March 20 2003
It was a reluctant sun that peeked out on the war’s first day. I remember a pale sun, hiding occasionally behind white clouds and the dirty grey smoke from the burning oil trenches around Baghdad. Honestly, I had wished for a bright refreshing sunrise, the kind that would give you the sense of a new day. But it simply wasn’t that kind of sunrise. It was almost depressing. Perhaps this was how it was like for Frodo when he saw his first sunrise in Mordor. The gloomy sunrise set the mood for the day. It was going to be a leaden day, heavy and somber and so full of uncertainty.
The bombing and the anti aircraft fire had continued past dawn. With the sun finally out, we could no longer make out any of the fighting or the explosions. They were still there, though, rattling our windows with loud thunderclaps. With nothing left to capture on film, we crawled into bed for a quick snooze. We fell asleep among the accoutrement of our profession, still kitted out in boots, helmet and flack jackets with our cameras by our side. It's not so hard sleeping with a flack jacket on, but try it with a steel helmet strapped to your head. We weren't taking any chances - if we suddenly had to run out of the building, we certainly weren't going to do it half-assed and naked. Or if the building fell on top of us while we were asleep, well, at least some part of us could still be reasonably intact.
I woke up with a start at around nine in the morning. I think I slept for an hour, at the most. After last night’s explosions, Baghdad was deathly quiet, as if the world had suddenly decided to end last night and we had gotten left behind. The sun was streaming through the balcony's thin curtain, and a slight breeze was blowing into the room. With it, a thin veil of smoke or dust hung in the air, swirling so gently in small eddies that you could see the particles hanging in the air. Val was still sprawled on his bed.
I don’t remember getting dressed anymore; perhaps it had to do with the fact that I went to bed fully dressed and with my shoes on. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and headed for the bathroom, where we stocked our bottles and jugs of mineral water. One quick look at the bathtub reassured me that it was still full of our “emergency water”. But amazingly, the taps still worked, and water flowed out freely at the first twist of the knob. That was an immense and immensely reassuring surprise. Everyone had expected the first bombs to cut the power and the water supply, and the telephone exchange. Apparently, we still had them all.
I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth with bottled water, and threw a windbreaker over my flackjacket. My camera was still hanging from my neck. It had been there all night, even while I slept. So was my precious, and very expensive, media ID.
"Pre," I roused Val from dreamland. "Punta lang ako ng press center, tingnan ko kung ano nangyayari."
I told Val he could stay in bed, just keep his walkie talkie on so I could call him if I needed him. I shouldered my backpack, which contained most of my bug-out gear. This included my water bladder, extra batteries and tapes for my own videocamera, batteries for my walkie talkie, and if I recall correctly, a packet or two of dehydrated food.
For a moment, I considered taking my steel helmet. I had no idea what lay outside the hotel. I also had no idea if the bombing was going to continue during the day. I wanted to be safe, but I was also concerned that a fully kitted correspondent would call too much attention to himself by walking around in broad daylight in war gear. In the end, I opted to leave the helmet behind.
With that, I rode down the elevator and strode into the lobby, which was mostly empty except for some young brawny looking men wearing leather jackets. I have always wondered about these men, who seemed to have a common fashion sense – close cropped hair, five o’clock shadow, and leather jackets. Perhaps hotel guests are required a uniform.
Assalamu Alaikum, I called out to some of them as I walked out the lobby. Some of them just nodded back. I vaguely remember stopping at the entrance of the hotel lobby to try to make small talk with some Iraqi employees, at least those who could understand a little english. Nothing of consequence really, just stuff like “long night last night huh, any news?” That sort of stuff. In truth I was quickly and surreptitiously trying to assess whether it was safe for me to go out already. More importantly, I was trying to gather the courage to finally step out of the hotel.
Strange as it may sound to some people, after last night, the hotel was now that one thing gave us a sense of stability and assurance, like an anchor of sorts. We knew we were not safe here, and that we were in a sense human shields of the Iraqi government. Anytime, they could just reach in and grab any of us. On the other hand, the four walls of the hotel may not protect us from the state machinery, but it would keep out any crazed individual or gang that may want to take out their anger of last night’s bombing on us.
So it was with some trepidation that I stepped out into the hotel driveway. The wind had picked up again, and I gathered my windbreaker around me so the flackjacket wouldn’t be so obvious. The hotel was just a block away from the information ministry, but I remembered that I would have to pass through at least one army checkpoint. Our hotel was in an awkward location, sandwiched between the information ministry and the Iraqi national television station, two prime targets for the allied coalition. This was a restricted zone of sorts, and security was much tighter here.
As I emerged out of the hotel gates, I could see that the checkpoint was manned and alert. Would the soldiers be hostile, even combative? It wasn't a far-out thought, considering that their capital had just been pounded by the Americans again. Some armies have been known to vent their frustrations on civilians whenever faced with a more technologically advanced foe. How would they react if they learn that my government supported the war on Iraq? Would they just hassle me, would they bundle me off to their headquarters. A heavy feeling settled at the pit of my stomach as I approached the army checkpoint. I remembered to flick on the switch of the videocamera hanging by a strap around my neck. I remember thinking morbidly that if anything happened to me, at least I should get it on tape.
As I approached the checkpoint, I caught the eye of the nearest soldier. Assalaam alaykum, I greeted him with my friendliest smile. To my surprise, he just waved me on past the checkpoint. I was through, and this was when I realized that, barring any radical change in Iraqi policy, or a smart bomb coming through our window, we had nothing as yet to fear from Saddam's security apparatus. At least for the meantime.
The sandbagged emplacements in front of the Information Ministry were casually manned by some Iraqi soldiers milling about. The ministry parking lot was half full. Iraqi minders and drivers hung around outside, talking in hushed tones. There was a palpable tension in the air that everyone felt and everyone pretended to ignore. But it was clear that after last night’s first bombing, things had changed.
