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Iraqis trampled on a statue of Saddam Hussein, seconds after U.S. forces in Baghdad pulled it down. (Photo: James Hill/The New York Times)
At the outset, for me, the approach of American troops to Baghdad was an issue of intense personal concern, as much as professional. The Army and Marine units that arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad in the first days of April 2003 were viewed, then, by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis as liberators from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. But they were my liberators, too.
Ten days earlier, Saddam’s thugs had come for me in the middle of the night in my room at the Palestine Hotel beside the Tigris River in the heart of the Iraqi capital, during a lull in the American bombing. I had been expecting them; in the last weeks before the invasion, the menacing character who acted as ringmaster for the foreign press in Baghdad in his capacity as the regime’s information director, Uday al-Tai’ee, had taken to mocking me as “the most dangerous man in Iraq” for stories I had writtenabout Saddam’s merciless terror on his own people, and I had understood the code.
“Brave fellow, aren’t you?” al-Tai’ee seemed to be saying. “But just wait. You can insult Saddam with impunity now, because you know we won’t kill a reporter for The New York Times as long as there’s a chance of avoiding this war. So you’re shooting from behind a blind, and that doesn’t take so much courage. But once the war starts, and we’re free to do what we please, that’ll be a different matter. Then we’ll see how tough you really are.”
The practitioners of Saddam’s miseries were brutal, but they were also cowardly and venal, and the plug-uglies who stormed into my hotel room were true to form. I told the lead thug, a man assigned to me by al-Tai’ee a few days before the war as my “minder,” and whom I knew to be from the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police, that his name was known to my editors in New York (true) and that if anything happened to me, they’d pass his name to the Pentagon and he’d end up in front of an American firing squad (pure fiction). With frontline American units advancing rapidly on Baghdad, I thought it might catch his attention. “You’re threatening me,” he said.
“Yes, I am,” I said, “just as you’re threatening me.”