J ust because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out
to get you, and someone’s definitely out to get us. Last week the Palestine hotel, home to many journalists here, was almost demolished by a particularly telegenic truck bomb. The neat mushroom cloud rose a thousand feet into the sky, shedding a geometrically near-perfect ring of falling debris about halfway up. It was terribly beautiful. Our security minders tell us that the attack was a sign that all journalists in the city are now fair game. Some of us have reacted by going into lockdown mode, retreating behind the walls of the world’s greatest fortress, Baghdad’s Green Zone, guarded by Georgian troops in American uniforms and Gurkha mercenaries hired by Global Security. The braver journalists, who still venture out into the wilds of Baghdad, slip under the radar screen by blending in with the locals. Most reporters wear Iraqi-bought clothes: marblewashed jeans, plastic flip-flops and horrible short-sleeved shirts, untucked, with a pack of Marlboro Lights in the breast pocket. We look as if we take fashion tips from Charles Saatchi.
All the roads in the Green Zone are lined with rows of identical concrete blast walls, 20 feet high and five thick, which makes every car journey like a drive through one of those video-game corridors. Most people you encounter wear bulky body armour and carry automatic weapons, just like in Doom. And the social hub of the place, known as Main Street USA, looks uncannily like a computergenerated image. Main Street nestles in a circle of blast walls and boasts a prefabricated Burger King, a Subway, a Pizza Inn and a coffee shop, where uniformed men and women sip lattes in the shade of beach umbrellas. The Pakistani cooks, imported and indentured by shady middlemen in Jordan, are lodged 16 to a room and very poorly treated, according to a recent story in the LA Times. They are invariably cheery, however, and wish you a great day as they hand over your order. There’s a souvenir stall which sells, among other things, hefty silver spoons ordered by Saddam from Christofle in Paris for the Republican Palace and emblazoned with the Baath party eagle, a bargain at $15 a pop. I have laid in a supply for future christening presents.
Like the world of Flash Gordon, the sky over the Green Zone is always full of helicopters — thundering Chinooks and Marine Sea Stallions, menacing Apache gunships and Black Hawks. My favourites are the nippy Little Bird choppers with snipers who dangle their legs out of the doors and sight their rifles on imaginary targets. But there is nothing as thrilling as flying in a Black Hawk. To avoid ground fire they fly low and fast, so low that you can see car numberplates and shirts on laundry lines billowing as you pass. I think this is what it must be like being an angel. An angel equipped with a pair of 50-calibre machineguns and a nose-cannon to visit catastrophic retribution on the unrighteous.
Before being allowed to attend the trial of Saddam Hussein, all journalists were closely questioned. In a bare steel-walled room an American woman named Randy wearing tight jeans and white trainers interrogated me at length on my past. She wanted to know my addresses for the last decade, whether I had ever declared bankruptcy or whether I had ever worked for any intelligence service. She also asked if I had ever used marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, opium, heroin, barbiturates or LSD. All of the above, I ventured. ‘I guess it was a college thing?’ Randy suggested helpfully, with a wave of her big grey mane of hair. One BBC colleague was asked, ‘Who do you think are the enemies of Iraq?’ Evidently one must be pure, ideologically and personally, before one can be allowed to witness the workings of Iraqi justice.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the new US ambassador, knows how to talk to Iraqis. Khalilzad’s recent visit to the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah caught me napping in a disused theatre used by the US Marines as their downtown headquarters. I awoke to find one of Zal’s grenade-festooned bodyguards standing guard over my cot and the man himself chatting to Fallujan bigwigs at a table a few yards away. As he listened to the local leaders’ complaints, head cocked, Zal nonchalantly toyed with a pair of Nomex gloves with the aplomb of a bored Ottoman pasha. The head of Fallujah’s city council implored Khalilzad to transfer all Fallujan boys now in Iraqi interior ministry jails into US custody. ‘They may be gone for six months, they may be gone for a year, but at least with the Americans we know we will see them again,’ the man said. Zal urged him to have confidence in the Iraqi corrections system.
Yet locals to whom we spoke trusted the Marines far more than the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces who were supposed to be keeping the peace. During the referendum Fallujans lobbied for the Americans, not the Iraqi army, to provide security for polling stations. A worrying sign. Standing up Iraqi security forces is supposed to be the US and British exit strategy — yet the Sunni heartlands evidently regard the new forces as ‘Iranian-backed’ Shiite ‘occupiers’. What will happen when the Marines leave?
Every evening the residents of downtown Fallujah are treated to a bagpipe recital by Lt Col Pat Carroll of the US Marine Corps. His nightly repertoire consists of tunes from the Old Country such as ‘Danny Boy’, as well as American patriotic airs such as the Marine Hymn. Carroll stands on a disused boxing ring in the centre of the base for his practice sessions. The noise alarms the unit’s pet turkey, which lives underneath the ring’s canvas floor and clucks furiously during the performance. The Marines had made their turkey a little joke ID card, which expires on Thanksgiving Day.
Khalilzad’s efforts to get the Iraqis to sign off on their new constitution, though ultimately successful, boded ill for the future. According to several ministers, Zal’s efforts were actually a furious round of bilateral talks with two parties at a time — Sunnis with Kurds, Kurds with Shia, Shia with Sunnis. The three sides never interacted with each other at any time. Like Dayton, which ended the Bosnian war, I observed to one senior Kurd, half-joking. He raised an eyebrow and cocked his cigar.
Ajolly Hallowe’en at the Baz Bar, the main British army watering hole in Basra — as jolly as one can get on the regulation two beers per night. Everyone is in civvies, many people wear homemade Hallowe’en costumes. One NCO has fake blood smeared all over his head, another wears a witch’s hat made from a bin liner. A group of soon-to-be demobbed Italians from Psy-Ops amuse themselves by attempting to set fire to each other’s jeans. Such levity would be inconceivable on an American base, where both civilian clothes and beer are unheard of. The Yanks do take themselves most awfully seriously.
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