Documentary : In Baghdad, When the U.S. Missiles Came : A reporter’s visit to the Iraqi capital became a matter of life--and death.

It’s well after 10 p.m., Friday, Jan. 15.

It had been a long drive across the Iraqi desert--10 grueling hours of desolation and sand from the Jordanian capital, Amman, to the heart of the most isolated nation on the globe. As we approach the reception desk of the Iraqi regime’s Rashid Hotel, Saddam Hussein’s confrontation with George Bush is intensifying by the hour. There are words of hate, threats of war. I’m American, the desk clerk Iraqi. The hotel, he says, is full.

“No rooms,” the clerk says curtly.

We protest, but he holds firm.

“There is big Islamic conference here. Hundreds of important delegates from all over the world. I can do nothing for you. Try the Sheraton.”

Exhausted and dejected, an American colleague and I turn to go across the Tigris River to the Ishtar Sheraton. But, as we do, a young Iraqi woman behind the reception desk calls out to me. Her name is Amira Toma.

“Don’t worry,” she says, a warm smile melting the moment. “When the conference ends in three days, we will have a room for you. I promise.”

Just 48 hours later, an American cruise missile would crash into the base of the Rashid. There would be an explosion just 25 feet from where we were standing at Amira’s desk, and the hotel lobby would fill with a torrent of glass and shrapnel. Hundreds of Muslims from 52 countries would accuse America of targeting Islam.

And Amira Toma would be dead.

So began 10 days behind the lines during and after a final face-off between outgoing U.S. President George Bush and the man the Arab world knows simply as Saddam--a week inside the mad world of Baghdad that so many here now hope will stand as a turning point in relations between America and one of its bitterest modern-day foes.

Saturday, Jan. 16

The Iraqi national anthem is playing through a scratchy public-address system, and dozens of bodyguards wearing identical black mustaches and old business suits fill the aisles of Baghdad’s National Theater, as Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam Hussein’s trusted No. 2 in the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, takes a prominent seat in the chilly auditorium.

This is a regime that has prided itself on its policies of science over superstition. Saddam and his inner circle are socialists, pan-Arabists and modernists, according to their party manifesto. But today, on what would be the eve of destruction, the leaders of Iraq’s authoritarian Arab Baath Socialist Party prove once again that they are, first and foremost, survivalists.

“We are blessed in this country for having the Islamic holy warrior President Saddam Hussein as leader, who is guiding the country in a religious holy war against the infidels and nonbelievers,” Ibrahim declares from the podium as he opens Baghdad’s 6th International Popular Islamic Conference.

The official is standing beside a 10-foot-tall oil painting of Saddam in formal military dress, complete with sword and sheath. He is cultivating the image of Saddam and Iraq as the nucleus of an expanding world conflict between Islam and the West. I look around the cavernous hall. There are delegates from the most committed Islamic organizations on Earth--Afghan moujahedeen (holy warriors), Palestinian militants, Sudanese fundamentalists, the Islamic Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Party of Islam.

Later in the day, a diplomat who has lived for years in Baghdad explains: “At the moment, Saddam needs this. Islam is the symbol of defiance of the West. He could change tomorrow if he must. But this long crisis really has brought Iraq closer to God. Some of it is deception. Much is real. All I can tell you is, with Islam or without it, with George Bush or without him, Saddam is here to stay.”

Sunday, Jan. 17

It’s one of those surreal moments at the cutting edge of the New World Order, the night President Bush will attempt to send his final “message” to a dictator he hopes will listen “loud and clear.”

A U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf already has launched 40 cruise missiles at Baghdad. They’re speeding above the Iraqi desert at more than 500 m.p.h. There’s a news blackout on the ships in the U.S. fleet, but colleagues in Washington have just tipped several American journalists in the jittery press room at the Information Ministry that something is on its way.

As we wait for the missiles to strike yet-unknown targets nearby, John Holliman, CNN’s Baghdad veteran who witnessed a similar U.S. attack here precisely two years before, is singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in a soothing baritone, waiting to go on live at the moment of impact. The other networks also are prepared to record the first blast.

Within minutes, the sky finally does explode in arcs of red tracer fire and yellow bursts of flak. But the series of bright, far-off flashes that ignite the southern horizon, beginning at 9:30 p.m., lasts just 20 minutes. Soon, the thundering Iraqi antiaircraft guns fall silent, and the shimmer of Orion and the Big Dipper returns to Baghdad’s cloudless sky. We wander back into the press room.

