'We want the Americans to hurry! Will it take more than 48 hours?' asked one Iraqi, before last night's attacks. Lara Marlowe reports from Baghdad
The destruction of the planning ministry started with a deafening "whoosh" on Thursday night. Almost instantaneously, a huge golden fireball erupted from the lower left of the building. It seemed to set a chain reaction in motion, as three other cruise missiles hit the base of the high-rise in rapid succession. The golden orbs settled into bonfires, and great plumes of smoke blew southwards, towards the US and British troops 300 miles down the highway.
The smoke smelled of metal and burning rubber and it did not lift until yesterday morning. The planning ministry had gaping holes in its facade, stained black around the edges. A smaller annex was flattened, just stubs of cement and steel reinforcement wires remained. But on the roof of the main target, you could still see two anti-aircraft artillery pieces, and a soldier walking around in the morning sun, drinking tea.
Iraqi radio said US cruise missiles also struck homes of the family of President Saddam Hussein, including his son Uday. A French theatre director who was invited to Uday's home with a Franco-Iraqi "friendship group" described it to me a few months ago. Uday's house was all black granite and gold plating, she said, with every imaginable hi-tech and laser security gadget. "I have never, anywhere, seen such luxury," she added. Be sure the Information Ministry will not take foreign journalists to see that rubble.
There will doubtless have been more strikes overnight, and we'll drive past more smouldering ruins today. In Belgrade in 1999, it took two and a half months of bombing the country's infrastructure before Slobodan Milosevic finally caved in. Bombing empty buildings makes a great sensory impression and costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but it's not necessarily an efficient way to overthrow a regime.
Two days into George W. Bush's war on Iraq, residents of the capital complained to me that it wasn't fast enough. "We want the Americans to hurry! Do you think it will take longer than 48 hours?" one asked.
Saddam Hussein, it seems, can read the minds of such traitors. "A curse on anyone who says the Iraqi army and people would joyfully welcome your aggressiveness and the forces under your orders and rejoice," he told his US and British aggressors in a statement read on Iraqi television.
Iraqis ought to be wise to the illusion of quick, clean conflicts: in 1980, Saddam promised them a "whirlwind war" of just a few weeks to conquer the Arab regions of southwest Iran. That first Gulf War lasted eight years and claimed more than 350,000 lives. In August 1990, it took Iraqi troops just a day to walk into Kuwait, but Iraq has been paying for the invasion ever since.
For now, the Iraqi capital is not the siege of Stalingrad - one of the overblown second World War analogies we hear daily - but an eerie limbo of hope and fear, anxiety and apprehension. Some of the mokhabarat - internal security agents answerable to the president's younger son - are said to be switching their identity cards for civilian papers.
Until now, spying on foreigners and one's fellow Iraqis guaranteed safety and a modest income. In case the tables turn, the mokhabarat are hanging on to their old papers for the time being. They are among the "bad people" said to be hunkering down in the centre of the city. "People are afraid; they say they have a secret weapon," says an Iraqi acquaintance. Asked how the government intends to defend the capital, the Foreign Minister, Naji al-Sabri, said ominously: "We have our own plans to defend ourselves; it's not our job to tell others."
For the time being, fear is the dominant emotion. I know a French Middle East correspondent who has refused to report from Iraq for years now, because he can't stand seeing the rictus of fear on people's faces when he tries to speak to them. Baghdadis talked slightly more freely this week, but still in whispers, and often glancing back over their shoulders. This week, a man cringed and remained silent when I asked him whether a wall mural of the President and one of his sons showed Uday or Qusay. Those names are best left unspoken.
"Don't try to plan ahead; everything changes every hour," the AFP bureau chief warned me when I arrived on Monday. He was right: none of the predictions about the war has so far proved true. There has been no airborne landing at Saddam Hussein International Airport. Contrary to what some Iraqi officials said, no curfew was imposed when the bombing started. My colleagues and I have twice fled the Information Ministry on short notice based on a "tip-off" from a US network that it was about to be attacked by cruise missiles.
The relationship between foreign journalists, the information ministry and mokhabarat is often one of paranoia and mutual suspicion. There are some well-educated, progressive officials who believe it is in Iraq's interest to have its side of the conflict covered. But they are struggling with the intelligence apparatus, for whom journalism means transmitting the Great Leader's speeches. A similar dynamic was at work in Belgrade in 1999, when the Federal Yugoslav government was issuing press cards on the same day the more hardline Serbian government ordered that all foreign journalists be expelled.
In Baghdad, this tension takes on new forms daily. The first thing I had to do on arrival on Monday was apply for a press card, a process taking several hours and costing $25. On Tuesday all press cards were withdrawn and all journalists were ordered to obtain new press cards, which are pink instead of white. Fee: $25. Was it just a shake-down, or an indication of a shift in control?
