- It was like a door slamming deep beneath the surface
of the earth; a pulsating, minute-long roar of sound that brought President
George Bush's supposed crusade against "terrorism" to Baghdad
last night.
-
- There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the
Baghdad air defences ö the Second World War-era firepower of old Soviet
anti-aircraft guns ö and then a series of tremendous vibrations that
had the ground shaking under our feet. Bubbles of fire tore into the sky
around the Iraqi capital, dark red at the base, golden at the top.
-
- Saddam Hussein, of course, has vowed to fight to the
end but in Baghdad last night, there was a truly Valhalla quality about
the violence. Within minutes, looking out across the Tigris river I could
see pin-pricks of fire as bombs and cruise missiles exploded on to Iraq's
military and communications centres and, no doubt, upon the innocent as
well.
-
- The first of the latter, a taxi driver, was blown to
pieces in the first American raid on Baghdad yesterday morning. No one
here doubted that the dead would include civilians. Tony Blair said just
that in the Commons debate this week but I wondered, listening to this
storm of fire across Baghdad last night, if he has any conception of what
it looks like, what it feels like, or of the fear of those innocent Iraqis
who are, as I write this, cowering in their homes and basements.
-
- Not many hours ago, I talked to an old Shia Muslim lady
in a poor area of Baghdad. She was dressed in traditional black with a
white veil over her head. I pressed her over and over again as to what
she felt. In the end, she just said: "I am afraid."
-
- That this is the start of something that will change
the face of the Middle East is in little doubt; that it will be successful
in the long term is quite another matter.
-
- The sheer violence of it, the howl of air raid sirens
and the air-cutting fall of the missiles carried its own political message;
not just to President Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the super-power,
those explosions said last night. This is how we do business. This is how
we take our revenge for 11 September.
-
- Not even George Bush made any pretence in the last days
of peace to link Iraq with those international crimes against humanity
in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. But some of the fire that you
could see bubbling up through the darkness around Baghdad last night did
remind me of other flames, those which consumed the World Trade Centre.
In a strange way, the Americans were ö without the permission of the
United Nations, with most of the world against them ö acting out their
rage with an eerily fiery consummation.
-
- Iraq cannot withstand this for long. President Saddam
may claim, as he does, that his soldiers can defeat technology with courage.
I doubt it. For what fell upon Iraq last night - and I witnessed just an
infinitely small part of this festival of violence - was as militarily
awesome as it was politically terrifying. The crowds outside my hotel stood
and stared into the sky at the flashing anti-aircraft bursts, awed by their
power.
-
- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=389208
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