Iraq, through the eyes of a veteran NBC reporter

It was through this romantic haze that I saw Saddam, who I believe also fancied himself a natural heir to Iraq’s grandiose rulers. He rebuilt the ruins of Babylon and stamped his initials on every brick. He commissioned a Koran handwritten in his own blood. Saddam’s word was law. If you crossed him you died. If you pleased him you were rewarded with cars and villas. It was simple. Saddam pardoned prisoners on his birthday, and sentenced men and women to hang for insulting him. Blasphemy — publicly defaming God or the Muslim Prophet Mohammed — was punishable by five years in prison. Defaming Saddam carried a death sentence. Iraqis said of their president, “If you raised your head, he cut it off.”

Like his forebears, and many Iraqis today, Saddam was also an ardent believer in fortune-tellers, oracles, and mystics. In August 2003, I met a jeweler from Baghdad’s small Mandaean community, a dwindling religious order that follows John the Baptist. He sold Saddam polished stones to protect him from evil. He told me Saddam also took the advice of a twelve-year-old clairvoyant boy who allegedly knew if a man was lying. After I drank several tiny, hourglass-shaped cups of strong, sweet tea in the jeweler’s shop, which was filled with silver rings with red and green stones, I bought a lucky charm, a folded parchment inscribed with a handwritten Mandaean prayer wrapped in a stag’s scrotum. I kept it in my shirt pocket for a year until I lost it. Fingers crossed.

Before the war there were giant photographs of Saddam on government buildings carrying bowls of rice (Saddam the Provider), brandishing rocket-propelled grenades (Saddam the Protector), eating bread with poor villagers (Saddam the Man of the People), and surrounded by adoring schoolchildren (Saddam the Father). All that was missing to complete the image was Saddam dressed in a caliph’s robes and turban.

The caliph was now in American hands. Iraqis couldn’t believe it.

This should have been a turning point. U.S. troops were still mostly greeted as liberators in December 2003. Despite much of the postwar rewriting of history, U.S. troops were welcomed when they first arrived. I saw Iraqis give flowers and bottles of whiskey to American soldiers in Baghdad in April 2003.

I ended my book A Fist in the Hornet’s Nest with Saddam’s capture. At the time I wrote that I didn’t understand why the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq. No one I spoke to in the Middle East was focused on Iraq in 2003. People in the region worried about Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Iraq was a nonissue. Nonetheless, I wrote that I supported the invasion, believing it had the potential to be the start of a radical plan to redesign and improve the modern Middle East, unstable since it was cobbled together by self-serving European powers from the debris of the Ottoman Empire defeated in World War I. But by late 2003, I was having serious doubts that creating a stable, democratic Middle East was possible — or being seriously pursued. President Bush invaded Iraq after having declared support for an independent Palestinian state. He called it Palestine, the first U.S. president to use the term. But then the Bush administration dropped diplomacy altogether.

Copyright © 2008 by Richard Engel

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