Lara Marlowe reports from Baghdad on a city, and people, preparing for the worst.
The woman at the Royal Jordanian ticket counter in Amman shook her head as she printed up the airline tickets. "Do you really want to go to Baghdad now ?" she asked several of the journalists queuing for RJ flight 1736.
When King Abdallah defied UN sanctions to restart flights to Baghdad, it created a stir. But with the US and Britain about to violate the UN Charter, that infringement seems like small beer now.
A war of epic proportions was doubtless about to start, but apart from the ticket-seller's remonstrance, the one and-a-half-hour flight was amazingly normal. Over their sandwiches and orange juice, my French colleagues contemplated something a diplomat said. Could it be true?
"Don't expect to be received as heroes because of France's position," they'd been told. "People in the streets will be angry with you, for trying to keep Saddam Hussein in power."
Airport security spotted a tiny pair of fingernail scissors in my hand luggage, and in overzealous enforcement of post-September 11th security measures, sent them as checked luggage to Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein is accused of hiding tonnes of VX nerve agent and anthrax spores. The US last week tested a 9.5 tonne bomb in Florida called a Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) that spreads inflammable fog over its target, then sets it alight for an explosion as powerful as an atomic weapon, killing everything within 500 metres. And Amman airport security confiscated my nail scissors on one of the last flights to Baghdad!
On the plane, I continued reading a magazine article comparing Saddam Hussein to Stalin, who died 50 years ago this month. Neither dictator ever knew his father. Both of their mothers worked as maids. Saddam read biographies of Stalin during a 20-month stay in prison in the mid-1960s, and openly modelled himself on "the little father of the peoples".
But it was a photograph of Saddam Hussein as a boy, about eight years old, which most struck me. This was the hard face of a street urchin who was beaten by his step-father, stole eggs and chickens and sold watermelons to feed his family, and stoned stray dogs for fun.
"His childhood was poor, chaotic, bitter," the French author Francois Soudan wrote. "He never managed to exorcise it; it is one of the keys to his later behaviour." How many future Saddam Husseins are growing up now? I wondered.
On the trek from Paris, I'd also read the Journal du Dimanche's one-page spread on Target: Baghdad Airport. One of the opening acts of the war would be the seizure of Saddam Hussein International Airport - where I was about to land - by US commandos of the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions and the British 16th assault brigade, the paper predicted. The only military aircraft on the tarmac on Sunday night was a white Hercules belonging to the UN, waiting to fly UN weapons inspectors out before the war started.
The Pentagon's plan to seize Saddam Hussein International Airport was reportedly hatched in the first week of March. It would be demoralising for the regime, and would create a bridgehead for weapons and reinforcements. Since Turkey refused to allow 60,000 US troops to base there, a bridgehead at Baghdad airport became more important.
So from the moment I landed, I imagined US troops in kitty litter and chocolate chip camouflage loitering around the terminal. They would quickly remove the words "Down USA", stencilled in red paint on the floor. Though the airport is nearly 30 years old, the Gulf-style domed ceiling and marble floors give an idea of the prosperity the country enjoyed in the 1970s, before Saddam Hussein's wars.
Almost instinctively, my eyes looked for him, the man many Iraqis refer to simply as "the photo".
To my surprise, there were only adverts for hotels and clothing shops, until I reached the baggage section. At the first of five bureaucratic way-stations to enter the People's Republic of Iraq, a clerk explained that I would have to have an Aids test.
"I can give you 10 days (without a test)," he said. "More if you take care of me."
I extracted a $10 bill from my purse and gained a 15-day reprieve. As I advanced through the airport, the requests for bribes became more frequent. At the last checkpoint, three paunchy officers in olive green uniforms moved in, wolf-like, to claim 20 dollars each. If it's like this now, what will it be like if there is anarchy on the streets of Baghdad?
"The Iraqi people are not afraid," the immigration officer who stamped me in announced with a gentle smile, watching my face to see if I'd understood. His tone was ambiguous: did he mean they thought they were about to be liberated? Or merely that they'd seen it all before?
There are few signs that war is imminent, apart from hour-long queues to buy petrol, and the antique dealers I saw clearing out their stalls across from the Palestine Hotel. My hotel has put masking tape Xs on only a few of its windows, but yesterday a newly painted blue and gold sign saying "SHELTER" replaced the hand-scrawled paper pointing to the basement. A chemist in Saadoun Street says her customers are stocking up on bandages and Paracetamol - hardly an antidote to what the Pentagon threatens will be the most intense, sustained bombardment in modern history.
"People haven't grasped it," commented an an Iraqi government employee. They feel they've been at war for 20 years, since Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, with only a two-year pause between the end of the first Gulf War and the Kuwaiti invasion.
A merchant selling brass lamps and kitch paintings of Arab horsemen shot nervous glances at my government "minder" and said he relied on Abu-Uday (Saddam Hussein) to protect him. But when I spoke to an officer who was buying socks - the next biggest fish in the fear chain - it was the "minder" who trembled. "Bush means 'empty' in Arabic," the officer said.
"These are all empty threats." I met Qabass, a true believer in President Saddam Hussein, by chance.
The pretty 22-year-old student wore an Islamic headscarf and said she'd never had a chance to speak English to a foreigner before. She says she has met Saddam Hussein about 10 times since her father, a retired military officer, died in 1998.
"The first time, I told him I was afraid, and he said 'Why?' and he kissed me on the forehead. I told him he was my father now."
Saddam Hussein has done a lot for her family, Qabass continued. Until very recently, he received groups of women and students in his presidential office, to hear their requests for assistance.
"He gave me this watch," she said, raising her sleeve to show a gold-faced wrist-watch bearing the Iraqi eagle. "He told us we were balm on his wounds, because he misses being able to go out in public."
Qabass says she is truly afraid for the first time, not because she lives on a compound for military families in Baghdad, but for the future of Iraq.
"I was not afraid in 1991. But this time, I am afraid he may leave us."
She does not hate the American people, but says there is "something diabolic" in the Bush administration. "They want our oil, and they hate our religion," she said. "They want to help the Jewish people."
Perhaps the bookseller, a kindly man who says no one buys his Barbara Cartland novels - only Korans - got it right. Would life be better in Iraq after the war? I asked him.
"Perhaps; if we survive."
