The Story (3 page)

The black car rolled to a halt, and three stocky men in black suits scrambled out, pistols drawn. David and I raised our hands and yelled in unison, “
Sahafi! Sahafiya!
,” Arabic for “journalists,” among the first Arabic words foreign correspondents in this treacherous region learned.

The men took us to a police station in a part of Baghdad I did not know. There we were thrown into an insufferably hot, pee-stinking cell. There was no toilet, no water, no bed, and no shortage of flies. While I paced back and forth, blinking at the graffiti in Arabic on the cell's peeling walls, David spread his safari jacket out on the least filthy part of the floor and dozed off instantly. His ability to catnap through any crisis was impressive, if infuriating. “Cheer up,” he yawned an hour later, restored by his nap. “It's cheaper than the Sheraton.”

The hours passed slowly. I was desperate for a cigarette, and so was David, but my pack was in my confiscated purse. As an Iraqi guard walked by, cigarette in hand, David called out to him. “
Habibi
,” he pleaded, using the Arabic for “dear friend,” “have you got a cigarette?”

The guard, who appeared to speak no English, moved closer to the cell. He had clearly understood, as he blew a smoke ring in David's face through the bars. “What you give?” He smiled menacingly, extracting an Iraqi cigarette from his uniform's shirt pocket and waving it in front of David.

“
Ma fi lira
!
” David replied. “I h-a-v-e
no
m-o-n-e-y. You have my wallet,” he added, dramatically emptying his jeans pockets.

“What you give?” the guard repeated. David looked at me, grinning diabolically.

“Take the woman!” David offered, pointing at me—a joke utterly lost on the guard.

Only David could make me laugh at such a moment. The mystified guard walked away, shaking his head. “
Majnoon
,” he muttered: foreigners are “crazy.”

Several hours later, we were escorted to a bureaucrat's office. The garishly lit room was filled with overstuffed leather sofas, ornate, wood-carved armchairs, and plastic flowers—standard issue in Arab government offices. Seated behind a desk beneath a giant photo of—guess who?—was an officious young man in an expensive double-breasted suit and a well-practiced smile. He motioned for us to sit down. He had no mustache.

Rafik, as he called himself, had just returned from university in England. He had loved studying there, he told us, showing off his English. He was responsible for determining whether David and I were spies, he continued quite casually. Why were we at the bombing site?

We were journalists doing our jobs, David explained in a tone meant to imply that surely such a sophisticated Iraqi would appreciate what reporters do. We happened to be in the neighborhood when the missile struck.

Was there no one else with us?

David and I avoided looking at each other. If the secret police had seen the diplomat, we were in trouble. We were alone, David insisted.

Didn't we know that taking pictures of such attacks was strictly forbidden? Punishable by prison and possibly death?

“We didn't take any pictures,” I lied. He could verify that by developing the film the police had confiscated in my camera.

Rafik picked up the phone and summoned an officer. Almost twice Rafik's age, the officer groveled before his young superior. Rafik snapped an order at him. I couldn't quite decipher what he said, but the policeman looked chagrined.

Suddenly hospitable, Rafik offered us tea. A tray of sticky baklava appeared, which David and I, ravenous by now, ate quickly. An hour later, the officer returned and whispered something in Rafik's ear. From his demeanor,
I sensed that the police had developed the authorized photos I had taken of Iraqi soldiers hoisting their weapons at the front.

Rafik smiled. We were free to go, he said, dismissing us. He did not apologize for having thrown us in jail. I asked for his business card. Still convivial, he said that his cards weren't ready yet. Besides, he added, while he had enjoyed our “chat,” it would be better for all of us, especially us, if we did not meet again, or mention how we had spent our afternoon. In the future, he concluded, we should avoid bombing sites.

I did not write about our detention. Back then, the
Times
frowned upon first-person accounts by reporters about our professional or personal woes. Moreover, I had to continue working in Baghdad. Writing about the incident would have risked future visas for me and other
Times
correspondents. David and I hadn't been beaten or tortured. We had simply been locked up and denied water, food, cigarettes, and our freedom for a half day. That was hardly news “fit to print,” as the paper's motto boasted. Especially considering what would have happened to us had we been Iraqi.

