U.S. Navy Birthday Celebration

A few weeks ago - Oct. 13 to be precise - we celebrated the U.S. Navy's 232nd Birthday.

It was a Friday the 13, in 1775, when the Continental Congress - which had not yet declared independence, authorized the creation of a Navy for the coming struggle with England. The proclamation establishing the Navy was very short and to the point:

"Resolved, That a swift sailing vessel, to carry ten carriage guns, and a proportionable number of swivels, with eighty men, be fitted, with all possible despatch, for a cruise of three months, and that the commander be instructed to cruize eastward, for intercepting such transports as may be laden with warlike stores and other supplies for our enemies, and for such other purposes as the Congress shall direct.

"That a Committee of three be appointed to prepare an estimate of the expence, and lay the same before the Congress, and to contract with proper persons to fit out the vessel.

"Resolved, that another vessel be fitted out for the same purposes, and that the said committee report their opinion of a proper vessel, and also an estimate of the expence."

How far the Navy has come since the days of John Paul Jones, calling out to the captain of Serapis, "I have just begun to fight!" Today, the U.S. Navy is the unparalleled master of the seas. We have 12 aircraft carriers (we had dozens in WWII) and the next biggest navy has two or three. The next biggest navy that is hostile to us...has none. Or none that aren't rust-covered amusement parks, anyway.

But we're not just a force on the ocean, and I'm the living proof. In the three and a half years I've been in the Navy, I've never once set foot on a ship. In fact, for the first time in history, there are more sailors on the ground in Operation Iraqi Freedom than there are supporting it at sea. In all, there are 30,000 sailors here in Iraq.

So, as we gathered one damp, sticky evening in the Al Faw Palace, we honored the tradition - and the future of the U.S. Navy.

A 50-foot-tall U.S. flag hangs in the rotunda of the Al Faw Palace.

It was a simple ceremony. We gathered and sang "Anchors Aweigh," joined by quite a few Army soldiers who stumbled along with a print-out of the unfamiliar words, just like Sunday morning Baptists:

Stand Navy out to sea,
Fight our Battle Cry;
We'll never change our course,
So vicious foe steer shy-y-y-y.

Roll out the TNT,
Anchors Aweigh.
Sail on to Victory
And sink their bones to Davy Jones, Hooray!

Actually, there are two sets of lyrics to the song: one for the Navy as a whole, and one for the Naval Academy. And it's not "Anchors Away!" The word "aweigh" means "to weigh" and "weighing anchor" means to pull an anchor out of the water and suspend it at the bow of a ship - which looks much like something hung from a chain on an old-fashioned scale - hence the term.

The highest-ranking officer available - in this case an admiral - addressed the gathering:

And we actually listened to him.

There was even cake to be had:

The words "Honor, courage and commitment" are from the Sailor's Creed.

The admiral and the most junior Seaman present (right) cut the cake, with a little help from another officer, and the use of a borrowed sword from the Marines.

Joining us at the event were some of our coalition partners. Here I am standing in the cake line with a sailor from the Ukranian Navy. He's a pilot by training, and started in the Air Force before switching to the Navy to fly sub-hunter aircraft. Obviously, he's on a little different duty these days.

The blue and white striped shirts - which the navy personnel from all of the Former Soviet Union wear - are a tradition from the Russian Navy that predates the Soviet Union to the time of the Czars. Soviet sailors were so proud of their blue-and-white shirts that when they were pulled off the blockaided warships and thrown into the carnage of Stalingrad as regular foot soldiers, they wore their distinctive navy shirts into battle. The Ukraine, independent since the early 1990s, nonetheless kept this tradition.

And here's a coalition partner who wouldn't have been my mortal enemy 20 years ago. This guy is from the Royal Australian Navy. Small as it is, it's probably the most professional branch of the Australian military. Although in actual wartime, they've always been a kind of backup to the English Royal Navy, they acquitted themselves well in World War I and World War II.

Pictures of the Lake

In the center of this base is a massive lake, built by Saddam Hussein at the height of his arrogant self-worshiping architectural effusion. It's surrounded by various buildings - homes and recreation facilities for Ba'ath Party officials.


They're all in use to this day - by us - and even lower-level staff folks who work in cubicles...work in cubicles with marble floors.

At the heart of the lake, of course, is the Al Faw Palace (see my earlier post): Here's a picture from the back:





Here are a few pictures of the lake:


A small causeway behind the palace leads to a small island, which was likely the dockhouse for Iraq's most rich and evil.



