When The Cheering Stops

By NANCY GIBBS

How do you recognize freedom on the street if you've never met her before? The people of Baghdad got to dance and kiss Marines, argue politics in the park and pray in a mosque that had been padlocked for years. But maybe liberation feels real only when it includes the chance to be bad. Vandalism and violence were not just freedom's product; they were its proof. You know it is a new world when you can slap your shoes on the tyrant's face, spit on it and slash it, when you can break a window and steal a chair, wheel a refrigerator away on roller skates, drive down the wrong side of the street--all conduct unthinkable just 24 hours before or at any time during the 8,000-day reign of Saddam Hussein, which has finally come to an end.

Americans watched in relief at the sight of U.S. soldiers hugging and feeding Iraqi children at last, hoping that the end of the war had at least begun. But the rebirth of a nation is messy and humbling, especially when it was brought about through battle. Many Iraqis were celebrating, but some were still shooting; some were pausing to rejoice on their way toward revenge. Baghdad was free for exactly one day before the first suicide bomber appeared; a few days later, 40 more bomb-stuffed vests were found in an elementary school. The Red Cross had to suspend operations after one worker was killed in cross fire, and there was little use rushing medicine into hospitals that had been stripped by looters to their last light bulb. Even as the other cities toppled--first Kirkuk, then Mosul--there were still people in Iraq who had nothing to do but fight and look for a chance to ambush a soldier with his guard down. From the comfort of their living rooms, Americans watched NBC broadcast a fire fight outside Baghdad so fierce that one wounded soldier was still firing from his stretcher, and the chaplain had to grab a rifle. Some of the biggest air strikes of the entire war came the night after Baghdad fell.

And then there is Saddam. It is testimony to the depth of his tyranny that rumors spread of how he survived yet again, this time escaping the four tons of bombs dropped on the house that a spy thinks he entered on Monday. There were claims that Saddam was whisked to his hometown, Tikrit, or that he was on his way to Syria for medical care, that he was hiding in the Russian embassy or in a mosque or was seen rising from the sunroof of his limo in downtown Baghdad, come to let the crowds kiss his feet. No one in Washington could be absolutely sure whether they had got him this time. But they were sure they had his airport, his palaces and, by Wednesday, his power.

It was as though the Iraqi government had died in its sleep. Baath Party enforcers were nowhere to be found on the street corners that morning. Official minders did not turn up as usual to chaperone foreign journalists. State TV went off the air, and for the first time since the war began, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf did not appear to make his extraterrestrial pronouncements of impending victory. Iraqi military uniforms and weapons were lying in ditches, artillery pieces abandoned under bridges. CIA eavesdroppers monitoring official communications heard ... nothing--no orders being given, no commands to move Iraqi forces. "It has been very deafening, the silence," a Defense Department official told TIME, which was one reason many in Washington came to think that maybe this time they had finished off Saddam after all. A U.S. intelligence official agreed: "All command-and-control communications pretty much stopped after the Monday bombing."

Fear, when set loose, can turn to fury; by nightfall there was no counting how many pictures and statues and paintings of Saddam had been stabbed and stomped and torched. In fact, that was how the 3/4 Battalion of the 7th Marines began their day: at the abandoned military compound where they had spent the night, a few took a sledgehammer to a mural of Saddam. "I hit him once for each Marine that died and once for each of my family members back home," said Lance Corporal Garfield Shealy. "He's the reason why I'm not with them, and he's the reason why those Marines died."

The American military went into Baghdad brutally where necessary, gently where possible, aware that an ambush was likely at any time yet surprised by what often greeted them. The Marine amphibious assault vehicles, strung on all sides with dusty rucksacks, rumbled in from the east; the 3rd Infantry Division came from the west, the pincer closing its grasp on the capital. The troops drove down streets lined with date palms and mulberry trees and bloated corpses being chewed on by dogs, to be welcomed by smiling people cheering and waving, calling "Thank you, Mr. Bush," "We very like Mr. Bush." People offered cookies and water. "I wasn't sure the war was justified until yesterday," a young tank operator said the next morning. "But seeing the people happy to see us like that, I finally understood why I was here." At least one of the babies born that day in Baghdad was named George.

As word that something extraordinary was happening spread across the city, the people of Baghdad went out to see for themselves. Some sought out the reporters they once talked to only in the thickest code to tell them awful stories and show their scars. Some sought out soldiers to tell them what to blow up, to urge that every Baath office and safe house be brought down. "We've been waiting for you for a long time," a young man told the first American he saw.

