Baghdad After Hours

In a city with a historic nightlife tradition, war and fanaticism have forced baghdadis to adjust to a world without pleasure

The Hunting Club is Baghdad's leading venue, but it isn't the best place to stage a rock concert. Night has fallen by the time the Devils take the stage, and most of the audience have returned to the relative safety of their homes. The group, dressed in white shirts buttoned up to the collar, struggles to inject a party mood into the near-empty club, which has the lost air of a 1950s sock hop in an Oklahoma church hall. "We're emerging from half a century of hibernation," my host, Dr. Rikab Alousi, says apologetically, harking back to his youth, when Iraqi women proudly displayed cleavage.

Beneath dimmed chandeliers, a few people gravitate to the dance floor, first in single-sex groups and then more furtively in couples. A girl whose black hair falls so seamlessly into her black dress the two could be a single piece ripples toward her partner. His arms are outstretched over her head as if he were holding a curtain to screen their would-be embrace from onlookers. The girl keeps her back to the people seated at the tables and swoons in complicity.

"The good days are on the horizon; the days of darkness will pass away," sings Hussam Rassan, encouraging his audience, which sits at tables laden with Black Label whiskey and Amstel beer (bottled in Jordan), to briefly recapture an age when the Baathists kept the mullahs at bay and men retired to their clubs to drink whiskey. Iraq was the Arab world's largest importer of scotch--the real thing, not the fake brands of bromine-dye "Johnnie Talker" that flooded the country when sanctions restricted imports. "The women will be bedecked in jewel pendants hanging down to their breasts," sings Rassan.

"That's what we're missing," cries Alousi, letting his gentlemanly air slip to reveal a machismo honed in the trenches during the Iran-Iraq war. "Dancing girls with free-flowing hair who shake their breasts." His tolerant, headscarved wife explains that this is their first party in five years. "Our mistake was that we never had a victory party to celebrate the fall of Saddam," she says.

Halfway through the evening, a power outage cuts the revelry short, dumping the audience back into a reality in which essential services constantly fail, helicopters fly so low that the vibrations trigger car alarms, and police abandon their checkpoints soon after dusk, leaving the streets free for insurgents to roam. Alousi hurries home.

Such is night in today's Baghdad. In a city once unrivaled in the Mideast in its pursuit of pleasure, secular Muslims struggle against fundamentalists to establish some kind of normal life. And they're doing it on their own as Americans sit tight in the Green Zone, where they too struggle to amuse themselves. Little has turned out as expected.

I first went to Iraq two years ago as a British journalist covering the Middle East when Baghdad was an ashen city blighted by Saddam's secret police and 12 years of sanctions. Following the U.S. invasion, I took a small apartment on the banks of the Tigris with a palm grove for a back garden. It was the sixth Arabic capital I would make my home in 16 years, and at the time it was the most welcoming. People were grateful, if disoriented, to be rid of Saddam. Families like Alousi's would invite me for evening barbecues at their homes overlooking the lazy Tigris and lecture me about the old Baghdad--before war, Saddam and the occupation restricted fun to enclosures like the Hunting Club.

In the 12th century Ibn Jubair, a traveler from Muslim Spain, wrote of two Baghdadi virtues: the "polished mirror" of the river Tigris, which wound through the city "like a necklace of pearls between two breasts"; and the beauty of the city's women, "so that if God does not give protection, there are the dangers of love's seductions."

The Hunting Club is one of the few hideaways in Baghdad where Iraqi girls and boys can hold hands and look glam. Daughters and wives who stayed at home, fearful that Saddam's playboy son Uday might take a fancy to them, are again heading to the club. The bars have their TV screens stubbornly fixed to sports stations, refusing to let bulletins of Iraq's relentless bloodshed spoil the mood in a capital where most days start with the thud of a car bomb. Sixteen months after an invasion freed them to buy the satellite dishes Saddam had banned, Iraqis are too tired to tune in to the news. Life was easier when the state pulled the wool over their eyes.