Not sure what this was, but I thought it looked cool. There are helicopters flying around this place all the time. Someday, I'll donate a whole post to my best helicopter photos.


I have strong suspicions that the lost gold of Iraq is sunk in here somewhere. Or maybe some WMDs. From what I've heard, there are also supposedly some bodies in here - probably folks who displeased Saddam, and were invited to take a recreational swim with concrete flippers.


At this intersection, it is recommended that you follow the stop sign. Those pretty rails don't really do the trick by themselves.


Surprise, surprise. Another helicopter!


The road in places is just a causeway between the lake and canals or ponds, like this one, near Saddam's personal mosque.

If you think this is cool, in a couple of weeks, I'll introduce you to some of the lake's inhabitants.

A Day in the Life...

I've talked a lot about the basics of life in Baghdad, but the reader may find it odd that I don't talk about what I do, day-to-day. There's a reason for that, of course.

I just can't.

The nature of the work I do means that a lot of it I can't talk to with anyone. And even if I could, I certainly wouldn't put it out on the Internet. I could try all that, "I could tell you but I'd have to kill you" nonsense, but that would be a little extreme. If I were James Bond, I certainly wouldn't have a blog. Either way, it's best to keep it simple. As an intelligence officer, I work with information.

Not that much different than my old days as a journalist, only these days, I write the truth for a change. ;)

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First of all, let me say, I've worked a lot of tough jobs. In High School, I pretty much worked on the farm. One summer in college, I worked at a wholesale produce terminal on Zarzamora Street in San Antonio. I worked from 3 a.m. until noon six days a week, unloading 100 lbs. bags of potatoes or frozen crates of corn from freight trains and 18-wheelers and putting them on smaller trucks to haul to grocery stores and restaurants.

Working on political campaigns, I sometimes did 16, 17 and 18 hour days. But those were limited to the end stretch of the campaign, and you always knew that on a particular Tuesday, the entire thing would be over...for better or for worse.

But when it comes to long hours, my current schedule blows those out of the water.

I work from midnight to noon. Six days a week. On my "day off," I only work six hours. All together, that's 78 hours a week.

And like a campaign, there's almost always something going on. Even when there isn't anything critical, there's always some long-term project that needs attending to. At first, I thought this was insane. That I'd never get used to such a schedule. But before too long, it became natural. And in a wierd way, it makes my time over here go by faster.

I usually set my alarm clock for about 10:45 p.m. Already showered the afternoon before, I quickly shave and head out. It's nearly pitch black outside, and the area of the base I'm in is covered with waist-high Jersey barriers made of concrete. On the way to the DFAC (Dining Faciliy), there are numerous obstacles that rise up at you out of the darkness. There's a canal from an old irrigation system, with a small bridge across it. A road or two, with curbs on either side, a jog through a parking lot filled with Humvees and Up-Armored Suburbans, a path along a reed-filled, smelly canal, etc.

The base is almost entirely blacked-out most nights. Partly for security, partly because electric power is such a scarce commodity here. Although the Iraqis are now nearly operating at power levels equal to the pre-war period, there are still interrupions. And in a country with blazing summers, the needs are great.

What power we have comes almost entirely from generators. Generators require fuel. Fuel is too heavy to airlift. Therefore fuel must come in via convoy...and run the gauntlet of IEDs, small arms attacks and whatever else Joe Jihad wants to throw at them. And if you didn't guess, fuel trucks have a bad habit of burning when they get hit.

So conserving energy here is obviously not just a good idea. There are soldiers and Iraqi truck drivers who are risking their lives every day so I can plug in my laptop. Kind of humbling.

As for my late-night snack at the DFAC, it leaves a lot to be desired. Not that the food is bad, but it's not...right. I mean, I'm about to start a full day on the job, and I want breakfast. But at 11:15 p.m., they don't have breakfast. They have dinner.

It only gets worse six hours later when I get my "lunch" break. Because by that time, they're serving breakfast. Only my noon meal makes any dietary sense.

Walking around in the dark allows you to do some thinking. At first, you're just thinking about where the next hole or curb or tree is, but once you learn your way, it's not so bad. You can just continue on, seeing things at the last moment in the dim glow of Baghdad's lights reflecting off the dust clouds (the only kind of clouds we have, typically). You know exactly when you need to turn on your mini flashlight. In one part of my commute, there are a pair of Jersey barriers, with a chain strung between them, directly across my route. Usually, it's disconnected, lying on the ground. But I know the one time I don't look for it, it will be up, and will catch me right at the ankles.

