Iraq, through the eyes of a veteran NBC reporter

It can reach over 120 degrees in the summer in Tikrit, so I can sympathize with the journalist trying to sleep. But she was such a distraction the military ordered her to leave the base.

I was in no rush to get back to the palace. I wanted to go in Saddam’s hole. I was excited and must admit I was having fun. The entrance was smaller than a manhole cover, too small for me to fit through wearing my bulky blue flak jacket lined with ceramic strike plates. I ripped back the Velcro straps, put my hands on either side of the hole, and lowered myself inside.

When my feet landed on the floor, I switched on a flashlight and painted the walls with dim yellow light. The subterranean chamber was like a tomb: rectangular, about ten feet long, four feet high, and three feet wide. The walls were covered in rough concrete. The floor was lined with boards. A naked lightbulb and fan hung from the ceiling. The fan was attached to a plastic hose that ran through a hole drilled in the wall and led outside. It was a ventilation system and let Saddam breathe when the tomb was plugged with the Styrofoam cork.

It seemed odd to many people in the States that most Iraqis didn’t celebrate the news of Saddam’s capture. A few in Baghdad fired guns in the air, a dangerous celebratory tradition in the Arab world. (It was banned in Gaza after a gun-toting guest at a wedding accidentally gunned down both the bride and groom; but Gazans never stopped.)

The most common reaction in Iraq to the news of Saddam’s capture was disbelief. Iraqi after Iraqi I interviewed insisted that the capture was a fake, a put-on by Saddam and the Americans to confuse them. I understood their skepticism. I also found the news hard to believe.

When I arrived in Baghdad in February 2003 about a month before the invasion, Saddam seemed in total control, ruling what I naively thought was in “the Iraqi way”: the tradition of the ancient caliphs Haroun al-Rashid and Shahryar of the fabled Arabian Nights.

While working for a small newspaper in Cairo in the 1990s, I bought a paperback copy of the Nights at a used bookstore in Athens. I often traveled to Greece carrying transparencies of the weekly Middle East Times. We printed the paper abroad to avoid Egyptian censorship laws. The Nights I bought was a translation by Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century British explorer, poet, adventurer, diplomat, soldier, archaeologist, swordsman, and writer reputed to be fluent in twenty-nine languages. He became one of my early idols, writer of some of my favorite lines, among them:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do,

from none but self expect applause;

He noblest lives and noblest dies

who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

In Burton’s Nights, the caliph Shahryar murders his bride after discovering her infidelity. Unable to trust another woman, the caliph then marries a series of virgins only to have them executed the next day. The caliph’s rampage stops when he meets the legendary storyteller Scheherazade, who keeps herself alive by enthralling him for 1001 straight nights with fantastic stories of jinn, giants, and flying carpets, each one ending with the same phrase: “If you let me live tonight I will tell you an even more fantastic tale tomorrow.” So he does.

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