After eight years of trench warfare with Iran, Iraqis careered into Kuwait. And following their flight from Kuwait, they struggled through 12 years of a global boycott. Liberation turned to occupation. And despite the arrival of the world's superpower, Iraq has remained a pariah, cut off by commercial airlines and oil giants too afraid to set foot in the country. Immigration authorities the world over consider Iraqis suspect. Iraqis are always falling out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Yet the current wave of killing, kidnapping and crime is small fry compared with the murders and mutilations under Saddam. Or so says Alousi.

"Fewer people are getting killed than before the war--we just know more about it now," he tells me as we prowl the gardens of the Hunting Club in the twilight before the Devils come out to play. "Before, we couldn't fathom what was happening even in a neighboring town." Or, he adds, in his own Baghdad borough. After the Iran-Iraq war, Alousi eventually found a job as a pathologist in a large Baghdad hospital. In those days they could tell how fast Saddam's execution machinery was churning by the number of bodies received at the morgue. But then the secret police started to deliver the bodies directly to families--for the cost of the bullet--with the eyes removed. "By law, the eyes belonged to the hospitals for research," explains Alousi. "We knew it had been a bloody month by the high cornea count."

"Why are you not like other countries?" laments singer Rassan, who has switched from optimism back to melancholy. "Why are your children swimming in pools of blood? Why are all our homes burdened by funerals?" They are questions that plague Iraqis. The previous regime and the current insurgents like to blame foreigners--America, Iran, Syria, Israel--for their suffering. But what if something in the Iraqi character itself is to blame? Rassan has his own answer: "The problem is not the homeland; the problem is the prison guard," he replies in verse, spitting out the Arabic for jailer, sajjan, as if pronouncing Saddam.

Alousi finds the answer a cop-out. "It's easier to blame other people for your misery than a whole society," he says, referring to the trial of Saddam and his 11 disciples as if all the sins of the past rested on their shoulders alone. Yet Iraqis are fond of saying that instead of one Saddam, they now have thousands of mini Saddams with his megalomaniacal, murderous zeal for power. After 35 years at the helm, with his face imprinted on every wall and in every consciousness, Saddam had cloned the country in his own image. He was the personification of Iraq. Maybe the singer was right.

I remember chiding my driver, Samir, a diminutive, moody man in his mid-50s, when he arrived for work unusually cheerful, bragging that he had beaten and divorced his wife and expelled his eldest son from his home. Admittedly, it would have been quite a feat; his towering wife is twice his weight, and his son ripples with muscles from working out. Eventually Samir confessed it was humbug. "People have to know I'm still head of the household," he said, a wizard of Oz with his curtain down.

It's about honor, says Alousi, when I ask why Iraq didn't set up a truth and reconciliation committee to exorcise itself of the past traumas, psychoses and guilt. "What matters is less the reality than the appearance of normality." Which was why, he says, so many families complied with Saddam's ban on mourning for loved ones killed by the state. It helped hide their powerlessness.

The last time Iraqis really raved was 1,200 years ago under the caliph Haroun al-Rashid, or Aaron the Upright. From his throne in Baghdad, he ruled the world's superpower, lording over an empire that reached from the Atlantic to Afghanistan. Today the overlord is better known for his exploits in bed. Accounts of his majesty fill the pages of One Thousand and One Nights, depicting a time when erotica was part of the rich tapestry of Islamic tradition.

Nothing but the odd tumbledown minaret has survived the centuries of brutalism that followed, from the caliph through Saddam. But that has not stopped Saad Janabi from dreaming of a revival. "I want to bring back the beautiful nights, the parties and the new clothes," says Janabi, the Hugh Hefner of Iraq, outlining the manifesto for his campaign to be Iraq's president come January.

In pursuit of such nocturnal delights, Baghdad's playboy has remodeled three of Saddam's family's riverside pleasure palaces and filled them with Iraq's hottest dancers and actresses. When he got the palaces (quite how is a mystery; many land-grabbers surfaced in the anarchy that followed the war), the buildings were wrecks. What American missiles failed to demolish, vandals had ransacked. But over the past five months, Janabi has painstakingly transformed the ruins, converting two into a grandiose headquarters for a 21st century television company named Rashid after his favorite caliph.

