In Chechnya or Bosnia you may have had to trek over mountains under fire, dragging your satellite phone and computer behind you, but at least you could write what you saw and what you felt.
That does not apply in Iraq. The Iraqi Ministry of Information carefully screens journalists entering the country. Visas can be as elusive as gold dust. Acquiring one can take months, and requires great patience and perseverance.
The process becomes all-absorbing. If and when word that your application has been successful reaches London the relief is huge. It can be baffling. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why some reporters get visas relatively easily while others are left in limbo.
When you arrive in Baghdad, either by road from Jordan or by plane to Saddam international airport, you leave behind your mobile telephone and any sensitive reading material, both of which are forbidden. Your satellite phone — your link to the world and the means to get your story out — is sealed at a customs point. To have the seal opened you have to register at the Ministry of Information press centre, upon which you very quickly become dependent.
You receive a government-appointed “minder” who accompanies you all day. You are forbidden from taking your satellite phone outside the building. If you are caught with your dish hanging out of your hotel window, you can be expelled. You are never explicitly told what to write and what not to write. The process is subtler than that. Journalists’ visas are “extended” every ten days, which means being very careful about the questions you really mean to ask because you don’t know whether or not your minder will report you, or your hapless interviewee, “upstairs”.
Life in Baghdad could be pleasant, with the restaurants — bordering the slow-flowing Tigris — filled with the wealthy drinking non-alcoholic beer, eating a fish speciality called masgouf, or watching the old-fashioned Lincolns and Chevrolets that Iraqis love to drive — cars that will shock American soldiers because they are the cars their fathers drove.
Then, the reality of what lies below the surface would intrude. In passing, someone will whisper to you. One night it was a musician in a bar who said in an urgent voice: “You must understand, we are afraid of our own shadows.” Another time, when I was visiting a small newspaper, a simple employee bravely leaned over his computer and hissed: “We want our freedom.”
But these encounters were rare. Most taxi drivers, merchants, tea-vendors or families I visited spoke highly of Saddam and his men. It is difficult to know whether they said what they said because they believed it, because it was all they heard on the television and radio, or because they were terrified. The coming days will show.
“I am telling you now, we will not come out to greet the Americans as our liberators,” said one Iraqi intellectual, choosing his words carefully. “Even if some people welcome a change, they will not welcome foreigners coming to rule them.” That is one potential danger the Americans must consider. The other is what will happen after the bombing, and whether there will be a civil war between the Sunni minority, who comprise most of Iraq’s present leadership, and the Shia, who are the majority. The most likely theory is a Shia uprising.
The question everyone wonders, but no one asks aloud, is whether the one million Shias who live in the festering Saddam City slum in Baghdad will rise up against anyone, or anything, connected with Saddam. Iraqis say, in their scripted voices, that everything is under control, that Iraqis — Sunni and Shia — will both loathe an occupier and unite to resist them.
Partly, this is true. But what is also true is that many Shias have felt repressed and under-represented for years, and the smouldering resentment you feel as you wander past the open sewers of Saddam City is very real. The bombing may be the match that lights the tinder box. Still, Iraq and Iraqis are easy to love, and it is difficult to have spent two months in a country and leave knowing it will be bombed.
One recent afternoon, as I wandered near the markets of Kerrada, I watched ordinary people buying ordinary things — hairbrushes, toothpaste, tin foil. Who among them would live and who would die? Seeing the shop windows, one could imagine piles of glass.
An hour after the move to get a second UN resolution collapsed on Monday and war became inevitable, the street scenes were the same: men in cafés drinking tea; even men surreally and optimistically continuing building work on the Ministry of Information. But their lives are about to change for ever.
Saying goodbye to so many people — families I had met, drivers, even minders who had tears in their eyes as they helped to load the vehicle for the long ride to Jordan — was hard. I wondered if I would ever again see the man whose tea station became the Times office inside the Ministry of Information in Baghdad.
All of them said the same thing, sadly. Not just “goodbye habibe” – Arabic for darling. But “goodbye, see you again, inshallah” – God willing.