Then, without warning, a deafening nearby explosion shakes the floor and, again, the sky explodes with antiaircraft fire. Half a mile away, a missile the Pentagon later would say was damaged and driven off course by Iraqi antiaircraft fire had landed beside the Rashid Hotel.

Within minutes I’m in the rubble of the lobby. Stretchers rush past filled with the bleeding and wounded--fellow journalists, Islamic delegates, Arab tourists. People are shouting, some are sobbing uncontrollably.

“Amira’s dead! Amira’s dead!”

A large German guest, who miraculously chose to brush his teeth moments before the window of his room shattered and sliced through his bed and walls, approaches me, seething. “I want to kill the first American I see,” he says, eyes wide with rage. “Where are you from?”

By sheer reflex, I tell the truth.

“You people will never understand,” he says, clenching his teeth and forcing control. “Look, my friend, I was one of those supposed ‘guests’ here in 1990--one of the so-called foreign hostages in Baghdad after the invasion of Kuwait. But I was very well treated. And now, just yesterday, I came back here because of my feelings for these people. I came back to see my Iraqi friends. You understand? No. You people will never understand.”

Monday, Jan. 18

The young Iraqi man is leaning against a wall in the large crowd that has gathered around the crumpled roof, twisted metal and broken furniture that had once been the Toukmachi family home. It, too, was struck the night before by a cruise missile that was diverted into this now-shattered middle-class neighborhood called Karrada. In the presence of Information Ministry guides, most of the onlookers speak in a single voice--venomous and predictable invectives for Bush, the Satan they say they blame for this civilian destruction. But, in the crowd, far from the Iraqi security agents who monitor the conversations of their people, Baghdad’s traditional veil of secrecy and fear is lifted for a brief and whispered moment.

As he watches a crew of technicians patch power lines with tattered lengths of used wire, the young Iraqi man shakes his head and smiles sadly.

“What do I think of this? Who do I blame for this?” he says, playing my questions back. “My friend, if I answer this truthfully, they will kill not only me. They will kill my wife, my children, my mother, my father and maybe even my cousins. I’ll tell you who we blame. We blame your bastard Bush--for keeping this man in power.”

Tuesday, Jan. 19

It is hours before Saddam Hussein would announce his unilateral cease-fire, a calculated olive branch on the eve of Bill Clinton’s inauguration. It is a gesture Iraqi officials liken to Iran’s dramatic release of the U.S. hostages on the day Ronald Reagan took office.

I’m sitting with an old Iraqi friend--one of tens of thousands of Iraqi intellectuals who constitute a creative and progressive class little-seen by an anti-Iraq America.

“Saddam may be brutal. Saddam may be crude. But Saddam is shrewd and a survivor,” my friend explains, his radio turned up loud to cover his words. “Please tell me: When will America realize it is not going to get rid of this man? There are 100,000 Republican Guardsmen ready to die for him. Nobody knows where he is until well after he’s been there. And he runs this country like the warden of a well-disciplined prison without windows or doors.

“Look, my friend, we love this man or we hate this man, it doesn’t matter. If this new American Administration forces him to change, all well and good. But confronting him will fail. Every single step George Bush took with this man only made our lives more miserable. And we are the ones who must live with him.”

Wednesday, Jan. 20

The old shopkeeper’s shelves are empty again today. It’s Inauguration Day in Washington and shopping day in Baghdad--a moment to pause, listen and assess the mood of a cautious Iraqi capital.

This is the second time I’ve seen this shop this way. The first time, the shopkeeper had locked up all his valuable items prior to the allied air strikes that kicked off Operation Desert Storm. It was instinct that time. This time it was the law.

Almost every item he had in stock is now banned by strict new government controls on imports--a harsh measure forced on Iraq’s wealthier merchant class by a nation desperately short of hard currency following 30 months of U.N. trade sanctions. I ask the shopkeeper whether the Iraqi people would ever rise up against Saddam.

“There’s a joke going around town,” the shopkeeper replies. “It goes something like this: Saddam Hussein asks an aide why the people don’t protest his rule. His aide suggests that Saddam get tougher on them. So he cuts everyone’s salary in half. No one protests. So he cuts their salary to zero. But still, no protests. So he orders his soldiers to take up positions on all bridges in the city and beat every man and woman as they go to work.

