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| ‘The Game Is Over’ | |||||||
| After three weeks of war, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador finally admits his boss’s regime has ended—and so, it seems, has his stay in New York | |||||||
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| April 11 — The final indignity for Mohammed al-Douri was being locked out of his own chauffeur-driven limousine. |
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THIS WAS THURSDAY morning, one day after al-Douri—whose boss, Saddam Hussein, was either dead or on the run, and whose job, Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, is as worthless as those dinars in his pocket—famously admitted that the Republic of Iraq did not, for the time being, even exist. “The game is over,” he said. That shocking admission—coming from a man who had defended Saddam in that most public of arenas only to watch his boss’s monuments get pulled down and dragged all over Baghdad—drew me to al-Douri’s Upper East Side townhouse the next day. It’s not that al-Douri was “the big story” the day after Baghdad fell, but he was the only member of the Iraqi regime that the world had heard from in the previous 24 hours. Given his loose tongue on Wednesday night, I felt I had to be at his stately townhouse the next morning. Obviously, conventional minds think alike. When I got to Iraq’s official mansion at 124 East 80th Street, I joined a pack of more than 20 reporters already camped out front. This being a residential community, a few neighbors came by out of curiosity. But they moved on quickly after realizing that when bunches of reporters are standing around complaining they’re usually just complaining about standing around in bunches. We waited. And waited. Meanwhile, reporters do what reporters do when there’s nothing to do but wait: trade war stories. Now, given that this particular group of reporters wasn’t in the real war zone—the only place we’re embedded, after all, is in our beds—the war stories weren’t so compelling. | ||||||||||||||||||
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One guy gloated that he was the one who forced al-Douri to admit that he was a man without a country. That was nothing, his cameraman reminded. They still had to rush the sizzling hot tape downtown. “And we couldn’t get a cab!” the cameraman said. (See, the battles aren’t only in Baghdad! You try to get a cab in New York on a rainy night!) During the long stretches of waiting, I got my first good look at al-Douri’s stately manse: a five-floor building flanked by the ritzy Junior League of New York City and a co-op so exclusive that the apartment buzzers don’t have names, just initials. By comparison to those two buildings, which look like they’re scrubbed every three hours, al-Douri’s home looks like it hasn’t had a spring cleaning since Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988. What little can be seen of the interior looks dingy and decrepit and wires dangle from every window (as if someone is stealing cable—hmmm). This being New York and I being a New York tabloid reporter by training, I chatted up the Junior League janitor to get the lowdown on al-Douri. “He doesn’t talk to us, ever,” Demetrio Perez told me. “Sometimes, I’ll be sweeping up and he’ll walk by, but he never says anything. The other guy [the previous ambassador] didn’t say anything either.” But everyone on the block seems to know that a person of infamy is nearby. As such, several neighbors have hung American flags conspicuously in their windows—a rare show of patriotism in Manhattan, where the only American flags you tend to see are at courthouses, city-owned buildings and the recruiting station in Times Square. Real estate is its own form of patriotism in New York, so people in the neighborhood are far more concerned about the fate of Iraq’s Georgian mansion than about its ambassador. “That’s an $18 million townhouse,” enthused Robert Anzalone, the principal broker at Fenwick-Keats, the real-estate agent around the corner from the building. “It’s a prime Manhattan building, so it’ll go fast.” Then he added conspiratorially, “I’ll bet they’ll deliver it vacant, too.” Sensing that al-Douri would sleep in, I killed time by walking around the corner to Iraq’s U.N. mission on East 79th Street. It’s directly across the street from Mayor Bloomberg’s own townhouse (that’s New York for you; whether on the subway or in your posh Upper East Side neighborhood, you’re always cheek by jowl with your sworn enemy). I returned to the residence and the hours ticked by in agonizing minutes. (I was so bored that I even read the New York Times’ House and Home section!) And then, suddenly, the doorknob on the mansion began to turn. The camera crews snapped to attention, the TV reporters got into position and I moved towards the gap in the parked cars that al-Douri would have to slip through on his way to his limousine. Truth be told, he looked horrible, no doubt the result of a sleepless night worrying about his wife and kids still in Baghdad. The night before, he had the relieved look of an accused man who finally admits his guilt, but this morning he had that Iraqi-ambassador-trapped-in-the-headlights look. Clearly, his status as a “portfolio without a country” had finally sunk in. So the media jackals moved in for the kill. But this time, al-Douri did what diplomats rarely do: he ran. Unfortunately for him, the chauffeur had put the car in a different place than the night before (isn’t that the first lesson they teach you in chauffeur school—put the car exactly where it was the last time?). Al-Douri looked up expecting to find the car in front of the house, but instead he found only cameras; the car was a little up the block away, and al-Douri didn’t know where to go, first feinting right and then left. So we started yelling, like we always do (even though we always say we won’t): “Who is ruling Iraq?” one reporter screamed. Before al-Douri could answer, someone else yelled: “Where are you going now?” Always pursuing the “local” angle, I heard myself yell out, “Mr. Al-Douri, how have you enjoyed your time in New York?” I guess I was somehow expecting him to turn, flash me a smile and a thumbs-up and say, “I love New York!” (There’s my front page!) But instead, he just kept saying “No comment” as he pushed forward toward the car. It got so frantic that two cameramen fell over each other and spilled onto the sidewalk, making it seem for a moment that chasing down this pathetic little man actually had historical importance. |
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Finally, he got to the door of the black Lincoln Town Car—but the damn door was locked (isn’t that lesson No. 2?). The more he pulled on the handle, the more he frustrated his own chauffeur’s efforts to unlock it (damn those electric locks!). You couldn’t help but feel sorry watching him suffer one last time. Make no mistake, this reporter is not sorry to see al-Douri go. It’s one thing to be the dictator—hey, someone has to be the jerk at the top—but there’s no glory in being the dictator’s mouthpiece (which explains why George Steinbrenner does his own interviews). Al-Douri is the same man, after all, who had said that America wants to “kill everyone in Iraq.” He’d also refused to answer questions from some reporters, deriding them as “Israelian Jews,” and called Operation Iraqi Freedom the “Anglo-Saxon invasion” (OK, so he gets some things right). And then he was off, driving toward the United Nations, to meet with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Annan declined to comment on his meeting with al-Douri. But al-Douri made it clear before the meeting that New York wouldn’t have him to kick around much longer. “When I feel that everything is ready, I will go,” he told a wire service reporter at the U.N., without elaborating. By Friday morning, the word on the street—East 80th Street, that is—was that he’d be leaving this weekend, bound for Baghdad. Here’s hoping he finds a better chauffeur for that ride outta town. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is www.gersh.tv |
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© 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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