Life in occupied Iraq

[Jeffrey C. Dege]

http://www.reason.com/0403/fe.sv.faith.shtml

Faith, Shame, and Insurgency
Life in occupied Iraq
Steven Vincent

Unless you're a VIP who can fly directly into the Baghdad airport,
the usual way to get to the city is from Amman, Jordan -- a 600-mile,
12-hour-plus drive (depending on the vagaries of Jordanian customs
officials) across barren terrain only a Bedouin could love. My Iraqi
driver picked me up at my hotel at 1 a.m., and after interminable hours
bouncing in a GMC Suburban along unmarked pavement lit by stars, we hit
the border at dawn. By a neat bit of timing, the sun was just lifting
over the horizon when we cleared the final checkpoint and, as I slipped a
Nelson Riddle tape into the cassette player, we were off again, roaring
across the Mesopotamian desert to the strains of "Route 66."

I'd come to Iraq to test my beliefs. Back in New York, I'd been a
firm and vocal backer of the war, though not necessarily of the Bush
administration. After witnessing firsthand the horrific events of 9/11,
I felt the civilized nations of the world had to take on terrorism at
its roots -- roots that included the Middle East's legacy of poverty,
hopelessness, and despotism, epitomized by, among other tyrants, Saddam
Hussein. Saddam may or may not have contributed to the murder of 3,000
people in downtown Manhattan, but I believed a free and prosperous
Iraq, spreading ripples of democracy and the rule of law from Damascus
to Riyadh, was a key element in preventing similar attacks in America
or elsewhere.

But a question had always nagged me: How could I truly endorse the
war unless I actually went to Iraq? How did I know my assumptions were
correct? And so last fall I traveled to the cradle of uncivilization,
staying in Baghdad from mid-September to late October, with a four-day
trip to the southern city of Basra. Although my experiences were by no
means exhaustive, I feel confident that they were intense and profound
enough to offer a valid perspective on the state of Iraq today. I spoke
to cab drivers, Islamic clerics, waiters, Western journalists, American
and British soldiers, anti-war activists, human rights activists,
Iraqi housewives, employed and unemployed academics, children, U.S.
government officials -- as close to a full panoply of current Baghdad
life as I could. What I saw and heard surprised, delighted, and horrified
me in ways I could never have predicted. I still support the war --
even more so, in fact. But I'm less optimistic than I was on April 9,
2003, the day the statue of Saddam fell in downtown Baghdad, when,
through my tears, I believed the good guys had won.

I realize no single account will sway someone as to whether the Iraq
war was justified. Indeed, for many opponents of the war, the demise
of Saddam Hussein and America's flawed attempts to establish democracy
in that country are beside the point. But I wonder how they can assume
that their suppositions are correct until they do what I did -- go to
Iraq and discover for themselves what the Iraqi people think and feel
about Saddam and the U.S.

Taking the Pulse

My education in the realities of Iraq started early. At a truck stop
near the "Sunni Triangle," the area west of Baghdad populated by foreign
and Ba'athist guerilla fighters, we picked up an Iraqi doctor whose car
had broken down. As we passed through the volatile towns of Ramadi and
Fallujah, where booby traps and ambushes kill or wound American soldiers
daily, the doctor pointed out the surrounding vegetation: verdant
fields, hedges, palms, and even, he said, copses of birch trees. "To
reward his followers," he explained, "Saddam diverted water from the
Euphrates River to turn this area into a Garden of Eden." In doing so,
however, the tyrant drained thousands of square miles of fertile wetlands
in southern Iraq to punish the local "Marsh Arabs" who revolted against
his regime after the first Gulf War. "In this way," the doctor concluded,
"Saddam turned a desert into gardens and gardens into desert. He corrupted
the very geography of Iraq."

