BAGHDAD,IRAQ — BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's farewell message to his nemesis in the White House was chilling, bitter and unrepentant.
"Damn the American aggressors and their agents!" he said in a live television address four hours after allied warplanes bombed military targets in southern Iraq yesterday. "Let Iraqi skies be filled with fireballs and flames against the aggressors from south to north, from east to west.
"The criminals," he declared, igniting, in his words, a holy war.
"Let every plane be a target for you," the Iraqi president told his people. "Just mention God's name and it will be destroyed."
a nation that has never acknowledged defeat, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Mr. Hussein's bombast in the face of international condemnation stirred pride -- even exhilaration --in the hearts of many Iraqis.
"We are not worried about the possibility of a war," said Daoud al-Asoud, a frail 70-year-old Baghdad lawyer who professes himself ready to sacrifice his three sons to the defense of Iraq's national pride. "We believe that anyone who dies will go to paradise. So we are not afraid of death."
At the long lines into gasoline stations, in the newspapers and on the street, Iraqis cursed President Bush with a fervor matching their leader's.
"Repulsive and nauseating Bush wants an excuse to attack Iraq in order to satisfy his sick genocidal mind," wrote a well-known commentator in the government newspaper al-Thawra, in its morning edition.
Even in his final days as president, Mr. Bush is not spared in Iraqi conversations. "I meet every day with many people," Mr. VTC al-Asoud said. "And no one blames France or Britain or Russia for Iraq's misery. They all blame Bush and America."
In the countdown to the allied attack, Baghdad was a mix of the surreal and the mundane.
Customers shivered in the shabby open-air restaurants along the Tigris River, where national tradition demands that waiters beat gasping river fish to death with clubs before cooking them over coals for dinner. Television sets were turned on above the cash register. Nobody was watching.
In Liberation Square in central Baghdad, the news ticker scrolled a digital message that seemed to come from another place and time. "To keep the capital clean is everyone's responsibility," the neon bulletin scolded. "Baghdad is a green garden, so keep it clean."
