“My first big foreign story with CBS, I did Nicaragua, Central America, when the CIA was paying the Contras to try to overthrow the Sandinistas – that was my first training in a war situation if you like.”

Lara Marlowe tosses off this information as casually as the rest of us might recall interning at a local rag, yet it was just the first peak of a prize-winning journalistic career that began in 1980, when she was 23. Born in Whittier, California, she received degrees in French Literature from the Sorbonne and UCLA (she speaks both French and Arabic), and a Masters in International Relations from Brasenose College, Oxford University.

After becoming an Associate Producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes while based in Paris, she went on to work for Time magazine in 1989, covering the last years of the Lebanese civil war and the hostage crisis. Marlowe later went on to undertake assignments in Mogadishu and the former Yugoslavia and in 1991 reported on the Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait. She became Time’s Beirut-based staff correspondent in 1993, having also covered the region for the London Financial Times over the previous four years. For the rest of the 90s she worked in Somalia, Azerbaijan, Rwanda, Algeria (she won an Amnesty International Press Award for her Marie Claire article ‘Where Girls Are Killed For Going to School’ in 1997) and Kosovo among other territories.

However, she will be best known to Irish readers as a Foreign Affairs correspondent for the Irish Times, and her recent reports from Baghdad have provided clear-eyed, reasoned and unflinching insights into life in the heart of a city under siege. Whether coolly documenting the restrictions imposed on journalists holed up in the Iraqi capital, describing the grief stricken residents of Shu’ala or interviewing a pair of elderly widowed sisters who grew up steeped in American studies but are furious at what they see as Bush and Blair’s colonialism, her reporting offers a welcome respite from the half-truths, hype, hysteria and propaganda constantly spewing from CNN, Fox News and Sky. Our interview was conducted via satellite telephone on Thursday April 3, shortly after 10am Irish time, Marlowe speaking from her room in the Palestine Hotel.

Peter Murphy: What’s the feeling amongst the people of Baghdad as the US forces encroach upon the capital?

Lara Marlowe: People seem very calm, actually. I wrote a piece a couple of days ago saying that there’s a certain amount of normal life in the city, and I think what has happened is that before the war started the Iraqis were told that the Americans would be in Baghdad in two or three days. And that didn’t happen, and now they really don’t take it seriously anymore. Today we’re hearing that the Americans are 30 miles outside Baghdad, they can see the lights of the city, and people here are just pretty much going on – to the extent that it’s possible – living normally. I think there’s a sort of feeling of, ‘I’ll deal with that when it gets to it.’ But there’s also an underlying anxiety, a fear that the bombing will get even worse, that there will be artillery shelling which is much more indiscriminate than bombing, there’s fear of gunfire in the streets. I think all of us have visions of how bad it could actually get, which would be sort of cowering on the floor in a basement or in a corridor with no water and no electricity; that’s the sort of worst case scenario we could be looking at in the next few days or weeks.

PM: Have the recent bombings of the civilian markets and the damage inflicted upon a maternity hospital instilled a feeling of betrayal in any of the people of Baghdad who might’ve believed the Coalition forces’ assurances that civilian casualties would be minimal?

LM: Yes and no. The maternity hospital, I have to sort of correct you, I talked to the International Committee Of The Red Cross representative who was a partner in the hospital – the hospital was totally evacuated, and it was across the street from a major Iraqi intelligence centre, which is why they had evacuated it. Maybe this is all coming out on the wires, I dunno, but that was the target. There was one person killed and about ten people wounded in the bombing, and they were basically motorists driving by, and for me it’s quite shocking that the Americans would bomb something like that, which, okay, maybe it’s a legitimate target, but are there legitimate targets in an illegitimate war? That’s another question. But even if you do consider it a legitimate target, why do you bomb it at 9.30 in the morning when there is a lot of traffic in that street and when you’re going to kill motorists going by?