In the press office, it was bedlam. Correspondents, cameramen and their minders were speaking in at least two dozen languages all at the same time. Theirs was a common question - where were the government spokesmen, and when could we visit the bombed areas? Unfortunately, the Iraqis proved very uncooperative. The minders would not allow journalists to move around the capital as yet. Everyone was in the press office, waiting for the next move.
It was midmorning when the Iraqis realized that, with all the angry reporters crammed in the press office, they may as well call a press conference. They summoned us to a small annex of the press office, where Information Minister Mohammed al Sahhaf somehow commandeered a podium in the lobby to give us the Iraqi government's official version of the opening stages of the new Iraq war, to wit, that hundreds of American troops have been slaughtered by victorious and heroic Iraqis defending the sands of their homeland. To beef up his claim, he summoned a whole host of functionaries to agree with him. I stood on a platform at the back to shoot the presscon, but Sahhaf lost me two minutes into his monologue. Looking around, I realized I was standing right beside Peter Arnett who, being big in status but small in stature, was craning his neck for a better view. Peter became a household name after the first gulf war with his riveting account of the opening days of the war. It was the birth of international live news, and its concurrent marriage with the concept of a 24-hour news network.
People know Arnett as a war correspondent made famous by his stint in Iraq. What most don't know is that Arnett had won two Pulitzer prizes for journalism for his remarkable and breathtaking coverage of the Vietnam war in the early and mid sixties when he was still working for the Associated Press. Of course, two Pulitzer prizes won't get you a cup of coffee, not unless you're working for television, in which case, you can’t get a Pulitzer. Such is the tragedy of modern journalism. Three decades of brilliant journalism can go unnoticed, if not for ten minutes of live reportage on international television. I've read Peter's annotation of the bombing of Baghdad, and it still pales in comparison with his prose three decades earlier in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, Peter was able to practice true journalism, and he excelled in it. In Iraq, he would still practice journalism of the broadcast kind, and it would prove to be incredibly frustrating and rewarding at the same time. After achieving fame for his Baghdad reporting for CNN in 1991, Peter's star would fall with the Tailwind scandal. Peter narrated a documentary produced for CNN exposing Operation Tailwind, a supposedly secret American covert operation during the Indochina war where the American government allegedly used chemical weapons against US army deserters. It was tragic because it wasn't even his story; in the grandest tradition of television journalism, the research and actual coverage were done by a small army of researchers and producers. Peter, the war correspondent who survived the rise and fall of South Vietnam, merely lent his name and reputation to the documentary by "voicing" or narrating it for TV. So when the allegations in the documentary were proven to be unfounded, CNN promptly disposed of its star war correspondent, allowing Christian Amanpour to take his place in the firmament of television news. Apparently hoping to cash in Peter's famed Baghdad reportage and his network of Iraqi contacts, NBC hired him and sent him over to Baghdad for the second round of fighting. But from what we heard, Peter didn't get the kind of welcome from the Iraqis that many expected. Some Iraqi officials even proved cold to Arnett, thinking that he wasn't as friendly to their cause as they had wanted. Obviously, you can't please everybody.
Of course, I didn't tell Arnett all these while I squirmed for a better camera position beside him. Having heard of his quick-tempered reputation, I didn't dare speak to him in the middle of a press conference. It was a good decision. A few minutes after the press conference, there was a commotion outside the venue, and I saw fellow journalists pulling Arnett and an Iraqi minder apart after a more than verbal tussle. Arnett was known since the sixties for knocking heads together, aside from getting his block knocked off every once in a while, a fact betrayed by a crooked nose that's been broken more than once. He's traded blows with South Vietnamese secret policemen to save the famous New York Times correspondent David Halberstam in the streets of Saigon, and he's been dragged and beaten a couple of times by the KGB in cold war Moscow. But that was way in the past. Today, he just chose to trade blows with someone who could very well have you arrested, deported, or worse, censored. But I guess that’s not really new for Arnett.
Given the excitement of last night, Arnett's duel was just a momentary hiccup. A few weeks later, NBC would also sack him for granting an interview to Iraqi State TV. Apparently some Iraqi journalist thought it was a good idea to get Arnett's perspective on the whole deal, and with characteristic bluntness, Arnett said on TV that the Americans were screwing up.
The press conference ended with not much meat being handed out, save for the expected “up yours” to the Americans. The Iraqis had their counterclaims, that all the bombs missed their targets, that aircraft had been shot down, and that Americans were getting killed. Naturally, they didn’t feel obliged to show us proof that anything they said was true – they were more used to getting their way from state media.
I climbed up to the lower roofdeck of the information ministry, where a few brave holdouts still had their armored tents. As expected, I found Paul, Haider, and the rest of the Reuters crew manning their posts. It was bedlam here as well. Paul was scratching his bald pate, answering calls on his satellite phone and barking orders at the rest of the gang. Everyone was busy as hell, and to top it all off, there were no more Pepsis in the fridge. It was the most tangible sign that the line in the sand had finally been crossed.
But there was bigger bad news. Sorry Ed, Paul said. We can’t accommodate live reports from you to Manila anymore. Or live reports from anyone, for that matter. My heart sank. What Paul was saying was that we [or Manila, to be more accurate] could no longer lease satellite time from Reuters Baghdad for our live reports. That left me stumped. This was our only lifeline to the outside world, and the whole coverage was built around the use of the Reuters satellite TV uplink. We didn’t even have our own satellite phone to make a simple call to Manila. With no satellite phone and now, no video transmission capabilities, we had no choice but to rely on the quirky Baghdad telephone exchange system. Assuming the telephone operators weren’t locked up in the bomb shelters.
