The Great War for Civilisation (192 page)

Driving across Baghdad was an eerie experience. The targets were indeed carefully selected, even though their destruction inevitably struck the innocent. There was a presidential palace with four 10-metres-high statues of the Arab warrior Saladin on each corner—the face of each, of course, was Saddam's—and, neatly in between, a great black hole gouged into the façade of the building. The Ministry of Air Weapons Production was pulverised, a massive heap of prestressed concrete and rubble. But outside, at the gate, there were two sandbag emplacements with smartly dressed Iraqi soldiers, rifles over the parapet, ready to defend their ministry from the enemy which had already destroyed it.

The morning traffic built up on the roads beside the Tigris. No driver looked too hard at the Republican Palace on the other side of the river or the Ministry of Armaments Procurement beside it. They burned for twelve hours after the first missile strikes. It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life. But then again, no one under Saddam's regime would spend too long looking at such things, would they? Iraqis were puzzled as to what all this meant. In 1991, the Americans struck the refineries, the electricity grid, the water pipes, communications. But on day two of this war, Baghdad could still function. The land-line telephones worked, the Internet operated, the electrical power was at full capacity, the bridges over the Tigris remained unbombed. My guess was that when—“if ” was still a sensitive phrase— the Americans arrived in Baghdad, they would need a working communications system, electricity, transport. What had been spared was not a gift to the Iraqi people, I concluded; it was for the benefit of Iraq's supposed new masters. How wrong I was.

The
Iraq Daily
emerged with an edition of just four pages, a clutch of articles on the “steadfastness” of the nation—steadfastness in Arabic is
soummoud
, the same name as the missiles Iraq partially destroyed before Bush forced the UN inspectors to leave by going to war—and a headline that read: “President: Victory Will Come in Iraqi Hands.” During the bombing on Friday night, Iraqi television— again, there had been no attempt by the United States to destroy the television facilities—showed an Iraqi general, appearing live, to reassure the nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile explosions blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television camera.

So where did all this lead us? In the early hours next day, I looked once more across the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the colonnaded ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and the sky was lowering with smoke. The buttressed, rampart-like palace—sheets of flame soaring from its walls—looked like a medieval castle ablaze; Ctesiphon destroyed, Mesopotamia at the moment of its destruction, as it had been seen so many times, over so many thousands of years. Xenophon struck south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. The caliphs came. And then the Ottomans and then the British. All departed. Now come the Americans. It was not about legitimacy. It was about something much more seductive, something Saddam himself understood all too well, a special kind of power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq wished to demonstrate as he smashed his way across this ancient civilisation.

That second afternoon, the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around Baghdad in the hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 6:20 p.m. on 22 March, when Saddam's biggest military office block, a great rampart of a building twenty storeys high beside his palace, simply exploded in front of me, a cauldron of fire, a 100-foot sheet of flame and a sound that had my ears singing for an hour afterwards. The entire buttressed edifice shuddered under the impact. Then four more cruise missiles came in. It was the heaviest bombing Baghdad had suffered in more than twenty years of war. To my right, a long colonnaded building looking much like the façade of the Pentagon coughed fire as five missiles crashed into the concrete. In an operation officially intended to create “shock and awe”— Rumsfeld's latest slogan—shock was hardly the word for it. The few Iraqis in the streets around me—no friends of Saddam, I would suspect—cursed under their breath.

From high-rise buildings, shops and homes came the thunder of crashing glass as the shock waves swept across the Tigris in both directions. Minute after minute the missiles came in. Many Iraqis had watched—as I had—the television tape of those ominous B-52 bombers taking off from Britain only six hours earlier. Like me, they had noted the time, added three hours for Iraqi time ahead of London and guessed that, at around 9 p.m., the terror would begin. The B-52s, almost certainly firing from outside Iraqi airspace, were dead on time. Policemen drove at speed through the streets, their loudspeakers ordering pedestrians to take shelter or hide under cover of tall buildings. Much good did it do. Crouching next to a block of shops, I narrowly missed the shower of glass that came cascading down from the upper windows as the shock waves slammed into them.

A few Iraqis—husbands and wives, older children—could be seen staring from balconies, shards of broken glass around them. Each time one of the great golden bubbles of fire burst across the city, they ducked inside before the blast wave reached them. As I stood beneath the trees on the corniche, a wave of cruise missiles passed low overhead, the shriek of their passage almost as devastating as the explosions that were to follow. How, I asked myself, does one describe this outside the language of a military report, the definition of the colour, the decibels of the explosions? The flight of the missiles sounded as if someone was ripping to pieces huge canopies of silk across the sky.

There is something anarchic about all human beings, about their reaction to violence. The Iraqis around me stood and watched, as I did, the tongues of flame bursting from the upper stories of the building beside Saddam's palace, reaching high into the sky. Strangely, the electricity grid continued to operate and around us the traffic lights continued to move between red and green. Billboards moved in the breeze of the shock waves; floodlights continued to blaze on public buildings. Above us, curtains of smoke were moving over Baghdad, white from the explosions, black from the burning targets. How could one resist this? How could the Iraqis ever believe—with their broken technology, their debilitating twelve years of sanctions—that they could defeat the computers of these missiles and of these aircraft? It was the same old story: irresistible, unquestionable power.

Well, yes, we said to ourselves, could one attack a more appropriate regime? But that was not the point. For the message of this new raid was the same as that of the previous night's raid, and of all the raids in the hours to come: the United States must be obeyed; the EU, UN, NATO—nothing must stand in its way. Many Iraqis were already asking me: How many days? Not because they wanted the Americans or the British in Baghdad, but because they wanted this violence to end: which, when you think of it, is exactly why these raids took place.

