Mein Kuwait

On a midsummer's night in Baghdad, soon after the ceasefire in Iraq's long war with Iran, Mohammed Abid stood outside his restaurant by the Tigris River, poking a net at the last fish circling in a tiled tub of water.

"Tonight Iraq celebrates victory and eats a very great deal," he said. "But in the morning, maybe we find that peace is like this fish, a slippery thing that swims round and round and sneaks away."

Snaring the river fish, Mohammed flopped it onto the sidewalk to see if it were of suitable size for my dinner. Then he picked up a rusted monkey wrench.

"We must never forget," he said, raising the tool in the air, "that Iraq has enemies everywhere."

"Persians." Thuunk.

"Syrians." Thwaap.

"Zionists." Thlub.

He gutted the bludgeoned fish with a few deft strokes and propped it over a wood fire. "No one," he said, wiping blood on his apron, "makes love to Iraq."

Mohammed was a man of vision. Just two years after the guns had fallen silent on Iraq's eastern front, hostilities had flared again. This time, Iraq's enemies were, indeed, everywhere—aboard battleships, in fighter bombers, massed in desert trenches near Kuwait. And I'd been deployed with dozens of other journalists to report from the besieged Iraqi capital.

Baghdad was a city I'd never dreamed of revisiting, except in nightmares. Ever since traveling there three times in 1988, I'd bored my friends and family with Jeremiahlike tales about Saddam Hussein's lust for blood and land. Kuwait wasn't the victim I'd imagined Saddam's devouring. But I suspected that Mohammed the fishmonger had been bludgeoning surrogate sheiks for months.

Baghdad once had seemed the most romantic of Arab capitals. The name conjured images of a fantasy Arabia, a land of harems and slave dens, of Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. It was the sort of place to which I'd imagined traveling aboard a magic carpet.

The actual journey resembled walking through the gates of a maximum-security prison. On my first visit, Iraqi Airways officials in Cairo told me to report four hours before the flight for security, and I needed every minute. Guards frisked passengers from toe to turban while X-raying their bags to the point of radioactivity. Then the soldiers lined us up on the burning tarmac to identify our luggage while they shook us down yet again.

Every personal effect was regarded as a potential weapon. One passenger had a small bottle of cologne and the guard uncorked it, passing it beneath the man's nose, to see if it were chloroform or some other substance that could disable the crew. The guard asked for my camera, aimed it at me and clicked—checking, I guess, for a gun inside the lens. Then he plucked the penny-sized battery from the camera's light meter: It could be used to detonate bombs.

"You are lucky," said the Egyptian in line behind me. "Last time I flew, you could not carry on anything, not a book, not a pen, not even a diaper for the baby. It was a very boring ride."

At Saddam International Airport in Baghdad, it was my typewriter that aroused suspicion. Iraq required the licensing of typewriters so security forces could take an imprint of the keys to trace antigovernment literature. Behind the customs desk rose a ziggurat of other forbidden imports: video tapes, audio cassettes, binoculars—any instrument for gathering or disseminating information. Even blood evoked xenophobia. The first sign at immigration stated that anyone who failed to present results of an AIDS test within five days would be fined. There was a certain irony to the sign, as few Westerners visited the country. Iraq didn't issue tourist visas.

The second sign—and the third and the fourth and the fifth—showed the jowly, mustachioed face of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. Big Brother was watching from portraits on every wall surrounding the baggage-claim area. He was watching from a leviathan billboard outside the airport. He was even watching from the dial of the wrist watch worn by an official sent to the airport to watch me as well. "Saddam is like Superman," the official said, showing how the watch hands ticked across the leader's cheeks and brow.

On the road into town, the president appeared at regular intervals and in innumerable guises: military fatigues festooned with medals; Bedouin garb atop a charging steed; pilgrim's robes praying at Mecca; a double-breasted suit and aviator glasses, looking cool and sophisticated. The idea seemed to be that Saddam was all things to all people: omniscient, all-powerful and inevitable. Like God.

"There are thirty-two million Iraqis," went a popular Western joke in Baghdad. "Sixteen million people and sixteen million pictures of Saddam."

Iraqis didn't tell that joke. Article 225 of Baghdad's penal code stated baldly that anyone who criticized the president, his party or government "for the purpose of raising public opinion against authority" would be put to death.

My escort from the Ministry of Culture and Information wasn't taking any chances.

