Five Years By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: March 16, 2008
LONDON
FIVE years on, it seems positively surreal.
On the evening of March 19, 2003, a small group of Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of strategic targets in the Iraqi capital. We had forced a way through a bolted door at the top of an emergency staircase leading to the 21st-story roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein’s command complex across the Tigris River.
The bombing had been jump-started 16 hours earlier, when President Bush ordered two B-1 bombers to attack the Dora Farms complex in south-central Baghdad in a dawn raid intended to kill Mr. Hussein and end the war before it began. That caught everyone by surprise, including Saddam, who somehow survived. But by nightfall, the city was braced. The BBC reported B-52 bombers were taking off from a base in England in early afternoon, and we knew, from the flying time, that zero hour for Baghdad would be about 9 p.m.
At precisely that moment — not a few seconds early, nor late — the first cruise missile struck the vast, bunker-like presidential command complex in what would become, under the American occupation, the Green Zone. For 40 minutes, followed by a break, and then another 40 minutes, a fusillade of missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam Hussein’s years of murderous tyranny. In Washington, they called it “shock and awe.” In Baghdad, Iraqis yearning for their liberation from Saddam called it, simply, “the air show.”
On that hotel roof were experienced Western foreign correspondents, men and women for whom impartiality was their coda. We feared the bombing would remove the last reason for the secret police to spare us, since our Iraqi “fixers” had warned us that the only thing protecting us in those final days was the regime’s concern that harming Western reporters would speed the course to war. Demonstrating our impartiality, once the first missiles struck, thus assumed an intensely personal, as well as professional, dimension — the measure, perhaps, of whether we would survive the time it took for Saddam’s regime to finally collapse.
....(snip)....
It was not long, of course, before events in Iraq began giving everybody cause to reconsider. On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.
Looking back, it has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then. At the least, it was the first misstep in what quickly became a long chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the primary cause the Bush Administration had given for the war; the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency that began flickering within 10 days of American troops entering Baghdad; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy, at least until the troop increase last year finally began bringing the war’s toll down. .......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16jburns.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
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