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HILLA, Iraq — Americans have set out to teach Iraqis about democracy, and the way it is going says much about the differing cultures and histories and aspirations of the teachers and the students. It is another matter whether the American effort can succeed: Whether President Bush will be able to make Iraq a torch of democracy capable of lighting a fire among the autocracies and dictatorships of the Arab world, or will end up resembling Woodrow Wilson with his belief that the League of Nations would make the world safe for Jeffersonian values after World War I. The venue...

MIRIYA, Iraq — Knowing what ordinary Iraqis thought was never easy for Western reporters when Saddam Hussein bestrode the land. Now his secret police and information ministry minders are gone, but not Mr. Hussein himself. So his terror still radiates among Iraqis, many of whom condition their words and actions against the possibility he may return. For now, to gauge the real mood of Iraqis, a visitor must listen carefully — especially when they gather in numbers, wary of what candor may cost if American troops are withdrawn before stability is established. One such conversation developed when a reporter and...

<p>In a righteous world, John Burns of the New York Times would win the Pulitzer Prize in perpetuity. Gifted reporters like Mr. Burns revive faith in the craft of ink-stained wretches. His genius for providing the apt cultural and psychological contexts shaping his immediate subject matter means a Burns story is both a nugget of current topical insight and the grist of future history.</p>

Reporting on the Real Iraqby Austin BayDecember 3, 2003Discussion Board on this On Point topicIn a righteous world John Burns of The New York Times would win the Pulitzer Prize in perpetuity. Gifted reporters like Burns revive faith in the craft of ink-stained wretches. His genius for providing the apt cultural and psychological contexts shaping his immediate subject matter means a Burns story is both a nugget of current topical insight and the grist of future history. He’s also one persistent and canny pro with a knack for getting what I call "the second day answers" in single interview....

BAGHDAD - To return to Baghdad after six months is to encounter a country at once dispiriting and yet, in spite of all, still hopeful, if flaggingly so. The letdown begins at 19,500 feet over the southwestern limits of the city, in a twin-turboprop aircraft of Royal Jordanian Airlines that seeks safety from ground-to-air missiles by flying a downward spiral over what was Saddam International Airport -- the first foothold seized by U.S. troops when they reached the city on April 3. With no metal chaff or magnesium flares to fool missile guidance systems, the pilots on the 900-kilometre flight...

 OUR ORWELL: Is there any journalist one trusts more than John F. Burns to tell us what is going on in Iraq? Somehow, Burns is untainted with the cynicism and reflexive anti-Americanism of many of his journalistic peers, and yet is open to the nuances of a complicated and often surprising world. His despatch from Iraq today in the NYT is peerless. Not just beautifully written, deep while never seeming less than conversational, it makes a couple of really important points. First off: The amiability that greets a Westerner almost everywhere outside the Sunni triangle, and even there when American...

BAGHDAD — To return to Baghdad after six months is to encounter a country at once dispiriting and yet, in spite of all, still hopeful, if flaggingly so. The letdown begins at 19,500 feet over the southwestern limits of the city, in a twin-turboprop aircraft of Royal Jordanian Airlines that seeks safety from ground-to-air missiles by flying a downward spiral over what was Saddam International Airport — the first foothold seized by American troops when they reached the city on April 3, and now a principal stronghold of the American occupation. With no metal chaff or magnesium flares to fool...

Who tattled on New York Times reporter John F. Burns to the Iraqi ministry of information? If the interview New York Times reporter John F. Burns gave to the editors of Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq is completely on the level—and I have no reason to think it isn't—the Times is sitting on a daisy-cutter of a scoop about perfidy and malfeasance by a member of the Baghdad press corps. And it's not just the Times holding back. Few in the mainstream press seem interested in identifying the reporter Burns says ratted him out to the Iraqi ministry...

In the unlit blackness of an October night, it took a flashlight to pick them out: rust-colored butchers' hooks, 20 or more, each four or five feet long, aligned in rows along the ceiling of a large hangar-like building. In the grimmest fortress in Iraq's gulag, on the desert floor 20 miles west of Baghdad, this appeared to be the grimmest corner of all, the place of mass hangings that have been a documented part of life under Saddam Hussein. At one end of the building at Abu Ghraib prison, a whipping wind gusted through open doors. At the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 19 - On the gilded marble tablets posted at the gateways of a score of presidential palaces, it was known as "The Era of Saddam Hussein." Yet in the 26 days of American warfare it took to bring that era down, the hallmark of Mr. Hussein's rule was revealed not as one of grandeur, but of gangsterism and thuggery. On the pediments of his palaces, Mr. Hussein mounted 30-foot bronze busts of himself as Saladin, the Mesopotamian warrior who conquered Jerusalem with his Islamic army in the 12th century. But Mr. Hussein's legacy, revealed with merciless...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 15 - He was here, and then, like a shadow, he was gone. At the Adhamiya Mosque in northern Baghdad, people have made a legend of the half hour last Wednesday, around the time of the noon prayers, when they say Saddam Hussein appeared in public, in the square outside the mosque, and offered what may prove to have been his last promise, or his last deceit, to the people of Iraq. "I am fighting alongside you in the same trenches," he told a cheering crowd in the square outside the mosque. And then, people who...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 9 - Saddam Hussein's rule collapsed in a matter of hours today across much of this capital city, as ordinary Iraqis took to the streets in the thousands to topple Mr. Hussein's statues, loot government ministries, interrogation centers and other buildings notorious for torture and killing, and to give a cheering, jubilant and often tearful welcome to advancing American troops. After three weeks of battling their way north from Kuwait against tough resistance from Mr. Hussein's diehard loyalists, Army and Marine Corps units moving into the districts of eastern Baghdad where many of the city's five...