“Finally, two protesters show up at Saddam’s office. The president, pleased at the response, invites them in. ‘Sir,’ one of them says shyly, ‘this latest order to beat us on the bridges is causing everyone big problems. We are all arriving late to work. Could you please send out more soldiers to beat us so they can speed things up?’

“The Iraqi people,” says the shopkeeper, “well, I’m afraid we’re a little like this.”

Thursday, Jan. 21

An Iraqi band is playing Arabic pop songs in the packed Chinese restaurant at the Hamra Hotel, one of many nightspots that endure.

Despite continuing U.S. air attacks on missile sites in Iraq’s “no-fly zones”--two vast regions where the United States and its allies have banned Iraqi military flights--a strange sort of peace seems finally in sight.

The late-night dinner crowd is mixed. There’s the usual array of middle-class Iraqis, as well as more than two dozen Western journalists who finally were finding a moment to sit and eat after days without meals and nights without sleep.

As midnight approaches, things seem to be getting a bit out of hand. One large group of American journalists, forgetting for the moment that the U.S. military had launched missile strikes on this city just a few nights before, asks the band to play some American music. And, as the Iraqi musicians proudly rip into renditions of “Tequila,” “Rock Around the Clock” and even “Rawhide,” to the rowdy accompaniment of some of the reporters, several Iraqi diners look up, seemingly offended.

“Oh no,” one of the Iraqis assures me later. “We enjoyed it very much. It just took us by surprise. Believe me, it’s very good for us to hear the sounds of the outside world again.”

Friday, Jan. 22

We’re combing through a wheat field 250 miles north of Baghdad, looking for bits and pieces of truth, trying to determine just why an American F-16 would want to drop its cluster bombs on Ali Hussein Ali’s farm.

With American planes flying overhead and Iraqi air force personnel as his escort, Ali shows us the dozens of tiny bomblets that exploded here 24 hours before. He shows us a pile of fertilizer, which is all he says there was to bomb. And, as the air force leads us away from half a dozen soiled red pennants marking live bomblets still in the ground, Ali insists that the Pentagon very simply was wrong.

“No. Never. None,” he says, when asked whether a SAM-3 surface-to-air missile site had been there the day before. “And I should know,” he adds, “it is my farm.”

The truth about Ali Hussein Ali’s farm? Well, America bombed it; that is sure.

And it’s also true that the Iraqi regime went far out of its way to try and show there was no reason for the attack--an indication, we’re told, that Baghdad still wants peace rather than war.

Perhaps the greatest truth we learn today, though, is just how hard the truth is to find. It has been a quiet day, aside from the jets overhead. And it isn’t until well after we leave that we hear the news that yet another missile battery was bombed by an American F-16--supposedly about eight miles from Ali’s farm, and the Pentagon says the incident occurred about the time we were there. When we hear about it, we ask our Iraqi air force escort if the report is true. “No,” is all he says.

Saturday, Jan. 23

It’s the first quiet night since I’ve been here in the press room of the Information Ministry building. For the first time in a week, there isn’t much news. Then Tom Johnson, president of Cable News Network (and former publisher of the Los Angeles Times), strides into the room. Within minutes, the rumor spreads: “So, CNN has an interview with Saddam,” many journalists in the room conclude. If true, it would be Saddam’s first direct contact with the foreign press since a CNN interview at the peak of the allied war in 1991.

It wasn’t until the next morning that everyone would learn the Pentagon reported Iraqi antiaircraft guns opened up on U.S. jets in southern Iraq.

As for the Saddam interview--no confirmation or denial. That’s how it is covering Iraq from inside Baghdad.

Sunday, Jan. 24

We’re speeding across the Iraqi desert at 80 m.p.h., heading due west. Dead ahead of us is the Iraqi-Jordanian border.

As we race toward that boundary, a line in the sand that so many see as a gate to freedom, two colleagues and I are exhausted. But, as with most foreigners who make this mad commute, our chests lighten with each mile. We’re cruising in a Custom Deluxe Chevrolet van--the trappings of Iraq’s ruling elite. It has tinted windows, carpeted walls, deep cushion seats, a television, even a VCR. And, as we speed past the final Saddam posters that punctuate this highway, today’s choice of films on the VCR could not have been more apt. While the radio is reporting that Iraqi antiaircraft guns again opened up on allied warplanes over southern Iraq, we’re watching “Die Hard 2.”