Paul tried to soften the blow, which was next to impossible. Perhaps, if he had Pepsi? It turned out that Reuters London had ordered Paul to keep all his cameras trained on the Baghdad skyline from now on, and feed everything directly and in raw form to all Reuters subscribers. Apparently, this was Reuters’ way of guaranteeing its subscribers the freshest video feed, and made sure that the wire agency and its subscribers do not miss anything.
Val and Yasser our driver soon came around, and Val recoiled at the news. If we weren’t going to be sending video, what use would he be in Iraq? At least I could make an occasional phone call to Manila. But what about his video? Paul could do nothing more than scratch his bald pate in sympathy.
Still, we hung around the Reuters tent. This was the only place we could get any news of the outside world, and any news of the conflict that started last night. Paul always had his television on, tuned to the BBC service. He was getting his TV signals via satellite. People like us who did not have that luxury, just had to make do with Iraqi state television’s endless replays of MTVs of Saddam cutting ribbons, or Saddam kissing kids, or Saddam reviewing his troops, or Saddam meeting his generals, or Saddam watching the flowers grow, all laid out to marching martial music. You could only take so much of the guy.
But how was the war going? Have the Americans crossed the border? And what was happening in the rest of Iraq?
The sun may have risen, but we were still very much in the dark. The war had definitely started; the crash and booms from last night were unmistakable. But ironically, being in the eye of the storm is never a guarantee of a clearer vantage point.
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I had watched the first Gulf War from the comforts of the Malacanang Press Office. In 1990, I was still covering the Presidential beat for The Manila Times. Those were exciting times for any journalists, definitely. But when news broke that Iraqi tanks had rolled into Kuwait in late August, the first question on everyone’s mind was – Where’s Kuwait again? Isn’t it somewhere in the Middle East?
Saddam, for the better informed, was a more familiar name. For eight years, he had been slugging it out with Iran. It was a surreal war, really: two countries armed to the teeth with the most modern technology, grinding each other down with human wave attacks and clouds of poison gas.
Poison gas. That phrase brings to mind the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, what they then called The War To End All Wars. Yet it was back with a vengeance, this time carried to the battlefield by modern jet aircraft and long range artillery rounds. The casualties on both sides were staggering, and children bearing Kalashnikovs marched proudly in columns down the streets of Tehran with baggy fatigues several sizes too big and blood red bandanas tied to their heads to fill in the gaps left by their fallen fathers in the front. At times, they were made to run in front, to detonate planted mines and clear the way for the older soldiers. Die young, they were told, and live forever. How have we come to this?
I remember how everyone rushed to brush up on their geography. This Gulf War thing promised to be big! Why, even the usually timid Americans had gotten into the act, coming out of its post-Cold War grogginess to lead a grand coalition of do-gooders to boot Iraq out of Kuwait. But what really made it big for all of us was the impact it had on all our pockets. In 1990, gasoline in the Philippines was selling for around seven pesos a liter. After the invasion of Kuwait, and with the increasing tensions in the Middle East as a result of Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the price of gasoline climbed to P15 a liter. I recall how we were in awe at how the market responded to events thousands of miles away, and how we were held hostage by the quirks of one megalomaniac and the double standards of the dozen others who stood by him and armed him for seven years before finally facing him down just because he did something that drove up the price of oil. Forget the claims that it was a basic fight between good and bad; that’s a construct of some brilliant propagandists in the Pentagon and the US State Department. If the Allies really wanted to punish Saddam for gassing Halabja in the mid-80s, they wouldn’t have waited another three or four years before bombing him into the stone age. As it turned out, they just pretended Halabja didn’t happen, at least until Iraqi Republican Guard soldiers strolled uninvited down the nice manicured lawns of Kuwait’s princes with their tanks in tow. THEN, they remembered to bring out the issue of Halabja. It was quite simply an issue of gold, black gold, and the supremely absolute rule that the only morals and interests that matter are those who have the might to enforce them, regardless of how selective that enforcement is.
We normally wouldn’t have cared about Iraq, Halabja, or Kuwait, if not for the fact that gasoline had doubled to 15 pesos a liter. At that time, that amount was staggering. Those were the days when a fifty centavo increase in the regulated price of gasoline could trigger a Welgang Bayan or Nationwide Strike big enough to destabilize the government. If gasoline hits 20 pesos a kilo, we promised each other, we would each buy bicycles and just pedal our way to our coverage in Malacanang, long sleeves, ties, and all. It was a joke we all hoped would not need a punchline. Seventeen years later, gas prices had hit 60 pesos a liter, and we are still waiting for the punchline.
But what added a touch of desperation in those days were all the speculations that this impending war would be the trigger for Armageddon, the end of the world. Suddenly, everyone was an expert in Biblical verses, Revelations, and a quirky old man named Nostradamus. Michel de Nostradame, or Nostradamus for you, was a French apothecary, roughly the 16th century’s equivalent of today’s pharmacist. But the fellow lived a much livelier life than today’s drug dispenser. Four centuries after his death, Nostradamus is still held in awe by millions of people as the man who “saw tomorrow.” Popular culture generously cites him as the man who predicted the rise of Napoleon, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein. Some would even go as far as to claim he predicted 9-11. Or perhaps we demand so much of him; it must have been difficult for a guy who has never seen an elevator to imagine a skyscraper 110 floors high.
But Nostradamus was not one to invite literal interpretations of his writings, which he divided into centuries, and then further divided into quatrains or verses. Perhaps in order to throw off witch hunters and agents of the Inquisition, he mixed together Latin, Greek, and Provencal into a headily confusing language that he further complicated through cryptic references, symbolisms, and a basic refusal to provide dates for prophecies. As such, while he is held in high regard by some as a prophet of sorts, others say his writings were too vague and abstract that they could easily be applied to any event imaginable. A kind of adaptive prophecy, you may say.