"Is this near the presidential palace?" I asked as we passed a heavily guarded compound.

"Not far," he said.

"And where is the foreign ministry?"

"Also nearby."

Searching for neutral topics, I commented on the weather. Yes, he said, it was very hot. How hot he could not say. The weather in Baghdad was classified information, "for security."

We pulled up in front of the hotel. Concrete pylons blocked the driveway, as they did at every major hotel and government building in Baghdad: security against car bombs. As the locks clicked open, I asked my escort if I needed to check in at the ministry.

"It has been arranged," he said.

In the hotel room, Big Brother gazed out from the television screen as a chorus of voices sang:

"We will challenge them if they cross the border, O Saddam.

"The victory is for you, 0 Saddam.

"With our blood and with our soul,

"We sacrifice ourselves for you, O Saddam."

•

Returning two years later, I felt as though I were in a museum where all the exhibits had been rearranged. The walls of the airport terminal were hung with abstract murals. The first few Saddam portraits I spotted on the drive into town showed a kinder, gentler leader: cuddling children, cooking his own food, kicking back with a fat cigar. And intersections that had displayed four huge Saddam paintings were now down to only one.

"It is normal," a Ministry of Culture and Information official assured me. "They need to be cleaned."

In fact, many of the portraits had come down soon after the revolution in Romania, an event that seems to have spooked Saddam. The parallels between his own police state and that of Nicolae Ceausescu's were discomfiting. Saddam had also liberalized travel, letting ordinary Iraqis go overseas for the first time in years. Even the weather report had been reinstated after a six-year ban, announcing with withering regularity that the midday temperature in Baghdad was 110.

But Iraqi glasnost had its limits. When I asked for a street map at the desk of the Baghdad Sheraton, the receptionist looked at me as though I'd dialed room service and ordered a gun. "I am so sorry," she said, pointing me to a Ministry of Culture and Information desk in the lobby. "I am sure they can tell you where to go."

Maps—like typewriters, binoculars and radios—could be tools of subversion, helping dissidents plot assassinations and coups. There were no maps in Baghdad.

•

Paranoia comes with the territory in Iraq. The blistered Mesopotamian plain has been overrun repeatedly by foreign armies: Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Mongolian, Turkish, Persian again. There have been 24 coups and uprisings in Iraq since 1947, including one that Saddam joined in 1959. Then aged 22, he stood on a street corner and emptied his pistol at the car of Abd Karim Kassim, a military strong man who had seized power in a bloody coup that killed Iraq's royal family. Kassim escaped unseated and untoppled, and he later boasted that he'd survived 29 such attempts on his life. His luck ran out soon after, and he was executed following a coup that briefly brought Saddam's Baathist allies to power.

Twenty years and two coups later, in 1979, Saddam muscled his way into the presidency. He celebrated the event by sentencing 21 of his closest conspirators to death on charges of treason. Saddam served as a trigger man on the firing squad. Ever since, Amnesty International's annual reports on Iraq have read like transcripts from the Spanish Inquisition: prisoners fed slow-acting poison, children tortured into informing on parents, teenagers returned dead to their families with fingernails extracted and eyes gouged out.

Not surprisingly, Iraqis don't open up easily to foreigners. Those who do (continued on page 183)Mein Kuwait(continued from page 96) so are sure to be questioned by the regime's five security forces, which spy not only on the people but on one another.

On my first visit in 1988, I had approached a man on the street to ask the time. He held up his arm as if warding off demons and scurried off. More often, pedestrians or shopkeepers responded by stating politely that their English, or my Arabic, was not so good.

"People just don't talk to you much, particularly about politics," said a United Nations worker named Thomas Kamps. "They know that's the fast lane to the electrodes and the dungeon."

There were genies inside every telephone and telex. One of Kamps's colleagues, an Ethiopian,told of phoning a co-worker in New York and switching, mid-sentence, from English to his nativeAmharic. A voice quickly cut in, instructing him to "please continue in a language we can understand."

Censorship of the media and the ban on overseas travel ensured that Iraq stayed airtight, hermetically sealed against the outside world. During Iraq's war with Iran, a typical copy of the Baghdad Observer devoted the upper half of its front page to a picture of the president, as it did every day, apropos of nothing. Alongside the picture was an Orwellian news flash—War Communiqué Number 3221—announcing that Iraqi troops had "liberated 13 strategic mountain peaks at the northern sector" and had inflicted "thousands of enemy casualties." The enemy's original taking of the now-liberated peaks had never been reported. In eight years of war, no Iraqi defeats and no Iraqi casualties were ever reported.

