&amp;amp;#x2019;s love of nightingales, how he wasn&amp;amp;#x2019;t connected to the insurgency, how the entire block watched him get marched into a car and driven away. But we can&amp;amp;#x2019;t keep ourselves from circling back to the photos wrapped in plastic. &amp;amp;#x201C;See this?&amp;amp;#x201C; Hassan asks, pointing to some strange wound on his brother&amp;amp;#x2019;s face.\n\nI don&amp;amp;#x2019;t know what to say about this. But somehow we bond over those autopsy photos, and Hassan insists that I keep them. They are all he has left of his brother, and I am honored that he wants me to have them.\n\nMy guards give Hassan his pistol back at the end of our interview, and he cocks it and lifts up his shirt and tucks the gun into his waistband. &amp;amp;#x201C;What would you do if you were me?&amp;amp;#x201C; he asks.\n\nI don&amp;amp;#x2019;t want to sound too pessimistic. But I don&amp;amp;#x2019;t want to lie, either. I tell him I would get out of the country while I still could.\n\nHassan nods and kisses my cheek. That&amp;amp;#x2019;s the last I see of him.\n\n\n\nThe country as a whole is beginning to split along ethnic and sectarian lines\u2014Sunnis staying in the west, Shiites in the south, Kurds in the north\u2014with little commerce between the areas because of the dangers of traveling. The same thing is happening on the neighborhood level, with Shiites and Sunnis fleeing mid areas to take refuge in areas that are safely one or the other. In the past, many Iraqis were uncomfortable saying whether they were Sunni or Shiite. &amp;amp;#x201C;I&amp;amp;#x2019;m Iraqi&amp;amp;#x201C; was the typical response. Now people are unequivocal Sectarian identity has become a life-and-death matter, something stamped on national identity cards. Even though religion is not explicitly stated on these cards, many first and last names are giveaways. As Ali, one of our translators tells me one night as we watch a cartoonish antiterrorism public-service ad on television, &amp;amp;#x201C;Iraq&amp;amp;#x2019;s destiny was not to be a religious country. But now it is.&amp;amp;#x201C;\n\nAli used to be an optimist. Like many other Iraqis, he thought the violence following the American invasion was just an ugly transition that Iraq had to endure before things got better. He doesn&amp;amp;#x2019;t feel that way anymore. And neither do most Iraqis. Nearly every Iraqi I talk to is hopeless about the country&amp;amp;#x2019;s future. Almost everyone agrees that even the darkest days of Saddam&amp;amp;#x2019;s tyrannical rule were better than the situation today. Suicide bombs, sectarian bloodletting, and street crime are killing more innocents than Saddam ever did with poison gas, they say.\n\nThe bloodiest parts of the country are the mid Sunni-Shiite zones where sectarian cleansing is spinning out of control, places like Baghdad, Baquba, and Jurf, a mean little town in an area south of Baghdad so infested with insurgents that the American military calls it the Triangle of Death.\n\nPatrick Donahoe, a boyish-looking 38-year-old lieutenant colonel from Edison, New Jersey, is the American commander in Jurf. Ten years ago, Donahoe was a peacekeeper in Bosnia, trying to reintegrate Bosniak, Croat, and Serb communities. Now he faces a similar jam in Jurf, a place of crumbly dirt farms and dilapidated weapons factories that sits right on a sectarian fault line\u2014Sunnis in the north, Shiites in the south, and the war in between. Shiites are boxing Sunnis out of politics, and Shiite police officers abuse Sunni men. Sunnis are hitting back with car bombs and beheading cops. Sunni and Shiite traders have ceased trading with each other, and now even long-intertwined, mid Shiite-Sunni families are pulling apart.\n\n&amp;amp;#x201C;The fact that Sunnis and Shiites have intermarried over the years and lived next door to each other isn&amp;amp;#x2019;t going to save this place,&amp;amp;#x201C; Colonel Donahoe says during a chat one afternoon in his hooch, an aluminum-skinned trailer sitting on a bed of gravel. &amp;amp;#x201C;It was the same in Bosnia and Rwanda. And look what happened. The only way to stop the violence is to give these Sunnis some hope. If they think they&amp;amp;#x2019;ll be under the boot of Shiites, they&amp;amp;#x2019;ll fight forever.&amp;amp;#x201C;\n\nHe is trying to keep his soldiers engaged with tasks like market patrols and merchant surveys, but there isn&amp;amp;#x2019;t all that much for the rank and file to do. And he&amp;amp;#x2019;s fighting against the tide. These days, even as the violence throughout the country becomes increasingly insane, more and more American soldiers, possibly to avoid spiking casualties in an election year, are being kept inside the wire, consuming millions of dollars of ice cream and lobster claws and passing their time shooting pool, pumping iron, and downloading porn. (One of the most popular sites has a slide show of generously cut female American soldiers doing naughty things with machine guns.)