I also like looking at the stars, when I can see them. It's not so easy. Although Baghdad's power is erratic and non-ubiquitous, it is a city of 5 million people, and it's always going to have a glow of some kind. Add to that the fact that the air, from ground level to about 1,000 feet is about 900,000 parts per million sand. Nothing shows this more clearly than when a car's headlights cross my path, and I can see the swirling sand like snow, dancing in the beams of light. Of course, I'm always thinking, "Great. I'm breathing that."

Sand of course, is not the worst thing you can breathe in. Fortunately, with the winds the way they are, we don't get much of the sewage smell that permeates many of the bad neighborhoods around town. But Iraqis - and the U.S. Army for that matter - don't believe in landfills. Instead, they burn their trash. On days when this happens, the smell of burning, rotting trash is putrid, acrid and it is everywhere.

As I said, I usually get a lunch break, right around dawn. I come outside into the still-dark night and walk back to the DFAC. Sometimes, when my timing is right, I catch the sound of the call to prayer echoing from the mosques across Baghdad. Five times a day, the call goes out, with the Imams singing their verses with modulating pitches - a musical tribute to Allah and a rejoinder to Muslims to turn their mind to God.

It's pretty in a way, I guess, and kind of strikes me as an ironic parallel to good old-fashioned Gregorian Chants, in which the Catholic church used to turn its adherents' minds to God. Of course, the Catholic Church never got Friar Tuck into a minaret 100 feet into the air and gave him a P.A. system that could carry for miles. Thankfully, they kept the priests earth-bound and instead used heavy bells to accomplish much the same thing. Nobody had to crawl up into the tower whose name wasn't Quasimodo.

When it comes to their singing, the Baghdad Imams are pretty good. Not Three Tenors quality, mind you, but O.K. for what they do. And I have to say that they beat the Imams of the mosques in Turkey hands down. That's the only other Muslim country I've spent time in, so I can't say. Of course, Baghdad, like Istanbul, has its share of history and claim to Muslim greatness. But in Istanbul, the women wear Ray Bans, skirts and high-heels, and in that kind of place, you just know that their religious piety just isn't quite as authentic any more. Kind of like a Taco Bell Islam. Of course, if that's the standard, I'm sure there must be some potential opera virtuosos hiding in the mud-brick huts of Afghanistan. Their calls to prayer could probably bring people to tears...if those people weren't too busy attending public stonings in the soccer stadium.

Back to Iraq, by the time lunch is finished, it is now daylight, and I head back to work. That is when I run the gauntlet...of military etiquette.

We call it "Salute Alley." A narrow path in which dozens of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines will pass. And in this narrow bottleneck, you can't escape.

I used to assume most people knew everything I did - or at least everything I did when I was a civilian - about the military. But they don't, and as the naive questions of some friends back home indicate, they need lessons now and then.

Soldiers (I use this term generically) are supposed to salute superior officers at all times when they are outdoors (except when working or driving or other times when it would be impractical). The officers, being salued, must return the courtesy.

Now obviously, you can't do this at night because you can't see someone's rank insignia. But once daytime arrives, the game is on. Passing through Salute Alley, I find myself saluting virtually everyone. My hand rises to salute, snaps up, snaps down, then repeats. Again and again and again. Enlisted people don't salute other enlisted people. They have it easy. They only salute officers. Officers however, must return the salute of enlisted people and junior officers, and must furthermore salute all the officers above them. The only people you don't salute are those who are your exact same rank. For me, a Navy Lieutennant Junior Grade, that means Army, Air Force and Marine 1st Lieutennants. And there aren't a whole heck of a lot of those around.

By the time I pass through the gauntlet, my right arm is nearly sore. I find myself holding it up for whole groups of people, because it's just not possible to get every one of them.

Foreign soldiers are not required to salute, nor am I required to salute them. This almost always holds true, but the Tongans (my good friends from Kuwait) are here, and they seem to get a kick out of saluing American officers. I always return the salute, usually matching it with "Malu la ley" (Good morning) or "Fe fe aku" (How are you)." Since I've been in Baghdad, I've learned more Tongan than Arabic, and the Arabic I know mostly consists of phrases like "Put down the weapon" and "Where is the suicide bomber car?" which isn't exactly the best way to politely greet an Iraqi Mulazzem Awwal (1st Lieutennant).