Only the tiny minority of Iraqis listening to the BBC or Voice of America—when their frequencies weren't jammed—could have had any notion of just about any external reality. Saleh was one of them. When I had met him in a downtown office on my first visit to Iraq, he chatted politely over tea until his colleagues filed out for lunch. Then he turned up a radio and leaned across his desk, speaking in a hoarse whisper.

"My phone is tapped, this office is bugged and, for all I know, my grandmother is wired for sound," he said. "But sometimes a man must speak his mind. Saddam Hussein, he is the worst dictator ever in the history of man."

Saleh said this with the grim but giddy urgency of a parachutist leaping from an airplane. "I could be shot," he added, "for what I've just told you."

Saleh liked to write and had applied several times for an Arabic typewriter. Each request had been denied, so he'd reapplied for a machine with English characters. He'd been waiting a year. "What am I going to do with an English typewriter," he wondered, laughing, "incite tourists to riot?"

Like most Iraqis, he'd stopped seeing anyone but his family and closest friends. "Who else can I trust? Can I even trust them?" And he limited himself to acts of defiance that would have seemed petty in any other place. Most Iraqi shops and homes displayed several pictures of Saddam; Saleh hung nothing more than a calendar adorned with the president's face. But he kept a carpet with Saddam's face woven at the center rolled up in the front closet of his home, just in case. "If there is a knock in the night, I can roll it out before answering the door," he said. "A man must be brave, but he must not be reckless."

•

Two years later, Saleh was still there in his dusty office, though he looked grayer and kept popping pills for what he called "heart sickness." A few months before, the army had furloughed his son after eight years at the Iranian front— only to call him back again to Kuwait.

"If America kills Saddam," he said, turning up the air conditioner, "many people will think the Prophet Mohammed is alive and well in Washington."

Earlier in the year, when the travel ban had been lifted, Saleh visited Europe for the first time in ten years. What struck him most was the hotel newsstand, stuffed each day with a dozen newspapers. "Half of them were in languages I could barely read, but I bought them all, just the same," he said.

Sighing wistfully, he unfurled an Iraqi paper to show me the thin gruel to which he'd returned. Gone were the communiqués about victories on some distant front of a never-ending war. But in an even eerier echo of 1984, history had been hastily rewritten. Iran, the millennial foe, had become a "fraternal" ally, and the sheikdoms that had bankrolled Iraq were now the "backward agents" of America. A front-page story reported that the Kuwaiti foreign minister was riddled with syphilis. On the inside pages, readers learned that rabbis were ministering to U.S. troops inside the holy Moslem shrines of Mecca and Medina.

Saleh chuckled and tossed the paper into the trash. Opening his desk, he drew out smuggled copies of Nnosweeh and Time, wrapped in brown bags as though they were pornography. "Without this," he said, "I would be a sheep like everyone else."

•

Getting information from private or public sources has never been easy in Baghdad. In 1988, when I made my pilgrimage, as must all visiting journalists, to the Ministry of Culture and Information, Mr. Mahn, director of protocol for the foreign press, sat behind his desk, with a redflyswatter in one hand and my requested "program" in the other. The fat, bug-squashing official reminded me at first of Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca. But then I realized that he bore an even closer resemblance to Saddam. It was an unspoken rule that officials not only draped their walls with Saddam portraits and wore a Saddam watch but also mimicked the president's squarish haircut and thick, well-manicured mustache. Unfortunately for Mr. Mahn, Saddam had recently decided to lose weight, and officials across Baghdad were now on what was known as the "Saddam diet"; their weights and target weights were published in the press and those who failed to lose the designated amount lost their jobs. By my third visit to Iraq, Mr. Mahn had shed 50 pounds.

I'd been warned of the difficulty of seeing Iraqi officials and had listed every person I could think of on my program, beginning with Saddam Hussein. Mr. Mahn took out a red pen and crossed out the president's name. "His Excellency, of course, is too busy to see you," he said. Saddam's face was everywhere, but the man himself was elusive.

"This is no," Mr. Mahn said, crossing out the next official I'd requested.

"This is also no." He continued down the list, alternating strokes of the red pen with slaps of the red flyswatter.