The archaeology of liberation began to yield the secrets of the regime. U.S. soldiers moved through the city streets and tunnels, searching for clues that would unravel the mysteries of Saddam's weapons program. Soldiers explored the Old Palace, imagining what it would be like to take a shower in the gold-and-marble bathrooms. It turns out that Saddam favored Colgate toothpaste and French cuffs; Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz read both Henry Kissinger and Danielle Steel. There were skinny lions, cheetahs and bears in pens on the grounds of one palace, which had 64 bathrooms. The Los Angeles Times reported that soldiers found a sheep on the grounds and fed it to the cats.

By the time the 3/4 Battalion arrived downtown at Paradise Square, Iraqis were picking yellow flowers from the gardens and handing them over for the Leathernecks to stick in their helmets. Lieut. Colonel Bryan P. McCoy saw the large picture of Saddam above the entranceway to the Palestine Hotel. "I want that down," he said. Another Marine pointed out the huge statue in the square. "And that," said McCoy. A Marine noted that U.S. forces were not supposed to pull down statues. "Get your 88 and pull it down," McCoy said, referring to a powerful tank-recovery vehicle. And with that, the Marines helped create the iconic moment that spread live around the world, when Saddam finally bowed before his people. His head was dragged through the streets in a noose, sparks flying, as the U.S. Commander in Chief watched it all unfold on TV.

That was a happy moment at the White House, where months of global arm wrestling and weeks of second-guessing were finally shelved. Vice President Dick Cheney said, "The conclusion of the war will mark one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the events "breathtaking," even as he was careful not to declare victory while soldiers were still fighting and civilians were still dying and prisoners of war were still missing. "Let there be no doubt," he said. "This is not over, despite all the celebrations on the street."

It is one thing to win a victory, quite another to win control. Only in the aftermath of Gulf War I were the most dangerous killers revealed. According to a Columbia University public-health study, far more civilians died after that war than during it. They perished from disease and from Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence (see box, page 49). That's why even the generals talk respectfully about the challenge of winning the peace, a test that begins long before peace has actually arrived. White House officials say President Bush, throughout the prewar planning, was briefed on the humanitarian and postwar efforts at the same time that he was briefed about the military options.

The speed with which the Iraqi regime disintegrated left little time for celebrating. Who was going to turn the electricity back on, restore order to the cities and prevent a civil war from breaking out between Arabs and Kurds in the north, between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims in the south or within the thousand pockets of hate that a merciless regime left behind? In Najaf a meeting that the U.S. arranged between rival Shi'ite clerics to pave a road to reconciliation ended with both being hacked to death by an angry mob. In Kirkuk a Saddam loyalist who surrendered to Kurdish fighters was beaten unconscious with rifle butts, shot, then soaked in gasoline and set on fire.

As they sought to set up the most rudimentary kind of authority, U.S. and British officials confronted the challenge of detoxifying a 24-year tyranny. How could they know the good guys from the bad, know how far down the Baath Party ladder to purge, know which tribal leaders were legitimate representatives of their people and which had been in Saddam's pocket? In a very real and horrifying way, the ransacking of government offices and power centers--all the resentment and retribution against the network of stoolies, spies and party apparatchiks--is part of the de-Baathification that both critics and proponents of the invasion had insisted would ultimately be necessary. There was no telling how many party leaders had escaped, whether they fled to Syria, as Rumsfeld suggested they had, or were holed up in Tikrit, preparing to mount one last showdown. By the end of the week, the Pentagon was handing out decks of playing cards with the faces of the most-wanted Iraqi leaders, so the soldiers could play go fish.

When White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked who at the moment was in charge in Iraq, he answered, "The taste of freedom." The sudden, gaping absence of a police state produced a spectacle of chaos magnified by the presence of a thousand cameras to capture it. As looters rolled down the street with their bathtubs, carts full of ceiling fans and chandeliers liberated from government buildings, they insisted that they were retrieving goods stolen from them over many years of kleptocracy. It was as though they needed to find their own way to take the regime apart, brick by brick, chair by chair. "Just as rape is about power and not sex, this is about politics and not materialism," Pentagon adviser Richard Perle told TIME. "The extremity of the looting reflects the deep hatred with the regime. They are breaking into facilities they associate with Saddam."

But once the government buildings had been stripped, the more insatiable looters sought out any target of opportunity. The National Museum was stripped of tens of thousands of artifacts from the cradle of civilization. Hospitals, colleges, markets, deserted air-conditioning factories were overrun by frantic thieves who cleaned them bare and then set them on fire. By night, there were more plumes of black smoke rising over Baghdad than at any time during the war. "We asked the Americans to stop this," said Mohammed, a former civil servant, "but they say they have no orders to do so. Saddam was a bad man, but he was a strong one. The Americans have no respect from these people already."

