Stronger and more popular than ever, Saddam prepares to kick baby Bush's ass
Tom Morinello
Ten years after the Gulf War, the Iraqi leader is stronger than ever.
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By Vivienne Walt
Jan. 18, 2001 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- On a street corner in Baghdad's Sheikh Omar
neighborhood, famous for auto mechanics who can fix any heap of junk, three
men are stooped over on the curb, arguing over a little pile of scrap metal.
"I'll take this!" says Sabar Hassem, 35, as he snatches a mangled piece of
rust from the heap. With the eye of a connoisseur, he recognizes it as an
air filter from a Ford pickup truck, perhaps from the 1950s. He gleefully
hands over 100 dinars, about a nickel, to the seller. "I will replace the
filter and remake it for a newer model," he says. "Then I will get maybe
2,000" -- about $1.05. His day, or maybe even his week, is made.
This is Baghdad exactly 10 years after the start of the Gulf War, a city
that has defiantly clung by its fingertips during a decade of Western-led
sanctions and embargoes. Before the devastating bombings, Baghdad had long
been the envy of the Middle East, with top-notch health care and schools.
Iraqis these days have learned to live by their wits.
Ten years ago this week, Baghdad stood shattered. After 40 days of continual
bombardment from American fighter jets, its bridges were bombed, its
electricity stations gone, its communication tower in pieces. Operation
Desert Storm, the U.S.-led attack that drove Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait,
flew 110,000 sorties over Iraq and dropped 85,000 tons of explosives. By the
time the allied force of 33 countries and hundreds of thousands of soldiers
finally ceased blasting the country on February 22, 1991, it had endured
perhaps the heaviest bombardment anywhere on Earth since the Second World
War.
In the war's aftermath, the United Nations imposed sanctions over Iraq's
mammoth oil revenues, in the so-called "oil for food" program, requiring
President Saddam Hussein to get approval for spending Iraq's own money, and
forcing most Iraqis to depend on monthly ration coupons of sugar, rice, oil
and other items for their sheer survival. During a week's travels around
Iraq, my taxi driver told me stories of quitting his job as a school
teacher, unable to make ends meet.
Arriving here, it's hard at first to grasp the devastation of the city.
Baghdad's bridges have been fixed, the shell marks cemented over and roofs
retiled. The electricity works almost 24 hours a day, a dramatic improvement
from just a few years ago. The streets are a jumble of stalls selling
everything from plugs to paper, and most kinds of food. Despite the
sanctions, those who have the cash can still get luxury items. One day I buy
bananas from Colombia, and that night am offered a fine French sausage for a
pre-dinner snack.
Above all, one fact dominates life in Iraq. Saddam, the man President George
Bush in 1991 called "Hitler revisited," has endured the decade, too.
As the third White House administration since the Gulf War gets ready to
unpack its boxes in Washington next week, the country will also see the
return of key Gulf War figures Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. A nagging
question looms over the administration of the man whose father prosecuted
the war: If Saddam has lasted through all this, what will finally drive him
out?
The Republican Party campaign platform last year promised "a comprehensive
plan for the removal of Saddam Hussein." And last month, Powell declared
that Saddam was "sitting on a failed regime," and was "not going to be
around in a few years' time." As secretary of state, Powell said he would
"re-energize" the international embargoes, he said.
Judging from a week in Iraq, Powell has an extremely tough task ahead.
International compliance with the sanctions has steadily weakened, and many
countries, especially Jordan and Syria, have reopened major trade
connections with Iraq in recent months. Meanwhile, countries such as France
and Russia have long pressured the U.N. to end the sanctions, saying they
only serve to deprive ordinary Iraqis of food and medicine and do nothing to
weaken Saddam.
In fact, top Iraqi officials and diplomats say Saddam enjoys greater support
within his country than he did before the war. Some of this is because he
uses his vast wealth to buy favors. But Saddam has also gained stature as
the figure who could face down Western attacks -- and live to tell the tale.
"He is as popular now as he has been at any time in the past," Nizar
Hamdoon, undersecretary of the Foreign Ministry, who served as ambassador to
Washington during the 1980s and to the United Nations in New York during the
1990s, tells me from his office. "When a country feels pressures
economically and from outside, they gather around the central figure. And in
Iraq, the central figure has always been the president."
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Travel around Iraq, and there is little doubt who is in charge. The 350-mile
drive linking Baghdad to the old Gulf War frontline on the Kuwait border
meanders past numerous military posts, some with their tanks pointed outward
in all directions, and their walls decorated with Saddam's portrait.