Baghdad is an unlovely place. Thirty-five years of war, economic
sanctions, and now looting have resulted in gutted buildings, pitted
streets, and garbage-strewn fields where packs of dogs run through
monotonous neighborhoods of plaster and poured concrete. The dominant
color is brown: brown skin, brown buildings, and brown sky, the last
from the smog that chokes the city like a five-pack-a-day habit. Add
autumnal temperatures of 100 degrees or more, nightmarish traffic jams,
and the ever-present threat of crime and suicide bombings, and you've
got a place unlikely to top anyone's vacation list.

But if you're interested in hooking up with the Baghdad scene, there
are two places to go. One is the Hewar Gallery, northwest of the city's
center. As with Rick's American Café in Casablanca, everyone goes to
Qasim Septi's combination art gallery, teahouse, and gossip nexus,
where former Ba'ath Party members and former agents for the Mukhabarat,
Saddam's secret police, hobnob with many of the same people they spied
on for the old regime. (The unspoken rule regarding Saddam supporters:
Unless they actively tortured or killed people, Iraqis forgive and
forget.) At the Hewar I met what passes for Baghdad's bohemians: young,
smart, male artists and writers, whose fluency in English makes them
the go-to guys for foreign visitors seeking insights into Iraq. I wasn't
sure what I'd hear when I asked them about the war.

"When I saw the statue of Saddam fall, I couldn't believe it; I thought
I was dreaming," said sculptor Haider Wady. "We use to pray to live
for just five minutes without Saddam Hussein. Now we have the rest of
our lives!" Painter Mohammad Rasim remarked: "We were afraid the U.S.
wouldn't invade. We knew there would be death, but we chose war to get
rid of Saddam." Naseer Hasan, a poet and former member of Iraq's national
chess team, put it in personal terms: "Throughout my nearly 40 years,
I've seen only oppression, terror, and murder. But the removal of Saddam
shows me that history can actually smile. Now, each morning I wake up,
I find parts of my soul that I thought were dead are slowly coming back
to life. April 9th was like a second birthday for me."

To be sure, not everyone at the Hewar felt reborn, especially
among the customers over 40, who remembered the good old days of
government-sponsored awards and competitions, lucrative commissions for
portraits of Father Saddam, and extra pocket money from spying for the
Mukhabarat. "Under Saddam, we could do any kind of art, as long as it
wasn't political; things were much better then," Septi, the owner, said
nostalgically. "Saddam was good for us; we lived well!" declared former
Saddam portraitist Abdul Jabar. Some yearned for Saddam's authoritarian
hand, especially when it came to the thieves, called in local slang
"Ali Baba," who infested Iraq directly after the invasion. "Saddam good,
Saddam strong -- under Saddam, no Ali Baba," an art dealer griped in
broken English.

The roughly 50/50 split between pro- and anti-Saddam voices at the Hewar
is deceptive, however. Because of the despot's beneficence to artists --
advocates of government arts funding, take note -- support for the tyrant
runs deep there. The same can't be said for the country as a whole. Among
the Kurdish population in the north, for example, opinion is largely
anti-Saddam, pro-U.S. In the south, the dominant Shi'a Muslims despise
Saddam but are neutral or somewhat antagonistic toward the U.S. Only in
the central Sunni Triangle do you find loyalty to Saddam mixed with deep
opposition to America.

Baghdad is part of this area, but judging by countless conversations I
had with residents, including more than 100 cab drivers, Saddam should
not consider running for mayor anytime soon. I'd say at least 95 percent
of Baghdadis hate him, with maybe 80 percent supporting the U.S. to
various degrees. Anti-American sentiment is tricky to gauge: Iraqis are
notoriously double-minded about everything -- quite capable, for example,
of praising the U.S. for removing Saddam one moment, then castigating
it for supporting Israel the next. But an August opinion poll conducted
by Zogby International for the American Enterprise Institute found that
while 32 percent of Iraqis wanted coalition forces gone within six months,
34 percent wanted them to remain for a year, and an additional 25 percent
said it should be two or more years.

