A firm stand on shaky ground

The old man is roughly the same age as modern Iraq - "over 80," he said.

Although now a little stooped, he has lived long enough to witness what will likely be another war and another change of government. Perhaps nothing he has seen, though, will be quite as dramatic as the war the United States launched this morning, as explosions rocked Baghdad, air raid sirens blared and jets roared overhead.

"I was a police detective in the days of the last king," said the old man, whose name and other details cannot be published for fear that he could be identified by the still all-powerful Iraqi authorities. "In those days Iraq was peaceful."

Not these days. Like the millions of other Baghdadis who remain in the city, the old man stayed in his yellow-brick house last night and waited for the sky to light up and the walls to shake as they did in 1991. Most of his family has fled the city, seeking refuge with relatives in the countryside outside the capital, but the old man has seen too much in his life to be bothered with running away. He spoke before the assault started. A closet monarchist to this day, the old man shares something with the present Iraqi government: stubbornness.

"He refuses to leave," said his grown-up son, who yesterday gave up trying to persuade his father to move to a safer place and was staying with him.

From old men quietly reaching the end of their natural days to younger men facing a possibly violent end to theirs, many Iraqis with sometimes different motivations stood their ground in Baghdad yesterday.

President Saddam Hussein, who at 65 could be said to be at official retirement age, watched the hours tick by on the 48-hour stopwatch of his enemy President George W. Bush. Hussein's only chance of survival, Bush had said, was to leave Iraq before 4 a.m. today Baghdad time, 8 p.m. last night in New York.

One of Hussein's senior deputies, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, also stood his ground. During the day rumors flew around the world that Aziz, one of the most public faces of the Iraqi regime over the years, had defected to northern Iraq, an autonomous region controlled by Iraq's Kurds. By late afternoon, Aziz was meeting with some of the remaining journalists in Baghdad to prove that he was most certainly not in Kurdish hands.

"For me, as well as for ... the courageous Iraqi leadership, we were born in Iraq and we will die in Iraq - either as martyrs, which is a great honor, or naturally," said Aziz, who wore his military uniform, just as his president had the previous evening on Iraqi television.

An entire building full of other Iraqis also refused to leave Baghdad. The deputies of the Iraqi parliament - appointed by Hussein - met in an emergency session stage-managed to demonstrate that the center of Iraqi politics and power was holding. They chanted and declared their support for Hussein. There would be no backing down, they said, no abandoning their country or their president.

The Iraqi people "stand united ... against treacherous forces and are ready for all sacrifices in their legitimate defense of their honor, principles and sanctities," said the parliament's speaker, Saadoun Hammadi.

There were no reports of mass defections from frontline Iraqi troops, but a small number of them surrendered to American GIs near the Kuwait border.

Most other Iraqi soldiers began to take their positions at the hundreds of bunkers that have sprouted all over the city in recent weeks. Carrying Kalashnikov rifles, the soldiers, security officers and militia members from the ruling Baath Party poked their heads over the sandbags and stood watching vehicles go by.

On one downtown street, four white flatbed trucks went by in a convoy carrying two anti-aircraft guns. A soldier on one of the trucks gave a V sign, for the victory that his president insists will be Iraq's.

But while all these men were staying in Baghdad to fight for their own survival - or because they are obeying orders from a government they dare not defy - the old man in his 80s was staying because this is the city where he has spent his life, where he has watched and taken part in the development of modern Iraq.

Speaking on a recent evening in remarkably good English, given that he has not much used the language for 30 years, his memory flitted between decades, touching on the years of the monarchy, the decade of military governments that began in 1958, and the years of Baath Party rule that came with the revolution in 1968.

He told of his times in London in the 1950s and '60s, recalling specific London street names, mentioning British friends as if he had seen them yesterday. "The first time I went to London I accompanied the king and his uncle," recalled the old man, who cuts a towering and dashing figure in black- and-white photographs from his youth. "They were received at Buckingham Palace by Queen Elizabeth."

He also spoke of how, when King Faisal and his family were killed in the bloody revolution of 1958, the new authorities threw him in jail for three months. "They thought I might try to take vengeance," he said.

Years later, he got his job back in the police force, although without the seniority he once enjoyed.

Even today he has links to the police, helping them with his experience. He can't stand being idle. He reads all day, is a devout Muslim who prays five times daily and will spend this war in the only city he can call home.

His beloved wife has been dead for many years and in spite of his son's encouragement, he refused even to consider remarriage. Last night, he had only his son to look after him as he waited for the bombs to fall.