Baghdad is plastered with the many faces of the man in bronze, oil, plaster,
and mosaic, on horses and off, waving, smiling, tenderly visiting poor
traditional families, typing, sipping tea, bending over sick patients, and
even hovering in the sky over a rural village scene, in a Chagall-like
panorama I spy in a wing of the Saddam Art Gallery. "He is often portrayed
as a symbol for all of Iraq," explains my government "guide," who is
required to accompany me during all interviews, even in a gallery.
In one room, artist Mejdi Ahmed, 32, shows me his three modern paintings on
sale, all abstract modern works. But like all of Baghdad's artists'
community, Ahmed's real income for the past decade has come from painting
Saddam portraits -- about 30 of them since 1990. "It pays well," he says.
"Many are in the government offices."
In fact, the only non-Saddam portrait I see all week is that of George Bush.
After the Gulf War Bush's face was installed in mosaic tiles into the
entrance floor of the Al-Rasheed Hotel, the country's top lodging which is,
of course, government-owned. For nearly 10 years, every journalist,
businessman and politician in Baghdad has stomped on Bush's blue eyes. The
caption: "Bush is Criminal."
Tales of Saddam's ruthlessness and profligacy abound, and the slightest hint
of dissent is instantly punished; thousands have been executed or jailed.
Most of the Iraq opposition, which the U.S. counted on to rise up after the
war and depose Saddam, has been driven out of the country or destroyed.
Saddam himself is more ubiquitous than ever. A Western diplomatic internal
memo late last year estimated Saddam had built about 46 new palaces since
1990. They include a sprawling complex near the airport, more Las Vegas than
Baghdad, with an artificial lake and a golden bust of Saddam on one corner.
You can see it all from the revolving rooftop restaurant of the Saddam Tower
of Challenge, the former communication tower that U.S. bombers obliterated
in 1991. Outside the tower, a huge Saddam statue features the leader
triumphantly standing over the bomb shrapnel.
Iraqis might chafe at Saddam's stranglehold, but both ordinary Iraqis and
top officials I interview say life has improved markedly in the past few
years, and that international sanctions are withering. Syria, for instance,
recently announced the reopening of its oil pipeline with Iraq.
"Practically, the sanctions regime is crumbling," says Hamdoon. "People and
businesses are doing business with Iraq, regardless."
Saddam won't die | 1, 2, 3
In fact, years of sanctions have bred wealth from those smuggling
hard-to-get goods into the country, skirting the West's rules. At Sardar's
car dealership in Baghdad last Sunday, two workers washed down a brand-new
blue-green Dodge Durango sports-utility vehicle, which still had its
American yellow warning label hanging from the air-bag cover. "That will go
for about $35,000. It is the only one in all of Iraq," says Sardar Hussein
Hassan, 32, a Rolex on his wrist, in his showroom filled mostly with
Mercedes Benzes.
After years of being eerily empty, Baghdad's giant Saddam International
Airport -- the Middle East's biggest airport when it was built in 1982 --
has been dusted off in the past two months, for flights around the Middle
East. Commercial airline service between Iraq and Jordan has resumed.
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On my 10-hour drive from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, the 600-mile stretch of
highway was jammed with trucks carrying goods into Iraq, away from the
prying eyes of United Nations officials. Streaming toward Iraq in front of
us were three trailers, loaded with factory-new Mercedes Benz sedans. The
traffic headed out of Iraq shows why: tankers loaded with cut-rate oil from
the second biggest oil fields in the world, after Saudi Arabia.
Officially, Iraq pumps about 2 million barrels a day. Even with the
sanctions in place, about 40 percent of that is consumed by gas-guzzling
American consumers. But oil sources last month estimated Saddam was earning
about $1 billion extra, trucking oil overland to Jordan and Syria, where it
disappears on the world market, with its profits going straight to Baghdad,
bypassing nosey international officials. At the end of 1999, too, the U.N.
Security Council finally lifted the quotas on how much oil Iraq was
permitted to sell. For Saddam, the timing was extraordinary. Oil prices
soared last year to their highest level since 1990, leaving Saddam with a
huge windfall of billions of dollars.
In meetings with reporters this week, officials boasted about their success
in smuggling out oil. "Our economy isn't linked to the Security Council,"
oil minister General Amer Muhammad Rashid said when I asked about the
smuggling estimates. "We have our own bilateral trade relations, and we have
full rights to manage this."
Despite the top-level money making, most Iraqis continue to endure dramatic
poverty. U.S. and British officials point out that Saddam has squandered
billions of government money bolstering a tiny elite, while Iraqis say the
West has deliberately impoverished their country's people through sanctions.
The statistics of the poverty, however, are not disputed. Healthcare has
plummeted in 10 years. UNICEF believes about 500,000 children die every year
from various diseases that they would not have died of if sanctions weren't
in place. Hospitals say they are chronically short of medicines and
equipment, all of which have to be approved for purchase by U.N. officials.
