Robert Fisk went to Baghdad on a Flying Carpet -- really

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk01152005.html

My Return to Baghdad
Flying Carpet Airlines


I tried out the new Beirut-Baghdad air service this week. It's a sleek little 20-seater with two propellers, a Lebanese-Canadian pilot and a name to take you aback. It's called "Flying Carpet Airlines". As Commander Queeg said in The Caine Mutiny, I kid thee not. It says "Flying Carpet" on the little blue boarding cards, below the captain's cabin and on the passenger headrest covers where the aircraft can be seen gliding through the sky on a high-pile carpet.

And it's an odd little flight, too. You arrive at Beirut's swish new glass and steel airport where you are told to meet your check-in desk handler in front of the post office in the arrivals lounge. There are a group of disconsolate Americans--"contractors" who've been passing the weekend in the fleshpots--and fearful Lebanese businessmen and, well, you've guessed it, The Independent's equally fearful correspondent.

It was a while before I realised that the whole thing was a kind of Iraqi metaphor. From the Beirut arrivals lounge, you pass through the metal detectors in departures, breeze past the spanking new duty free, pick up a cappuccino and then--here we go--head for the special Mecca pilgrimage departure gate. In a box-like room painted all white, you wait for a small blue bus which eventually chugs guiltily off round the side of the airport, past the shell-blasted freight cargo hangars from Beirut's very own, pleased-to-be-forgotten war, to the steps of the only aircraft in Flying Carpet's fleet.

Only when I had clambered, half-doubled up, down the tube to my seat did I realise that we were only a few hundred metres from the site of the old US Marine base, suicide-bombed back in 1983 at a cost of 241 American lives. I remember how the air pressure changed in my Beirut apartment when the bomb exploded and how, a couple of days later, I saw Vice President George Bush Snr standing amid the rubble, telling us: "We will not let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards change the foreign policy of the United States." Ho hum.
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read on to see smirk make a second Ho hum moment.

but I MUST add these two paragraphs

Of course, the moment you arrive at the scene of Bush's great new experiment in democracy--and we are all looking forward to the elections in Baghdad with the same kind of enthusiasm that the people of Dresden showed when the first Lancasters flew down the Elbe--it all looks very different. Baghdad airport is crowded with heavily armed mercenaries and friendly, but equally armed, Gurkhas. And there's a big poster not far from the terminal with a massive colour photograph of the aftermath of a Baghdad car bombing, complete with the body of a half-naked woman in the lower right-hand corner.

The text beneath this obscenity is in Arabic. "They want to destroy our country--they attack schools. These dogs want to keep our children in ignorance so they can teach them hatred. We need the help of the multinational forces to show them that we will do anything to get our country back and to root out the killers and looters on our roads who bear the full responsibility for these terrible crimes committed against our peaceful Iraqi people. The Iraqi people refuse to be victims because they are a strong community which will never die." Ho hum again.
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[yinkaafrica]

1. That is one brave guy. I love his column.