If L.A. were Baghdad

WE’RE SLIDING into Year Five of the war in Iraq -- a country that, as we’ve been told, is the size of California.

Sometimes I’ve wondered what it would be like, an Iraq-sized war in Iraq-sized California. I asked my colleague Doug Smith, who’s spent a lot of time in Iraq, to give me a sense of how the war would play out, overlaid on California.

Baghdad is much smaller than Los Angeles, but it’s the city in Iraq most like L.A. It has a complex freeway and road network to distant suburbs; it was a population magnet, the economic hub. Doug said he too has wondered “how Angelenos would cope with what’s going on in Baghdad. I think they’d go screaming mad, but maybe these are things that people adjust to quickly.”

Maybe. Californians perform heroically in quakes and fires, but those are natural disasters, and they are fleeting.

Set aside the causes in Iraq, the cast of killers and why they’re killing. What is it like to live these stories every day, not just read them? What if all those murdered Iraqi police and recruits wore the badges of California cities and towns? What if it weren’t a hundred Iraqis being killed every day but a hundred Southern Californians? Over a year, that would be like killing every man, woman and child in Dana Point.

Each of the incidents outlined below happened in the last month in Iraq; I just moved them to familiar locales and agencies, approximating where they could have happened after comparing a map of Baghdad and Iraq with one of L.A. and California.

Feb. 1: Twin bombings at South Coast Plaza killed at least 73 people. Moments after the first bomb, a Costa Mesa police officer spotted a man flinging open his jacket to show his explosives belt. The officer shouted “Suicide bomber!” and ran toward the man. He flung his arms around the bomber to shield others from the force of the blast and was killed in the second explosion.

Feb. 3: A dump truck carrying concealed explosives under boxes of food blew up at Grand Central Market on a busy shopping Saturday, killing at least 130 people and injuring 300. Portions of the century-old downtown building collapsed, burying many of the ground-floor stalls where vendors sell groceries, DVDs, clothing and more.

Feb. 13: One employee was killed when the offices of the weekly Sacramento News and Review burned down under suspicious circumstances. Investigators have not determined the cause of the blaze, which came 10 days after eight car bombs went off in central Sacramento and suicide bombers tried to ram a car into a state office building.

Feb. 25: At least 40 USC students were killed when a suicide bomber blew herself up at the university’s Marshall School of Business. Last month, 70 USC students were killed in an attack, and two months ago, gunmen fought across a playground at Brentwood Elementary School. Across L.A., attendance at K-12 schools is down by nearly two-thirds.

Feb. 26: Lt. Gov. John Garamendi escaped serious injury when an assassin who had gained access to the well-secured Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles set off a bomb as Garamendi presided over ceremonies honoring state employees. Five people were killed.

Feb. 27: A suicide car bomber outside a busy Starbucks in Whittier killed three people. At about the same time, at an El Pollo Loco restaurant on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, a bomber ate lunch and left behind a sack of explosives, which killed three people and injured 13 when it went off.

March 2: A videotape sent to KCBS-TV appears to show 18 kidnapped and blindfolded Long Beach police officers being shot to death. The bodies of 14 of the missing officers, their hands tied behind their backs, were found near a Long Beach middle school the day before, the same day that a Santa Monica police officer and his bride were the target of a car bomb that blew up as the newlyweds arrived at their new home. They were unhurt, but three wedding guests were killed.

Tuesday: Six California National Guardsmen on patrol on I-5 south of Bakersfield were killed by a bomb that exploded near their vehicles.

Imagine City Hall’s walls turned to Swiss cheese from tank rounds; Disney Hall, the Westwood Federal Building, the Griffith Observatory -- every notable building in Los Angeles, in California, sandbagged and surrounded by slab walls as high as two men.

Imagine arriving early at work so that armed men can search your car. Imagine falling behind on your mortgage to pay for security to keep you alive on your way to work, especially along violence-plagued arteries such as Sepulveda, Olympic and Vermont Avenue.

Lay a map of Baghdad alongside your paper every day and fit the Iraq news to your hometown. The Mansour neighborhood could be Brentwood. Zafraniya could be Bell Gardens; Mahmoudiya, that’d be Buena Park. And today’s car bomb, today’s discovery of bodies -- it looks like it could be right where you live.