Robert Fisk: Iraq, One Year On.

[reprehensor]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5150

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.

more at link.

[burrowowl]

1. Thanks for the link

Fisk is always a good read.

[reprehensor]

2. :)

My pleasure. It's a heart-wrenching read, though.

[enough]

3. "Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?"

snip>

What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to ask. Then a new myth was created. The Iraqi army had melted away, abandoned Baghdad, changed into jeans and T-shirts and slunk off in cowardly disgrace. Baghdad was no Stalingrad. Yet that was to alter, dangerously, the narrative of Baghdad's last days. There was a fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank of the Tigris where Saddam's guerrillas fought off an American tank column for 36 hours, the US tanks spraying shellfire down a motorway until every vehicle - military and civilian - was a smouldering wreck. I walked the highway as the last shots were still being fired by snipers, peering into cars packed with the blackened corpses of men, women, children. Carpets and blankets had been thrown over several piles of the dead. In the back of one car lay a young, naked woman, her perfect features blackened by fire, her husband or father still sitting at the steering wheel, his legs severed below the knees. Sure, the Iraqi military had mixed themselves up amid the civilians; so in the end the Americans had fired at all of them. It was a massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?

What do we remember most now about those few terrible weeks a year ago? In war, all day you try to stay alive and all night you lie awake because the roar and explosion of aircraft and bombs are too loud for sleep. And then you have to stay awake and alive all next day. Is it any surprise that there comes a moment - when a man holds out to you what you think is half a loaf of bread and which turns out to be half a baby - that anger is the only integrity left? Cluster bombs are our creation. And I recall with a kind of raw amazement how, as American gunfire was swishing across the Tigris, I somehow reached the emergency room of Baghdad's biggest hospital and had to slosh through lakes of blood amid beds of screaming men, one of whom was on fire, another shrieking for his mother. Upstairs was a man on a soaked hospital trolley with a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor.

more>

[swinney]

4. Robert Fisk speaks pay attention

He is the Walter Cronkite of Europe.