yoshomon
17 Mar 2004, 06:39 PM
Iraq, one year on
by Robert Fisk; UK Independent; March 15, 2004
The surviving Iraqi employees of the United Nations fearfully changed the plates on their white, unmarked vehicles last week. From now on, there will be no "UN" next to the registration number. When I visited the headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at the desk fingered my business card and looked into my eyes with palpable fear - as if an Englishman was a potential suicide bomber.
At night, in my grubby hotel, I listen for gunfire and fear the attack which so many of the guests have been predicting for weeks. Will the bombers arrive at dinner-time when the South African and British mercenaries come clanking back from their "security duties", all Heckler and Koch automatics, silver pistols and black flak jackets, ready for their beers and cheap French vin rouge? Or at 6am, just after the fajr dawn prayers, their Islamic souls cleansed for self-immolation amid the infidels and crusaders? I count the minutes between 6am and 8am, the hours when they most often strike. I've lost count of the number of times my
bedroom windows have rattled at breakfast-time.
When Haidar and Mohamed arrive to take me off to Mosul or Basra or Najaf, I feel relief. On the road south, we all wear kuffiah scarves round our heads now, two Iraqis and an Englishmen pretending to be tribal toughs to avoid the killers on Highway 8. We were driving down there at first light last week - ah, the relief to be away from my hotel at that hour of the morning - when the US presidential envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, came on the car radio. We were just approaching the spot where two American civilians working for the occupation authorities had been shot dead by men in Iraqi police uniform. The car radio crackled away. Things are improving in Iraq, Bremer told us. Haidar and Mohamed and I exchanged glances, eyes crinkling beneath our scarves. Then our car was filled with hollow laughter.
A year ago, there were no problems on Highway 8. The monstrous old tyrant Saddam had seen to that. If robbers had been looting and raping north of Basra since the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad was law-and-order land. There the looting and raping was done by the government, not the people. Now it's the other way round. I still have a souvenir of my last pre-war flight into Baghdad, my baggage tag on the last Royal Jordanian aircraft into pre-invasion Iraq, the very final airliner to touch down in the dictatorship. "Saddam Hussein International Airport," it says. We passengers were fleeced as usual at the terminal. Ten dollars to immigration, $20 to the man who checked my computer, $40 to the guy who accepted the paper from the man who had taken the $20, and another $20 to the soldiers at the gate.
It was raining outside and our tyres hissed on the highway, but Baghdad was illuminated like a Christmas tree. The mosques were floodlit, the Iraqi police cars dozing beneath the palm trees, the foliage rich and sweet-smelling under the street lamps. Didn't they know, I kept asking myself? Didn't they realise what was coming?
I remember the last night before war. I had gone to buy toilet rolls and bandages, observing a soldier in uniform carrying his young son on his shoulders. Last leave, I thought. Did Iraqi soldiers write poems like Sassoon and Owen? Or was it just Saddam's infantile novels that they read on their way to the front? In the pharmacy, I joked with the chemist that he was kind to sell me bandages when the RAF might be bombing him within hours.
"Yes," he said. "I rather think they will."
We all had our "minders" then, Saddam's lads from the corrupt old ministry of information whose job was to steer us away from the paths of political unrighteousness and towards the sclerotic anti-American street demonstrations and the interminable press conferences of junior ministers. But after a while, once their own bosses had been paid off, we paid the minders too, bought them from their government allegiance until they were taking us where we wanted to go, even into the firestorm of America's armour, the Iraqi army dead bouncing in the back of the pick-ups in front of us.
The first bombs struck 20 miles from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed expert on terrorism, now works and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.