Finally, my exhausting day over, I head to the chow hall for one last meal (lunch, which is my dinner) and then to my trailer. Every 2-3 days, I try to hit the gym for an hour. When I'm not doing that, I hit the computer lab or read a book. In all, I rarely have more than 3-4 hours of free time before I turn the lights out, draw the shades (actually, my camouflagued poncho, which substitutes for shades) and go to bed, around 5 p.m., for the end of another day in Baghdad.

Six hours later, the alarm rings, and I start it all over again.

A Note on Fear

There was another attack on the base today. Closer than previous attacks, but this time, no serious injuries and thankfully, no deaths.

It happened this morning, and I was in the chow hall eating. Suddenly, the siren went off "BRRR, BRRR, BRRR...Incoming, incoming, incoming." Everyone stopped eating. A few people got down off of their chairs and considered crawling under the table. That would have been silly. If a mortar or rocket hit our building and came through the roof - that little plastic table won't do you much good.

I didn't have my body armor with me. None of us did. Going outside to get to the bunkers was out of the question, as we were safer inside than out. So I continued to eat my french toast. After all, I was hungry, my lunch hour (breakfast is my lunch) was short, and I had to get back to work once the attack was over.

"Boom, boom, boom" I exchanged a glance with the guys around me. We guessed the location based on the sound. Boom was certainly closer than whump. But still a good distance off. After about six impacts, there were no more. A few minutes later, the all-clear sounded.

Something a friend of mine back home said has been running around my head for a couple of weeks. After I described an attack on the base, she said that my nonchalance really worried her.
Why, I wonder?

She seemed to have wanted me to have more fear about that particular event, or express more concern. The fact that I didn't kind of shocked her.

First of all, make no doubt about it. I am not some Bravado-filled, 18-year-old kid, who thinks nothing can happen to him. The kind who skateboards, skydives, or jumps his pickup - Dukes of Hazzard Style. Even so, there is a philosophy that only those who take risks can truly be said to live. Or as Friedrich Nietzsche, the late 19th Century Philosopher, said, "Live Dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!"

Of course, Fred was always a bit of a shock jock, and almost everything he said must be taken with a grain of salt, as hyperbole. But he nonetheless had a point. Living your life based on fear, being - as one philosophy professor I read opined - "the ultimate couch potato" can hardly be said to be living much at all. When you reach old age and look back at your life, you need to have some achievements to point to that you can be proud of. Not that they all have to involve risk, but they have to be real, genuine. It can't be that you watched every episode of some T.V. show.

My own re-evaluation of my belief in "invincibility" came back several years ago when I was injured in a farming accident. I fractured three vertebrae in my back, and had I landed a little different, could have been paralyzed. It was the kind of moment that made me sit up and think. Or more accurately, lie there on my back, keep frantically pressing the little buzzer until the nurse came in to give me more morphine...and think.

But rather than pull in and avoid risk - avoid life - I decided to take a much more discerning view of it. Risk is one thing. Stupid risk is another. Don't avoid risk just out of fear. Accept it, grow comfortable with it, minimize it, but live your life. That's really the only thing you can do. Just as we were all at one point paranoid teenagers afraid to take the car out onto the interstate, we outgrew that fear, gained confidence and turned our 1980 Pontiacs up the on-ramp of life.

That is how you deal with fear. You figure out the dangers, improve yourself to avoid as many of them as you can, and you go out there, into the world, and face them.

I guess if you played semantics, you could make a distinction between different types of fears. There's healthy fear, paralyzing fear, and angst.

Angst, in the German, is kind of a general, all-around fear of life, the universe and everything. When you're afraid of the future, worried about the state of youth, global warming or the coming of the Great Pumpkin...that's angst.

There's really not much you can do about angst. It's beyond you, unreachable, inviolate. So you just live with it. For me, in college, I dealt with angst through poetry, and in fact, most of the romantic poets - Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, were all about angst. Beethoven was angst defined. The Fifth Symphony is a practical explosion of angst, mixed with a good dose of "Sturm und Drang" - Storm and Stress. In his Ninth (and last) Symphony, he turned the minor-chord angst into a passionate, major chord euphoria.

Angst can either eat you up or motivate you, as it did Beethoven. Sometimes it does both, as the Ninth shows so well.

Moving on to the more specific types of fear, we have what I call healthy fear and paralyzing fear. They're really the same kind of fear, met with different responses.

Healthy fear is learning a danger, developing a plan of action that minimizes it, staying cool under stress and implementing that plan. Paralyzing fear is just what the name implies. It's not meeting your fear, but surrendering to it.

