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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1952, a look at Iraq as it was half a century ago
A turab, an ill wind that makes the air clammy-hot and full of dust, swept through Baghdad on the sixth of March, signalling the beginning of spring, with summer soon to follow. The sky turned a luminescent, murky brown, and plastic bags and other refuse blew about. My driver, Sabah, who is usually cheerful, became dour and languid and complained of a headache and fever. He wanted to go to the hammam, the Turkish baths, to relax, but it was women-only day, and Sabah cursed and popped some Panadol painkillers instead. That afternoon, my government minder, a listless young man named Khalid, said that he wanted to visit his family in Karbala, a couple of hours away. He would be back the next morning, he promised, muttering enigmatically about making arrangements before the war came. After Khalid left, Sabah said that he was unlikely to return, and he did not. Khalid had asked me when I thought the Americans would invade. He said he believed that they would do it on March 14th, a Shia day of mourning, commemorating the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson at the Battle of Karbala in the year 680. "I think they will do this on purpose, as an insult to Muslims,"he said. When I told Khalid that I thought the American war planners had other things to consider--the weather, military strategy, political and diplomatic negotiations--he seemed unconvinced.
Whether or not the turab had anything to do with it, March 6th was the day that many Iraqis concluded that war was, after all, inevitable. The Russians, with perhaps the most sizable remaining contingent of foreign diplomats, evacuated most of their embassy staff, and the Japanese announced that they were departing the next morning. Pretty much everyone else, except for about three hundred Western journalists, was already gone. Even some of the so-called human shields, a motley contingent of European, Australian, American, and Turkish antiwar and environmental activists who had pitched up a fortnight earlier, ready to sacrifice themselves, had succumbed to nerves and squabbling and begun to withdraw. Medical workers reported, sotto voce, that anti-aircraft guns were being installed on the roofs of hospitals. At the Triumph Leader Museum, which houses a collection of gifts given to Saddam Hussein over the years, curators had removed things from the display cases and squirrelled them away for safekeeping, although it was doubtful how safe anything would be anywhere in Baghdad once the bombs began to fall. I went to the museum to take another look at the gun that had been used in 1920 to assassinate Colonel Gerard Leachman, a British officer who spent the First World War in the deserts of what was then Mesopotamia, leading Bedouins in skirmishes against the Ottoman Turks. By 1920, after the League of Nations gave the British a "mandate"to govern what was now referred to as Iraq, Leachman was trying to subdue restive Arab tribesmen. He advocated "wholesale slaughter"as the only really effective method, and in present-day Iraq his assassin, Sheikh Dhari, is remembered as a hero and a patriot. The Sheikh's descendants gave his gun to Saddam as a birthday present a few years ago.
The March 6th issue of the Iraq Daily, a badly translated English-language newspaper produced by the Ministry of Information, carried the usual stories giving the government's spin on events, including an editorial with the headline "the u.s. army generals dream of the british vanished empire."The editorialist referred to Britain's calamitous twentieth-century military adventures in Iraq and suggested that the Americans would share a similar fate: "We have prepared for you a nice and comfortable grave next to your inferior Stanley Maude”--the British general who captured Baghdad from the Ottomans in 1917 and died there while attempting to impose some kind of order on Mesopotamia's Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Jews, and...
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