Among those less friendly toward the U.S., there's a welter of views,
ranging from pro-Saddam, pro-liberation (a tough one to parse) to
vehement diatribes against George Bush that Michael Moore might envy.
These sentiments were largely drowned out in December when the news that
U.S. troops had captured Saddam sent Iraqis into the streets, singing,
dancing, and shooting guns into the air. "Saddam is gone and took all his
evils with him," said Rand Matti Petros, manager of a Baghdad Internet
café, in an e-mail she sent me shortly after the tyrant was pulled out
of his hole. "This surely must be the work of God."

Hamlets and Gertrudes

Besides the Hewar, the other must-see destination in Baghdad is the
Shabander Teahouse. It's down on Mutanabi Street, in an old part of the
city where buildings dating from the Ottoman Empire sag with age and
neglect. On Fridays, Baghdad's booksellers crowd the muddy thoroughfare,
hawking everything from Saddam's potboilers to English-Arabic dictionaries
to American engineering manuals a quarter-century out of date. Friday
was also the day my artist friends gathered in a dirty, open-air,
turquoise-colored teahouse where, for 1,500 dinar (about 75 cents), you
can purchase a glass of bitter lemon tea, rent a narghile (water pipe),
and sit for hours. Like the Hewar, the Shabander is a social scene favored
by Western journalists eager to interview Iraqi locals. I was one of the
few American reporters this crew had met -- and boy, did I get an earful.

"A lot of French journalists are shit," Wady, the sculptor, observed
one afternoon as we shared a narghile filled with apple-flavored
tobacco. "They come here and talk against the U.S. in a stupid way.
They don't care about the crimes of Saddam Hussein." And it's not only
the French, noted Esam Pasha, a painter and translator for the U.S.
military: "European and Arab journalists talk to us, but they don't
care about our happiness in being liberated. They only want us to make
anti-American comments." Even a cabbie who took me to the Shabander one
afternoon weighed in. "Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia TV, no good," he said.
"They only show pictures of bombings and killings of Americans -- always
how things are bad in Iraq, never how they are getting better."

Worse, I heard many stories at the Shabander about foreign correspondents
staging news events to discredit the U.S. One young man introduced me to
a Spanish photographer who, he later reported, had just finished posing an
Iraqi woman in a nearby pile of rubble looking plaintively toward heaven,
as if seeking deliverance from U.S. bombs. Rasim, the painter, claimed he
witnessed Arab TV journalists pay idle Iraqis to light a car on fire and
throw rocks to create an "anti-American" demonstration. "These journalists
come here with their minds already made up," he groused. "They're not
interested in anything that contradicts their anti-American viewpoint."

I asked Hasan, the poet, why, if the freeing of his country from
Saddam Hussein was such a great event, so many people, both in Iraq and
throughout the world, view it so negatively. "Think of Hamlet," he told
me. "In the play, the young prince is haunted by his murdered father.
At the same time, his mother, Gertrude, wants to forget the murder in
order to get along with her life and encourages her son to do the same.
But Hamlet can't forget; he won't forget. We see the same in the world:
Hamlets who refuse to forget the crimes of Saddam, and Gertrudes who
refuse to remember them."

In a small building north of the city center lie the final traces of many
victims of those crimes. Their bodies are dust, their voices gone; now
only documents exist to indicate their unpleasant fates. Imprisonment,
exile, torture, rape, disfigurement, amputation, execution -- the list
of the horrors experienced by Iraqis at the hands of the Ba'athist
regime goes on. I stood in an upstairs room of this small building,
home to the National Iraqi Association of Human Rights, surrounded by
thousands of battered folders, many of which were taken from the Ba'athist
headquarters in Baghdad, each folder an individual story of misery, loss,
and death. "We have 17 more rooms like this in our offices across Iraq,"
said Asad Abady, deputy director of the human rights group.

