BAGHDAD, 8 April 2003 — The last days of Baghdad. The Last Days of Saddam. Back in the 1950s, Hollywood produced films in which every historical scene would be followed by the sudden appearance of a fictional newspaper with an appropriate headline. Pictures of Marines storming ashore in the Pacific would be followed by the headline “Back to Bataan” or “MacArthur Returns.” Seeing the US Marines for the first time yesterday morning, as they jumped from their personnel carriers and threw themselves in the dust — and the sight of Iraqi soldiers running for their lives — provoked a cluster of new headlines in my imagination. “By the Waters of Babylon...” might apply to the Iraqis, but the geographical location would be 80 miles out.
And it’s easy, in what more and more Iraqis are coming to regard as “the last days”, to understand the cruel intellectual beauty of collapse. There’s the Iraqi official I’ve known for years who has always enthusiastically supported the Baath Party line but who suddenly suggested to me yesterday that “negative events” may soon take place in Baghdad. Then there’s that extraordinary videotape of Saddam embracing his Baathist militiamen in the streets of Baghdad last Friday — not entirely unlike a European leader who pats a small Volksturm member on the cheek in his last known picture. Needless to say, the Pentagon black propagandists started their usual orchestra. It was Saddam’s double, it was filmed weeks ago... But it was all real. I’ve met two Iraqis who saw Saddam on Friday with their own eyes — complete with mole on the left side of his face — and the districts he visited were easily identifiable. For readers who know the city, Saddam was parading himself in Adamiya, Sarafiyeh, Al-Awi, Mansour, the Haifa and Iskan districts.
That well-known European despot to whom I just referred spent his last hours asking for news of Wenck’s Wehrmacht rescue division. Saddam is more literary. There have been his daily messages to the people. In the latest, he excused himself for making Baghdad the cornerstone of Iraq’s defense, pointing out that he had done so only because it was the “sacred heart” of the country — not, of course, because he happened to be here.
In a far more amusing peroration — notable for its deep sense of cynicism — Saddam chose to write a long letter to Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who is now cooperating with the regime’s American enemies.
“For a long time we’ve been watching this so-called rapprochement between you and the United States, Zionism and others,” Saddam wrote in the letter, published four days later when the United States Army was at the gates of Baghdad. “I was saying to myself only the other day that this Jalal — well known for his political maneuvers and tactics — thinks it’s in his interest to do these things. It’s so familiar to us — we know so well the personality of Talal...but it’s my principled duty to bring to your attention that if you continue in this way — to help the US forces and open a front in northern Iraq and thus reduce American casualties — it will only lead to catastrophe...”
I have to record, however, that Saddam is not the only one to reveal a dark sense of humor in these critical hours. Al-Qadissiyah newspaper, in what may well prove to be one of its last editions, published a story from Najaf which recorded how the late Um Ali, an elderly lady in the city, was in a hearse on her way to the city’s cemetery when an American air attack struck the car in which her remains were being carried. With a panache worthy of a British tabloid, the enterprising editor headlined his story: “Um Ali Martyred Twice”.
The last days have also witnessed the battle of the Ayataollahs as the Pentagon and the Iraqi government have tried to interpret and reinterpret the greatest personalities in the land — those, that is, who have survived the mysterious murders, hangings and car accidents of the past two decades. Ayatollah Al-Osmar Ali Assistani, for example, was first claimed by the United States to have called upon his Shiite flock not to fight the American occupation troops. Now the good Ayatollah claims he was misquoted. He never urged his people to collaborate and wants them to fight against the West. Or so say those last editions of the Baghdad press.
Now Sheikh Abdul Karim Mohamed Biara Al-Mudaress has produced a fatwa, which emphasizes the importance of Iraqi martyrdom in the battle against the Americans. Far from a few paragraphs in government newspapers, Al-Mudaress has been rewarded with a glossy brochure with the entire text of his juridical opinion printed opposite a color photograph of the white-bearded and bespectacled expert in Islamic jurisprudence, complete with his hand-written signature.
Yet another Iraqi Shiite prelate, Sayed Hussein Sayed Ismael Al-Sadr, has now demanded that true believers must fight the “devils, criminals, Zionists and Crusaders.” Since Saddam had developed the habit of ridding himself of meddlesome preachers, the brochure suggests that Al-Mudaress and Al-Sadr have nothing to fear from the supreme leader — as long as the supreme leader lives.
Meanwhile the Palestinians — who have rightly been emphasizing the intimate connection between America’s invasion of Iraq and Ariel Sharon’s dispossession of their people in the West Bank and Gaza — have finally been provided with a physical connection between the two. For just three days ago, an American aircraft obligingly dropped a set of fragmentation bombs over the small Baghdad suburb of Al-Baladia, where live 10,000 Palestinian civilians — almost all of them survivors or descendants of those who fled Palestine in 1948.
Sure enough, when I arrived at their crumbling hovels at the weekend, there were the usual pieces of American weaponry — many of them hunks of metal still live munitions, on the roofs, balconies and front yards, small black tubes attached to tapes; the children were held back by women in traditional Palestinian clothes, a middle-aged man holding up a coat that dripped blood. Its owner was looking for his own children when the bombs cascaded down on Al-Baladia. It was the usual story; no, there was no military target; no, there were no army trucks at the back of the streets. But there were some undamaged military petrol tankers dug into a field of dirt a quarter of a mile away and one bomb had exploded on the main highway between the vehicles and Al-Baladia.
Of course, it was the Palestinians who paid the price and they didn’t spend much time pondering the message. “Sharon kills our people in Palestine so George Bush tries to help him by killing us here,” Taher Al-Mahdi Ijzim said. His family came from Haifa 55 years ago. “Do you think that we don’t know what this means? Seven of our people are wounded here by the Americans in exactly the same way as our people in Palestine are wounded and killed by the Israelis. Thank you, Mr. Bush. We understand.”