- Saddam's main presidential palace, a great rampart of
a building 20 storeys high, simply exploded in front of me - a cauldron
of fire, a 100ft sheet of flame and a sound that had my ears singing for
an hour after. The entire, massively buttressed edifice shuddered under
the impact. Then four more cruise missiles came in.
-
- It is the heaviest bombing Baghdad has suffered in more
than 20 years of war. All across the city last night, massive explosions
shook the ground. To my right, the Ministry of Armaments Procurement -
a long colonnaded building looking much like the façade of the Pentagon
- coughed fire as five missiles crashed into the concrete.
-
- In an operation officially intended to create "shock
and awe'', shock was hardly the word for it. The few Iraqis in the streets
around me - no friends of Saddam I would suspect - cursed under their breath.
-
- >From high-rise buildings, shops and homes came the
thunder of crashing glass as the shock waves swept across the Tigris river
in both directions. Minute after minute the missiles came in. Many Iraqis
had watched - as I had - television film of those ominous B-52 bombers
taking off from Britain only six hours earlier. Like me, they had noted
the time, added three hours for Iraqi time in front of London and guessed
that, at around 9pm, the terror would begin. The B-52s, almost certainly
firing from outside Iraqi airspace, were dead on time.
-
- Police cars drove at speed through the streets, their
loudspeakers ordering pedestrians to take shelter or hide under cover of
tall buildings. Much good did it do. Crouching next to a block of shops
on the opposite side of the river, I narrowly missed the shower of glass
that came cascading down from the upper windows as the shock waves slammed
into them.
-
- Along the streets a few Iraqis could be seen staring
from balconies, shards of broken glass around them. Each time one of the
great golden bubbles of fire burst across the city, they ducked inside
before the blast wave reached them. At one point, as I stood beneath the
trees on the corniche, a wave of cruise missiles passed low overhead, the
shriek of their passage almost as devastating as the explosions that were
- to follow.
-
- How, I ask myself, does one describe this outside the
language of a military report, the definition of the colour, the decibels
of the explosions? When the cruise missiles came in it sounded as if someone
was ripping to pieces huge curtains of silk in the sky and the blast waves
became a kind of frightening counterpoint to the flames.
-
- There is something anarchic about all human beings, about
their reaction to violence. The Iraqis around me stood and watched, as
I did, at huge tongues of flame bursting from the upper stories of Saddam's
palace, reaching high into the sky. Strangely, the electricity grid continued
to operate and around us the traffic lights continued to move between red
and green. Billboards moved in the breeze of the shock waves and floodlights
continued to blaze on public buildings. Above us we could see the massive
curtains of smoke beginning to move over Baghdad, white from the explosions,
black from the burning targets.
-
- How could one resist it? How could the Iraqis ever believe
with their broken technology, their debilitating 12 years of sanctions,
that they could defeat the computers of these missiles and of these aircraft?
It was the same old story: irresistible, unquestionable power.
-
- Well yes, one could say, could one attack a more appropriate
regime? But that is not quite the point. For the message of last night's
raid was the same as that of Thursday's raid, that of all the raids in
the hours to come: that the United States must be obeyed. That the EU,
UN, Nato - nothing - must stand in its way. Indeed can stand in its way.
-
- No doubt this morning the Iraqi Minister of Information
will address us all again and insist that Iraq will prevail. We shall see.
But many Iraqis are now asking an obvious question: how many days? Not
because they want the Americans or the British in Baghdad, though they
may profoundly wish it. But because they want this violence to end: which,
when you think of it, is exactly why these raids took place.
-
- Reports were coming in last night of civilians killed
in the raids - which, given the intensity of the cruise missile attacks,
is not surprising. Another target turned out to be the vast Rashid military
barracks, perhaps the largest in Iraq.
-
- But the symbolic centre of this raid was clearly intended
to be Saddam's main palace, with its villas, fountains, porticos and gardens.
And, sure enough, the flames licking across the façade of the palace
last night looked very much like a funeral pyre.
-
-
- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=389497
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