As Saddam's role model Josef Stalin once noted, "The death of one man
is a tragedy, the death of millions a statistic." For that reason I
hesitate now to recite the horrendous acts of Saddam: the hundreds of
thousands killed in his wars; the thousands buried, sometimes alive,
in mass graves; the barbaric tortures involving acid baths and wood
chippers, electricity, power tools, and ravenous dogs. For what do they
mean? Amnesty International reports how Ba'athist guards sliced chunks
of flesh from the bodies of women prisoners and then force-fed them
to the captives. Abady told me of seeing buildings in northern Iraq
filled with captive Kurdish women: A man could go to these buildings,
fill out a form, and take a woman away for his own pleasure. The mind
resists contemplating such deeds -- and this resistance is the first
step to denial, and then forgetfulness.

I had gone to the association precisely to know, as best I could, the
evil of Saddam Hussein. There I found more than files and statistics.
In Abady's office, I met a woman whose husband and son were executed by
the regime (which diligently charged her for the bullets) and buried in
graves she was forbidden to visit. I met with people who were among the
first on the scene when mass graves were uncovered near Babylon. They
described the skeletons of men, women, and children killed so abruptly
that the jugs they had brought to fetch water from a nearby river that
day were still clutched in their hands. "Not since the days of the
Mongols and Tartars has there been such brutality," Abady said.

Evidence of Saddam's brutality is everywhere in Iraq. In the Shabandar,
I talked with a man I'll call Ahmed. Once a high-ranking Shi'a cleric,
he was arrested by the Ba'ath Party in the late 1990s for supposedly
conspiring with anti-government Shi'a groups in Europe. Imprisoned for
three years, he was repeatedly tortured. Guards tied his wrists behind
his back and hung him from the ceiling, sometimes for days at a time.
They starved him, beat him with heavy black cables, electrocuted him with
wires connected to a hand-powered generator. When he finally regained
his freedom, Ahmed told me, the right side of his body had lost most
of its feeling, while an untreated disease he contracted in prison had
withered his right leg to the size of his arm. "When I went into prison,
I was a Muslim," he told me. "When I left, I was an atheist."

But the heart of Saddam's malevolence wasn't only in the awful statistics
(5,000 dead in the 1988 poison gas attack on the Kurdish village of
Halabja) or stories of individual atrocities (the 1999 murder of Mohammad
al-Sadr, in which Ba'athists drove nails into the Shi'a cleric's head
after raping his sister in front of him). It was also found in the
endless stories of routine harassment, imprisonment, and fear expressed
by everyone I talked to in Iraq. "Just a conversation like we're having
now," Rasim, the painter, related one afternoon as we walked down Mutanabi
Street, "could lead to the police picking me up and questioning me for
hours about what we talked of."

Saddam was always watching: Wady described being interviewed by a European
film crew interested in his sculpture. "A 'minder' from the regime stood
behind the interviewer, next to the camera, and if they asked a sensitive
question, she opened her eyes to warn me not to answer incorrectly or else
she would report me," he said. "Of course, if I'd hesitated, or looked
defiant, she would report that, too." Saddam was always listening: An
Iraqi man told me how his son one day blurted out "I hate Saddam Hussein"
among a group of friends and was arrested within hours, forcing the man to
pay more than 1 million dinars in ransom. Sometimes what you personally
had done wasn't even the issue. An Iraqi cab driver told me he spent
two weeks in prison because his uncle was a communist. "I had to cover
my ears because of the screams of the women being raped," he said.

The climate of terror and uncertainty that Saddam spread throughout the
nation lingers today. "I wake up every morning fearing that I've been
dreaming and that Saddam is still in power," said Rand Matti Petros,
the Internet café manager. "My generation is lost," Pasha, the painter,
said sadly. "Maybe in 20 to 30 years Iraqi children will live normal,
happy lives outside the shadow of Saddam." Exacerbating the pain of
many Iraqis is a keen awareness of the world's record of apathy toward
their plight. "Where were the U.N. and our 'fellow Arabs' when we were
suffering?" Hasan asked. "Where were the peace activists and leftists?
How can they all accept the crimes of a dictator for so many years,
then rise up in protest when a war begins to remove that dictator?"