Nonetheless, everyone was thrilled and terrified with Nostradamus’ writings. A man who predicted everything from airplanes to landing a man on the moon had prophesied that East and West would collide in a spectacular battle that would herald the end of the world. For believers, all the clues left behind by the writings of Nostradamus pointed to George Herbert Walker Bush as the man of the West, and Saddam al-Tikriti Hussein as the man of the East. Further imaginative readings of Nostradamus’ quatrains spoke of plague and fire falling from the sky, wiping away billions of souls. To the believers, this sounded suspiciously like nuclear war and biological warfare. George Orwell’s famous film “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” was screened so many times in TV channels that people had begun quoting from Nostradamus’ quatrains without really understanding them. After all, if they showed it on TV, then it must be true!
So 1990 ended with much of the world wondering if the world was about to end as well.
When the allied coalition finally launched their assault on Baghdad in February 1991, there was only a smattering of newsmen left in the Iraqi capital. Among them, a small team from the upstart Cable News Network, long labeled the Chicken News Network by its more established rivals.
I remember watching the Baghdad skyline aglow with millions of tracer bullets and anti aircraft fire through the night vision lenses of CNN’s cameras. Flashes in the horizon marked the places where so-called smart bombs fell. Then there were the smart missile videos, grainy black and white images of buildings growing larger as the missiles approached their targets. Then, static, as the video feed got cut. The technology was breathtaking. What I really found amazing was how anyone could throw perfectly good videocameras at these buildings. But that’s the cheapskate in me talking. The world was entranced by visions, not of the end of the world, but of the start of a new kind of news – the 24 hour kind. Twenty-four hour cable news? What a brilliant idea! No matter that most people would just leave the TV on without paying attention to it, such that the sounds and video just merged with the general noise of daily life. It’s just like tuning in to the Aquarium Channel.
The rest of course is history, turning the First Gulf War into the biggest blockbuster since John Rambo rescued America’s martial honor from the bottom of the barrel with a few unintelligible grunts and mumblings. What got lost in the flurry of press and parades was that one question that some people had been asking even before the war started – If Saddam was the evil monster portrayed by the Pentagon and the State Department, why did the Americans leave him in control in Baghdad. If he was such a megalomaniac, a mass murderer, why did the Allied Coalition stop the war as soon as they regained Kuwait? Aha! Maybe there was an answer there somewhere…
The truth is that the Allies needed Saddam there in Baghdad. He was the wild card that kept the Saudis, the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Libyans in check. He was the monster who could use an iron hand to control all the wild passions of the different sects and tribes that lived in Iraq. He was the bad boy who simply had to take the place of the first Evil Empire, the Soviet Union.
In the end, the coverage of the first Gulf War was unremarkable, except for the performance of Peter Arnett and his team in Baghdad. The rest of the western media was trapped in Kuwait by a recalcitrant US military that refused to have anything to do with them until the end of the war. The ghosts of Vietnam still haunted the US military, which blamed the media, rightly or wrongly, for its disastrous withdrawal from Saigon.
After the lopsided American victory, Iraq settled in the background as other concerns made headlines. But it would remain there, simmering and brewing, a virtual pressure cooker in the middle of the Middle East. Once in a while, the Coalition would strike at Iraq for alleged violations of the post-Gulf War UN sanctions. In the first major airstrike after the war, Bill Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox, a bombing campaign to punish Saddam for his refusal to cooperate with UN arms inspectors.
Things would change dramatically after 9-11.
Four months after the World Trade Center disaster, George W. Bush, son and namesake of the “crusader” of the first Gulf War, lumped Iraq, Iran, and North Korea together in what he called the Axis of Evil. Bush went further and found all sorts of tenuous links between al Qaeda and Saddam. By the middle of 2002, it was already clear that the United States had pulled all the stops in an effort to justify a new war against Iraq, this time, with the aim of toppling Saddam Hussein. The tragedy of 9-11 provided the best excuse to start another tragedy. America was again going to war against Saddam, but this time, the stakes were loftier, but the reasons were shallower.
The prospect of another Gulf War was interesting and intriguing to a lot of Filipino journalists, although few would have considered the idea of being in the middle of it. It also still sounded too remote at the time. Still, Iraq is such a fascinating subject, Saddam or no Saddam.
In mid-2002, Jim mentioned that he had a friend named Danny who was also acting as the publicist of the Iraqi embassy in Manila. We considered the possiblities. With the West browbeating Iraq, the Iraqis may want to tell their side of the story before the bombs started falling. We met up with Danny and discussed the prospects of visiting Iraq. Such a visit would have been well timed, since Saddam, in a bid to convince the world, if not himself, that he still had the popular mandate, had decided to call a national plebiscite. Or was it an election? It was really hard to tell. Voters simply had to indicate if they still wanted Saddam in charge. There were no other names on the ballot. Obviously, that didn’t really prove convincing, to the West, or even to the Iraqis. Saddam’s government would announce later that Saddam got 100 percent of the vote [some would joke that he got even more], a major achievement even for other tin-pot dictators. Normally, dictators leave a small measure of “doubt”, just enough to indicate that there is still some sort of legitimate opposition allowed by the regime. But no, Saddam had to go the whole nine yards.
While our inquiries would lead nowhere in the end, we had crossed a Rubicon of sorts – in the intervening months after Afghanistan, we had played with other ideas like travelling to Somalia and such. But it was mostly half-hearted, and did not amount to much. Now, we were seriously considering deploying to another war zone, possibly at a time of war. With Afghanistan just two years under our belts, it was the best proof that there are lessons that some people never learn.
For our meeting with Danny, I brushed up on Iraqi history and culture. And after some initial reading, I was already ready to call myself stupid. For a decade, we read with great interest the prophecies of Nostradamus, the adventures of Peter Arnett and the CNN team, and the astounding technology that gave us the smart bomb and cameras inside missiles and night vision goggles and cable television and just about everything we thought we needed to know about the Gulf War. But we had never really learned about Iraq.
