Sitting in the Palestine hotel, waiting for the final assault on Baghdad, one of the journalists’ favourite games was trying to work out which of the officials we knew would be subject to de-Ba’athification and which would survive in the new regime.
One correspondent, particularly buffeted by the bureaucracy and accused at one stage of being a spy-not a trivial matter at that time-had already drawn up his list for Guant?namo Bay.
But there is another side to this too. Some of us were, and are, concerned about the rough justice that may await Iraqi officials we have got to know quite closely over the years-not at the hands of the Americans or British, but their fellow Iraqis. In the rebellions following the first Gulf war, many Ba’ath party members were beheaded.
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