During the 1991 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, I was in Saudi Arabia. I had been trapped there when the Saudis, without warning, closed their airspace in January on the eve of the American-led invasion. The
Times
began ramping up its prewar coverage in the fall of 1990, and Joe Lelyveld, then the paper's executive editor, had sent me back to the Middle East as “special Gulf correspondent” after reading
Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf
, the bestseller that Laurie Mylroie and I had written after Saddam invaded Kuwait in August. I had a license to roam freely and report on the ambivalent Arab reaction to the impending invasion of the region's most powerful Arab state.

Like many of those I was interviewing, I had mixed emotions about the impending war. On the one hand, I believed strongly that the United States and its allies had to eject Saddam from Kuwait—Iraq's “nineteenth province,” as he called it—and punish him for having plundered his oil-rich neighbor. If the world failed to react to Saddam's latest aggression, respect for the sovereignty of nation-states on which the United Nations
was based would mean nothing. At the same time, I had seen enough of war in the Middle East—the civil war in Lebanon, for instance—to know that wars are fiendishly hard to end.

I saw American diplomacy at its best under President George H. W. Bush before that war. Led by Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Bush's team overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to build an effective coalition against Iraq. Saudi Arabia's King Fahd had been persuaded to let the United States station forces on its soil—heretofore unimaginable, given the xenophobia of the kingdom's Wahhabi religious establishment. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney impressed me by flying to Riyadh armed with satellite photos showing Iraqi troops massing near the Saudi border. He convinced the king that Saddam might invade Saudi Arabia next. Only decades later would Cheney confirm why King Fahd had overruled his more cautious relatives and embraced American protection. “The Kuwaitis waited,” Cheney quoted the king as having told his timorous relatives, “and now they are living in our hotels.”
¹¹

Covering the normally reclusive kingdom during the war was thrilling. Journalist visas to Saudi Arabia had been rare during my three-year stint in Cairo. But with Saddam's forces massing near their border, the Saudis suddenly seemed delighted to host the infidel Americans.

King Fahd's review of the coalition forces was a dramatic, made-for-TV spectacular. It had begun with his visit to 1,500 American and Saudi troops assembled on a giant tarmac at Hafr al-Baten air base. The royal entourage had then raced across the desert in a fifty-car motorcade as journalists struggled to keep pace in our jeeps and vans. At King Khalid Military City, some five thousand foreign troops from over thirty coalition nations stood in formation, each battalion behind its national flag and signposts identifying it in English and Arabic. Fahd, wearing a flowing white
thobe
, a gold-embroidered, sand-colored cloak, and the traditional red-and-white-checked head scarf, had used a small footstool to hoist his enormous frame onto the floor of an open jeep. At his side was Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the beefy commander of America's ground forces. Together they drove slowly past troops assembled on the desert as far as the eye could see. Saddam had no idea what was in store for him, I thought, as I gazed at the
largest international military force ever assembled for war in the modern Middle East.

Later that day, Fahd, who rarely gave interviews, spoke to me and a small group of female reporters.
¹²
Adel al-Jubeir, then an irreverent young press aide who would later become Saudi ambassador to Washington, had suggested this unorthodox nod to American feminism to his bosses. In a tent scented by incense and roses, Fahd held forth. About seventy-two years old—Saudis are usually vague about their age—Fahd was imposing, well over six feet tall. Seated in an ornate, high-backed chair while we stood clustered around him on luxurious Arabic carpets, he answered eight questions with a ninety-minute monologue. The king obviously had no interest in mastering the art of the press conference.

Like most of the other rulers I had managed to interview for the
Times
before the war, Fahd said that he felt betrayed by Saddam. Although he had given Iraq $25 billion in aid during the 1979 Iran-Iraq war, Saddam had repaid him by sending an assassination squad to kill him after they had quarreled over money and policy. For Fahd, this war was personal.

The same was true for Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, whom I had interviewed two months earlier in Cairo. A firm supporter of the war, Mubarak disclosed his heretofore secret efforts to save Saddam from himself. His account, too, was a terrifying portrait of Arab politics: lies, backstabbing, and betrayals by Saddam and other Arab leaders who had once called Mubarak their “brother.”
¹³

Mubarak, who led the largest, historically most significant Arab nation, had bluntly warned Saddam that war was inevitable unless he withdrew. “How can Saddam make such a miscalculation of his situation?” Mubarak wondered aloud.