It was a reluctant sun that peeked out on the war’s first day. I remember a pale sun, hiding occasionally behind white clouds and the dirty grey smoke from the burning oil trenches around Baghdad. Honestly, I had wished for a bright refreshing sunrise, the kind that would give you the sense of a new day. But it simply wasn’t that kind of sunrise. It was almost depressing. Perhaps this was how it was like for Frodo when he saw his first sunrise in Mordor. The gloomy sunrise set the mood for the day. It was going to be a leaden day, heavy and somber and so full of uncertainty.
The bombing and the anti aircraft fire had continued past dawn. With the sun finally out, we could no longer make out any of the fighting or the explosions. They were still there, though, rattling our windows with loud thunderclaps. With nothing left to capture on film, we crawled into bed for a quick snooze. We fell asleep among the accoutrement of our profession, still kitted out in boots, helmet and flack jackets with our cameras by our side. It's not so hard sleeping with a flack jacket on, but try it with a steel helmet strapped to your head. We weren't taking any chances - if we suddenly had to run out of the building, we certainly weren't going to do it half-assed and naked. Or if the building fell on top of us while we were asleep, well, at least some part of us could still be reasonably intact.
I woke up with a start at around nine in the morning. I think I slept for an hour, at the most. After last night’s explosions, Baghdad was deathly quiet, as if the world had suddenly decided to end last night and we had gotten left behind. The sun was streaming through the balcony's thin curtain, and a slight breeze was blowing into the room. With it, a thin veil of smoke or dust hung in the air, swirling so gently in small eddies that you could see the particles hanging in the air. Val was still sprawled on his bed.
I don’t remember getting dressed anymore; perhaps it had to do with the fact that I went to bed fully dressed and with my shoes on. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and headed for the bathroom, where we stocked our bottles and jugs of mineral water. One quick look at the bathtub reassured me that it was still full of our “emergency water”. But amazingly, the taps still worked, and water flowed out freely at the first twist of the knob. That was an immense and immensely reassuring surprise. Everyone had expected the first bombs to cut the power and the water supply, and the telephone exchange. Apparently, we still had them all.
I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth with bottled water, and threw a windbreaker over my flackjacket. My camera was still hanging from my neck. It had been there all night, even while I slept. So was my precious, and very expensive, media ID.
"Pre," I roused Val from dreamland. "Punta lang ako ng press center, tingnan ko kung ano nangyayari."
I told Val he could stay in bed, just keep his walkie talkie on so I could call him if I needed him. I shouldered my backpack, which contained most of my bug-out gear. This included my water bladder, extra batteries and tapes for my own videocamera, batteries for my walkie talkie, and if I recall correctly, a packet or two of dehydrated food.
For a moment, I considered taking my steel helmet. I had no idea what lay outside the hotel. I also had no idea if the bombing was going to continue during the day. I wanted to be safe, but I was also concerned that a fully kitted correspondent would call too much attention to himself by walking around in broad daylight in war gear. In the end, I opted to leave the helmet behind.
With that, I rode down the elevator and strode into the lobby, which was mostly empty except for some young brawny looking men wearing leather jackets. I have always wondered about these men, who seemed to have a common fashion sense – close cropped hair, five o’clock shadow, and leather jackets. Perhaps hotel guests are required a uniform.
Assalamu Alaikum, I called out to some of them as I walked out the lobby. Some of them just nodded back. I vaguely remember stopping at the entrance of the hotel lobby to try to make small talk with some Iraqi employees, at least those who could understand a little english. Nothing of consequence really, just stuff like “long night last night huh, any news?” That sort of stuff. In truth I was quickly and surreptitiously trying to assess whether it was safe for me to go out already. More importantly, I was trying to gather the courage to finally step out of the hotel.
Strange as it may sound to some people, after last night, the hotel was now that one thing gave us a sense of stability and assurance, like an anchor of sorts. We knew we were not safe here, and that we were in a sense human shields of the Iraqi government. Anytime, they could just reach in and grab any of us. On the other hand, the four walls of the hotel may not protect us from the state machinery, but it would keep out any crazed individual or gang that may want to take out their anger of last night’s bombing on us.
So it was with some trepidation that I stepped out into the hotel driveway. The wind had picked up again, and I gathered my windbreaker around me so the flackjacket wouldn’t be so obvious. The hotel was just a block away from the information ministry, but I remembered that I would have to pass through at least one army checkpoint. Our hotel was in an awkward location, sandwiched between the information ministry and the Iraqi national television station, two prime targets for the allied coalition. This was a restricted zone of sorts, and security was much tighter here.
As I emerged out of the hotel gates, I could see that the checkpoint was manned and alert. Would the soldiers be hostile, even combative? It wasn't a far-out thought, considering that their capital had just been pounded by the Americans again. Some armies have been known to vent their frustrations on civilians whenever faced with a more technologically advanced foe. How would they react if they learn that my government supported the war on Iraq? Would they just hassle me, would they bundle me off to their headquarters. A heavy feeling settled at the pit of my stomach as I approached the army checkpoint. I remembered to flick on the switch of the videocamera hanging by a strap around my neck. I remember thinking morbidly that if anything happened to me, at least I should get it on tape.
As I approached the checkpoint, I caught the eye of the nearest soldier. Assalaam alaykum, I greeted him with my friendliest smile. To my surprise, he just waved me on past the checkpoint. I was through, and this was when I realized that, barring any radical change in Iraqi policy, or a smart bomb coming through our window, we had nothing as yet to fear from Saddam's security apparatus. At least for the meantime.
The sandbagged emplacements in front of the Information Ministry were casually manned by some Iraqi soldiers milling about. The ministry parking lot was half full. Iraqi minders and drivers hung around outside, talking in hushed tones. There was a palpable tension in the air that everyone felt and everyone pretended to ignore. But it was clear that after last night’s first bombing, things had changed.