"In the 1980s, I would teach my students about tuberculosis and malnutrition
theoretically, from books," Sami Delami, 62, a pediatrics consultant, tells
me in his office at the Saddam Children's Hospital. "Now we have many cases
here."
One day, I step inside a tiny house that backs onto a bus lot. Inside,
Gulperi Abdul Beg, 45, invites me to sit on a mat on the floor of the main
room, whose windows are plastic sheeting. The glass shattered in the 1991
bombing, and Beg has not had the money to replace them since. "I'm sorry you
are sitting on the floor," she says, handing me a glass of water for
refreshment. "We have sold all the furniture."
When the bombs began dropping in 1991, middle-class Iraqis were among the
highest paid groups in the Middle East. A civil servant earned about $2,000
a month, and a university professor made about $5,000 a month. One dollar
bought 1.5 Iraqi dinars a decade ago. Now, civil servants earn less than $25
a month, and when I change $50 -- at 1,800 dinars per dollar -- I am given a
large shopping bag in which to lug the piles of notes.
"You will not believe it, but we used to go on holiday in Europe, and return
with money still in our pockets," one Iraqi photographer tells me. "We felt
like kings." And so, professional Iraqis have fled in droves: about 2
million now live outside, including hundreds of thousands in the United
States, many of whom are "the cream of our country," says Nizar Hamdoon, the
Foreign Ministry undersecretary.
In a vague attempt to staunch Iraq's intellectual starvation, the government
finally tiptoed into the Internet age last summer, opening two "Internet
cafes" in Baghdad, hooked to Iraq's sole server -- which is
government-controlled. It was the first glimpse Iraqis had of the technology
to which even African villages had been hooked to for a few years.
In one of the government-run cafes, 18 terminals on two floors offer one
hour of service to each user, for about a dollar -- not a small sum for
Iraqis these days. In front of one terminal, Qabas Awad, 28, tells me she
had traveled four hours by taxi from her home in Mosul, simply to log on to
a site about British taxation law. "I'm a student," she said, her hair
hidden by a scarf. "The books we are using are at least 10 years old."
Sexual sites are blocked, and users probably suppress any thought of logging
on to exiled Iraq opposition group sites while the staff prowl the floors.
Downstairs are four terminals reserved for those who already have paid
e-mail subscriptions, typically government departments and companies. No one
had heard of a single private citizen with e-mail. "I went there and said I
wanted to check my Hotmail," one Iraqi television producer told me later.
"They told me it was illegal."
Despite all that, there is a constant line of people waiting for a free
computer, and Sana al-Ukabi, 24, a staff member, says she is so busy
teaching people how to use the Internet that she has no time to log on
herself.
So, what are the popular sites for users? She laughed, and said: "Anything
that is different from here."
And that, despite sanctions fraying at the edges, is still a lot better than
here.
King Pineapple
whine endlessly in message
news:ceZ96.9852$eh.1...@e420r-sjo2.usenetserver.com...
> Saddam won't die
> Ten years after the Gulf War, the Iraqi leader is stronger than ever.
Thanks to Clinton, that is...
Mitchell Holman
It wasn't Clinton who halted Allied troops as they were
about to liquidate Saddam for good in 1991, now was it........
Mitchell Holman
"The U.S. victory in Gulf war was a stirring victory for the forces of aggression."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 4/11/91
Ranetek
Sadam Hussein the first time. I don't think so. Sadam Hussein won the war
with the US. He is still in power because GHWB and Colorectal Powell didn't
have the balls to finish the job.
"Mitchell Holman" <ta2...@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:CD116C0E4E3C1BC8.CDBA4F45...@lp.airnews.net...
The Lone Haranguer
Mitchell Holman wrote:
>
> In article <VmZ96.1258$nq.9...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>, "King Pineapple" <saddl...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> }Tom Morinello <tmo...@earthlink.net>took up the equivalent of 16 posts to
> }whine endlessly in message
> }news:ceZ96.9852$eh.1...@e420r-sjo2.usenetserver.com...
> }
> }> Saddam won't die
> }> Ten years after the Gulf War, the Iraqi leader is stronger than ever.
> }
> }Thanks to Clinton, that is...
>
> It wasn't Clinton who halted Allied troops as they were
> about to liquidate Saddam for good in 1991, now was it........
>
> Mitchell Holman
As agreed in the UN resolution which launched the Gulf War.
Most people (except liars and ignoramuses) know that.
Clinton couldn't get UN approval for his "legacy" war on
Yugoslavia so he went ahead without it, adding the United
States to the list of "rogue nations" who commit terrorist
acts. Nice going Scumbag.
LZ