\n\nI spend hours on one base hanging out in the chow hall, the DFAC, where the boredom of the days is broken, at least, by three surprisingly excellent meals. Over pancakes, I talk to some soldiers who ask me what it&amp;amp;#x2019;s like outside the wire, saying they haven&amp;amp;#x2019;t set foot &amp;amp;#x201C;in the red zone&amp;amp;#x2019;&amp;amp;#x2019; for months. At lunch, as I polish off a meatball sub, the DFAC manager starts venting about the problems of trucking thousands of gallons of Baskin-Robbins ice cream here from Kuwait with a few scorching deserts and hungry insurgents in between. Still, he says, it&amp;amp;#x2019;s worth it. He&amp;amp;#x2019;s fighting the war on terror, one scoop at a time. At dinner, I eat a crisp salad with some Iraqi soldiers who fill their plastic trays with heaping piles of cookies and chicken. The Iraqis tend to sit on one side of the cafeteria, the American soldiers on the other.\n\nThere&amp;amp;#x2019;s a caste system of labor on the base, with former child soldiers from Uganda serving as guards, Lebanese as translators, Nepalese as cooks, Filipinos as ice cream scoopers, Iraqis as toilet cleaners, and tattooed American contractors running the show.\n\nUnderstandably, the military is trying to make base life as comfortable as possible. No matter which way the political winds are blowing, it seems pretty clear that American troops are going to be in Iraq for a long, long time. The Korea-fication of bases has already begun, with soldiers consolidating at huge permanent-seeming installations complete with Wal-Mart&amp;amp;#x2013;sized PXs, Burger Kings, Subways, Internet caf\u00E9s, swimming pools, and sprawling markets that specialize in pirated DVDs. (Nobody seems to care too much about copyright issues in a battle zone.) And while the security outside the blast walls continues to deteriorate, life inside gets better and better.\n\nOn one of my last days on the base, I&amp;amp;#x2019;m waiting outside an Internet caf\u00E9 when a soldier waves me over to a nearby building.\n\n&amp;amp;#x201C;Hey, man, you got to check this out,&amp;amp;#x2019;&amp;amp;#x2019; he says. &amp;amp;#x201C;A movie&amp;amp;#x2019;s about to start.&amp;amp;#x201C;\n\nI follow him into an air-conditioned space and grab a seat next to some guys sprawled on leather couches. A fifty-inch projection screen flickers to life. The opening credits roll. The soldiers punch their fists in the air and cheer. It is indeed the perfect picture to catch on a hot Iraqi day: Dazed and Confused.\n\n\n\nAt this point, it&amp;amp;#x2019;s hard to remember those early days at the Palestine Hotel, when all that hope and anticipation was in the air. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s hard to believe that that place ever existed. Or that the tide against the insurgency is turning. Or that the day will come soon when Iraqi forces stand up and American forces stand down and Iraq becomes a place people want to live in, no flee. Because what exists right now is a country so consumed by hate that it will take years to calm down. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s a place where law and order have vanished and people have retreated into the most elemental alliances\u2014family, tribe, sect, and ethnicity\u2014 to protect themselves as the country degenerates into a Hobbesian nightmare, a nightmare of someone else&amp;amp;#x2019;s making.\n\nOne afternoon not long ago, shortly before I left Iraq for what might be the last time, I was standing on the balcony of our bureau, talking on my satellite phone. A group of kids, maybe 8 or 9 years old, were playing on a swing set nearby, a surreal enough sight in and of itself. Suddenly, a mortar shell whooshed overhead and crashed into the Green Zone across the Tigris River. My immediate instinct was to hit the deck. But when I looked back at the swing set, the kids were still there, going up and down, up and down on the swings, their hair lifting in the wind as a cloud of explosive dust mushroomed behind them. To them, I suppose, there was no reason to do anything different. They&amp;amp;#x2019;re kids, after all. And this was just another hopeless day in an endless line of them, just another sunny afternoon in Baghdad. And soon enough, they&amp;amp;#x2019;ll probably see much worse.\n\n[CLICK HERE FOR MORE OF OUR BEST BELTWAY COVERAGE IN THE GQ POLITICS ARCHIVE.**](http://men.style.com/gq/features/politics)\n\n**"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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