It is the morning of 25 March 2003. Let us now praise famous men. Saddam Hussein is doing just that. Today he proceeds to list the Iraqi army and navy officers who are leading the “resistance” against the Anglo–American army in Um Qasr, Basra and Nasiriyah. Major-General Mustafa Mahmoud Umran, commanding officer of the 11th Division, Brigadier Bashir Ahmed Othman, commander of the Iraqi 45th Brigade, Brigadier-Colonel Ali Khalil Ibrahim, commander of the 11th Battalion of the 45th Brigade, Colonel Mohamed Khallaf al-Jabawi, commander of the 45th Brigade's 2nd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Fathi Rani Majid of the Iraqi army's III Corps . . . And so it goes on. “Be patient,” Saddam keeps saying. Be patient. Fourteen times in all, he tells the army and the people of Iraq to be patient. “We will win . . . we will be victorious against Evil.” Patient but confident in victory. Fighting Evil.

Wasn't that how President Bush was encouraging his people a few hours earlier? At other times, Saddam sounds like his hero, Josef Stalin. “They have come to destroy our country and we must stand and destroy them and defend our people and our country . . . Cut their throats . . . They are coming to take our land. But when they try to enter our cities, they try to avoid a battle with our forces and to stay outside the range of our weapons.” Was this modelled on the Great Patriotic War, the defence of Mother Russia under Uncle Joe? And if not, how to account for those hundreds of Iraqi soldiers still holding out under American air and tank attacks? People, party, patriotism. The three Ps run like a theme through the Saddam speech, along with a bitter warning: as the American and British forces make less headway on the ground, Saddam says, they will use their air power against Iraq ever more brutally. So what does it feel like to live these days in President Saddam's future Stalingrad?

A few hours later, the cruise missiles and the planes came back. The great explosions blanketed Baghdad in the darkness. One of the Tomahawks smashed into the grounds of the Mustansariya University—twenty-five students wounded and one dead, so they claimed. There were other sounds in the early hours. A blaze of automatic gunfire on the Tigris corniche—attempts to capture two escaping U.S. airmen, the authorities insisted—and then a full-scale gun battle not far from the city centre at 2:30 a.m. There were rumours. Armed men had come from Saddam City, the Shia slums on the edge of Baghdad, and had been intercepted by state security men. No “independent confirmation.” A story that the railway line north of Baghdad has been cut. Denied.

On Sunday, the Iraqi minister of defence, General Sultan Hashem, gave a remarkable briefing on the war, naming the units involved in front-line fighting— the 3rd Battalion of the Iraqi army's 27th Brigade was still holding out at Suq ash-Shuyukh south of Nasiriyah, the 3rd Battalion of the Third Iraqi Army was holding Basra. And I remembered how these generals gave identical briefings during the 1980–88 war against Iran. When we checked on their stories back then, they almost always turned out to be true. Did the same apply today? General Hashem insisted that his men were destroying U.S. tanks and armour and helicopters. This was easy to dismiss—until videotape of two burning U.S. armoured personnel carriers popped up on the television screen. Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan had been obliging enough to explain the Iraqi army's tactics. It was Iraqi policy to let the Anglo–American armies “roam around” in the desert as long as they wanted, and to attack them when they tried to enter the cities. Which seemed to be pretty much what they were doing.

From Baghdad, with its canopy of sinister black oil smoke and air-raid sirens, the American plan appeared to be rather similar: to barnstorm up the desert parallel to the Tigris and Euphrates valley and try to turn right at every available city on the way. If there's trouble at Um Qasr, try Basra. If Basra is blocked, have a go through Nasiriyah. If that's dangerous, try to turn right through Najaf. But the open road—the long highway to Baghdad lined with adoring Iraqis throwing roses at GIs and Tommys—was proving to be an illusion.
²⁰¹
Yet we could not travel. No Western journalist—even with permission to take a street taxi—could leave the Baghdad city limits. On 27 March, I went to see my old friends at the Al-Jazeera channel whose local offices stood on the west bank of the Tigris. They had a crew in Basra which was under British ground and air attack. I begged them to show me the roughcuts of the videotape they had received from Basra. If I could not go there, I could at least look through the lens of their cameraman before the Iraqis— or, after transmission, the Americans and the British—got their hands on it.

I sit in their editing studio, the sound of anti-aircraft guns pummelling away outside the walls. The video-camera is hand-held, unsteady, the cameraman nervous. Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, an Iraqi girl—victim of an Anglo–American air strike—is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a dreadfully wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress. An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq's second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited Al-Jazeera tape—filmed over the past thirty-six hours and newly arrived in Baghdad—is raw, painful, devastating.

It is also proof that Basra—reportedly “captured” and “secured” by British troops—is still under the control of Saddam Hussein's forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out there, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck. A remarkable part of the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the explosion of incoming—presumably British—shells.

The short sequence of the dead British soldiers—for the public showing of which Tony Blair was to express such horror a day later—was little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past twelve years, pictures that never drew any expressions of condemnation from the British prime minister. The two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and abdomen. Another sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra civilians and armed men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers' British army jeep—registration number HP5AA—and dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can be seen kicking the overturned Ministry of Defence trailer, registration number 91KC98, which the jeep was towing when it was presumably ambushed. Also to be observed on the unedited tape is an RAF pilotless drone photo-reconnaissance aircraft, its red-and-blue roundels visible on one wing, shot down and lying overturned on a roadway. Marked “ARMY” in capital letters, it carries the code sign ZJ300 on its tail and is attached to a large cylindrical pod that probably contains the plane's camera.