"This is no." Thwap.

"Never mind."

"No."

"Still no." Thwap.

"Never mind."

After five minutes, Mr. Mahn had flattened a dozen bugs and reduced my epic-length list to three or four requests. One of them was to "see current fighting on the southern battle front."

"This maybe you can see," Mr. Mahn said. "On video." He stuffed the list into his breast pocket. "Now you can go back to the hotel and wait. We will see what we can do with your program."

Not much, as it turned out, which left plenty of time for wandering the streets and "sight-seeing." Playing tourist in Baghdad wasn't easy. There was, first of all, the matter of maps. There was also the problem that broad areas of the city were sealed off, for security.

Driving in the vicinity of Saddam's riverside palace was a bad idea. Soldiers had been known to open fire on any car that motored past too slowly or that made a suspicious U-turn. Even visiting Baghdad's premiere tourist site, a striking memorial to the war dead, could be hazardous. One Japanese visitor attempted it at night and alarmed the guards with the flash on his camera. They responded with a burst of machine-gun fire, missing him but riddling his car with bullet holes.

I visited, without camera, a museum of Saddam's life, which included his birth certificate, his fifth-grade report card (he scored an 89 in history, his best subject) and a family tree tracing his ancestry to the family of Mohammed. Saddam was raised in the Euphrates town of Tikrit by his uncle Khairallah Tulfah, who once wrote a leaflet titled "Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies." His foster son was doing what he could to finish Allah's work in at least two of those categories.

Downtown, there was a statue marking the site where Saddam had attempted to assassinate Abd Karim Kassim. Nearby sprawled the centuries-old copper bazaar, where hammer-wielding craftsmen tapped out giant urns, plates, ashtrays and wall hangings—with Saddam's face adorning their center.

The rest of the capital seemed drab. As far back as the 12th Century, an Arab traveler lamented of Baghdad, "There is no beauty in her that arrests the eye, or summons the busy passer-by to forget his business and gaze." The flat, sunbaked plain surrounding the city offered little with which to build, except mud. Invaders had periodically leveled most of the great buildings that once existed. And Iraq's vast oil wealth had finished the job, with swathes of the old city ripped down to make space for towering hotels and housing blocks. Or for statues of Saddam.

•

Wandering the streets once again on my return visit last year, it became obvious that Saddam's personality cult hadn't really waned, despite my first impression. It was true that there were fewer portraits of the president. But, hewing to the architectural axiom "Less is more," new likenesses of Saddam were grotesquely bloated, as though some pituitary disorder had infected the paint and clay.

One fresh sculpture of Saddam rivaled the Colossus of Rhodes: It was four stories high, with Saddam's outstretched arm casting a shadow the length of a football field. Even Iraqis seemed stunned. "Normally, you must be dead before they put up something so big," a cabby confided, stalled in traffic beneath the statue's Promethean gaze. A much smaller statue, titled Arab Horseman, that had once graced an adjoining lot, had been torn down so as not to obstruct the view of so much as the shins of the new Saddam.

Nearby, a new monument called Hands of Victory soared 150 feet into the air. The hands—modeled in Pharaonic scale on those of Saddam—clutched enormous crossed sabers, their hilts draped with nets of Iranian helmets. In the same complex, an Eiffel Tower-like structure was going up, topped with a giant clock. Its base was to be decorated with scenes from the president's life. This was Baghdad's answer to Big Ben, though it wasn't destined to become a tourist attraction. The clock lay inside a restricted area, where cars were forbidden to stop and pedestrians to enter.

I'd also hoped to visit Babylon, which I'd last seen in 1988. The ancient city lies 60 miles south of Baghdad along a dull road bordered by date palms, mud-brick villages and 50-foot-high placards of Saddam. Just outside Babylon, I had come upon the biggest portrait I'd yet seen. It showed the president receiving inscribed tablets from a skirted Babylonian king, beneath the words from nebuchadnezzar to saddam hussein. Nebuchadnezzar, of course, was the ruler who had defeated the Jews and carried them back to Babylon as slaves. His modern-day heir has inserted several bricks into the rebuilt Babylon inscribed with the information that they were laid "in the era of the leader Saddam Hussein.

But when I asked a Ministry of Culture and Information official if a day trip to Babylon were OK, his face curled into a chilling smile. "To follow the line of Bazoft?" he asked. "You are free." Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born London-based journalist, had been hanged by the Iraqis a few months before, accused of spying during a drive south from the capital. I decided I could live without seeing Babylon again.