Much of Janabi's media experience comes from America, where he lived in exile for eight years with his American wife--a Republican mayor--from whom he is now estranged. He is a touchy-feely politician and addresses all Westerners as "buddy." Where its namesake ruled the land, says Janabi, his media empire will rule the airwaves that rule men's minds. For a price tag of $7.5 million, he has decked his studios in Italian marble hewn in Mosul. The lights are finished in gold leaf, and a half-completed gazebo adorns the garden, where Janabi plans to film an aerobics show. Two golden eagles perch over a central atrium crafted with a mosaic of precious stones. Even the doorknobs--which come from Syria--have been designed to mimic the breastlike archways that filled his caliph's Baghdad.

The palace has seen such pleasure before. Janabi's predecessor, Saddam's son Qusay, had a tiled painting of bare-breasted muses installed; it defied the looters' efforts to pilfer it and now lies cracked on a balcony wall. Janabi once quarreled with Qusay over revenue from a cigarette business he ran in Iraq and says he is unsure whether the painting accords with his tastes. In the meantime he has commissioned a fresco of Caliph Haroun al-Rashid topped with a phallic turban and eyeing semi-clad dancing girls at the foot of his throne.

"That's me, buddy," he says, pointing to a sketch of the caliph held by the artist, before he leads the way to his latter-day harem of dancers, singers and would-be Jane Fondas for his aerobics show. "It's better to shoot movies than people, no?"

Fearful that not all might agree, Janabi has rebuilt the bombed palace walls higher than the Qusay originals and crafted vast iron gates to hide his dream Iraq from intruders. Gone are the anything-goes days that followed the American invasion, when bootleggers set up Budweiser stands on Baghdad's thoroughfares and communists returning from exile held public unveiling ceremonies in which women would strip off their headscarves. To avoid assassination (he has survived four attempts already), Janabi zooms by speedboat along the untraveled Tigris that winds through the city, jetting between his three palaces. Gunmen in sunglasses guard the launches, and a 45-minute car journey is replaced by five minutes on the water.

On my first visit, I feel as if I were straying onto a Dr. No set. Janabi's pleasure gardens are bedecked with pavilions, swimming pools and two stables of Rolls-Royces and other vintage cars. An Excalibur sedan bears the license plate Baghdad 1. Janabi says he brought them all from Dubai after the U.S. invasion, when Iraqis still dreamed of better times. The cars lie like caged tigers, unable to risk a spin on the roads.

But despite the mayhem beyond his grounds, Janabi has not yet abandoned his boyish optimism, a trait he must have acquired during his American exile. He spends much of his time planning gatherings for his political party, the Iraqi Republican (continued on page 163)Baghdad(continued from page 76) Group (which he denies is named to please his American friends), and overseeing his personal security force, which has joined the American private military company Kroll to defend the USAID's reconstruction work in Iraq. He discusses plans for a $2 billion pleasure park in the heart of Baghdad, where the country's elite can make merry on a golf course and in restaurants and bars. Perhaps as a foretaste he has assembled a large love shack from bamboo, mud and daub, with a floor covered in traditional woolen carpets. A petite housekeeper with dyed chestnut hair prepares for the evening's sleepover for Janabi's friends and accompanying houris. "Five girlfriends," the security chief informs me.

Ava, the stylish office manager at the journalists' training center where I used to work, chides me for my prudishness in suggesting that Baghdad might not be ready for Janabi as president.

"What we need is a sexual revolution," she says. In contrast to the lives Iraqis have led for the past 17 months of American tutelage under quasi--house arrest, she longs for the prewar days, when she picnicked with her artist friends in the palm groves and long grasses that ring Baghdad. Iraq's greatest problem, she tells me, is psychological--its people are all living lies, acting like pictures of Koranic virtue painted by the mullahs, with their warnings of hellfire for those who fail. "Women have to pretend they are virgins before marriage," she says. "We've suppressed our true selves wara al-abaya"--behind the veil.

Killjoys

Even Janabi is not immune to the mullahs. His close relative Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi is Iraq's prime party pooper, its killjoy par excellence. He lives in Falluja, a city 30 miles west of Baghdad. The Saad bin Abi Wakkas mosque, where he holds court, is widely regarded as the epicenter of Iraq's 15-month insurgency. From here he dispenses fatwas, or religious injunctions, enjoining his army of Kalashnikov-bearing disciples to kill American infidel soldiers and the agents (or "spies"), such as Saad Janabi, who work with them. Last April he chased the U.S. Army out of Falluja. From this jihadi haven he now plans, say his followers, to carve out an emirate across the entire Sunni triangle that would stretch from Iraq's northern border with Syria down the Tigris and Euphrates valley to Baghdad. The two Janabis last met in winter and exchanged harsh words.

