- SADDAM HUSSEIN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (8:00 AM) -- So where are the Americans? I prowled the empty
departure lounges, mooched through the abandoned customs department, chatted
to the seven armed militia guards, met the airport director and stood beside
the runways where two dust-covered Iraqi Airways passenger jets -- an old
727 and an even more elderly Antonov -- stood forlornly on the runway not
far from an equally decrepit military helicopter.
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- And all I could hear was the distant whisper of high-flying
jets and the chatter of the flocks of birds which have nested near the
airport car park on this, the first day of real summer in Baghdad.
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- Only three hours earlier, the BBC had reported claims
that forward units of an American mechanised infantry division were less
than 16km west of Baghdad -- and that some US troops had taken up positions
on the very edge of the international airport.
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- But I was 27km west of the city. And there were no Americans,
no armour, not a soul around the runways of the airport whose namesake,
in poster form, sat nonchalantly in the arrivals lounge in a business suit,
cigar in hand. Even more astonishingly, there was no sign of the 12,000
Republican Guards whom the US division expected to fight.
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- Indeed, Saddam Hussein International Airport looked as
if it was enduring an industrial strike (let us not conceive of such an
event in Saddam's Iraq) rather than an imminent takeover by the world's
only superpower.
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- Was it true, the Iraqi minister of information was asked
at his daily 2pm press conference (11pm NZT) - a routine institution of
usually deadly tedium - that the Americans were at the airport?
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- "Rubbish!" he shouted. "Lies! Go and look
for yourself."
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- So we did.
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- And, alas for the Anglo-American spokesmen in Doha and
the US officer quoted on the BBC, the Iraqi minister was right and the
Americans were wrong. But it's a good idea to take these things, if not
with a pinch of salt, then at least with the knowledge that there are always
two reasons for every decision taken in this violent, ruthless land.
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- Sure, the Americans had been caught lying again - as
they were about the "securing" of Nasiriyah more than a week
ago - but was that the only reason journalists were permitted to visit
Baghdad airport? We saw no Republican Guards - just as the Americans have
themselves somehow failed to discover the 12,000 Republican Guards supposedly
facing them.
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- Indeed, what I found most extraordinary was that there
appeared to be absolutely no attempt to block the road into Baghdad from
the airport.
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- Save for a few soldiers on the streets and a police squad
car, you might have thought this a mildly warm holiday afternoon.
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- Was their some kind of trap about to be sprung? Were
the Americans being lured into the gentle, palm-fringed highway into town
because, unknown to all of us, there was in fact some real armour hidden
away in the great fields on the western banks of the Tigris?
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- All day, I had asked myself about the supposed American
assault-to-come on Baghdad.
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- Where were the panicking crowds? Where were the food
queues? Where were the empty streets? True, the motorway to the airport
was a spooky, lonely journey.
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- But the centre of Baghdad was livelier than for many
days.
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- The city authorities have put more of their Chinese double-decker
buses back on the streets - normal service, as they say, has been resumed
- and the railway company claimed its trains were still leaving for northern
Iraq.
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- At lunchtime, I dropped into the Furud Takeaway for my
daily fix of chicken "shish-taouk", tomatoes and green beans.
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- It was packed with Shia families, the ladies in black
chadors, the men largely bearded, chomping through giant "mezzes"
of "hoummus" and "tabouleh" and lamb and rice.
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- The television was showing an Iranian channel, a musical
in the Persian language. Iranian TV has two Arabic channels whose signal
can be picked up without a satellite dish - and many Baghdadis trust their
news service more than that of Kuwaiti or Saudi television.
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- Near the Rafidiyeh Bridge, in a canyon of traffic, I
caught sight of a middle-aged man staring at the great monument to Saddam's
"victory" in the 1980-88 war with Iran.
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- At the base of a column, iron, helmeted soldiers stood
behind iron sandbags, firing an iron machine-gun at their Persian enemies,
an iron soldier throwing an iron grenade in the same direction.
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- There is this monument to military victory in Baghdad,
a monument to the "martyrs" of that victory - perhaps half a
million of them - and a monument to the unknown soldier of that same war.
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- Ex-prisoners asked for a monument to their suffering
- in eight years, there were 60,000 of them - but their request was officially
turned down.
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- Was that to emphasise the humiliation of surrender? Is
this a lesson for the young Iraqi soldiers of today whose combat troops
I saw on the road south of Baghdad on Wednesday, jumping from their trucks
in steel helmets and flak jackets? Each night, I can hear the drumbeat
of explosions and cluster bombs west of the city.
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- Who is dying there? The Chief of Staff of the Republican
Guards' Baghdad Division -- the same division whom the Americans are supposedly
incinerating - announces that he has suffered only 17 dead and 35 wounded.
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- Every morning, the newspaper Qaddisiyeh carries a detailed
battle report from the front lines - always supposing there is a front
line - which includes unit numbers and brigades.
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- On Wednesday, for example, the newspaper informed its
readers that the Americans failed to cut the Kut to Baghdad highway, that
Iraqi forces destroyed 14 US tanks in the province of Diwaniyeh, that the
704th, 424th and 504th Brigades of the Iraqi army's 3rd Army Corps prevented
a US thrust near Suq el-Shuqh.
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- And so on and so forth.
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- Whether this represents anything like the battles which
the Iraqis believe they are fighting will await the inquiries of historians.
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- Certainly, no one here takes the total of tanks and planes
destroyed too seriously, although the Iraqis inevitably popped up yesterday
to "confirm" the American admission of an F-18 aircraft shot
down over the country.
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- Thus another long day, peppered with the rumble of faraway
detonations, closed at Baghdad airport last night, dusk falling over the
grimy terminals with their painted exhortations of "Down, Down America"
and the airport's director, Wafa Abdullah Jabbouri, announcing that "there
is no-one at the airport, you can see it's completely safe, even the workers
still turn up each day." No doubt they do.
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- And while there's a large complex of buildings blown
to pieces by missiles a mile away and the airport radar system is out of
action after an early raid by American or British jets, Mr. Jabbouri appeared
to be correct.
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- Had the Americans found themselves miles away on the
edge of the old RAF airbase at Habbaniyeh, one wondered, and confused it
with the airport outside Baghdad? Had they sent a patrol up to the far
side of the Saddam airport for a few minutes, just to say they'd been there?
Back in 1941, a German patrol briefly captured the last tram-stop on the
line west of Moscow, collecting the discarded passenger tickets as souvenirs
- and then got no farther.
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- But few here believe the Americans cannot bash their
way into Baghdad if they really want to. After all, Napoleon got to Moscow
in the end.
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- I guess it's the same old question. The Russians could
hold Stalingrad because they loved Russia as much as they feared Marshal
Stalin.
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- Does that equation of patriotism and dictatorship apply
to the Iraqis? Messers Bush and Blair must hope it does not.
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- Ms. Jean Isachenko, jeani@primus.ca
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