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Laser-guided bombs had blown holes in the third and fifth floors and had

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Laser-guided bombs had blown holes in the third and fifth floors and had melted the satellite dishes on the roof.Elsewhere in the city, the smart bombs and cruise missiles had hit ministries and security headquarters. The building housing the ruling Baath Party had a large bite taken out of its roof. The Ministry of Justice looked normal but a missile had ripped apart its insides. There was smoke rising from Saddam Hussein's presidential compound and the military intelligence headquarters looked as if it too had been hit.But the destruction had less impact on the Iraqi government than appeared from television pictures. This was not the first time Baghdad had been attacked in recent history. The Iranians bombarded the city during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and ever since government institutions had alternative locations to which they had already transferred.I later asked an Iraqi intelligence officer in exile where Saddam and his key officials had been during the bombing "I can tell you where we weren't," he replied "We didn't hide in any underground command bunkers. We assumed the Americans knew about them and had the bombs to penetrate through the reinforced concrete." Saddam himself turned out to be living mainly in a middle-class suburb called al-Tafiya, moving house every few days.

He travelled in cheap, inconspicuous cars, sometimes accompanied by only a single bodyguard - a colonel who himself wore no insignia of rank.But though the government had survived the first day of the bombing largely intact, ordinary Iraqis were in a state of collective shock. Six months earlier, many had favoured Saddam's invasion of Kuwait (on 2 August) But the last thing they wanted was another war. Several hundred thousand Iraqis, from a population of only 18 million, had died or been wounded fighting Iran. As the allied armies assembled in Saudi Arabia, they knew they could not fight the whole world. "We didn't expect a war," an Iraqi general sent to Kuwait later recalled. "We thought it was all a political manoeuvre."On the last day of peace I had toured Baghdad.

There was an ill-attended protest rally of school children outside the British embassy organised by the Baath party. Horses were still being exercised by their trainers near the al-Mansur race-track. The largest public gathering I could find turned out to be a meeting of pigeon fanciers.It was not that the Iraqis were ill-informed about what was happening There was little on Iraqi television and radio but people spent hours listening to foreign radios in Arabic, switching from the BBC to Radio Monte Carlo to Voice of America. "Our main hobby is listening to the radio," said one.But if people in Baghdad did have qualms about Saddam's refusal to pull out of Kuwait, there was nothing they could say or do about it, apart from voting with their feet. There was a pervasive fear that Saddam would fire a Scud missile, armed with a biological or chemical warhead, at Israel - and that the Israelis would respond with a nuclear strike on the Iraqi capital.Among those who stayed in Baghdad, mostly too poor to leave, on the first day of the war the mood was fatalistic. Some made formal declarations of defiance towards the US, probably thinking this was the only safe course when talking to a foreign journalist.

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