The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war seem more awesome now than they did at the time. Saddam, the man the British and Americans loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (pet dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked), had already degenerated into senility, writing epic novels in his many palaces while his crippled son Uday drank and whored and tortured his way around Baghdad; a classic Middle East tale from the city of a thousand and one nights but hardly the target for the world's only superpower.
rest of article: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5150
by Robert Fisk; UK Independent; March 15, 2004
The surviving Iraqi employees of the United Nations fearfully changed the plates on their white, unmarked vehicles last week. From now on, there will be no "UN" next to the registration number. When I visited the headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at the desk fingered my business card and looked into my eyes with palpable fear - as if an Englishman was a potential suicide bomber.
At night, in my grubby hotel, I listen for gunfire and fear the attack which so many of the guests have been predicting for weeks. Will the bombers arrive at dinner-time when the South African and British mercenaries come clanking back from their "security duties", all Heckler and Koch automatics, silver pistols and black flak jackets, ready for their beers and cheap French vin rouge? Or at 6am, just after the fajr dawn prayers, their Islamic souls cleansed for self-immolation amid the infidels and crusaders? I count the minutes between 6am and 8am, the hours when they most often strike. I've lost count of the number of times my
bedroom windows have rattled at breakfast-time.
When Haidar and Mohamed arrive to take me off to Mosul or Basra or Najaf, I feel relief. On the road south, we all wear kuffiah scarves round our heads now, two Iraqis and an Englishmen pretending to be tribal toughs to avoid the killers on Highway 8. We were driving down there at first light last week - ah, the relief to be away from my hotel at that hour of the morning - when the US presidential envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, came on the car radio. We were just approaching the spot where two American civilians working for the occupation authorities had been shot dead by men in Iraqi police uniform. The car radio crackled away. Things are improving in Iraq, Bremer told us. Haidar and Mohamed and I exchanged glances, eyes crinkling beneath our scarves. Then our car was filled with hollow laughter.
A year ago, there were no problems on Highway 8. The monstrous old tyrant Saddam had seen to that. If robbers had been looting and raping north of Basra since the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad was law-and-order land. There the looting and raping was done by the government, not the people. Now it's the other way round. I still have a souvenir of my last pre-war flight into Baghdad, my baggage tag on the last Royal Jordanian aircraft into pre-invasion Iraq, the very final airliner to touch down in the dictatorship. "Saddam Hussein International Airport," it says. We passengers were fleeced as usual at the terminal. Ten dollars to immigration, $20 to the man who checked my computer, $40 to the guy who accepted the paper from the man who had taken the $20, and another $20 to the soldiers at the gate.
It was raining outside and our tyres hissed on the highway, but Baghdad was illuminated like a Christmas tree. The mosques were floodlit, the Iraqi police cars dozing beneath the palm trees, the foliage rich and sweet-smelling under the street lamps. Didn't they know, I kept asking myself? Didn't they realise what was coming?
I remember the last night before war. I had gone to buy toilet rolls and bandages, observing a soldier in uniform carrying his young son on his shoulders. Last leave, I thought. Did Iraqi soldiers write poems like Sassoon and Owen? Or was it just Saddam's infantile novels that they read on their way to the front? In the pharmacy, I joked with the chemist that he was kind to sell me bandages when the RAF might be bombing him within hours.
"Yes," he said. "I rather think they will."
We all had our "minders" then, Saddam's lads from the corrupt old ministry of information whose job was to steer us away from the paths of political unrighteousness and towards the sclerotic anti-American street demonstrations and the interminable press conferences of junior ministers. But after a while, once their own bosses had been paid off, we paid the minders too, bought them from their government allegiance until they were taking us where we wanted to go, even into the firestorm of America's armour, the Iraqi army dead bouncing in the back of the pick-ups in front of us.
The first bombs struck 20 miles from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed expert on terrorism, now works and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.
The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war seem more awesome now than they did at the time. Saddam, the man the British and Americans loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (pet dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked), had already degenerated into senility, writing epic novels in his many palaces while his crippled son Uday drank and whored and tortured his way around Baghdad; a classic Middle East tale from the city of a thousand and one nights but hardly the target for the world's only superpower.
rest of article: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5150