On Wednesday, a wave of panic spread through the press corps when all journalists were ordered to stay in two hotels that are considered likely targets. The order was rescinded the same evening. During the bombardment on Thursday night, an information ministry official was seen on the pavement outside the hotel where most of the press corps are staying, taking note of the balconies where journalists used illegal satellite telephones.
Since Thursday, the day the war started, radio and television broadcasts must be cleared by Iraqi censors. To be fair, the US military is also censoring correspondents "embedded" with the troops who are advancing northwards.
"I can't say where we're going," I heard a BBC reporter in southern Iraq say on the radio yesterday. "All our people seem to be on the periphery," a British television reporter in Baghdad told me. "One of them talked about an artillery barrage and I called London and asked what was going on and they said, 'Our people haven't the slightest idea and neither do we'."
The hundred or so peace activists and volunteer "human shields" who've hung on in Baghdad are slightly better treated than the press, though the mokhabarat checked all their passports on Thursday in the sudden paranoia that some might be journalists in disguise. The peaceniks mean well, but are beginning to look frazzled. Some carry Bibles, and most tend to wear 1968 Haight-Ashbury style hippie clothing. One of them, an Arab, chains himself to a tree in Abu Nawas street every morning.
While hunting for a way to file to The Irish Times, I happened into a back room on the ground floor of my hotel. It was guarded by several mokhabarat and inside were three "human shields" taking notes, writing an e-mail on a computer and using a rare international telephone line. One of the mokhabarat agreed to let me send an e-mail, then got into an argument with the "human shield" - I think he was Spanish - who was writing home. It turned out the system was down anyway. When I pleaded to use the telephone, I was turned down with the words: "It's for human shields only."
I managed to avoid a ministry-guided tour to a grain silo manned by"human shields" outside Baghdad on the first day of the war. Press conferences are the other main event, with the foreign and information ministers acting as principal spokesmen for the regime. Though civilians, they wear the olive green Ba'ath party uniform to show the country is on a war footing. In what has become a well-oiled ritual, the minister speaks in Arabic with no interpreter for at least half an hour, while representatives of the main British and American newspapers and television networks, few of whom speak Arabic, sit and fidget. I'm not sure whether it's to signal that Iraq is playing to an Arab and Muslim audience, or just to annoy the English-speakers.
In a speech on Thursday, the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Iraqi military and other supporters of the regime that their "previous actions will not be excused" if they fight the advancing Americans. The clear implication was that past actions - which have all too often included torture and murder - will be forgiven if the perpetrators co-operate with their new rulers.
The same principle has applied in Afghanistan, where the war criminal Gen Rashid Dostom now sits in President Hamid Karzai's government. Afghanistan is in some ways a model for the war on Iraq, and not a particularly happy one, considering the anarchy in much of the country and documented reports of torture in the US-run Bagram prison. Iraqis in Europe speak of "the search for an Iraqi Hamid Karzai"; a search led - surprise - by Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush acolyte and Afghan-born American who is the real power in Afghanistan. In the Arab world, Karzai has become synonymous with the Bush administration's desire to install subordinates throughout the region. Palestinians speak of "the search for a Palestinian Hamid Karzai" to nominally rule a few square kilometres of the Occupied Territories, under the orders of Ariel Sharon.
Washington's ideal candidate to lead Iraq would be personable and adept at expressing the gratitude of the Iraqi people to the US - in English - on US networks. And he would be weak enough to succumb to every US demand. A US-based Iraqi academic was interviewed for the job at the White House, but was discounted because he was gay. Factions in the US government still advocate putting Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the CIA-funded Iraqi National Congress, in charge of the country. But Chalabi is a Shi'ite, and his history of shady financial dealings also works against him.
The West has been intervening in Iraq since the British invaded in 1917. If there is a lesson to be learned from the rise and possibly imminent fall of Saddam Hussein, it is that we must stop repeating our errors. Slobodan Milosevic's trial for war crimes at The Hague speaks volumes about the West's continuing propensity to cosset dictators. Old friends who have testified against Milosevic included former high-ranking British and American officials, including Lord David Owen, Richard Holbrooke and Paddy Ashdown. Who would testify at Saddam Hussein's trial? Donald Rumsfeld, who gushed over him in the early 1980s? Jacques Chirac, who sold him two nuclear reactors?
For all their impatience, the Iraqis' feelings about the bombardment and invasion are fraught with ambivalence. One contact told me he couldn't wait to see Ba'ath Party members murdered. But when I ran into him after the war started, he said of the Americans: "I wish they would stop. This isn't the way to solve this."