17 March 2003

The Moment of Truth

It was a restless night here, waking at four, then settling in again just in time for the alarm to pierce the dark with sharp dissonance. I drifted through some Icelandic symphony music before the time-hack that said it was ten hours in London.

It is a morning of thrown gauntlets on the BBC, the Moment of Truth in this long drama. Tony Blair a junior partner in this great enterprise but by far the more articulate. The Spaniard's remarks were not reported, if he made any, and I imagine he was happy to have his fifteen minutes of fame.

They say that the Marines are ready to go, and the Third Armor, too, their leaders having told them that the only road home is the road that goes through downtown Baghdad. Karen Hughes and the chief White House speechwriter was on the airplane with the President coming back from the Azores. So we have been told to expect a major address, maybe today. Most folks seem to think that the war will come this week. I tend to agree, based on nothing in particular, and would place my nickel on tomorrow around dinner time for kickoff.

Which means that hard-eyed men are moving now.

My ex-wife looked at me yesterday and wondered why I was not going. She had been at a St. Patrick's Day party on Saturday, a big annual affair we used to go to. She retained the family membership on that friendship. She said that everyone was doing something, being pulled out, getting cell phone calls through the evening. I was laconic. The road that brought me to where I am now did lead through Baghdad, only it was thirteen years ago, and I am filled with the oddest and most unsettling feeling of déjà vu.

I was sitting in a cafe in Rome. My ship was in Naples and I had leave for seventy-two hours. A shipmate and I had taken a train north and plunged into the Eternal City. We tromped over the town, marveling at the squares and churches and fragments of Empire. We wound up exhausted and hungry and sharing a table with an Irishman. He was a registered nurse and he had come from Baghdad. He had a prominent scar on his forehead and he had been working as contract support to the Iraqi health care system, dealing with the casualties of the recent war with Iran. Their knowledge of the immensity of the losses had become a fact that the Ministry of Information took note of. Another nurse, his lover, had disappeared into the maw of the Iraqi Security Service, and he too had become inconvenient. The scar on his forehead came from an automatic rifle bullet that was slightly deflected by the glass of his windshield. He recalled the black beret and the weapon coming up and then not a great deal. He had an extra passport, a useful thing to have in Iraq, and he fled without returning to his apartment.

I listened in fascination to the oppressive nature of the regime he described, a banal evil of Ministries and inconvenience and rifle shots in the night. It was a moment of truth about a place I did not think about much. Then we returned to America in our ship, having vanquished the dread Communist hoards. Only to be right back the next year in the great hurrah against the dark-eyed man with the bushy mustache. Maybe his part in this saga will be over, soon, since all roads now seem to lead not to Rome but to the ancient city of the Assyrians.

This morning the commentators say that computers, and photocopiers and telephones are being carried out of the Ministry of Information in Baghdad. Saddam is has turned Winston Churchill inside out, vowing to bring the great battle to the skies and the seas and everywhere. It is a moment, certainly, and maybe even one that contains a grain of truth.

We'll see about that this week. But though I have been around this block before, it seems that the vista is always different when you get there, and that sometimes familiar steps can take you to a place you never intended.