April 9, 2003 Key Section of City Is Taken in a Street-by-Street FightBy JOHN F. BURNS AGHDAD, Iraq, April 8 - The battle for the heart of Baghdad began before dawn within the sprawling gardens of Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace and tapered off by early afternoon with the Americans in control of an area running perhaps two miles along the Tigris's western embankment and a mile or more back from the river. American tanks moving out of the northern end of the presidential compound into the city's open streets fired repeatedly in the direction of the Information Ministry and...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Tuesday, April 8 ? Gunfire erupted on the grounds of the Republican Palace early this morning, almost 24 hours after an American tank column entered the compound, which has been repeatedly bombed by allied planes since the war began. The explosions shook awake residents of a city that has now come to resemble a battlefield, with Iraqi special forces and militiamen taking up position on crucial streets and bridges. Shortly after the mortar fire and other explosions around 4:50 a.m., a fire burned in the palace compound on the west bank of the Tigris River. American troops...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 6 - After being subjected to two weeks of relentless bombing that has destroyed many of the power centers of President Saddam Hussein's government, the Iraqi capital found itself today deep into the ground battle that promises to be the decisive phase of America's war to topple the Iraqi leader. From the heart of the capital, a new cacophony of battle signaled the shift from a war fought primarily from the air to one where the outcome will depend increasingly on American ground troops. The earth-shaking devastation of bombs and missiles was mostly stilled today, overtaken...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 5 - Senior Iraqi officials remained defiant today in the face of American military might, asserting that Iraqi soldiers and suicide bombers had "crushed" American troops at Baghdad's international airport and broken the American advance on the capital into isolated pockets that were surrendering to relentless Iraqi attacks. On a day when American commanders sent advance units probing within miles of central Baghdad, the official Iraqi response was mocking and triumphalist, much as it has been throughout the 17 days of war. To Westerners here who have kept abreast of the military situation by satellite telephone...

April 5, 2003 Iraqi TV Presents a Relaxed HusseinBy JOHN F. BURNS AGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — With American troops moving cautiously toward placing the city under siege, Iraqi television tonight showed a 12-minute film of a relaxed and cheerful man it said was Saddam Hussein strolling with apparent nonchalance around Baghdad and stopping to exchange greetings with ordinary Iraqis. The film, shown several times during the evening, appeared to be Iraq's riposte to conjecture among officials in Washington that the 65-year-old ruler might have been killed or incapacitated in the opening American missile strikes of the war, 16 days...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 3 - For one motorcycle patrolman here today, it seemed to matter little that columns of American troops were as close as the airport, or that the drivers still on the roads might have reasons to hasten in a city under heavy bombing, or even that the government whose laws he enforces might not be quite so solid as its ceaseless announcements of battlefield triumphs have implied. Idling on the embankment beside the Tigris on a perfect spring day, the leather-jacketed patrolman spotted a car careering though a red light, and gave chase. From an 11th-floor...

Iraq Shows Casualties in Hospital HILLA, Iraq, April 2 - The boy was bewildered, perhaps 10 or 11, separated from his parents, lying on a hospital gurney. All about was chaos, mothers weeping for their dead and wounded children, doctors and nurses shouting to be heard, coffins shouldered along the corridors to taxis that stacked two and three on their roofs at a time, serving as makeshift hearses. It was never clear, in the confusion, if the boy was told why he had been asked to follow the nurse out of the ward, down the passageway, past the lamentations...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 31 - With American advance units pushing ever closer to Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's presidential compound once again under remorseless aerial attack with what seemed like American bunker-busting bombs, the Iraqi leadership put on a show of redoubled defiance today and promised American troops nothing but "death in the desert." When government ministers emerged in their military-style uniforms and berets to spread their message of doom for the American war effort, they were insistently upbeat about events on the battlefield. But there was something different in their their demeanor - something more strident, more polemical, more...