In many ways they are remarkably similar. Both command private armies and dream of building caliphates. But Janabi the killjoy cites an alternative Islamic tradition in which an angry puritanical prophet wages a holy war against polytheists, Persians and Byzantine Christians. This Janabi rages against the Shias, the majority sect in Iraq, as idol worshippers who have swapped Saddam's ubiquitous icons for icons of their own. Their pantheon of haloed imams, or spiritual forefathers, beams down from billboards across southern Iraq.

In his emirate, most entertainment is banned. Cinemas are torched, as are the cassette shops selling pirated porn and pop. The only films permitted are snuff videos of "martyrs" who car-bomb police stations--and of four American Blackwater security guards drawn, quartered and hanged on a footbridge over the Euphrates by a mob of 70 cheering townsmen. The families coming to collect relatives beheaded as spies are banned from public mourning and from reciting the prayer for the dead, just as under Saddam.

The heads of Iraq's puritanical Salafi movement, such as Sheikh Mehdi Sumeidy, also thump "Onward Muslim Soldiers" from their pulpits, reveling in a warrior faith. "The Americans have come to our land to rape our women, kill our men and sow corruption," the sheikh bellowed at thousands of congregants gathered for his Friday sermon in Baghdad's towering Ibn Tuboul mosque. "The infidel must be removed."

Before the war, Sufi mystics--such as Sheikh Janabi--and Salafis were fierce enemies. Now they have formed an alliance against a common enemy. After prayers at Sumeidy's mosque, ushers push leaflets into worshippers' hands that contrast the good deeds of the Muslim who cries "Jihad in the name of God" and the "coward" who meekly whines about America's abuse of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison.

Statistically, say coalition officials, attacks peak after Friday prayers, and a growing number of mosques serve as launchpads for mortar attacks. One Salafi mosque not far from Sumeidy's--the Lovers of Mustafa--had holes blown in its side when two car bombs parked in its forecourt exploded prematurely at the conclusion of dawn prayers. And in a raid on Sheikh Mehdi's mosque, U.S. soldiers uncovered a cache of weapons, earning the holy man five months in jail.

Wearing a starched white tunic, Sheikh Mehdi is a charmer. He talks fondly of the American guards who held him captive in the Abu Ghraib detention camp. The Army doctor who saved him from the torture inflicted by his Iraqi captors was so kind, "he must have been Muslim." (The Iraqis, he says, hauled him from the ground by a rope tied to his hands, which were cuffed behind his back. This procedure--known as the chicken torture--dislocated his arms.) He sighs for the uniformed American woman who kept guard over him like an illicit lover. (He claims to have converted her to Islam by flattering her "beautiful eyes.") He even gasps when recalling how American administrators provided him with a megaphone, boxloads of Korans and four tents to open a school for jihad inside the prison, turning Abu Ghraib into a sausage factory for transforming Baathists into Islamist militants.

The results of the Salafi schooling can be found flying on black flags across Iraq. Three Waiters were Martyred when their Car Overturned on a Baghdad Highway. God Rest their Souls, reads a painted message on black sheeting strung across the entrance of my local restaurant, al-Saa, where I used to lunch on vine leaves and stuffed peppers. The restaurant had been a favorite of American soldiers, who would park their tanks at its gates. The gossip was that its proprietor had been negotiating to open an outlet at a U.S. base outside Falluja. According to Iraqi newspapers--although not to the trembling proprietor--the bodies of the waiters had been mutilated and dropped at Falluja's morgue. Serving the coalition, says Sheikh Mehdi approvingly, is apostasy, a crime punishable in Islamic law by death.

