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CounterPunch
March 22,
2003
A Cauldron of Fire
Irresistible,
Unquestionable Power
By ROBERT FISK
Baghdad, Iraq.
Saddam's main presidential palace, a great rampart
of a building 20 storeys high, simply exploded in front of me--a
cauldron of fire, a 100ft sheet of flame and a sound that had
my ears singing for an hour after. The entire, massively buttressed
edifice shuddered under the impact. Then four more cruise missiles
came in.
It is the heaviest bombing Baghdad has
suffered in more than 20 years of war. All across the city last
night, massive explosions shook the ground. To my right, the
Ministry of Armaments Procurement--a long colonnaded building
looking much like the façade of the Pentagon--coughed
fire as five missiles crashed into the concrete.
In an operation officially intended to
create "shock and awe'', shock was hardly the word for it.
The few Iraqis in the streets around me--no friends of Saddam
I would suspect--cursed under their breath.
From high-rise buildings, shops and homes
came the thunder of crashing glass as the shock waves swept across
the Tigris river in both directions. Minute after minute the
missiles came in. Many Iraqis had watched--as I had--television
film of those ominous B-52 bombers taking off from Britain only
six hours earlier. Like me, they had noted the time, added three
hours for Iraqi time in front of London and guessed that, at
around 9pm, the terror would begin. The B-52s, almost certainly
firing from outside Iraqi airspace, were dead on time.
 Police cars drove at speed through the streets,
their loudspeakers ordering pedestrians to take shelter or hide
under cover of tall buildings. Much good did it do. Crouching
next to a block of shops on the opposite side of the river, I
narrowly missed the shower of glass that came cascading down
from the upper windows as the shock waves slammed into them.
Along the streets a few Iraqis could
be seen staring from balconies, shards of broken glass around
them. Each time one of the great golden bubbles of fire burst
across the city, they ducked inside before the blast wave reached
them. At one point, as I stood beneath the trees on the corniche,
a wave of cruise missiles passed low overhead, the shriek of
their passage almost as devastating as the explosions that were
to follow.
How, I ask myself, does one describe
this outside the language of a military report, the definition
of the colour, the decibels of the explosions? When the cruise
missiles came in it sounded as if someone was ripping to pieces
huge curtains of silk in the sky and the blast waves became a
kind of frightening counterpoint to the flames.
There is something anarchic about all
human beings, about their reaction to violence. The Iraqis around
me stood and watched, as I did, at huge tongues of flame bursting
from the upper stories of Saddam's palace, reaching high into
the sky. Strangely, the electricity grid continued to operate
and around us the traffic lights continued to move between red
and green. Billboards moved in the breeze of the shock waves
and floodlights continued to blaze on public buildings. Above
us we could see the massive curtains of smoke beginning to move
over Baghdad, white from the explosions, black from the burning
targets.
How could one resist it? How could the
Iraqis ever believe with their broken technology, their debilitating
12 years of sanctions, that they could defeat the computers of
these missiles and of these aircraft? It was the same old story:
irresistible, unquestionable power.
Well yes, one could say, could one attack
a more appropriate regime? But that is not quite the point. For
the message of last night's raid was the same as that of Thursday's
raid, that of all the raids in the hours to come: that the United
States must be obeyed. That the EU, UN, Nato--nothing--must stand
in its way. Indeed can stand in its way.
No doubt this morning the Iraqi Minister
of Information will address us all again and insist that Iraq
will prevail. We shall see. But many Iraqis are now asking an
obvious question: how many days? Not because they want the Americans
or the British in Baghdad, though they may profoundly wish it.
But because they want this violence to end: which, when you think
of it, is exactly why these raids took place.
Reports were coming in last night of
civilians killed in the raids--which, given the intensity of
the cruise missile attacks, is not surprising. Another target
turned out to be the vast Rashid military barracks, perhaps the
largest in Iraq.
But the symbolic centre of this raid
was clearly intended to be Saddam's main palace, with its villas,
fountains, porticos and gardens. And, sure enough, the flames
licking across the façade of the palace last night looked
very much like a funeral pyre.
Yesterday's
Features
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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