In the press office, it was bedlam. Correspondents, cameramen and their minders were speaking in at least two dozen languages all at the same time. Theirs was a common question - where were the government spokesmen, and when could we visit the bombed areas? Unfortunately, the Iraqis proved very uncooperative. The minders would not allow journalists to move around the capital as yet. Everyone was in the press office, waiting for the next move.
It was midmorning when the Iraqis realized that, with all the angry reporters crammed in the press office, they may as well call a press conference. They summoned us to a small annex of the press office, where Information Minister Mohammed al Sahhaf somehow commandeered a podium in the lobby to give us the Iraqi government's official version of the opening stages of the new Iraq war, to wit, that hundreds of American troops have been slaughtered by victorious and heroic Iraqis defending the sands of their homeland. To beef up his claim, he summoned a whole host of functionaries to agree with him. I stood on a platform at the back to shoot the presscon, but Sahhaf lost me two minutes into his monologue. Looking around, I realized I was standing right beside Peter Arnett who, being big in status but small in stature, was craning his neck for a better view. Peter became a household name after the first gulf war with his riveting account of the opening days of the war. It was the birth of international live news, and its concurrent marriage with the concept of a 24-hour news network.
People know Arnett as a war correspondent made famous by his stint in Iraq. What most don't know is that Arnett had won two Pulitzer prizes for journalism for his remarkable and breathtaking coverage of the Vietnam war in the early and mid sixties when he was still working for the Associated Press. Of course, two Pulitzer prizes won't get you a cup of coffee, not unless you're working for television, in which case, you can’t get a Pulitzer. Such is the tragedy of modern journalism. Three decades of brilliant journalism can go unnoticed, if not for ten minutes of live reportage on international television. I've read Peter's annotation of the bombing of Baghdad, and it still pales in comparison with his prose three decades earlier in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, Peter was able to practice true journalism, and he excelled in it. In Iraq, he would still practice journalism of the broadcast kind, and it would prove to be incredibly frustrating and rewarding at the same time. After achieving fame for his Baghdad reporting for CNN in 1991, Peter's star would fall with the Tailwind scandal. Peter narrated a documentary produced for CNN exposing Operation Tailwind, a supposedly secret American covert operation during the Indochina war where the American government allegedly used chemical weapons against US army deserters. It was tragic because it wasn't even his story; in the grandest tradition of television journalism, the research and actual coverage were done by a small army of researchers and producers. Peter, the war correspondent who survived the rise and fall of South Vietnam, merely lent his name and reputation to the documentary by "voicing" or narrating it for TV. So when the allegations in the documentary were proven to be unfounded, CNN promptly disposed of its star war correspondent, allowing Christian Amanpour to take his place in the firmament of television news. Apparently hoping to cash in Peter's famed Baghdad reportage and his network of Iraqi contacts, NBC hired him and sent him over to Baghdad for the second round of fighting. But from what we heard, Peter didn't get the kind of welcome from the Iraqis that many expected. Some Iraqi officials even proved cold to Arnett, thinking that he wasn't as friendly to their cause as they had wanted. Obviously, you can't please everybody.
Of course, I didn't tell Arnett all these while I squirmed for a better camera position beside him. Having heard of his quick-tempered reputation, I didn't dare speak to him in the middle of a press conference. It was a good decision. A few minutes after the press conference, there was a commotion outside the venue, and I saw fellow journalists pulling Arnett and an Iraqi minder apart after a more than verbal tussle. Arnett was known since the sixties for knocking heads together, aside from getting his block knocked off every once in a while, a fact betrayed by a crooked nose that's been broken more than once. He's traded blows with South Vietnamese secret policemen to save the famous New York Times correspondent David Halberstam in the streets of Saigon, and he's been dragged and beaten a couple of times by the KGB in cold war Moscow. But that was way in the past. Today, he just chose to trade blows with someone who could very well have you arrested, deported, or worse, censored. But I guess that’s not really new for Arnett.
Given the excitement of last night, Arnett's duel was just a momentary hiccup. A few weeks later, NBC would also sack him for granting an interview to Iraqi State TV. Apparently some Iraqi journalist thought it was a good idea to get Arnett's perspective on the whole deal, and with characteristic bluntness, Arnett said on TV that the Americans were screwing up.
The press conference ended with not much meat being handed out, save for the expected “up yours” to the Americans. The Iraqis had their counterclaims, that all the bombs missed their targets, that aircraft had been shot down, and that Americans were getting killed. Naturally, they didn’t feel obliged to show us proof that anything they said was true – they were more used to getting their way from state media.
I climbed up to the lower roofdeck of the information ministry, where a few brave holdouts still had their armored tents. As expected, I found Paul, Haider, and the rest of the Reuters crew manning their posts. It was bedlam here as well. Paul was scratching his bald pate, answering calls on his satellite phone and barking orders at the rest of the gang. Everyone was busy as hell, and to top it all off, there were no more Pepsis in the fridge. It was the most tangible sign that the line in the sand had finally been crossed.
But there was bigger bad news. Sorry Ed, Paul said. We can’t accommodate live reports from you to Manila anymore. Or live reports from anyone, for that matter. My heart sank. What Paul was saying was that we [or Manila, to be more accurate] could no longer lease satellite time from Reuters Baghdad for our live reports. That left me stumped. This was our only lifeline to the outside world, and the whole coverage was built around the use of the Reuters satellite TV uplink. We didn’t even have our own satellite phone to make a simple call to Manila. With no satellite phone and now, no video transmission capabilities, we had no choice but to rely on the quirky Baghdad telephone exchange system. Assuming the telephone operators weren’t locked up in the bomb shelters.