That to me is quite shocking, and certainly is something that occurs to Iraqis as well. At Shu’ala the night that it was bombed, this poor Shia suburb, there was almost a feeling of a lynch mob in the making, I mean people were hysterical, they were very angry. I think part of the reason that the Americans and the British are having such a hard time in this war so far is that they have no credibility with the Iraqis. George Bush Sr. called on the Shias and the Kurds to rise up in ’91, they did, and after the ceasefire he let Saddam Hussein use his attack helicopters to massacre them. They’ve seen the way the Americans allow the Israelis to oppress, bomb, shell and assassinate Palestinians, and they just do not trust them. And there’s also this feeling that, okay, we may not like our government, we may not like the regime, but this is our problem and we want to sort it out our way, in an Arab way, and we don’t want people coming in here and bombing us and killing hundreds of civilians to do it.

PM: Have you cultivated contacts in Iraq over the last ten years?

LM: I first came here in, I think it would’ve been around April or May of 1991, a month or two after what I call the second Gulf War – we often forget the Iran/Iraq war which was horrific, a real war which lasted eight years. Actually the man who was in charge of the Information Ministry then is now the Foreign Minister, and his former deputy is now in charge of the Information Ministry. In addition to that I have civilian friendships I’ve maintained through the years, so I do have some contacts here, and that certainly helps, there’s a familiarity with the place and with the people that you obviously wouldn’t have if you were coming in for the first time. But it’s always been a hard country, Iraq, it has never been a place that’s really pleasant and fun to go and work in, it’s not like going and doing a story in Italy or something.

PM: To what degree do the restrictions imposed by the Ministry Of Information hinder you as a journalist?

LM: Well let me say first of all that if I thought I was not able to tell the truth as I see it here and to report what is happening, if I thought that I was in any way misleading my readers, I would not stay here. I think, despite the difficulties, it is well worth doing. The rules are that every journalist has to work with a ‘guide’ as they call it, or a ‘minder’ as we call it, and you’re basically not allowed to leave the hotel without a minder. Most of the travelling around Baghdad, or indeed outside Baghdad as I did yesterday, is in buses. If you’re lucky your minder speaks good English and helps out as an interpreter, so in a way they serve a useful purpose.

Some of them are fairly subversive, some of them are very, very loyal to the regime, and it’s something that you have to kind of feel your way through, you have to be very careful what you say and they are also very careful what they say, because ultimately they’re responsible. I think in a state of war, now, the government probably don’t have time to check, but I’ve heard stories in the past that minders have been called in and held to account for things that people wrote, because there’s always the assumption that a minder is giving unpleasant information.

The other restriction is that you’re not allowed to take taxis in the street. Frankly, in a country at war where there are a lot of very suspicious people who view foreign journalists as spies, it’s not a bad idea to have someone from the Information Ministry who knows you’re accredited, who knows you’re here with the permission of the government, who can defend you in the event you get stopped by someone very suspicious and hostile and probably armed. So I don’t consider either of those restrictions to be… what’s the word? Unbearable, shall we say.

PM: Is it paranoia to assume your hotel room is bugged?

LM: It’s certainly a possibility – in the past that was always the assumption. I honestly can’t say. Maybe there’s a bug two or three feet from where I’m sitting right now and there’s a guy at the other end listening. My instinct about it is that they are so overwhelmed with trying to fight off this American-British invasion that they’re not going to worry about what Lara Marlowe says to Hot Press magazine at the moment – I think it has kind of gone beyond that!

(But) they are surprisingly open in very many ways. For example, I’m talking to you on a satellite telephone, which is in my hotel room; there is nobody here in the room with me. In the last Gulf War that would have been impossible, the Iraqis didn’t allow it. So all of my stories for the Irish Times I have transmitted myself, no Iraqi official has read a single one before I sent it, I would not allow that, I would not put up with it.

PM: Presumably the ‘embedded’ journalists who have been assigned to certain Coalition forces units operate under similar restrictions.