Though U.S. officials viewed much of the looting as the last spasm of a dying age, the mayhem did promise to complicate the urgent reconstruction campaign. When civilian authorities make their way into Baghdad, they will be setting up shop in offices and hospitals that for the most part were carefully spared by U.S. bombers but were emptied of every last desk chair by people so poor, they looted the garbage. In Basra thieves wrecked equipment in the electrical booster stations, which in turn cut off the water supply once again. The headquarters of the company that oversees all oil production in the south of the country was pillaged. "Where is the security?" asked an enraged Kareem Judy, 42, an engineer in British-controlled Basra, as he stood outside the gutted five-story shell of the Sheraton Hotel. "How can the British let this happen?" Crucial utilities technicians were not about to return to their jobs if they were afraid of being caught in cross fire or having their cars stolen.

Soldiers initially told not to respond to looters unless their own safety was threatened--the British high command "doesn't want us to make ourselves unpopular here," said a British soldier--were eventually given freer rein. By Friday the BBC was reporting that British soldiers shot and killed five bank robbers in Basra. The Pentagon imposed a nighttime curfew on Baghdad, and on Saturday, despite a fire fight downtown, the capital overall was much calmer. The looting had subsided, residents were returning to the city, and many shops and restaurants had reopened. In days to come, the U.S. hopes to restore many of the local security forces. "I would expect the traffic cops weren't involved in crimes," says a State Department official. The first joint patrols between Iraqi police and U.S. troops were scheduled to begin soon. In Mosul residents formed neighborhood-watch groups to prevent further looting.

Pentagon authorities are also hoping to reassemble the regular Iraqi army, even as it plans for at least a two-year U.S. military occupation. "They can help rebuild their own country," one officer says. "We'd continue to pay them for work like engineering, road construction, removing rubble, picking up unexploded ordnance." As for the U.N., Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Senate committee last week, "The U.N. can be an important partner, [but] it can't be the managing partner. It can't be in charge."

Installing a legitimate new army or police force is a delicate task. U.S. special forces in Najaf recruited local men to serve as an indigenous fighting force--a couple of dozen men who were dubbed the Coalition for Iraqi National Unity--to help root out any lingering resistance. They rode into town smiling for the cameras and waving their new AK-47s. Asked whether these men might have been fighting recently for Saddam, a special-forces soldier replied, "Some of them probably were, but they have had a conversion." Outside the group's headquarters in a local factory were parked seven late-model Nissans and a very new-looking Mercedes. To charges that the men had been looting the town, second in command Hassan Mussawi insisted, "We are self-financing; the people give us what we need." In a city of hungry people, none of these new gendarmes looked as if he had missed a meal in a long time.

Once order is restored, there remains the task of restoring just about everything else. What kind of money will be used? Who is going to write laws for a new day? And more immediately, how do you feed 27 million people? That task requires 480,000 tons of food every month and some way of distributing it. In Najaf a woman in black with six children in tow appeared with her ration card at an American outpost. It was her day to get rice and flour. Who would feed her now? Soldiers found her enough food for a week or so; no one knew what would happen after that.

Within Baghdad, the welcome extended to American soldiers was surely not indefinite. "We need change, sure," said Ali Owaid, 27, a chemist. But "we'll fight the Americans if you stay here. I wish the government to be Iraqi, not American." The soldiers had no illusions that flowers would be strewn at their feet for long. "You go from hero to despised occupier, and it's only a matter of time," says Lieut. Colonel McCoy. "No one wants a foreign occupier in their country. We wouldn't. So whether that takes a year or a week depends on how you conduct yourself. And if we become the ugly American, that will happen real quickly."

In the meantime, he and others could savor what had just happened--after 20 days, a 350-mile charge to Baghdad, 32,000 combat missions, 20,000 bombs--and what had not yet occurred. The country's major cities fell without the weeks of grinding door-to-door fighting that many had feared. Fewer than 120 U.S. soldiers perished, a figure at the low end of the most hopeful forecasts. Iraq's bridges and dams and essential infrastructure survived. While no arsenal of chemical and biological weapons had yet been found, those arms had also not been used--on U.S. forces or on Tel Aviv. There was no crisis of refugees on the borders, though the U.N. had predicted 1.5 million. The oil fields were secure. The Turks and Kurds were not, for the time being, fighting a war within a war. It was a moment of relief to have at least come this far without those fears being realized, even knowing harder days would surely come. --Reported by Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/Baghdad; Jim Lacey/Najaf; Terry McCarthy/Basra; Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washington; and Michael Ware/Kirkuk

With reporting by Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/Baghdad; Jim Lacey/Najaf; Terry McCarthy/Basra; Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washington; and Michael Ware/Kirkuk