Put simply, healthy fear is keeping an eye out as you walk around, looking for dangers, or mapping out in your mind the locations of all the bunkers, so you can find them even in the blackness of night. Paralyzing fear is just cowering. Hiding.

The first kind of fear is a vital instinct for survival that God or evolution (I tend to see the supposed conflict as irrelevant, since one is a cause and the other is a mechanism) put into us. Primative man knew that when he heard the saber-toothed tiger roar, it was time to pull out the spear or climb into a tree for protection.

The second kind of fear doesn't actually make you safer - but does exactly the oposite. Paralyzing fear leaves you numb, unresponsive, panicked. And panicking has never saved a single person in the history of mankind, unless by sheer luck.

The panicked man rolls up into a fetal ball, which is nice and convenient for the saber-toothed-tiger to chew on, and saves him the effort of chasing him down. The man with healthy fear is active, not passive, and lives more often than not.

Ultimately, healthy fear does not guarantee your survival, and panicking does not guarantee the opposite. But your odds are better when you keep your wits, turn your fear instinct into a positive fear response, and do your best to meet the challenge.

As we left the dining facility, dawn had come, and black smoke curled up into the sky in one direction. We walked in the direction of work and, coming around a corner, caught a glimpse of a sheet of flame rising up from beyond a building. Of the six or seven shots they sent over us, only one had hit anything substantive. We couldn't tell, but it looked like it may have been a parked car. For those there at the scene, fear - paralyzing fear - would have done them absolutely no good at all. For the rest of us, healthy fear - rethinking our emergency response plans, putting our noses back to the grindstone and getting to work - was the only real option.

Medals for the departing troops

As new folks like me move into our positions, others, who have been here, put in their times, and done thier jobs well will move on. Yesterday, on the balcony of the palace, we had a small ceremony for four departing members of our unit.

Members of our unit who will soon be departing,

and who received various medals for their service.

Our team.

(Two Navy personnel, one Airman, and the rest are all Army.)

Al Faw Palace

Al Faw Palace, Baghdad

Situated in the Southwest corner of Baghdad, sandwiched between the city and the airport, is a vast complex of buildings built by the Iraqi government. But these were no mere ministries, no place where the average Iraqi could visit and see his government in action. No, this place, known as the Abu Ghraib Palace complex (not to be confused with the prison) was restricted to an elite, the plundercrats of Ba'athist Iraq.

It was once a stunning Dictator's Disneyland. And today, it is the headquarters of the Multi-National Forces-Iraq.

It was ironic that I left my work at the ornate Texas Capitol, working every day amid splendid architecture and tourists to uproot myself to Iraq, and wound up...in a palace.

None of this I knew beforehand. Training for all contingencies, I spent months training in Humvees, shooting, and learning the special "tiger crouch" walk - a zig-zag pattern of movement designed to disrupt the aim of snipers. I planned for the worst, and ended up...here.

Not that I'll never need those skills from time to time. But the vast majority of my work is done indoors, in air conditioning, in what is more or less an office environment. Not that I'm complaining. I'm 35 years old and trained for a certain kind of work. I'm not an 18-year-old kid just out of school and full of piss and vinegar. But nonetheless, after all my training, it's a bit of a letdown.

So here I am, 6,000 miles from Austin, once again working in a place where tourists take photographs of the door hinges. Only these tourists, just like in Saddam's time, aren't the average Joe...or Abdul. They're almost all soldiers or contractors.

The two buildings - Al Faw and the Texas Capitol - are an interesting study in contrast. At 450,000 square feet, Al Faw is bigger than the Texas Capitol's 360,000, though the Iraqi building is much more square, than the Texas Capitol, which is elongated. The Texas Capitol has an ornate stone exterior and a relatively plain interior. Al Faw's exterior is dull sandstone, but its interior is filled with beautifully-polished marble and ornate designs.Overall, both buildings impress. But the Texas capitol does so with a tasteful, democratic grandeur. Al Faw does so in an excessive, jaw-dropping display of Oriental, authoritarian excess.

Al Faw Palace is one of eight built by Saddam Hussein during the mid 1990s as a luxury retreat for himself, his sons and leaders of the Bath Party. It's built on a vast complex of several palaces, arranged around a massive man-made lake, and several smaller lakes. At the same time that Saddam was complaining that his people were starving and Iraq was chronically short of water, he built this mammoth compound, consuming vast percentages of the Iraqi budget, and diverting immense sums of water that could have been used to irrigate crops.

