would come the power-generating stations, telecommunications towers, telephone exchanges, relay stations, aircraft shelters, control towers, and all those known facilities for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.
Later still would come the systematic “degradation” to less than fifty percent of its fighting power of the Iraqi Army south and southwest of the Kuwaiti border, a condition on which General Schwarzkopf insisted before he would attack with ground troops.
Two then-unknown factors would later cause changes to the course of the war. One was Iraq’s decision to launch a barrage of Scud missiles at Israel; the other would be triggered by an act of sheer frustration on the part of Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron.
Dawn broke on the morning of January 17 over a Baghdad that was very badly shaken.
The ordinary citizens had not slept a wink from three A.M. on, and when daylight came, some of them ventured out to peer curiously at the rubble of a score of major sites across their city. That they had survived the night seemed to many miraculous, for they were simple folk who did not realize that the twenty smoking mounds of rubble had been carefully selected and hit with such precision that the citizenry had been in no mortal danger.
But the real sense of shock was among the hierarchs. Saddam Hussein had left the Presidential Palace and was lodged in his extraordinary multistory bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel, which was still full of Westerners, mainly from the media.
The bunker had been built years earlier inside a vast crater dug by earth-movers, with mainly Swedish technology. So sophisticated were its security measures that it was in fact a box within a box, and beneath and around the inner box were springs of such strength as to protect the inhabitants from a nuclear bomb, reducing shock waves that would flatten the city above into a minor tremor down below.
Although access was via a hydraulically operated ramp set in waste ground behind the hotel, the main structure was beneath the Rashid, which had deliberately been built on the ground above as a specific repose for Westerners in Baghdad. Any enemy wishing to attempt a deep-penetration bombing of the bunker would have to obliterate the Rashid first.
Try as they might, the sycophants surrounding the Rais were hard put to create a gloss over the night’s disasters. Slowly, the level of the catastrophe penetrated all their minds.
They had all counted on a blanket bombing of the city, which would have left residential areas flattened and thousands of innocent civilians dead. This carnage would then be shown to the media, who would film it all and show it to the sickened audiences back home. Thus would begin the global wave of revulsion against President Bush and the United States, culminating in an emergency session of the UN Security Council and the veto of China and Russia against further massacre.
By midday, it was plain that the Sons of Dogs from across the Atlantic were not obliging. So far as the Iraqi generals were aware, the bombs fell approximately where they had been aimed, but that was all. With every major military installation in Baghdad deliberately sited in densely populated housing areas, it should have been impossible for massive civilian casualties to be avoided. Yet while a tour of the city revealed twenty command posts, missile sites, radar bases, and communication centers blasted to rubble, those not in the targeted buildings had sustained little more than broken windows and were even now gaping at the mess.
The authorities had to be satisfied with inventing a civilian death toll and claims that American aircraft had been shot out of the skies like autumn leaves. Most Iraqis, stultified by years of propaganda, believed these first reports—for a while.
The generals in charge of air defense knew better. By midday, it was clear to them that they had lost almost all their radar warning ability, that their SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—were blind, and that communication with the outlying units was all but cut. Worse, the radar operators who had survived kept insisting the damage had been done by bombers that simply had not shown up on their screens. The liars were at once put under arrest.
Some civilian casualties had indeed occurred. At least two Tomahawk cruise missiles, their fins damaged by conventional triple-A gunfire rather than SAMs, had crashed off-target. One had demolished two houses and blown tiles off a mosque, an outrage that the press corps was shown during the afternoon.
The other had fallen on waste ground and made a large crater. During the late afternoon the body of a woman was found at the bottom of it, badly smashed by the impact that apparently killed her.
Bombing raids continued throughout the day, so that the ambulance crews were not prepared to do more than wrap the corpse hastily in a blanket, bring it to the morgue of the nearest hospital, and leave it there. The hospital happened to be close to a major Air Force command center that had been demolished, and all beds were occupied by service personnel wounded in the attack. Several scores of bodies were taken to the same morgue, all dead from bomb blasts. The woman’s was just one of them.
With his resources at the breaking point, the pathologist worked fast and cursorily. Identification and cause of death were his principal priorities, and he had no time for leisured examination. Across the city the crump of more bombs could be heard, and the blast of counterfire was unceasing. He had no doubt the evening and night would bring him more bodies.
What surprised the doctor was that all his dead bodies were service personnel, except the woman. She seemed to be about thirty and had once been comely. The concrete dust clinging to the blood of her smashed face, coupled with the place she had been found, gave cause for no other explanation than that she had been running away when the missile struck the waste ground and killed her. The body was so tagged, then wrapped for burial.
Her handbag had been found next to the body, and it contained a powder compact, lipstick, and her identity cards. Having established that one Leila Al-Hilla was undoubtedly a civilian victim of a bomb blast, the harassed pathologist had her taken away for hasty burial.
The more elaborate post-mortem for which he did not have time that January 17 would have shown the woman had been repeatedly and savagely raped before being systematically beaten to death. The dumping in the crater had come several hours later.
General Abdullah Kadiri had moved from his sumptuous office in the Defense Ministry two days earlier. There was no point in staying to be blown to bits by an American bomb, and he was sure the Ministry would be hit and destroyed before the air war was many days old. He was right.
He had established himself in his villa, which he was reasonably certain was anonymous enough—albeit luxurious—not to be on any American target map. In this too he was right.
The villa had long since been provided with its own communications room, which staff from the Ministry were now manning. All his communications to the various command headquarters of the Armored Corps around Baghdad were by buried fiber-optic cable, which was also out of reach of the bombers.
Only the farther units had to be contacted by radio, with a threat of intercept—plus, of course, those in Kuwait.
His problem, as darkness fell over Baghdad that night, was not how to contact his Armored Corps commanders or what orders to give them.
They could take no part in the air war, being tasked to disperse their tanks as widely as possible among the rows of dummies or bury them in the subterranean bunkers and wait.
His problem, rather, was his personal security, and it was not the Americans he feared.
Two nights earlier, rising from his bed with a bursting bladder, bleary with arak as usual, he had stumbled to the bathroom. Finding the door, as he thought, stuck, he had pushed hard. His two hundred pounds of body weight had torn the inner bolt from its screws, and the door flew open.
Bleary he might have been, but Abdullah Kadiri had not come from a back street near Tikrit to command all Iraq’s tanks outside the Republican Guard, had not climbed the slippery ladder of Ba’ath Party internal feuding, and had not sustained a trusted place on the Revolutionary Command Council without ample reserves of animal cunning.
He had stared in silence at his mistress, sitting wrapped in a robe on the toilet seat, her paper sustained by the back of a Kleenex box, her mouth in a round O of horror and surprise, her pen still poised in midair. Then he had hauled her to her feet and hit her on the point of the jaw.
When she came to, with a jug of water dashed in the face, he had had time to read the report she was
