The As It Happens Files (26 page)

Not a happy ending for poor Violet or Ruby, but at least the Flight family had their cat, hamster, goldfish and two dogs to keep them company.

My own house has provided shelter over the years for two cats, a rabbit, a turtle, some fish, numerous budgies and a blue-crowned conure. This last, named Zak, I regarded as the bane of our existence, eating us out of house and home—I mean
literally
eating the house, along with the picture frames, the chairs and a shelf of cherished antique books, all the while making a fearsome racket and pooping on our shoulders at every opportunity. He, or more likely
she
—you can’t tell about conures—was my son’s bird, and like many parrots, he/she was fiercely devoted to his/her chosen human and had only disdain for everyone else. For some reason, I was fond of him. Her. Have you seen the documentary
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill?
If so, perhaps you can understand how easy it is to fall in love with parrots in spite of their obnoxious habits.

What I’m building up to here is that my friends at
As It Happens
knew about my love-hate relationship with parrots, and they rarely missed a chance to get a parrot story on the air. Over the years we talked to many people who
had gripping stories to tell: their parrots had been lost or stolen, recovered, arrested by customs officials, subpoenaed to give testimony in court. One parrot (English, naturally) had taken up sewing, and more than one had been sent up for using inappropriate language in public places. There was even a parrot named Zak who liked to whistle the
1812 Overture.
Allegedly.

The thing is, no matter how clever and talented these parrots were or how well they talked, sang, whistled or swore
off
the air, the minute we put them on the radio, they clammed up (so to speak). I was getting a reputation as the interviewer who couldn’t coax a sound out of one of the most notoriously chatty creatures on the planet.

Until November 2003. When we were preparing a special 35th anniversary programme in the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, Executive Producer Lynn Munkley and the rest of the staff decided to spring a parrot on me as a surprise. I’m not sure whether they’d taken pity on me or they wanted to demonstrate to our “live” audience just how inept I was when it came to interviewing guests of avian persuasion—a bit of both maybe—but right at the end of the programme, Barbara introduced Susan Sherman and her friend Jingle Bell, a magnificent double yellow-headed Amazon parrot (who had only one head, actually).

I said, “Does he talk, Susan?”

“No. Did somebody say he talks?”

Very funny,
I thought.

Anyway, Jingle Bell was a real trouper. His best trick was if he (Susan claimed Jingle Bell was a “he”) did something wrong, you pointed your finger at him and said
BANG!
and he flipped right over and hung upside down from his perch. It was very cute.

But the best thing Jingle Bell did for me was this: he actually
said something on the radio.
He said, “Hi.”

When I—so grateful to him—followed this up with “You’re a beautiful parrot,” he said, “Beautiful” right back. I have witnesses.

The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun.

W
ith these words, shortly after nine-thirty EST on the evening of March 19, 2003, White House Press Spokesman Ari Fleischer announced to the world that the war to topple Saddam Hussein had begun. This time CBC Radio was ready. How could we not have been after the months of sabre rattling and the ultimatums? Radio meetings had been held, tasks assigned, hotels booked and an around-the-clock call list drawn up. Fleischer’s announcement occurred on my watch; minutes later I was taking my place in the news studio alongside Barbara Smith, and our own small army of news and current affairs producers had started churning out scripts and updates and dialling up people to talk to: American military experts, Canadian military experts, Iraqis, experts on Iraq, diplomatic and political voices from all over, our own reporters on the ground in Washington, London, Amman, Kuwait City and Doha, and in Iraq.

My fellow current affairs host Bernard St-Laurent joined us, Jill Dempsey took over the news updates and the lot of us held the fort until we were relieved in the wee hours of the morning. The worst part of that night was staggering to the hotel across the street around 4:00 a.m. only to find that I couldn’t check in to my room, because I couldn’t find the reception desk, which had disappeared in the chaos of a major renovation.

It’s hard to get a sense of how things are going when you’re in the eye of the hurricane, which is how it felt. I think we did a fair job of reporting the scraps of news we got hold of, filling in with some of the background material that we’d all been sucking up for months. But if the first casualty of war is truth, a corollary of that might be: the first people to forget this are journalists. Remember the first Gulf War? All those great videos of—well, they could have been of anything, really—shown to us by the American military in their briefings? All those “smart bombs” zeroing in on their targets? There were no reporters on the ground for that one, not in the beginning anyway. The U.S. Department of Defense had decided after the Vietnam War that reporters were a major pain in the butt and very likely the reason they’d lost that war; they didn’t want the Press getting in the way of “Desert Storm.”

Eventually, reporters were allowed in to see what was going on in Kuwait in 1991, and a few of them became quite famous as a result—among them, Canadians Bob McKeown, who arrived in Kuwait City with a CBS crew a day before the allied forces did, and Arthur Kent, whose reporting of Scud missile attacks from his base in Dhahram, Saudi Arabia, earned him the moniker Scud Stud—and a lot of marriage proposals, too, it was rumoured. But until the Press were allowed to see things with their own eyes, we had
no idea
what was really going on. After they arrived, you still couldn’t be sure what was being struck out of their reports by military censors or what they were holding back. I’m not saying you don’t need to control information if you’re fighting a war, but it would be best if we could all remember that, until the war is finished, a good deal of what gets told about it, from all sources, is likely to be fiction.

