Baghdad notebook: "Things were better in Saddam's time"

In the passport queue at Baghdad airport, my heart sinks. This place vies with Cairo for the title of most venal airport in the Middle East. Our luggage is minutely examined by the Mukhabarat, or secret police, then customs. Early morning becomes mid-afternoon. Our papers (scrupulously in order) lie unattended on a desk. Eventually, a customs man, with a large moustache and belly hanging over his belt, waddles over. ‘We cannot stamp these today,’ he says. ‘We will have lunch now, and then we will sleep. Come back tomorrow. Or the next day.’ Our bags are moved into a room piled high with luggage seized from other TV crews: flak jackets, lights, someone’s camera and editing gear. ‘How much?’ asks our fixer, wearily. ‘$600,’ says the customs man, dropping any pretence that this is anything other than a shakedown.

Outside, the wall still has the faintest outline of a mural of Saddam, ‘the portrait’ as his ubiquitous image used to be simply known. ‘Things were better in Saddam’s time,’ says our fixer. ‘The customs only asked for $100. Maximum!’ He is a Sunni and over the week I often hear Sunnis reminisce fondly about the old dictator. ‘Even people who were in prison said he was fair,’ a Sunni sheikh tells me, improbably. ‘He made no difference between Sunni and Shia [the two great rival sects of Islam].’ Shiites, murdered in large numbers by Saddam, would disagree. They are in charge now, in the territory not part of the ‘Islamic State’ declared by the (Sunni) jihadis of Isis. A US TV correspondent says her network insists she avoids using ‘Shiites’ and ‘Sunnis’ in her reports: too complicated. Not for the first time, I wonder if President Bush really knew the difference before he invaded Iraq.