"I'm in baghdad and it's sunday night. Today was perhaps the most bizarre, terrifying (although my traveling companions and I were never in any immediate danger), and mind-blowing day of my life. We left lovely amman at 4am and were in baghdad by about 3 pm. The landscape, physical, climatological, and cultural, changed so much that the night bore no resemblance to the morning. I can't possibly catalog it all, but i can give some impressions.

We crossed the border and headed into iraq at about 10 a.m. a gmc
suburban, the choice of foreign travelers, at $500 cash for the trip.
Perhaps 100 km into the western desert, and burned out cars appear by the roadside. a scorched ferrari said to have belonged to uday hussein, missiled to oblivion as one of his lieutenants tried to escape. Saddam's majestic 6-lane highway from jordan to baghdad, probably better than any US desert interstate, marked by scores of burn marks. A highway overpass with a gaping hole caused by a bomb, which we are told was aimed at a passenger bus. A few hundred yards later, the bus itself, utterly destroyed, the only visual comparison to one suicide-bombed in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.



A highway rest stop sells water and chocolate bars. Truck drivers stand

in 110 degree heat working on their huge, super-heavy-duty overland

trucks, which are late 60s models but look like (and may have) they've

just been built brand new at some iranian factory that hasn't been

retooled in 35 years. Among the buildings at the rest stop is a pile of

rubble, next to it the twisted frames of a tractor trailer and a chevy

van. We're told the first death of the war took place here, a jordanian

truck driver who was talking on his satellite phone at the wrong rest stop

at the wrong time. One of our driver's friends had his suburban shot up

by the US, and they paid him and his passenger $8,000 to keep quiet about

it.



There is heavy truck traffic on the baghdad-amman highway. The trucks

headed to baghdad are loaded with supplies, food, and a good number of

used cars. The trucks headed to amman are almost universally empty, as if

Iraq has nothing worth exporting except the oil that barely flows.



Miles and miles of downed high voltage power lines. Cable tower after

cable tower broken in exactly the same place. Too precise for airplanes

or copters. Special forces or somebody must have systematically placed

explosives on all of them. Is this why the lights are out in baghdad? I

don't know.



We cross the euphrates into ramadi and fallujah, where everyone says the

highway is beset by bedouin bandits. Our local drivers definitely fear

this stretch, although the bandits don't have a reputation for violence;

they just pull guns and demand money. The white gmcs speed up and drive

in a convoy for safety. Along this stretch (and at earlier points when

they got nervous) they form into a tight defensive driving formation, a

squadron of heavy-duty suvs doing 150 kmh all together. The driver next

to us flashes his .45 cal. pistol and a smile to make us (and himself)

feel safer.



And then it's the outskirts of baghdad. Increasingly frequent us army

convoys of humvees, fuel trucks, heavy trucks with .50 cal. machine guns,

and even some street sweepers, which will seem in retrospect futile when

we see the condition of the city. Our driver asks me not to photograph the

soldiers, because they are "crazy" and he doesn't want me to get us all

shot.



The guardrails in the middle of the divided highway have frequently been

flattened by us tanks, done to create places for them to make u-turns

without exiting the superhighway. Sometimes the guardrails have been

pulled out across a full lane of traffic, very dangerous when everyone is

traveling at high speed to avoid the bandits.



We pass a huge, terrifying saddam prison, buildings all sand-colored and

surrounded by a tall wall topped with numerous machine gun nests.



As we enter the city itself, it is total chaos. Nothing could have

prepared us for this. No traffic lights working anywhere. Traffic going

both ways on all one way streets. Horse carts, motorcycles, suvs, tanks,

humvees, and pedestrians. Hundreds and hundreds of men lined up in the

sun, using newspaper hats and umbrellas, to apply for jobs in the new

Iraqi army, whatever that means.



Baghdad is barely smaller than New York, with few tall buildings, meaning

lots of sprawl. It's huge and everywhere there are piles of rubble and

bricks. Buildings that have been bombed, shelled, or burned by looters.

Huge buildings blackened and broken in every direction. The fairgrounds

demolished, and the telephone exchange. Everywhere thousands of people

going every way on the streets. And smoke. Some buildings are still

burning. Trash is burning all over. Every hotel and lots of people have

diesel generators, since the US can't seem to get the electricity on. And

lots of cars with dirty exhaust.



We get reports that many more us soldiers are dying than the pentagon

admits. Perhaps 5 a day. One of my traveling companions sees four guys

drive past our hotel brandishing a gun. Shortly after, the soldiers show

up in their bradley fighting vehicle and do a sweep of the neighborhood.

Darryl Gates couldn't have dreamed of this kind of agressive policing.

Everyone says to make sure not to dress anything like a GI, and never to

talk to soldiers on the street. I don't know whether I'd less want to be

an Iraqi civilian or an American soldier.



Our sort-of air conditioned hotel suite is $35 a night. Our balcony looks

down on a parking lot filled with identical UN vehicles. The streets are

full of desperately poor people. They have that look in their eyes. There

is nothing for them to do in their own society. A lot of these people

probably have university degrees.



we dine at the al-Hamra across the street, the finest hotel in the city

since the US shelled the palestine. A steak is $5 US. The generator, and

the lights, cut out once during dinner, but nobody seems to notice. Four

Australian spec. forces looking guys escort some kind of aussie offcials

to a table near us, leaving their rifles on the floor of the dining room

as they drink diet pepsis and wait for their wards to eat. A

civilian-looking white guy stands in the lobby with a folding-stock

kalashnikov casually hanging over his shoulder.



And, finally, the sun. I think I can deal with the 115(or more) degree

heat, but the sun is piercing through the dry air. I'm ok, but 20 minutes

of it makes me somewhat sunburned. I've never felt anything like it. It

adds so much tension to the air.



George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleeza Rice and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney are insane. I don't know what they think the are doing here, but if it involves order and sanity they have failed miserably and indefinitely. It's obvious enough from the newspaper accounts but you have to see it for yourself. They have caused a catastrophe here. The events of the past year have moved so quickly we tend to forget about the effect of 12 years of economic sanctions. "The price is worth it?" I don't know what they're going to do, and the masters of war themselves must be terrified.

We're ok for now. We'll probably be here about nine days. Have lots of good contacts for information and guidance. There is a 24-hour internet cafe across the street. $3 and hour and very slow, but it works. No phones except satellite phones, which everyone in the Middle East calls by the brand name "thuraya." All the self-important international journalists have them. We don't.



That's it for now. I've been up for 37 hours straight and I'm going to bed.



sf



ps: it's good to hear that billy nessen is out of indonesia; let's hope

his health improves."