The lack of actual reporting on the Gulf War of 1991 was controversial enough that the Pentagon were persuaded to
take the Press along on their next outing. In Iraq in 2003, the media were invited to have their people “embedded” with American divisions as they marched toward Baghdad, filing reports as they went. There was a debate about this, too; some people felt the reporters would be compromised by getting too close to the military. My own feeling was that it was better to get the story from a reporter—even an embedded one—than from a general, or in addition to the general’s.

Anyway, there were other stories being filed by reporters who weren’t embedded, so the “embedded story” would be just one piece of the greater picture. The main problem with the embedded reports, as I saw it, was that the dramatic visual material they contained would probably get more play on TV than other material, which could in turn give them more weight than they merited. The pictures certainly were dramatic at times—no doubt about that—and in that sense, the Iraq War of 2003 was the first war the world watched live on TV.

Radio, as usual, would provide the context. Or so I hoped. But in the beginning, we in radio were as hungry for the drama of unfolding events as our sisters and brothers in television. And, as usual, hard facts were scarce. So what did we tell people on that first night of the war? We told them that there were about three hundred thousand troops at the ready for operation “Shock and Awe.” That the U.S. 101st Airborne and the 82nd Airborne were set to land not only troops but also trucks, tanks and heavy artillery wherever they were needed. We told them that the opening salvo apparently had been directed at a “target of opportunity.” We told them that the Kurds could hardly wait for the war to get under way and were hoping to join the fight, and that the Turks were warning the coalition not to arm the Kurds.

Beyond that, we speculated. We speculated about whether the ground war had started yet, whether the paratroopers had
landed, how the weather would affect things, why the attack had begun at dawn instead of at night, who or what the so-called target of opportunity might be. Was it Saddam? Did they get him? What would happen to Iraqi resistance if they had got him? What kind of resistance were the coalition forces likely to meet anyway? Would Saddam use chemical or biological weapons? Did he have any?

We talked about how some Iraqi soldiers were said to have defected and how Iraqi State Radio was said to have been jammed or even taken over.

It was CBC reporter Frank Koller who reminded us that night on air that almost everything we were able to report at that point was suspect since we simply did not have enough good information yet, but that hardly gave us pause. This, of course, is the really bad side of 24-hour “news”, be it on TV or radio: you have to fill the air with
something.
I wouldn’t say we actually got anything wrong that night, but much of the time we were just flapping our jaws.

In reviewing the tape of that evening, I was struck by one comment in particular and who it was that made it: Laurie Milroy, a member of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, predicted that the war to topple Saddam would be a short war and that most of the Iraqi public were either in favour of the invasion or, at worst, neutral, but when I asked her about the post-war plan, Dr. Milroy said, “That’s an unfortunate question, because it’s not as far along as it should be.”

As history would soon show us, no truer words were spoken that night.

For a while, though, the war went quite smoothly. The Americans and their allies made steady progress toward Baghdad, encountering little in the way of serious resistance, and our
own well-planned campaign to cover the war went just as smoothly. All regular programming had been suspended for the time being, so the whole staff was available to pitch in. My shift settled into a comfortable mid-afternoon to about ten o’clock or midnight, with every once in a while a pee break or a few minutes to eat something. Apart from the fact that it
was
a war, we were having a pretty good time at work. I loved the fact that we were live all the time and I loved having a big story to cover every night.

By the start of the second week, we were easing back into our regular schedule, although it didn’t get wholly regular for quite a long time. At
As It Happens,
for example, we never went home before ten while there was still a chance of a major development to cover, and that would be the case for weeks to come. Baghdad was taken and Saddam’s statue toppled, Iraqis danced in the streets and George Bush dropped onto an aircraft carrier in the Gulf to declare the war over. I recorded it in my own journal.

We were both a little premature.

Those were days, however, when it was still possible to hope for a good outcome. People who had opposed the war might even have been feeling a bit sheepish; after all, a tyrant had been ousted and a country liberated and it had all been pretty much a walk in the park.

Five years later, Iraq smells more and more like Vietnam, more like a swamp than a park, a victory only for the enemies of peace and the enemies of the United States. Everyone blames the U.S.

But for one young Iraqi in Baghdad, the truth is more complex.

We first talked to Salam Pax (a pseudonym) in September 2003, barely six months after the invasion. He had flown to London to attend to the publication of his book,
The Baghdad
Blog,
which was based on excerpts of a web diary he’d started when it first became apparent that the U.S. was going to invade Iraq. Salam was an architect by training, an engaging writer, a witty and keen observer of his environment—and he spoke excellent English. Above all, he had no known agenda, so he made an excellent witness, and we were hungry for witnesses. I began by asking him how his blog had got started.