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 Andrew Gilligan
A week and a half into the war, Andrew Gilligan reflects on life as a western journalist in the heart of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Some people were on the pitch. They thought it was all over. It isn't now ... and it's caught a lot of us out.
The hapless British military PR who said he'd be in Baghdad in three or four days - the American right, with their fantasy of a 72-hour drive up the motorway - one of two Iraqis - and, I confess, a good part of the Baghdad press corp.
Now that the locals have churlishly refused to play the part allocated to them in the CENTCOM script, we're settling down resignedly for the longer-haul.
Things could of course be worse. We could be in a tent, in a sand-storm, with the Iraqis shooting at us. We could be in the ninth-circle of journalists' hell, CENTCOM HQ in Qatar, with 250 press officers telling us nothing. Things could be worse, but they're still not great.
We're in the Palestine Hotel, base for the Baghdad press corp, hub of the Iraqi propaganda effort, and all round minus-10 star certified dump.
So far eight journalists have been taken away in the middle of the night, only five have returned.
The bombs come at any time, shaking the rickety concrete, making the upper floors flex and sway. The blast is shocking, like someone suddenly running up and hitting your window with a sledgehammer. The carpets are stained, the water is brown, the staff steal your things, and the room rate is a big-value $120 a night.
As the BBC does keep saying, our movements are restricted, we need a Government minder to go anywhere. There are few actual roadblocks or physical barriers, just the uncomfortable knowledge that you'd better not get noticed.
You have to be conscious of what you're not being shown. There must have been 300 attacks on Baghdad so far, but we've only been taken to about 10 of them - the civilian ones - ergo, the other 290 will probably have been on target.
Still, the ministers are smug, the regime remains buoyant, and even the Iraqi dinar (the official currency) has gained in value over the last week.
We're all guilty of a rush to judgement. It's far too early to say that the war is going badly for Britain and America. We're all still waiting for the big story to begin. The defenders of Baghdad are waiting too. The armed men on street corners, the trenches in the parks, the heavy equipment hidden under the fly-overs out of American view.
The saving grace remains the grace of the Iraqis - still, despite growing civilian casualties, miraculously polite, miraculously nice. Let's hope it lasts.
Read Andrew's view on the way the Iraqi media has been covering the war.
Read Andrew Gilligans daily diary from Baghdad, chronicling the lead-up to war.
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