During that July week of the killings, Baghdad's gourmets were grumbling. Nearby proprietors closed their restaurants in solidarity. Some who also fed American troops went into hiding, including the Christian owner of Candles, who plied the best hors d'oeuvres in the city. An army marches on its belly, and the insurgents were out to stop it. In earlier fighting, the highways had been strewn with the charred remains of food trucks bringing supplies to the bases. Coalition officials griped about the shortage of lettuce. And in mid-July 40 Indian chefs at the Falcon base in southern Baghdad resigned en masse after two mortars hit their trailers, miraculously without causing injury. To avoid the kidnappers, fresh migrant labor had to be imported by charter plane at a cost of $100,000.

Iraqi expressions of disillusion about the failed relationship with America are frequently disingenuous. It takes two to make a relationship work. But even Ahlam, the cook at my former office who spends her life mixing with Westerners, now longs for the time before U.S. administrators came to Baghdad to abolish Iraq's army and rob her husband of his career as an officer. Now she is the breadwinner, and her humbled husband has turned drunken and violent--against his family, though, not against American forces. Sometimes she would come to work bruised, crying at the latest threat of divorce that would leave her homeless. Even that, she says, she could cope with. The final straw came when she asked an American tank commander to lower his aerial when he was driving his tank through her neighborhood because it was knocking down the electricity wires. Failing to understand her remonstrations, the commander trained his tank turret on her. Now she just wants U.S. troops out.

As the months roll by, increasing numbers of Shia Muslims in eastern Baghdad--the underdogs under Saddam--echo the Sunnis from the west in fighting to evict U.S. forces from their neighborhoods. The preachers in Sadr City, the vast Shia slum that arcs around the city's northeast, sound much like Sheikh Mehdi. After months of alleyway sniping, turbaned clerics under the command of a young and sweaty firebrand, Moktada al-Sadr, negotiated a truce with U.S. commanders that, for a time, left them almost as free as the Fallujans to pursue their Kulturkampf against the trappings of Western influence. Gangs of kneecappers scoured Baghdad's neighborhoods to root out liquor merchants, peddlers of Craven brand cigarettes (which the mullahs had declared were made in Israel) and girls in trousers and cowboy boots, like Ahlam's daughters. Barbers flouting a ban on Western haircuts had their shops torched and the heads of their clientele shaved bald.

Hossam is a teenage CD peddler. "Saddam forced us to sell pop songs and banned religious cassettes," he says. "Under the mullahs the rules are reversed, but the punishment stays the same." He has draped his stall in Imam Ali posters, much as he once hung Saddam posters. Partly they are an amulet to ward off evil; more properly they are a deterrent against the inspection of the porn videos hidden under the sermons. One of the more nerve-racking moments I had in Baghdad was while I was walking through the streets with a FedEx parcel of magazines sent from Playboy headquarters. Should a car bomb chance to explode, I feared, pictures of Playmates would be sent fluttering over Baghdad, confirming the clerics' worst suspicions of what sinful foreign infidels had in store for Iraq.

The Shia zealots prefer their females in the flesh. In Basra, a southern port under British command, the local agitator, Abd-al-Sattar al-Bahadili, goaded his rampaging God squads to "kidnap British female soldiers and hand them over to religious leaders to be taken as slaves." For each woman, he promised a $170 reward.

Their favorite catches are gypsy girls, known to Iraqis as ghajar. For generations gypsies have hooked Iraqi men with their pulsating dances and intoxicating liquors, especially on Fridays, when boys would skip communal prayers for an afternoon in their laps.

Historically, Iraq's Shia clerics are not prudes. Their spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, through his website (sistani.org), prohibits chess but permits anal intercourse--with the woman's consent. Oral sex is okay--provided no liquid gets in the mouth. And he suggests temporary "enjoyment" marriages as a way to avoid adultery. But the ayatollah's intemperate young Luther, Moktada al-Sadr, is not one to live and let live.

In raid after raid, Sadr's militia--the Mahdi's Army, armed with pickaxes, sledgehammers and rocket-propelled grenades--has reduced gypsy homesteads to rubble, chasing out the inhabitants and leaving scavengers to pick through the ruins. The worst pogrom occurred in the southern town of Diwaniya last March, when preachers ordered their followers to bulldoze the entire village of 300 families, mosque and all. "It was a well of debauchery, drunkenness and mafia activities, and they were buying and selling girls," insists Yahya Shubari, Sadr's 30-year-old delegate, who ordered the nighttime assault. Swept up in the new righteous puritanism, many approved of the rout. "Men would come from all over the south and Baghdad to dance with the gypsies," explains Bassam al-Najafi, owner of a fly-ridden local restaurant. "Women were leaving their husbands to work there. Moktada al-Sadr is cleansing the town."