It was upon seeing such things that Gen. Tommy Franks dismissed the United Nations "Oil for Food" program as "Oil for Palaces." The Palace, like many Saddam constructed, was built to honor great military victories. Dozens of these palaces exist. There's the "Victory over Iran" Palace, and the "Victory over America" Palace.

What?

That's right. To Saddam Hussein, the 1991 Gulf War was a victory for Iraq. Despite the fact that his army suffered a humiliating defeat and was expelled from Kuwait lost around 20,000-30,000 deaths in combat versus allied deaths of around 500, Saddam saw his own survival as proof that Iraq had won. As is so often the case with dictators, he was the state, and the state was him. As Louis XIV said, "L'État, c'est moi!"

Al Faw Palace was built to honor one of those "great" victories, in this case, the liberation of the Al Faw Peninsula in Southern Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. In 1986, a surprise Iranian attack led to a dramatic Iraqi defeat, and occupation of the Peninsula, which lies in Southern Iraq and juts out into the Persian Gulf. Humiliated by this reverse, Saddam massed 100,000 Republican Guard troops and launched a counter-offensive, supported by massive artillery barrages and chemical weapons, which caused immense casualties among the Iranian troops.Al Faw was reconquered, and Saddam considered it his greatest victory. He proclaimed a national holiday, and after the 1991 Gulf War, began work on the palace. When it was dedicated, it ostensibly claimed to be in honor of all the sacrifices made to win back Al Faw.

Writing at the entrance of the palace reads:

Peace on Faw in its defense

Peace on its land and its name

Peace on the honorable ones

Peace on the sacrificial blood.

However, despite these general platitudes, no names of the thousands of Iraqi soldiers who died are stenciled on its walls. Instead, it is Saddam's initials which are ever-present. It reminded me of Santa Anna's statement at the Alamo, when his generals urged he delay his attack to reduce the risk to his men. Santa Anna replied that he wanted his men to die, because only blood would consecrate his victory. After all, he added, "What are soldiers but so many chickens?"

This bridge connecting the palace and the mainland was hit by a U.S. precision-guided bomb. Another bridge remains intact.

A close-up picture.

The palace has a whopping 62 rooms, many are huge, ornate ballrooms, with lavish ornamentation and chandeliers. It includes 29 bathrooms, with ornate toilets painted in gold trim, and fixtures of gilded brass (most of which were long-ago "appropriated" by the ground troops who arrived in 2003 and are now replaced with more simple ones.The main hall has a massive dome - wider, but also shorter - than that in the Texas Capitol.

The rotunda area of the palace.

Another view inside the palace

The dome is ornately decorated with intricately-carved reliefs in geometric patterns, amid which one can see Saddam Hussein's initials, written in beautifully-scripted Arabic, everywhere.The centerpiece of this building, however, is the massive crystal chandelier which hangs from the center of the dome. With 234 lights, it fills the space, hanging down like a giant, luminescent inverted jellyfish.

The top of the dome, from which the chandelier hangs.

The chandelier. It is probably 25 feet tall.

And as opulent as it was, built at a staggering cost amid some of the world's worst poverty, the Al Faw Palace - one of Saddam's greatest and most notorious achievements - was not his only palace. It was hardly even his favorite. In fact, this Neuschwanstein of Baghdad was not even enough to get the dictator excited.

Saddam, it seems, only visited the place six or seven times.

Intricate designs fill the ceilings, even in the side hallways. These aren't just painted on, they're carved - or more likely, molded.

More Al Faw Photos

More Photos of Al Faw Palace

The top of the dome - detail

The chandelier, viewed from the Third Floor.

In addition to the big chandelier, there are dozens of smaller ones - each of which would be the impressive centerpiece of a wealthy American mansion. These are just in the hallway.

A banister on the second floor.

One of the stairs. Notice the massive chandelier that runs down the middle of the stairs from the third floor to the first.

One of the 16 massive marble columns in the main rotunda area.



"Saddam is the greatest...dirka...dirka..." Notice the missing letters. I expect they're on Ebay by now.

This is a throne given to Saddam Hussein as a gift by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian terrorist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At least Al Gore never paid people to hijack airplanes...would have required too many carbon offsets.

(Notice in the middle is a model of the Dome of the Rock, the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jeruselem. You can also see the stains from all the Sweaty GIs who have taken a break from the rigors of war by kicking back on the deposed dictator's throne.)

Hi Mom!