March 14 2004 at 09:10AM

Happy first birthday, war on Iraq



	By Robert Fisk

It was almost year ago, on March 20, when the first bombs struck 30km from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad the next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed "expert" on terrorism, now works, resides and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.

The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war are more awesome now than they were at the time. Saddam Hussein, the man we loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (our dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked) had already degenerated into late middle-age senility, writing epic novels in his many palaces while his crippled son Oudai drank and whored and tortured his way around Baghdad; hardly the target for the world's only superpower.
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As the American 101st Infantry Division approached Baghdad, one of the last editions of the Ba'athist newspapers carried a telling photograph on its back page. A uniformed, tired, fat Hussein stood in the centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusai but on his right Oudai, his eyes dilated, shirt out of his trousers, a pistol butt above his belt. Who would ever fight to the death for these triple pillars of the Arab world?

Yet Hussein thought he could win, that destiny - a dangerous ally for all "strongmen" - would somehow lay low the Americans. It was always fascinating to listen to Mohamed al-Sahaf, the information minister, predicting America's doom. It was not just Iraqi patriots who would destroy the great armies invading Iraq; the heat would burn them, the desert would consume them, the snakes and rabid dogs would eat their bodies. Not since the Caliphate had such curses been called down upon an invader.

18 million Iraqis could not be defeated by a computer