The Spirit of Impotence

Yet the more I investigated Saddam's regime, the more I began to realize
that the dictator had bequeathed something perhaps even more corrosive
to the Iraqi people than repression, trauma, and fear: shame. This is
one of the most sensitive parts of the nation's psyche, one that may
prove the most problematic. On some level, many, if not most, Iraqis
are ashamed that Saddam Hussein brutalized them -- and even more ashamed
that it took foreign troops to end his reign.

At a small social function one evening, I spoke to an Iraqi woman who
expressed excitement over the fall of Saddam. Yet in almost the same
breath, she declared, "I hate the Americans so much I fantasize about
taking a gun and shooting a soldier." When asked how she expected Saddam
to fall without the hated U.S. soldiers, she looked at me miserably. "I
know," she said, "and you can't imagine how that humiliates me."

A waiter admonished me, as if I'd advised Rumsfeld and Bush: "You should
have waited just a little longer. We would have risen up and overthrown
him ourselves." When I asked why the Iraqi people hadn't toppled Saddam
before, other Baghdadis claimed that the tyrant had support from "outside"
forces -- most notably, the Jews. Speaking of Iraq's disastrous invasion
of Iran in 1980, the piano player in my hotel confided, "You know,
of course, that the Jews manipulated Saddam into attacking Khomeini in
order to keep the Arabs down -- and Israel on top."

This sense of impotence and humiliation, exacerbated by every Humvee
that rumbles down a Baghdad street and every Bradley Fighting Vehicle
that ties up traffic, is the flip side to the pro-liberation sentiment
I heard so often in Iraq. It helps explain the "thanks, America -- now
go home" syndrome observers frequently note. It also colors U.S. plans
to hand over civil and military affairs to Iraqi officials as quickly as
possible -- giving them, the theory goes, a stake in their own future. But
Iraqi attitudes may be more complicated than that.

Unlike the German acknowledgement of guilt for Hitler, Iraqis, I found,
do not blame themselves for Saddam. To them, he is like a gunman
who burst into their home, seized their family, and terrorized the
neighbors -- until the police finally stormed in and drove him out.
Now, standing amid the ruins caused by the police raid, they say:
"We weren't responsible for the maniac. You took it upon yourself to
remove him. Thanks, but how soon are you going to repair our house?" They
overlook the fact that from 1968 to 1980 Iraq lived happily under the
control of the nationalist-socialist Ba'ath Party, reaping the benefits
of a booming oil economy. (I heard numerous times about how "wonderful"
Baghdad was in the 1970s.) Not until Saddam took full control of the
nation in 1979 and launched the war on Iran -- and then on the Kurds,
and then on Kuwait, and then on the Shi'ites -- did the Iraqis realize
they were in the hands of a madman. By then it was too late.

"I hate Saddam! I hate Americans! I hate Iraqis -- and I hate myself! I
need a Valium!" cried one woman at the Hewar Gallery. It was, I thought,
an apt summation of the mentality shared by many Iraqis today.

Despite Iraq's former claim to be the most "modern" culture in the Middle
East -- despite the presence today of high-tech gadgetry, Internet cafés,
and multichannel cable TV in a Babel of languages -- the country is
in many ways reminiscent of America in the 1950s. In the absence of a
civil rights mentality, ethnic, racial, and religious differences are
seen as legitimate and natural grounds for discrimination. Ecological
consciousness is minimal: Baghdad is a polluted, sprawling city where
garbage cans are few and littering a way of life. Women generally live
terribly restricted lives, wrapped in black head-to-foot sheets no
matter the temperature, excluded from public activities, and confined
mostly to the kitchen and the bedroom. (Although Iraqi women once had
more extensive rights than women in many other Middle Eastern countries,
they lost ground in the 1990s as Saddam increasingly adopted Islamic law
to placate his restive Shi'a population. Today they are among the most
oppressed women in the region, with illiteracy rates climbing above 75
percent.) Gay rights are unknown.