•

But there was one spot I made sure to revisit. Down by the river, I found Mohammed the fishmonger where I'd left him two years before, in a blood-stained smock, clubbing fish and propping them against an open wood fire. Thrashing around in their tiled tub of water, the unsuspecting fish looked fat and happy. Mohammed didn't. "Business no good," he said, waving his monkey wrench at the sole customer in his restaurant. "No one have money anymore."

He seemed pleased to see me, though his long list of Iraq's enemies now included America. "And Egypt and Saudi Arabia and England and France and Russia," he said, ticking them off on his fingers. I pointed out that Iran, at least, was off Iraq's hit list.

"Persians be enemies again someday," he said, shaking his head. "No one makes love to Iraq."

Although strait-jacketed in most respects, Iraq was remarkably unbuttoned when it came to drink and entertainment. Mohammed's restaurant sat beside Abu Nawas Street, a neon-lit stretch of clubs and bars named for a medieval Arab poet famed for his suggestive verse. Two years before, Mohammed had taken me to one of the clubs and we'd sat in a dark booth upholstered with red velvet and visited every few minutes by fantastically fat bar girls.

"Pretty boy want to fickey fickey?" the first one had cooed, holding me in a playful hammer lock.

Mohammed had leaned across the pitch-black booth and lit a match an inch from the woman's nose, revealing a haggard, heavily made-up face and the shoulders of a longshoreman. "By Allah!" he cried, shooing her away. "What species is this?" After half an hour, he'd exhausted his matches and the supply of women in the bar.

Recalling the incident now, I suggested to Mohammed that we make a return trip and I offered to pay for the beer. For the first time, Mohammed's mood brightened. "I only go out with Allah now," he said. He pointed to a picture of Mecca that now hung above his fish tank, beside a dusty picture of Saddam. Mohammed had found religion.

"For years, I throw my dinars away at ugly women and bad beer," he said. "Why I do this?" Clutching his monkey wrench, he smiled and nodded suggestively at the fish tank. "Stay here, Mr. Tony, I make you nice dinner."

I declined the offer and ducked across the street to visit the night club without him. It was closing early, for lack of customers, but the doorman, a glum Egyptian named Omar, said I could poke my head in for a quick look. The scene inside was even more tattered and depressing than I remembered. Two Iraqis hunched over a half-empty bottle of whiskey as a lone dancer shuffled listlessly across the stage. Months-old tinsel hung from the rafters, cigarette burns covered the tablecloths. One amplifier had blown out, bombarding half the club with deafening warbles and feedback.

Omar said the club would probably close for good now that the Kuwaitis no longer came to town. Although Kuwait was now, officially, Iraq's 19th province, most of its inhabitants had fled into exile.

"Kuwaitis paid, got drunk and paid some more," he said. Even Egyptians—the club's other large clientele—were fleeing Iraq in the mass exodus of foreign workers. "I think the happy days are all done in Baghdad," he said.

I walked back past the shuttered stores on Sadoun Street, Baghdad's main shopping drag. Earlier that week, the government had closed ice-cream parlors to conserve milk, and pastry and chocolate shops to nurse Iraq's dwindling store of sugar. Restaurants were to close on the weekend, as meat, rice and other staples could be purchased only with ration cards. At one A.M., the only other person on the street was a soldier, snoozing over his submachine gun.

Culling back to the Tigris, I found a bench and gazed out at the anti-aircraft emplacements on the river's other bank. The guns had been taken down after the cease-fire with Iran—and resurrected now that enemy bombs threatened again. A small boat with an unmuffled engine puttered toward me and then turned around. It was forbidden to continue downriver, past the presidential palace.

A night out in Baghdad had never been my idea of a good time. But it depressed me that what little vitality the city had once possessed was now draining away so fast. War or no war, Iraq seemed destined to become a desert Albania: destitute and lifeless, forever armored against the outside world.

But then, anything was possible. Ten months before, on a raw Christmas night in the Romanian town of Timisoara, I'd seen ill-clad and crooked-toothed mobs rush into the street to celebrate the news that the dictator Ceausescu was dead.

Walking back to my room at the Baghdad Sheraton, with its dim light and tapped phone, I wondered if I would return here again some starry Arabian night, to watch Baghdad dance on the banks of the Tigris.