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<H1><B><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=6><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 24pt">Robert Fisk: In vain, I looked for signs of the
storm to come. Baghdad is a city sleepwalking to war
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></H1>
<P class=padnone><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">18 March 2003 <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><!-- Indy:Include story# 388226 --><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">For Baghdad, it is night number
1,001, the very last few hours of fantasy. As UN inspectors prepared to
leave the city in the early hours of this morning, Saddam Hussein has
appointed his own son, Qusay, to lead the defence of the city of the
Caliphs against the American invasion. Yet at the Armed Forces club
yesterday, I found the defenders playing football. Iraqi television
prepares Baghdad people for the bombardment to come with music from the
Hollywood film, <I><SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Gladiator</SPAN></I>.
But the Iraqis went on with their work of disarming the soon-to-be invaded
nation, observing the destruction of two more Al-Samoud
missiles.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">The
UN inspectors, only hours from packing, even turned up to observe this
very last bit of the disarmament which the Americans had so fervently
demanded and in which they have now totally lost interest. With the
inspectors gone, there is nothing to stop the Anglo-American air forces
commencing their bombardment of the cities of
Iraq.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">So is
Baghdad to be Stalingrad, as Saddam tells us? It doesn't feel like it. The
roads are open, checkpoints often unmanned, the city's soldiery dragging
on cigarettes outside the United Nations headquarters. From the banks of
the Tigris river - a muddy, warm sewage-swamped version of Stalingrad's
Volga - I watched yesterday evening the fishermen casting their lines for
the fish that Baghdadis eat after sunset. The Security Council resolution
withdrawn? Tony Blair calls an emergency meeting of the Cabinet? George
Bush to address the American people? Baghdad, it seems, is sleep-walking
its way into history.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">How
come I found a queue of Iraqis waiting outside the Sindbad cinema in
Saadun Street last night, queuing for that ancient Egyptian clunker
<I><SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Private Lives</SPAN></I>, its posters
displaying the ample size of its heroine? Talk to any Iraqi and they will
tell you they adore - more than adore - Saddam. But they would, wouldn't
they? And we've heard that for well over two decades. True, the local
Baathist papers regale us with peace marches and peace protests around the
world - as if Mr Bush is going to call back his quarter of a million men
because Jordanians burnt American flags on
Sunday.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">The
detachment is quite extraordinary, as if we are breathing here in Baghdad
a different kind of air, as if we exist on a planet quite removed from the
B-52s and Stealth bombers and cruise missiles and Mother of All Bombs,
which will soon make the earth tremble beneath our feet. The very history
and culture of the Arab world is about to be visited by a Western-made
earthquake, the likes of which has never been
seen.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">Even
the aftermath of the Second World War and the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire will be made redundant in the coming hours. Yet on the banks of the
Tigris stands a massive statue, bound in sacking and gauze, a monolith of
epic proportions, waiting for the unveiling of another bronze likeness of
Saddam Hussein.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">In
the fumes of Baghdad's traffic yesterday, among its old yellow taxis,
brand new red double-decker buses and trucks, I searched for signs of the
tempest to come. There were a few. Queues of cars outside gas stations,
filling up for the last time, a clutch of antique shops closing down, a
gang of workers were moving the computers from a ministry, just as the
Serbs did before Nato visited Belgrade in the spring of 1999. Didn't the
Iraqis know what was about to happen? Did
Saddam?<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">I
could only be reminded of that remarkable and very recent account by a
former Cuban ambassador who was part of a 1990 delegation sent by Fidel
Castro to persuade President Saddam of the overwhelming American firepower
that would be sent against him if he did not withdraw from Kuwait. "I've
received several reports like that," President Saddam replied. "It's our
ambassador to the UN who sends them to me and most of the time, they
finish down there." And here Saddam gestured to a marble rubbish bin on
the floor.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">Is
the marble bin still being filled with similar reports? Yesterday, Iraqi
state television told us yet again that President Saddam said, personally,
that although Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the past, they no
longer existed today. It was America's own weapons of mass destruction and
its sponsorship of Israel that threatened the
world.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">All
day, a UN C-130 aircraft baked on the tarmac at Saddam International
airport - there are two more UN transport aircraft in Cyprus - ready to
take the 140 inspectors out of Iraq before Mr Bush and Mr Blair launch
their blitz. No one questions the obvious: why did the inspectors bother
to come? If the British, as the Attorney General claimed, didn't need UN
Security Council resolution 1441 to wage war because they were justified
under earlier resolutions, why on earth did they vote for it? Because they
hoped President Saddam would refuse to accept them back or, as President
Saddam put it rather neatly yesterday, "the inspectors came to find
nothing". This kind of argument claims no audience in Baghdad. The
cynicism with which Iraqis treat the UN - and the American and British
misuse of the UN - may only be paralleled by another kind of cynicism
whose central figure is that one so ostentatiously adored in the streets
of the city on the Tigris.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">A
group of foreign "peace activists" stood hand-in-hand along the parapet of
Baghdad's longest bridge, old men and young American Muslims and a
Buddhist in a prayer shawl, smiling at the passing traffic, largely
ignored by Iraqi motorists. It was as if Iraqis were less caught up in
this demonstration than the foreigners, as if their years of suffering had
left them complacent to the terrible reality about to fall upon
them.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">Then
comes more news from the Revolutionary Command Council. Its latest decree
- signed, of course, by its chairman, Saddam Hussein - announces the
appointment of General Ali Hassan al-Majid as commander of Iraq's southern
zone, which includes Basra, America's first target for invasion. General
Ali Hassan is known as Chemical Ali for his gas attack on the Kurds of
Halabja. What does this portend for the Americans? Or the Iraqis? Or is
this now an honorary title for a force that will be rolled over by the
lead American tanks?<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">So I
went at dusk last night to the great eggshell monument which President
Saddam erected to the half-million Iraqi dead of his 1980-88 war against
Iraq, whose cabinet basements are lined with the names of every lost
Iraqi, inscribed in marble. "Hope comes from life and brings fire to the
heart," one of the lines from an Arabic poem says round the base. But the
couples sitting on the grass beside the monument had not come to remember
loved ones. They were courting students whose only political comment -
aware of that "minder" hovering over my shoulder - was that "we have
endured war so many times, we are used to
it".<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">So I
am left with an heretical thought. Might Baghdad ultimately become an open
city, its defenders moved north to protect Saddam's heartland, the
capital's people left to discover the joys and betrayals of an American
occupation on their own? I suppose it all depends on the next few hours
and days, on how many civilians the Americans and the British manage to
kill in their supposedly moral war. Will Iraqis have to construct another
monument to the dead? Or will we?
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