Most gypsies have since gone underground, but the sheikh of Nahawan, a town on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, is a rare tribal leader too fond of partying to let go of the gypsies he protects. Down a dirt track off a trunk road where trucks stop for repairs, we arrive at the home of Ohud and Itab, two buxom "sisters" clad in black. They bustle us into a dimly lit back room. Before the introductions are over I feel a hand in my pocket and a toe caressing my heel. "I'm looking for money," says Itab, laughing as she adjusts her bra strap. Her sister nuzzles my driver, who explains they had fumbled together 15 years earlier (which is less than plausible as Ohud would have been 10 at the time). "Please, please," he begs, as Thorne, our cameraman, and Ohud exchange flashes. "I now pray five times a day. I'm married."

But the rest of Ohud's "family" soon join in. The shirtless brother, Saad, turns up the televised Arabic pop channel, and the mother claps and snaps her fingers, keeping time. A ring of young children dance in the center, and from his stroller a toddler waves his arms and chews a cigarette his mother has stuck in his mouth like a lollipop. Gypsy lovemaking is a family affair.

Itab reappears, squeezed into a low-cut, body-hugging floral gown, and pulsates a dance to fulfill Alousi's dreams. "They have to learn how to dance like their sisters," says their mother, Um Saad--a more profitable education, she adds, than going to school.

She complains that America's arrival in Iraq caused the family to fall on hard times. The presence of American tanks had for a time brought reassurance against the zealots. But Saad is suffering from withdrawal after the liquor-store torchings triggered a fourfold increase in the cost of alcohol. "Is this democracy?" he asks. "We want to dance and drink, not pray."

The toothless father, Abu Saad, says disapproving neighbors have taken to informing Sadr's militia about their activities. "The neighbors mock you during the day and sleep with you at night," he says. In one raid, the militia stole a client's car; in another they held the family at gunpoint while they purloined the family savings of 5 million dinars. "All the world belongs to God, and Sadr is his earthly representative," explained the militiamen. The gypsies are desperate for American protection, but the soldiers rarely show up. "In the days of Saddam, we stayed open until six in the morning," says Abu Saad. "Now we shut at six at night."

•

On June 28 the Americans handed over authority to Iyad Allawi, Iraq's new prime minister. His cabinet was far less dominated by religious groups than the American-appointed Governing Council, and his staunch secularism initially brought sighs of relief. But he too was no party animal. While he shied from smiting the insurgents who were setting off car bombs, his police charged the beer peddlers on the banks of the Tigris beneath the Jadariya bridge. They laid into the peddlers' cardboard-box stands of Turkish and Israeli lagers with all the zeal of Jesus upending the money changers' tables outside the temple. It had been one of the last remaining spots where teenage boys could escape Baghdad's stifling fundamentalism and gather in the evening breeze.

Three nights later Allawi's police struck again, raiding Baghdad's red-light district, the old Jewish quarter Betaween (so called because it's "in between" two once reputable districts). In the cleanup, police said, they netted more than 500 drug pushers, pimps and other pariahs Saddam had released from jail in a prewar amnesty.

"Allawi is a dictator who is trying to use his muscle to threaten and terrify, but there are better ways," says Janabi, the would-be playboy caliph. "We have oil; we have an economy. We should enjoy it."

Americans

Against this puritanical onslaught, America has retreated behind the blast walls that, like giant tombstones, encircle its enclave spread over much of downtown Baghdad. As the insurgency intensified, tanks rumbled into position at the gates of the seat of Anglo-American power in Iraq, the Green Zone. Bent on the prime goal of survival, the U.S. military decreed that its entire food supply be trucked in from abroad to prevent the host population from poisoning it. Fraternization with locals was declared a punishable offense.

