Crossing Jordan to rubble of Baghdad

Editor’s Note: NEWS staff writer Alicia Anstead is sending periodic dispatches from Iraq and points along her itinerary to Baghdad, where she is traveling with fellow journalist Peter Davis of Castine, who is on assignment for The Nation magazine.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The car ride from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad is long, flat and unpredictable. Everyone warned about “Ali Babas,” robbers stealing money and equipment from journalists, especially between Ramadi and Fallujah outside of Baghdad. Two Korean reporters in our caravan of eight SUVs said they had prepared for this by splitting their cash into two parts: one to hide from robbers and one to give to robbers. My own money was divided among six places.

At first light, our driver, zooming along at more than 100 mph, stopped at a small market just before the Iraqi border, where the storeowner welcomed us. He is accustomed to journalists laying over here – which is evident from the hundreds of business cards that have been taped to the wall since just before the war. He offered me eggs, but I accepted only a small glass of steamy, sweetened tea, which I hoped would coat the apprehension lodged in my stomach.

Within 20 minutes, the sun rose and began its blaze. As we were about to leave, I asked how much I owed for the tea. Nothing, the owner replied nodding his head. It was his treat. I was grateful for his generosity – and for not having to retrieve cash from the hiding places in my clothing.

The experience of crossing the Jordan-Iraq border is cryptic in the extreme. There are several checkpoints with Jordanian, Iraqi and American guards, and there is scrambling in all directions to find the right line, the best expediter, the proper papers. As we finally pulled away from the last guarded spot, the driver turned to us, smoke billowing from his cigarette, and spoke the only full English sentence we heard from him during the 10-hour trip: “We are in Iraq.”

Much of the journey covers utter desert, but a green carpet, spread over more than 100 miles, announces the approach to Baghdad. It is a gradual unfolding, one that shifts from brown to brush to bushes to palms and eventually to tall trees and flowering vines. Baghdad does not rise out of the desert so much as appear, like a mirage. And like a prism: It is one of the oldest cities in civilization, but the newest glass through which Americans are seeing themselves.

Coalition troops are stationed in pockets throughout the city. Humvees growl down the streets, their manned guns pointed and decisive. Others are parked, and their drivers are sometimes trading cigarettes or playfully chatting with children or locals.

Around them is a pervasive sense of structural crumbling, both from civic neglect under Saddam Hussein and from the war.

Although people are out on the street and many businesses have reopened, Baghdad as a city has been devastated. Its buildings bear the black brush strokes of fires set by looters. “Bombed, stolen and burned” is the way one Iraqi repeatedly described the practice of this war. He pointed to his own singed office building in the former Ministry of Information and said he had escaped the bombs by only two hours.

At the Convention Center, where on Sunday the new Iraqi Governing Council was announced, the United States has set up headquarters in the midst of the rubble and litter.

The state-of-the-art hall, which is in the same “green zone” as the Republican Palace and was once used by the fallen regime for conferences, is home to the most visible collection of troops, some of whom live in an office, converted to barracks.

“If they offered me a ride home tonight, I’d take it,” said Maj. William Thurmond, a native South Carolinian who sails in Camden when he and his wife are stateside. “But I’d also want to be back here.”

Thurmond, who is director of the Press Information Center, attended the announcement of the 25-member council, meant to mark the return of governing power to the Iraqis. When I asked him what he thought of the council, Thurmond answered in the spirit of his duties here: “My job is the military. How the Iraqis rule themselves is their business.”

Others in the room were more opinionated.

An Iraqi intellectual who lives in America but returned to Baghdad recently after 34 years in exile said: “This is the first good thing Americans have done.”

An Iraqi journalist who was a Baath Party member and employee of the regime (making $2 a month) complained that none of the council members, all of whom have ties outside of Iraq, represents the people who have lived through the suffering.

A soldier from Ohio told me that he was afraid this was a puppet council that would ultimately end in more disaster for the Iraqis, if not the Americans. During the conference, an Iraqi woman in the audience stood up and expressed a fourth opinion.

“Long live Bush!” she called out three times.

But her sentiments rang out only as far as the next Iraqi I spoke to. He revealed that his friend had been offered $150 to carry out a “mission.”

A mission, which is unmistakably anti-Bush, involves harming or killing Americans.

On Monday, such a mission was carried out in the afternoon when I was back at the Convention Center interviewing David and Sandra Hodgkinson, a husband-and-wife team working here. They grew up in Maine, met in the military and are now State Department employees heading up the Office of

Human Rights and Transitional Justice in Baghdad.

As we were talking, Sandra received a phone call that bounced her up from her chair. “A bomb?” she asked of the caller. “There’s been a bomb? Or there’s going to be a bomb? Do we have to evacuate?”

It turns out someone had lobbed a grenade into the car entrance to the Convention Center, destroying only the SUV of the Tunisian Embassy. No one was hurt, but the troops immediately quadrupled their presence in the area. If the Iraqi vendors on the street corner near the explosion were unnerved, they did not show any fear. It is likely they are used to explosions.

The next day at Ambassador Paul Bremer’s regular Tuesday news briefing, he said security is the No. 1 issue in Iraq. The guerrilla violence, most of which has claimed the lives of American troops and Iraqis working with them, was surely being carried out by professionals hired by remaining members of Saddam’s team, rather than disenfranchised Iraqis looking for money to buy food, Bremer added.

Either way, I wondered how much had been received for this mission and if the money would have to be hidden from the same “Ali Babas” whose criminality contributed to the crumbling of Baghdad.