So is postmodernism. The philosophical tone among the secular educated
is a kind of Eastern Europe-style existentialism, dominated by ideas
of repression and political cynicism, with a direct connection to the
absurd. In 1995, for example, Saddam's son Uday shot his uncle in the
leg over a business dispute. To teach his kid a lesson, Saddam had him
stripped of power and imprisoned -- but then oversaw the creation of
"spontaneous" protests demanding that he free Uday and reinstate him to
his former position. "We were hauled out of school, given signs and told
to shout out our love for Uday, whom, of course, we all hated," Pasha
remembered. (Father Saddam, of course, relented and freed his reckless
scion.) Today, a suicide car bombing becomes the occasion for shockingly
nihilistic jokes about body parts and explosives. "You have to laugh
about the absurdity of these things," Hasan said, "or you will go mad."

Faith in Iron-Fisted Kings

In other ways, Iraqis' consciousness goes back even further -- to the
iron-fisted kings of their Babylonian heritage. Many Iraqis told me
that as much as they hated Saddam, they still needed a strongman like
him to keep their "ungovernable nation" -- which really isn't a nation
but a colonialist expediency created by the British in 1922 -- from
fracturing into disparate parts. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the
Kurds and Sunnis and Christians and Turkomans ever working together.
Then there are the Shi'a Muslims, who comprise some 60 percent of the
population and probably hold the future of Iraq in their Islamic hands.
On top of all these differences is the terrorism, which, as I write this,
seems on the verge of breaking out of control (although Saddam's capture
may dampen the will of the insurgency).

The obstacles to democracy posed by these attitudes and social divisions
were only heightened by errors the United States made in the immediate
aftermath of the war, many Iraqis say. These included the failure to
"shoot a few looters" to deter others, disbanding the Iraqi police
and army, and stripping former Ba'athists of their jobs before
securing order in the country (suddenly unemployed, many Ba'athists
joined the fedayeen out of desperation, the theory goes). "It's been
downhill since" is the gloomy assessment of Hassan Fattah, editor of the
English-language newspaper Iraq Today. "Inevitably, the liberation became
an occupation." An occupation, one should add, directed from a heavily
defended compound in central Baghdad that is physically, politically,
and psychically remote from the average Iraqi.

I don't mean to overstate the problems facing the U.S. in Iraq. Still,
it bothers me to see supporters of the war assume that events are
going better than the "biased," "liberal" media depict them. That may
be true sometimes, but not always. Iraq is too complicated for such
simple analysis -- a fact I admit I had not sufficiently considered
when I stood up to endorse the war. Now, when I'm asked if the U.S. can
succeed, I can only join others in answering: "We must. The prospect of
failure in Iraq is too catastrophic to conceive." It's not a policy so
much as a statement of faith: that the center will hold, that democracy
and freedom will triumph, that tyrants cannot long escape accountability
and justice. But if it seems foolish, as it does to increasing numbers of
people, to risk American lives and treasure on such an abstract concept,
there are others who are risking their lives on something even less
substantial: American public opinion.

At the former Iraqi Officers Club, now a base for the Florida National
Guard, I interviewed Pasha and a number of other Iraqi men who serve
as translators for the U.S. Army. It is an extremely hazardous job:
More than 25 translators have died, many by assassination at the hands
of fedayeen who consider them traitors. These linguists know they are
marked for death, yet they continue to do the job. "We want to help
rebuild Iraq," they explained.

I asked them if they ever thought about South Vietnam. When I was there in
1993, I met several Vietnamese who had worked for the American military,
including a few translators. Left behind by the U.S., these men spent
10 years in "re-education camps" and were now pulling rickshaws in
Saigon. Did the Iraqis worry that a similar fate might befall them?

"Oh no," they told me. "We have faith in the United States." Or, as
another translator put it to me, in words that still make me shiver,
"Our fates lie with you now. We know Americans will never abandon us."

Steven Vincent is a freelance writer living in New York City.

--
Mellita, domi adsum.