Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation

May 2003

May 2003 Jordanian/Iraqi Border 5.1.03 The sun is coming up over the desert, bouncing light off the cars lined up at the border. We’re near the head of the line. Our driver knew the shortcut through Jordan, and we spent last night ›ying through the desert on a rolling road past the American bases that King Abdullah has promised the world don’t exist. Off to our right we can see the road that was used for years to smuggle oil from Iraq to Jordan. We stand outside the cars, waiting for the border to open, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. There are ‹ve Suburbans in our convoy. We’ll travel together when we cross the border. The drivers are talking among themselves, scaring some of their passengers. “You see this?” says Khalid, who’s driving the truck Ernie and I are riding in. He points at his truck’s heavy aluminum grill. “I will ram them if they try to attack us. I don’t care if they have machine guns, we will not let them get in front of us.” “Machine guns?” mutters a guy from the Wall Street Journal. “Sometimes they run sheep onto the road to force us to stop,” Khalid says. “I will hit the sheep.” 10 Wall Street Journal’s face goes whiter. “Hey, Dave, tell this guy why you’re going to Baghdad.” I mention to Wall Street Journal that I’m going to open a paper in Iraq. He looks at me, confused, and I don’t think it registers. He’s shaking a bit and climbs back in his truck to sit down. Khalid has three children and makes the trip three or four times a week. He’ll be able to retire after a few months of this, if he wants. I ‹gure he wants to die about as much as I do, so when we cross the border I put my feet up and talk to Ernie, occasionally offering Khalid cigarettes from the cartons I’ve brought with me. Our convoy forms a V shape. The drivers leapfrog each other as they speed down the three-lane highway at 100, 110 miles per hour. It’s a smooth ride, and eventually I fall asleep, waking when we stop just outside Ramadi, about 100 miles from Baghdad, in the area where most of the attacks on travelers have been taking place. The U.S. Army has been receiving reports on the attacks but refuses to patrol this area carefully; journalists even stand up at press conferences to testify about being tied up and left in the desert. George W. Bush declared major combat operations over yesterday, when he landed an air force ‹ghter on the deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln, but that means little to us. I’m not sure what to expect, and Ernie, for all his experience, admits he’s not sure either. The road into Baghdad, which runs through miles of desolate moonscape, has never been entirely safe. Even when Saddam was in power, banditry was not unheard of. Iraqi tanks litter the side of the highway. Some have been ripped apart by American ‹re; the back doors of others hang open as if they had been suddenly abandoned. Buses, almost completely destroyed, haloed in broken glass, were presumably used to carry volunteer foreign ‹ghters to the front. It doesn’t look like the aftermath of a battle so much as of a series of explosions that spontaneously blew out the tanks and buses from the inside. The tanks look especially incongruous in the MAY 2003 11 groves near the Euphrates, where the machinery of war is dwarfed by ‹fty-foot date palms. Abandoned antiaircraft guns sit amid the trees or atop small hills near the highway, like museum pieces on display. Outside Ramadi we inspect a bombed-out bridge. Ernie puts on his ›ak jacket. I have none. An hour later we hit the outskirts of Baghdad, a sprawling city of mostly two-story buildings, not unlike the low-slung neighborhoods just beyond downtown Detroit. The Baghdad skyline, such as it is, is clustered along the north side of the river. Garbage is piled in the streets, some of it burning and some of it just baking in the afternoon sun, and even though Khalid has turned off the air conditioning and we’re stuck in the terrible...