LM: I think there’s about 500 of them if I’m not mistaken, working under very restricted conditions, so for the sake of fairness you have to point that out too. What it is possible to do is see things; when you drive around the city you see a lot. You certainly hear the bombing constantly, and there’s no shortage of information coming at you on Iraqi television, they have at least two, often three press conferences a day. The difficulty is sifting out what you think is true, what is not, what is interesting, what things mean – you have to do a lot of deciphering.

PM: Is there any real danger that you may be asked to leave the country?

LM: I’ve heard in the last hour that they have posted a list of 60 journalists who are being asked to leave. And touch wood, I understand my name is not on the list, I haven’t actually seen the list yet. The impression I have is that there are just too many journalists, they’re finding it too unwieldy to handle so many, and they’re trying to thin our ranks out. What criteria they’re using for deciding who stays and who leaves I couldn’t tell you.

PM: There has been mounting criticism here of the hysterical nature of the reporting on the 24-hour news channels, specifically their broadcasting of unsubstantiated rumours and misinformation – for example, reports that Saddam Hussein was killed or seriously injured in the initial days of the campaign.

LM: Well there’s that old cliché about the fog of war. I think certainly in every war I’ve covered there have been reports and counter reports and denials and things that turned out not to be true, I think that’s part of the nature of the beast. It was the case in Serbia in 1999; it’s always been the case.

This is a very nasty war and the Iraqis have actually become much more astute at managing the media and their propaganda; they’re allowing several hundred journalists to be here and they’re constantly feeding us information – and again I stress that it’s our job to try to figure out what’s true and what’s not.

The Iraqis have actually in some instances told the truth when the Americans and the British did not. Reports that Saddam Hussein was dead were very quickly denied by the government. The Iraqis said that they had taken American prisoners of war, and I was very sceptical, and then they showed them on television being interviewed, so there are quite a few instances where they have told the truth. I’m sure there are quite a few instances where they have not told the truth. In the press briefings every day we get told things like, ‘Well, we destroyed 14 American tanks here, we shot down two planes and three helicopters’ and it’s absolutely meaningless because you have no way whatsoever of checking it, you just don’t know.

PM: Again, presumably it’s the same for the journalists on the Coalition side.

LM: It’s pretty much the same; they have no way of checking. I was talking to Peter Arnett who was in Vietnam, and he was saying that at the so-called ‘Five o clock follies’ in Saigon everyday the American briefers would make all kinds of outrageous claims regarding the air war on North Vietnam. Nobody had any way of checking it, but they claimed in the first couple years that they’d killed something like three times the total population of North Vietnam! But the parts concerning South Vietnam, the reporters could actually go out and check it, and journalists would stand up in the briefings and say, ‘That’s not true, you’re lying, I saw it myself.’

That is not really possible to do here, there are sort of wheels within wheels within wheels, and you’re never sure you’ve really got the whole picture. I think if you can just lift up the corner of a blanket for your readers you’re not doing that badly, if you can just get close to what is happening, get an idea of the truth, even if its impressionistic, it’s more than somebody sitting far away in Europe is going to know without you being here.

PM: Peter Arnett recently lost his job at NBC/MSNBC for saying in an interview with Iraqi TV that the Coalition forces’ initial war plan had failed. Did he speak to you about that?

LM: It wasn’t actually what I was talking to him about, but he says that people have been incredibly supportive all over the world. He says it was a stupid thing to give an interview to Iraqi television – I personally would not have. But that said, he told the truth, I mean, it’s not like he made something up to tell them, he just said the American-British advance was in trouble and that it was not working out the way it was meant to, which is I think something any journalist covering this conflict would agree with. So is that grounds for firing him? I don’t know. He says he’s got a lot of requests for articles and appearances and things, so he’s staying on, he wants to see what happens, he wants to see the story like all the journalists here do.

PM: Can you give me some sense of your everyday living conditions – accommodation, sanitation, food and so on?