Paul tried to soften the blow, which was next to impossible. Perhaps, if he had Pepsi? It turned out that Reuters London had ordered Paul to keep all his cameras trained on the Baghdad skyline from now on, and feed everything directly and in raw form to all Reuters subscribers. Apparently, this was Reuters’ way of guaranteeing its subscribers the freshest video feed, and made sure that the wire agency and its subscribers do not miss anything.
Val and Yasser our driver soon came around, and Val recoiled at the news. If we weren’t going to be sending video, what use would he be in Iraq? At least I could make an occasional phone call to Manila. But what about his video? Paul could do nothing more than scratch his bald pate in sympathy.
Still, we hung around the Reuters tent. This was the only place we could get any news of the outside world, and any news of the conflict that started last night. Paul always had his television on, tuned to the BBC service. He was getting his TV signals via satellite. People like us who did not have that luxury, just had to make do with Iraqi state television’s endless replays of MTVs of Saddam cutting ribbons, or Saddam kissing kids, or Saddam reviewing his troops, or Saddam meeting his generals, or Saddam watching the flowers grow, all laid out to marching martial music. You could only take so much of the guy.
But how was the war going? Have the Americans crossed the border? And what was happening in the rest of Iraq?
The sun may have risen, but we were still very much in the dark. The war had definitely started; the crash and booms from last night were unmistakable. But ironically, being in the eye of the storm is never a guarantee of a clearer vantage point.
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I had watched the first Gulf War from the comforts of the Malacanang Press Office. In 1990, I was still covering the Presidential beat for The Manila Times. Those were exciting times for any journalists, definitely. But when news broke that Iraqi tanks had rolled into Kuwait in late August, the first question on everyone’s mind was – Where’s Kuwait again? Isn’t it somewhere in the Middle East?
Saddam, for the better informed, was a more familiar name. For eight years, he had been slugging it out with Iran. It was a surreal war, really: two countries armed to the teeth with the most modern technology, grinding each other down with human wave attacks and clouds of poison gas.
Poison gas. That phrase brings to mind the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, what they then called The War To End All Wars. Yet it was back with a vengeance, this time carried to the battlefield by modern jet aircraft and long range artillery rounds. The casualties on both sides were staggering, and children bearing Kalashnikovs marched proudly in columns down the streets of Tehran with baggy fatigues several sizes too big and blood red bandanas tied to their heads to fill in the gaps left by their fallen fathers in the front. At times, they were made to run in front, to detonate planted mines and clear the way for the older soldiers. Die young, they were told, and live forever. How have we come to this?
I remember how everyone rushed to brush up on their geography. This Gulf War thing promised to be big! Why, even the usually timid Americans had gotten into the act, coming out of its post-Cold War grogginess to lead a grand coalition of do-gooders to boot Iraq out of Kuwait. But what really made it big for all of us was the impact it had on all our pockets. In 1990, gasoline in the Philippines was selling for around seven pesos a liter. After the invasion of Kuwait, and with the increasing tensions in the Middle East as a result of Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the price of gasoline climbed to P15 a liter. I recall how we were in awe at how the market responded to events thousands of miles away, and how we were held hostage by the quirks of one megalomaniac and the double standards of the dozen others who stood by him and armed him for seven years before finally facing him down just because he did something that drove up the price of oil. Forget the claims that it was a basic fight between good and bad; that’s a construct of some brilliant propagandists in the Pentagon and the US State Department. If the Allies really wanted to punish Saddam for gassing Halabja in the mid-80s, they wouldn’t have waited another three or four years before bombing him into the stone age. As it turned out, they just pretended Halabja didn’t happen, at least until Iraqi Republican Guard soldiers strolled uninvited down the nice manicured lawns of Kuwait’s princes with their tanks in tow. THEN, they remembered to bring out the issue of Halabja. It was quite simply an issue of gold, black gold, and the supremely absolute rule that the only morals and interests that matter are those who have the might to enforce them, regardless of how selective that enforcement is.
We normally wouldn’t have cared about Iraq, Halabja, or Kuwait, if not for the fact that gasoline had doubled to 15 pesos a liter. At that time, that amount was staggering. Those were the days when a fifty centavo increase in the regulated price of gasoline could trigger a Welgang Bayan or Nationwide Strike big enough to destabilize the government. If gasoline hits 20 pesos a kilo, we promised each other, we would each buy bicycles and just pedal our way to our coverage in Malacanang, long sleeves, ties, and all. It was a joke we all hoped would not need a punchline. Seventeen years later, gas prices had hit 60 pesos a liter, and we are still waiting for the punchline.
But what added a touch of desperation in those days were all the speculations that this impending war would be the trigger for Armageddon, the end of the world. Suddenly, everyone was an expert in Biblical verses, Revelations, and a quirky old man named Nostradamus. Michel de Nostradame, or Nostradamus for you, was a French apothecary, roughly the 16th century’s equivalent of today’s pharmacist. But the fellow lived a much livelier life than today’s drug dispenser. Four centuries after his death, Nostradamus is still held in awe by millions of people as the man who “saw tomorrow.” Popular culture generously cites him as the man who predicted the rise of Napoleon, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein. Some would even go as far as to claim he predicted 9-11. Or perhaps we demand so much of him; it must have been difficult for a guy who has never seen an elevator to imagine a skyscraper 110 floors high.
But Nostradamus was not one to invite literal interpretations of his writings, which he divided into centuries, and then further divided into quatrains or verses. Perhaps in order to throw off witch hunters and agents of the Inquisition, he mixed together Latin, Greek, and Provencal into a headily confusing language that he further complicated through cryptic references, symbolisms, and a basic refusal to provide dates for prophecies. As such, while he is held in high regard by some as a prophet of sorts, others say his writings were too vague and abstract that they could easily be applied to any event imaginable. A kind of adaptive prophecy, you may say.
