Out of the ashes

Baghdad

As the Puma chugs over Baghdad I look out over the machine gun and I have to admit I am full of a sudden wistfulness. I have been here before, almost two years ago exactly.

It was a week after the end of the war, and in those days my feelings were of nervous hope. I jogged by the twinkling Tigris. I ate out in restaurants — shoarma and chips, served with every sign of friendliness. I wandered around without a flak jacket and shoved my notebook under people’s noses, and said things like, ‘What do you think of George Bush, hmmm?’ And now look at the dear old place. We have been here for two years. We have spent something like £5 billion of UK taxpayers’ money, and the Americans have spent $400 billion. We have invested this country with 150,000 foreign troops, and built bases so big that it takes a chopper minutes to overfly the prairies of Humvees and half-tracks. We have tried bullying and kindness, bribery and bullets, and look at the state to which we would seem to have reduced Iraq.

Last time I was here I drove in from Jordan. These days the danger is so extreme that even the troops give the road a miss, and fly from the airport by helicopter. Our first helicopter is apparently shot at in Basra, causing the pilot to emit some missile-fooling ‘chaff’. The next is crippled by a homicidal pigeon. We are waiting at Baghdad airport for a third helicopter — in fact, I am taking my ease in a chemical toilet — when a mortar bomb crumps a few hundred yards away. By Baghdad standards, of course, I have seen nothing. There are about 23 attacks per day, many of them fatal, and in the 24 months since my blissful first visit the Americans have responded with a thoroughness bordering on mania.