Free And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel Page A

was a sideshow after 9/11.
    I watched the twin towers collapse on TV from my apartment in Jerusalem. I knew then that the story I was covering was over.No one would care anymore about rioting Palestinians. In the Second Intifada, Palestinians lost what little control they had in the West Bank. After 9/11 they lost the West’s attention. Washington had other priorities.
    The Bush administration was fixated on Iraq from the start. It’s been well documented how Iraqi opposition groups and American neoconservatives convinced the president it would be easy to topple Saddam. Bush naively believed Saddam’s regime could be replaced by a democracy, which the president saw as the antidote to all political evils. The United States was also hungry for revenge, the military was primed for war, and congressional checkbooks were open. All that was needed was a casus belli, and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) fit the bill.
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    IN JANUARY 2002, PRESIDENT BUSH had given Iraq top billing in his “Axis of evil,” ahead of North Korea and Iran, and in June he launched Operation Southern Focus to degrade Iraq’s air defenses. In September 2002, one hundred US warplanes attacked air defense installations in western Iraq. Congress authorized military action against Iraq in October. In November, the UN passed Resolution 1441 finding Iraq in “material breach” of the cease-fire terms that had ended the Gulf War in 1991. As 2002 drew to a close, the United States was clearly going to go to war with hundreds of thousands of troops. I thought to myself, Okay, this is going to be the place where I make my career. I decided to leave Jerusalem on the train for history’s next station, which I thought would be Baghdad.
    First I talked to my wife. Jerusalem had given her a false idea of what being a foreign correspondent was all about. It was acommuter conflict. In the morning I’d drive to a clash between the Israelis and the protesters, I’d get a whiff of tear gas and maybe a rubber bullet in the leg, and then I’d be home in time for dinner. Sometimes I’d go out to the clashes, come home for lunch, and go back out for more. But Iraq was a completely different situation. I’d be away for weeks or months at a time. Maybe years. I didn’t know.
    I had bought a house in Sicily, a place I had loved since high school. The house, in a picturesque town called Cefalù, on the north coast, had cost about $100,000. The money to buy it had mostly come from my blackjack winnings in Cairo. I told my wife I might be away for a long stretch, that things could get messy in Jerusalem, and that she might as well go to Sicily to oversee the renovations of the house since we were going to fix it up anyway.
    That left me with the problem of getting a visa. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry assigned “minders” to foreign journalists, which was a labor-intensive undertaking, and many more journalists were seeking visas than there were trusted minders. As a result, the Iraqis were only giving visas to the major networks, and I was a lowly freelancer.
    But I had a friend in Jordan who I felt sure could help me out. Beneath her party-girl exterior as a flamboyant, melodramatic shopaholic, she was a shrewd operator who understood the mysterious ways of the Middle East. She ingeniously suggested that I enter Iraq as a peace activist. The so-called Iraqi Peace and Friendship Society brought foreigners to the country to act as “human shields” who would be willing to station themselves at oil refineries, power plants, air force bases, and other strategic sites in hopes of deterring American attacks. The society imported dozens of peaceniks, career hippies, Muslim fundamentalists, and assorteddo-gooders. My friend in Jordan suggested I could get in the queue with a friendly bribe to a Jordanian official, and she had a man in mind.
    He was besotted with his three-year-old son and, like most Arabs, greatly fond of tea. I got on a flight to London, bought some