LM: Well, like probably 95% of the journalists here I’m living in a thing called the Palestine Hotel, which is a former Meridian Hotel. It has seen better days I can promise you, it was built by the French, I guess, judging from the décor, in or around the 1970s, and it really isn’t able to handle the number of journalists and people staying in it. It’s pretty run down, the lifts keep breaking; people get stuck in the lifts. I consider myself quite lucky because so far, touch wood, I’ve had hot water, electricity; I’m able to have a bath everyday. Sometimes the water that comes out of the pipes is very brown, but there is a housekeeping service, they make my bed everyday, they give me clean towels, so y’know, compared to other situations like, say, Afghanistan where I was a year and a half ago, it’s actually quite luxurious.

The hotel food is extremely monotonous; they give us the exact same food every day for lunch and dinner, so I try to get out when I can. I’ve actually gone out twice for dinner in the evening despite the air raids because you just get to the point where you need a little variety in your life! I’ve also gone shopping quite a bit and stocked up on biscuits, juice, mineral water, things I can eat in my room when I’m working – fruit, bananas, apples, that kind of thing.

PM: Can you sleep during the bombings at night?

LM: I have very good earplugs. In the beginning I would leave the window open because the fear is always that if there’s a big explosion nearby, your windows will shatter and actually throw little splinters of glass into you. But I found that it was so noisy I just wasn’t getting any sleep, and so now I shut the window ’cos they’re pretty well made French windows with very thick glass, and it probably filters out 70 to 80% of the noise. But for some reason, I don’t know, the Americans always drop a few really loud ones about 3.30 in the morning. Last night was fairly steady; they tend to drop a big bomb about once an hour all through the night, so I got woken up every hour. But you do kind of get used to it, and there are days when you’re so exhausted that you do sleep through it. I mean, compared to what’s happening to this country I should think it’s a fairly minor concern.

PM: Is it a macho environment among war reporters?

LM: I’ve covered quite a few wars – I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many women as this time, a lot of young women, Arab women, Italian, French, there was a Chinese woman reporter, she got evacuated with the Chinese. I’d say there’s probably at least a quarter to a third women, which is kind of refreshing. I’ve never really… I’d say that there’s a lot more sexism in newsrooms in London, Dublin, Paris or New York than there is in the field in a place like this. I’ve never encountered it in a war situation. I think when you’re all out there and there are bombs exploding and you’re worried about being expelled or arrested or being yelled at for something you’ve written, everyone is trying so hard just to survive that you do tend to actually be quite generous and help each other. Certainly until I got my satellite phone sorted out and my communications system working, I relied quite a lot on colleagues, and they were very generous and very kind. There was a cameraman from British Channel 4 (who) programmed my computer ’cos I wasn’t getting the data thing working to file, so yeah, there is a lot of camaraderie. I think people are still competitors, that is still there, and I’ve seen people sometimes on bus trips look around to see if they’re immediate competitor was on the trip or not – that never goes away though.

PM: We’re seeing contradictory images of the US forces in action being reported in the media. On one hand, the spin is that this is a new kind of ‘sensitive’ war machine, on the other we’re hearing about Marines acting like jocks and calling the Iraqis ‘Hajis’.

LM: Well, I haven’t seen a single American soldier! I did talk to one newspaperperson in Europe who said that the wire agencies are transmitting, y’know, hundreds of images of Marines sort of giving candy to children or holding babies, these sort of recruitment poster images. And this person said, ‘I absolutely refuse to run anything like that on any of my pages’ which I thought was a very laudable position, because that’s not what this is about. To me there’s something obscene about talking about humanitarian aid when you are bombing people and killing civilians. This country does not need humanitarian aid – apart perhaps from Basra where they haven’t got running water and electricity and they’re in trouble, but then again, that is the result of the war – what this country needs at the moment is not to be bombed.

PM: How long do you anticipate being in Iraq?

LM: Originally I had hoped to be in Dublin the last week of April because I was supposed to do Off The Shelf for RTE and participate in the Cuirt festival in Galway, and I still dream of doing both, but I think the chances are diminishing by the hour. It’ll be three weeks on Monday I’ve been here. I originally had in my mind an idea that I’d stay here six weeks but certainly if we realise in a few more weeks that this is going to be Vietnam and the thing is going to drag on for years I might take a break at some point.