Two decades later, I, too, dwelt on the puzzling consistency of Saddam's behavior. The Iraqi leader had almost always miscalculated—in failing to see that his invasion of revolutionary Iran in 1980 would solidify, not topple, the new militant Islamist regime, and a decade later, in underestimating America's resolve to uphold the sovereignty of Kuwait in 1991. After 9/11, he failed to appreciate America's fury against Al Qaeda and its supporters and President Bush's determination to prevent a hostile leader
who had already used WMD against his own people from threatening to use such weapons in terror attacks against the United States, or providing them to those who would. Saddam had been the only world leader to
praise
the 9/11 attacks—America's “cowboys” were “reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity,” he declared—an insult that neither the Bushes nor Cheney would forget.
¹⁴
A bully, Saddam distinguished himself by being unwilling to retreat, even when confronted with the prospect of overwhelming retaliation.

After the 1991 Gulf War, Prince Khalid bin Sultan, the head of the non-American coalition forces, took me with him to liberated Kuwait. While he met his Kuwaiti counterparts, I interviewed Kuwaiti mothers weeping over their missing sons, visited their looted homes, and breathed the city's acrid air. I stood on a cold, deserted street in the slums of Kuwait City, taking notes about a desperate Palestinian family. Cradling a notebook on top of my elbow, I held my pen in one hand, a flashlight in the other. There was still no electricity. Because Saddam had set Kuwait's oil fields on fire, the air was black from burning oil; it was impossible to write or even navigate the streets of the capital without a flashlight. Noon felt like midnight. Yet even darker was the evidence, everywhere, of the torture that the Kuwaitis had endured at the hands of Saddam's forces.

Prince Khalid had warned me that the allied victory might not mean the end of Saddam, then an unconventional view. By the end of February, the coalition's seven hundred thousand troops had crushed Iraq's exhausted, poorly supplied forces—the world's fourth largest army. Kuwait had been liberated in four days. Most Iraqi soldiers had surrendered or retreated to Iraq. Though Khalid and others told me that the Saudis had wanted the war to continue, Bush had declared a cease-fire when Iraq indicated it would honor the coalition's demands. One hundred twenty-five American soldiers had died; another twenty-one were missing in action. The “hundred-hour war” was hailed as a triumph for America and its European and Arab allies.

Years later, several officials who had overseen the war, Vice President Cheney among them, would regret not having forced Saddam from power. In his memoir and an interview, Cheney lamented having agreed to let
Saddam's armed helicopters overfly Iraq. I had reported the consensus view among Arab and American intelligence analysts: such concessions to Iraqi dignity mattered little, as Saddam's regime would soon fall. No ruler could survive such a humiliating blow. Once again, the intelligence community would underestimate Saddam. And so would I.

In early 1993 I returned to northern Iraq after being shown samples of still-secret Iraqi documents that Kanan Makiya had helped smuggle out of Iraq with the help of US diplomats, the Iraqi opposition, and the US Air Force.
¹⁵
At an archives facility in Maryland, researchers from Middle East Watch, a private human rights group, and the US government's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—groups that rarely worked together—collated, scanned, and analyzed more than four million pages of Iraqi files, proof of Saddam's genocide against Iraq's Kurds. The decade-long slaughter and repression of Kurdish Iraqis had reached its zenith between March and August 1988, but the campaign, dubbed Anfal, or “booty,” had never before been substantiated by official Iraqi records.

Like the files of the Stasi, the East German intelligence agency that had trained Iraq's security police, the material described in chilling bureaucratese the “liquidations,” “expulsions,” and “transfers” of Kurdish victims, who were almost invariably referred to as “saboteurs,” “criminals,” “traitors,” and “human cargo.” The files included routine vacation requests, payroll records of mercenaries and informants, intercepted letters and postcards, and so on—but also page upon page of authorizations of “purifications,” “liquidations,” and other euphemisms for mass murder.