Scenes From Baghdad
On the eve of war, and as the bombs start falling, New Yorker reporter John Lee Anderson gives you a front-row seat:

As war approached, most Iraqis I met seemed to be oddly neutral about the prospect. They were concerned about their families, but were not visibly hostile toward the West, or toward Americans. I had the impression that there was widespread, if privately held, support for regime change. I had a number of unmonitored conversations with Baghdadis, and several spoke to me with a candor that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks earlier. One day, as I was standing near the Tigris River with an Iraqi man, he said, "If God wills, Bush will bomb Saddam into the river. But not the people. Just Saddam. And Tikrit." Tikrit is Saddam's home town, and most of his close associates are from there. "If God wills, Tikrit will be flattened," the man said. He spat, and called Tikritis "camels' offspring" and a series of other pithy epithets in Arabic.

I was invited to dinner one night at the home of a senior government official, a man I will call Firas. There were a few other guests - educated, well-to-do Iraqi men who were friends of his. I told Firas that I hoped to stay in Baghdad during the war, and he said he thought that the rumors about the Al Rashid being a target were credible. He said he assumed that his ministry would be bombed, but he didn’t say that this was a terrible thing, or that the Americans were embarking on a criminal enterprise by going to war with his government

Firas grilled Gulf shrimp on a portable charcoal grill in the kitchen, and his guests sat in the living room drinking Lebanese arrack and eating warm pistachios, cashews, and almonds. Whenever Firas joined us, he would pick up the remote control of the TV and flip channels, following the news on CNN, Iraqi state TV, and Al Jazeera. Then he got interested in "My Best Friend’s Wedding," which was playing on a satellite movie channel. He laughed delightedly at the scene where Cameron Diaz sings badly in a karaoke bar. Throughout the evening, Firas was interruptedby phone calls, including one from his boss, who wanted to talk about the eleventh-hour invitation to Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to return to Baghdad to discuss Iraq’s offer of "accelerated cooperation" on the issue of disarmament. When he got off the phone, Firas turned to me and shrugged, as if to say he knew that it was already too late to stop the war, but he had his official duties to perform. "What else can we do?" he said.

As we ate the shrimp, Firas began flipping channels again, and found another movie, "Six Days, Seven Nights," starring Harrison Ford and Anne Heche as two mismatched people who crash-land on a deserted South Sea island. The movie was subtitled in Arabic, and Firas kept the sound turned down, but it was pretty easy to follow. Ford and Heche feuded and fought and then, predictably, fell in love. Firas and his Iraqi guests were transfixed. I said that it seemed a little strange to be sitting here in Baghdad watching a Hollywood film a few days before the American attack, and they nodded vigorously and laughed, then turned back to the television set.

And this:

After the "decapitation" strike against Saddam early on Thursday morning, Paul McGeough and I moved back to the Palestine for good. The lobby was swarming with secret police, journalists, and some pretty eccentric-looking human shields, including one with long dreadlocks and pierced ears who wore black Kurdish pantaloons with a saggy rear end. In a new traffic island behind the hotel, next to a big statue of Saddam, one of the Korean feminist groups had hung a banner protesting sexual abuse. The second strike came on Thursday evening, and when I looked out my window I noticed that several Iraqis were sitting on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to a small hotel nearby, as if nothing much were happening and they were just enjoying the fresh evening air. There were three big hits quite close to us, but across the river, and we watched the fires from our balcony. We could see a few cars driving around, even over the bridges. Dogs barked, and the river looked as calm as olive oil, with just a shimmer of motion on the surface.

Fascinating stuff.