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Sept. 11: Back to Baghdad

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

September 11, 2003

Baghdad, Iraq - With so much riding on the George Bush administration's effort to remake Iraq, it's been easy for me to feel sick at my stomach in the month since bombs started blowing up people on whom America must rely to make this work. The United States needs help from Arab friends (like the Jordanians killed in the bombing of their embassy), from the United Nations, from patriotic Iraqis eager to rebuild after Saddam (like the police officers who have come under repeated attack) and from ordinary people like the Shia Muslim worshippers of Najaf. Since Aug. 7, all of these groups have been attacked by bombers whose message is: "cooperate with the Americans at your peril."

The TV images of these assaults have given me the same queasy surge of vertigo that I get when my feet zip out from under me on slick ice.

So I've been eager to get back to Baghdad for the first time in four months - to see how bad it really is. Like any medium, TV pictures can mislead - and the more dramatic they are, the more potentially misleading they can be about the reality of something as complex as a country of 25 million people. Back in April, the TV drama was of American victory: a nearly bloodless fall of Baghdad, Saddam's statues smashed and Iraqis cheering in the streets. Just as the brief euphoria of that moment was misplaced, so is the despair that I'm tempted to feel at the smart, calculated and painful bombings of the past 35 days.

So what's the meaning of the bombings, the daily attacks on U.S. troops, the reports of thousands of foreign Islamic militants having entered Iraq to fight the Americans? Are they steps in our long descent into quagmire? Or is the U.S. occupation really settling Iraq into a season of building, as the administration declares?

A patient as big as Iraq has a gazillion vital signs that might show whether it's getting better or sicker. On this trip, the first sign I checked was the road into Baghdad.

In entering and leaving Iraq last spring, I joined many foreign journalists on the 600-mile road from Amman, Jordan. It's a searing ribbon of empty, black asphalt splitting a desert of brown rock and sand. The desolation is unbroken until you dip down into the damper, greener Euphrates River valley.

The road has never been safe since the war. When I drove in to Iraq 48 hours after Saddam Hussein's fall, we heard plenty of gunfire, and in the towns we passed through near Baghdad, streets were choked with looters dragging furniture, machinery - anything really - out of government facilities, some of them boiling with smoke and flame. In May, as I drove out of the country, we were warned of bandits on the road, so I helped form one of many journalists' convoys - packs of SUVs that bolted out of Baghdad at dawn and roared at a steady 80-90 mph to the Jordanian frontier.

These days, various reports - including those by Centurion, a British security firm working on behalf of a number of news organizations in Iraq - warn that the road is getting more dangerous. Bandits have blocked the highway and held up journalists' convoys at gunpoint, taking money, computers, even the SUVs. Jordanian and Iraqi drivers have been shot, some killed; and one report told of an armed guard hired by a news organization firing back in a gun battle with attackers.

Which is why 15 assorted relief workers and journalists were at the airport in Amman this morning, eager for seats in a twin-engine Beechcraft (a 1900D, if you want to look it up - it'd look nice in your driveway!). We were eager enough that, when the plane could take no more weight, three of us abandoned our luggage in the terminal. I stuffed my toothbrush and my satellite phone in my computer briefcase and pray that the rest of my luggage will arrive in two days via the road.

The Beechcraft is flown by Airserv, an outfit that provides air services for humanitarian agencies in hotspots. It's one of few planes flying civilians into Iraq these days. (Another is a twin-engine plane flown from Beirut by a Lebanese charter company called - no kidding - Flying Carpet. The Flying Carpet is grounded for repairs just now.)

Even from the air, the day's first signal about Iraq's security wasn't good. The pilots flew at 23,000 to Baghdad and put the plane right above the airport. There, they banked left. Hard. A long, turning corkscrew of a dive pressed our behinds into the seats and made it hard to lift our arms from our laps. I didn't know that quite such G-forces were allowed in a civilian plane! The maneuver was to avoid the anti-aircraft missiles that anti-U.S. guerrillas have recently fired at U.S. military aircraft here.

So a Sept. 11 trip into Baghdad isn't very reassuring on the question of whether the U.S. occupation is really bringing security to Iraq.

But there's a lot more to see.