From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

As a reporter covering the gulf war in January, Lara Marlowe saw jet fighters launched from an allied air base. In Iraq last week, she saw the ! sites they bombed. "I visited the landing strips, bridges and government ministries, as well as the blunders: for example, a water purification plant and a medical dispensary," she says. With Iraqi censorship lifted early this month, Marlowe was free to travel throughout the country. She found striking scenes: women in black robes carrying groceries through miles of rubble, a rusting merchant navy docked next to palm groves. Some of her experiences bordered on the surreal. In the southeastern city of Kut, the provincial governor handed her a white album filled with photographs of allied bomb damage. "The album's cover was embossed with letters that said, in English, MEMORY OF WEDDING."

Lara has seen the gulf war from all sides now. In February she entered Kuwait City with Saudi troops. "It was impossible to compare the destruction in Iraq with that in Kuwait -- and not conclude that Iraq fared much better," says Marlowe. The gulf war is not the first conflict that Marlowe has covered for TIME. Since 1989 she has lived in Beirut, where she reported the last throes of the Lebanese civil war. Born in Whittier, Calif., and educated at UCLA, the Sorbonne and Oxford, Lara previously worked in the Middle East for American and European newspapers and as an associate producer in Paris for CBS's 60 Minutes.

One of the sad facts in Iraq, says Lara, is that even without censorship, most citizens remain fearful of speaking to reporters. "Many Iraqis refused to talk to me because I had no government 'minder' with me," she says. Officials were equally reticent, frequently glancing at omnipresent portraits of Saddam Hussein as if seeking approval of their statements. Still, there were flashes of honesty. At a hospital in Basra, Marlowe asked a mother with a dying infant what had happened in the city. "She can't answer a question like that with all these people around," said the government interpreter. "Look at the pain in her eyes and you will see the answer." Says Marlowe: "I realized that only one man had the right to speak his mind in Iraq -- Saddam Hussein."