Nonetheless, everyone was thrilled and terrified with Nostradamus’ writings. A man who predicted everything from airplanes to landing a man on the moon had prophesied that East and West would collide in a spectacular battle that would herald the end of the world. For believers, all the clues left behind by the writings of Nostradamus pointed to George Herbert Walker Bush as the man of the West, and Saddam al-Tikriti Hussein as the man of the East. Further imaginative readings of Nostradamus’ quatrains spoke of plague and fire falling from the sky, wiping away billions of souls. To the believers, this sounded suspiciously like nuclear war and biological warfare. George Orwell’s famous film “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” was screened so many times in TV channels that people had begun quoting from Nostradamus’ quatrains without really understanding them. After all, if they showed it on TV, then it must be true!
So 1990 ended with much of the world wondering if the world was about to end as well.
When the allied coalition finally launched their assault on Baghdad in February 1991, there was only a smattering of newsmen left in the Iraqi capital. Among them, a small team from the upstart Cable News Network, long labeled the Chicken News Network by its more established rivals.
I remember watching the Baghdad skyline aglow with millions of tracer bullets and anti aircraft fire through the night vision lenses of CNN’s cameras. Flashes in the horizon marked the places where so-called smart bombs fell. Then there were the smart missile videos, grainy black and white images of buildings growing larger as the missiles approached their targets. Then, static, as the video feed got cut. The technology was breathtaking. What I really found amazing was how anyone could throw perfectly good videocameras at these buildings. But that’s the cheapskate in me talking. The world was entranced by visions, not of the end of the world, but of the start of a new kind of news – the 24 hour kind. Twenty-four hour cable news? What a brilliant idea! No matter that most people would just leave the TV on without paying attention to it, such that the sounds and video just merged with the general noise of daily life. It’s just like tuning in to the Aquarium Channel.
The rest of course is history, turning the First Gulf War into the biggest blockbuster since John Rambo rescued America’s martial honor from the bottom of the barrel with a few unintelligible grunts and mumblings. What got lost in the flurry of press and parades was that one question that some people had been asking even before the war started – If Saddam was the evil monster portrayed by the Pentagon and the State Department, why did the Americans leave him in control in Baghdad. If he was such a megalomaniac, a mass murderer, why did the Allied Coalition stop the war as soon as they regained Kuwait? Aha! Maybe there was an answer there somewhere…
The truth is that the Allies needed Saddam there in Baghdad. He was the wild card that kept the Saudis, the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Libyans in check. He was the monster who could use an iron hand to control all the wild passions of the different sects and tribes that lived in Iraq. He was the bad boy who simply had to take the place of the first Evil Empire, the Soviet Union.
In the end, the coverage of the first Gulf War was unremarkable, except for the performance of Peter Arnett and his team in Baghdad. The rest of the western media was trapped in Kuwait by a recalcitrant US military that refused to have anything to do with them until the end of the war. The ghosts of Vietnam still haunted the US military, which blamed the media, rightly or wrongly, for its disastrous withdrawal from Saigon.
After the lopsided American victory, Iraq settled in the background as other concerns made headlines. But it would remain there, simmering and brewing, a virtual pressure cooker in the middle of the Middle East. Once in a while, the Coalition would strike at Iraq for alleged violations of the post-Gulf War UN sanctions. In the first major airstrike after the war, Bill Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox, a bombing campaign to punish Saddam for his refusal to cooperate with UN arms inspectors.
Things would change dramatically after 9-11.
Four months after the World Trade Center disaster, George W. Bush, son and namesake of the “crusader” of the first Gulf War, lumped Iraq, Iran, and North Korea together in what he called the Axis of Evil. Bush went further and found all sorts of tenuous links between al Qaeda and Saddam. By the middle of 2002, it was already clear that the United States had pulled all the stops in an effort to justify a new war against Iraq, this time, with the aim of toppling Saddam Hussein. The tragedy of 9-11 provided the best excuse to start another tragedy. America was again going to war against Saddam, but this time, the stakes were loftier, but the reasons were shallower.
The prospect of another Gulf War was interesting and intriguing to a lot of Filipino journalists, although few would have considered the idea of being in the middle of it. It also still sounded too remote at the time. Still, Iraq is such a fascinating subject, Saddam or no Saddam.
In mid-2002, Jim mentioned that he had a friend named Danny who was also acting as the publicist of the Iraqi embassy in Manila. We considered the possiblities. With the West browbeating Iraq, the Iraqis may want to tell their side of the story before the bombs started falling. We met up with Danny and discussed the prospects of visiting Iraq. Such a visit would have been well timed, since Saddam, in a bid to convince the world, if not himself, that he still had the popular mandate, had decided to call a national plebiscite. Or was it an election? It was really hard to tell. Voters simply had to indicate if they still wanted Saddam in charge. There were no other names on the ballot. Obviously, that didn’t really prove convincing, to the West, or even to the Iraqis. Saddam’s government would announce later that Saddam got 100 percent of the vote [some would joke that he got even more], a major achievement even for other tin-pot dictators. Normally, dictators leave a small measure of “doubt”, just enough to indicate that there is still some sort of legitimate opposition allowed by the regime. But no, Saddam had to go the whole nine yards.
While our inquiries would lead nowhere in the end, we had crossed a Rubicon of sorts – in the intervening months after Afghanistan, we had played with other ideas like travelling to Somalia and such. But it was mostly half-hearted, and did not amount to much. Now, we were seriously considering deploying to another war zone, possibly at a time of war. With Afghanistan just two years under our belts, it was the best proof that there are lessons that some people never learn.
For our meeting with Danny, I brushed up on Iraqi history and culture. And after some initial reading, I was already ready to call myself stupid. For a decade, we read with great interest the prophecies of Nostradamus, the adventures of Peter Arnett and the CNN team, and the astounding technology that gave us the smart bomb and cameras inside missiles and night vision goggles and cable television and just about everything we thought we needed to know about the Gulf War. But we had never really learned about Iraq.
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