But there’s always a fear of leaving just before things get interesting, so you do want to hang on. I want to be here to see whatever kind of resolution of this conflict there is, and I hope that I will survive both physically and administratively – in the sense that they do appear to be sending journalists back now and that sort of thing – I do hope that I can hang on long enough to see that.

PM: Do your family and friends worry about you being in Baghdad?

LM: Both my parents are dead and my family are actually in California, my brother and sisters. They’re used to it, I’ve done this a lot of times before. I have a lot of friends in Paris where I’m based; I’ve called a few of them. This may sound silly, but I miss my cat quite a lot. I have a very nice concierge who goes to see him twice a day and feeds him, so I know he’s in good hands. I think that compared to colleagues who have children for example, really you feel the heartstrings being tugged when they make their evening calls home. I think I’m fortunate – I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to have children, I think children are lovely – but it’s not a problem for me. I think it’s great to be able to pack your bags and cover a really good story and know that you can stay there as long as long as you want to.

PM: Do you have any prediction as to the long-term effects this war will have on Iraq? Is it conceivable that we’ll have something like the Northern Ireland situation, with a long-term military presence trying to govern in hostile circumstances?

LM: Oh that’s totally conceivable, but I would say, not to diminish the tragedy of Northern Ireland, but if anything the scale of it here would be much, much greater because you’re talking about a country of 26-28 million people, depending on whose figures you take, and a country where you’ve already had one suicide bombing, where the government is threatening the American and British forces with hundreds of Arab volunteers willing to commit suicide and take the biggest possible number of forces with them.

I think it is possible still that the US and British politicians will get what they wanted, what they were promising us from the beginning, which was a triumphant entry into Baghdad and being showered with flowers and rose petals and rice and that sort of thing. It’s still conceivable, it could happen, but it’s not a Hollywood movie, it doesn’t end there and it is very hard for me to imagine a scenario whereby this could have a happy ending. It cannot.

It is going to be a catastrophe regardless of how it ends, and I believe that to take a country with the problems that Iraq has and come in and bomb it for weeks or months and say, ‘We’re going to create freedom and democracy and we’ll all live happily ever after and freedom and democracy will follow in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine’ is just childish, its absurd, its illogical. It defies reason and it’s criminal actually because a lot of lives are going to be lost in this process and the uncertainty is total.”

Words from the front
A sample of Lara Marlowe’s recent reporting from Baghdad

“As we drove out of Baghdad yesterday morning, white tongues of flame shot from three anti-aircraft artillery pieces in a palm grove, with a loud, “pop, pop, pop”.

Men stood in the doorway of a grocery store, pointing to the sky, towards the US bomber that the gunners aimed for. Please don’t let the pilot mistake us for a troop bus, I kept thinking.

It was the first time in two weeks of war that Iraqi authorities allowed foreign journalists to travel outside the capital. With amazing nonchalance, they took us southward, towards the battlefield with US forces, straight through their own defences. On a patch of scorched earth beside the motorway, an oil tanker poured petrol into a trench, that had burned itself out. More anti-aircraft artillery, this time stashed beneath a fly-over. Just south of the city, soldiers milled in front of a big barracks – not the sort of place any sane person would enter.

At the second big military complex – also not bombed – boulders had been placed on the road to stop intruders. Traffic was surprisingly heavy, considering we were only a few dozen kilometres from what US military spokesmen describe as “the relentless pounding of the Republican Guard”. A makeshift food market was spread out by the side of the motorway with trucks piled with cabbage, potatoes and tomatoes.

Further on, in the vast, fertile plain south of Baghdad, dozens of military fuel and troop trucks were dug in, with earth embankments protecting their engines. Each vehicle was several hundred metres from the next one, making it impossible to hit more than one with a bomb or rocket.

If the Americans want to destroy our rickety old equipment, the Iraqis apparently think, we’ll make them use up lots of expensive weapons.”

– The Irish Times, April 3, 2003