How the wise men lifted my gloom at Christmas in bandit-ridden Baghdad
by Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday:
Of all the strange, upset and postponed Christmases I have experienced in following my curious trade of journalism, the oddest was 20 years ago, when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured by the Americans in a hole in the ground.
I hurried to Baghdad for the second time that year, a glum and unfestive journey leaving Europe and its cheerful lights behind for the darkness of the war-blasted, electricity-free Iraqi capital.
I remember especially having to change planes in Vienna, where the airport was full of Christmas and merriment, and I was sunk in the most hopeless gloom. I had thought one visit to post-war Iraq was quite enough. The place was obviously bound for disaster. A clueless invasion had been followed by a still more hapless occupation.
There had been many low points, the lowest a mass grave of Saddam’s victims, which those who had uncovered it hoped would still the doubts of people such as me who believed the war was wrong. It did not do this. The sight was revolting and deeply sad, but it simply did not justify this huge aggression (now rapidly being forgotten), in which so many more mass graves would be dug and filled.
Months later, the capture of the fallen tyrant had not made much difference. It was the Americans who were feared now, not for deliberate cruelty but for the trouble they had brought while meaning well.
In a shabby city centre square with my brave, patient Iraqi fixer and translator Samir, I greeted the appearance of a US Army patrol with interest, but Samir quickly pulled me down behind a pile of rubble, hissing: ‘They open fire on anyone, for no reason. Get down!’
Samir, a Christian Arab with no love for Saddam, was one of many who told me how much worse life had become for Iraqi Christians since the invasion – an unintended but huge result of the war.
Saddam had restrained all kinds of fanatics, who have ever since made life an increasing misery for non-Muslims and for women.
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