From behind their walls, administrators ruled Iraq in a virtual reality. Once inside the enclave, few U.S. personnel ventured out to the Red Zone. In his final months, Ambassador Paul Bremer, the proconsul, passed ever-greater numbers of decrees with ever-diminishing impact. Sadr's decrees against Craven cigarettes had more efficacy.

The handover to Iraqi authority has so far done little to narrow the chasm between America and Iraq. The American embassy in Baghdad staged its Fourth of July celebrations in the gardens of its "annex"--Iraq's presidential palace. Revelers partied, oblivious to the irony that they were commemorating the independence of one nation in the occupied grounds of another. Bare-chested bodyguards with holsters on their hips played drinking games. Advisors frolicked by the presidential pool, sporting T-shirts embossed with scorpions and the logo Let Freedom Sting. A giant video screen relayed a fireworks display, the sound turned down low to prevent confusion with incoming rockets. On the roof, a couple was caught in flagrante making its own fireworks near the spot where one of Saddam's vast iron visages had formerly loomed over Baghdad.

The heads of the statues now lie in a forgotten corner of the Highlander FOB (forward operating base), just beyond the Green Zone's walls. Their decapitation from atop the presidential palace symbolizes America's greatest success in Iraq--the toppling of Saddam. For entertainment on Saturday nights, Sergeant Mike Kelly--known to colleagues as the defender of the heads--tanks up, takes aim and pisses over Saddam Hussein. Kelly says it's good for improving his accuracy both in his current work as a sniper and his civilian job as a hairdresser in Ventura, California. "Little old ladies in for a blue rinse ask me how it's possible for me to be a sniper," says Sergeant Kelly, a white-haired 50-something with a Mohawk. "I tell them it's all about precision."

The fate of the heads is undecided. One, say its American guards, was smashed during its transition from atop the palace. A second may go to the Smithsonian. An Iraqi memory commission is seeking control of the other two.

Pissing on totems aside, there's little to do for amusement. The U.S. military has infuriated soldiers by limiting access to issues of Playboy, out of respect, it says, for local cultural values. Sergeant Kelly has tried to lure Iraqi women working at the base by offering haircuts. "Who's your boyfriend?" he solicits hopefully when Mona, who works at the cafe, arrives for her cut. "All of you," replies Mona, coquettishly eyeing the younger soldiers as her scarf slips from her head, leaving Sergeant Kelly crestfallen. But most outsiders have long given up hope for a local dalliance for fear of being caught in a tribal vendetta. Even the Christian girls began keeping their distance after a spate of church bombings rocked the community, which has a reputation for colluding with its coreligionists.

In the ruins of the Green Zone's Tomahawk palace--so named because a dozen Tomahawk missiles slammed through its ornate marble walls during the invasion--soldiers slouch, exchanging tales, like fishermen, of the ones who got away. A gunner just back from skirmishing in Sadr City reenacts the battles between youths aiming rocket-propelled grenades and the barrage from Bradley fighting vehicles. A gunner from Oregon reenacts the night. "Say hiya to Allah for me," he says, taking aim at the palace columns and erupting into a gargle of shooting noises.

Others find solace in prayer. Bookshelves stacked with camouflaged Bibles have been placed in Army canteens so that faithful Christian soldiers can call on God without getting shot when patrolling the palm groves. And Saddam's former throne room serves as the U.S. embassy chapel. Beneath the 99 names of Allah carved into an awe-inspiring crenellated marble ceiling, the coalition's Jewish servicemen gather each Friday night for a service to welcome the Sabbath and give thanks for their return to Iraq. Under the British 60 years ago, Iraqi Jews had numbered 250,000. Under Saddam they were whittled down to around 35.

Separation

As Westerners and Iraqis built higher walls of mutual suspicion, I naively assumed that more than a decade in the Arab world might spare me from being caught in the fray. Like many journalists here, I hid my European features behind a growth of facial hair. My landlady, who lived in the downstairs flat with her two children, taught me the rudiments of Iraqi Arabic so that the trashmen would not grow suspicious and inform on me. She did her best to make me feel at home. She decorated my balcony with flags for Shia days of mourning and shrieked to chase away the geckos--known in Arabic as the abu-brais, or the "father of leprosy"--because, she said, they spread impotence. A widow in her 40s, she had kept her looks by dyeing her hair and maintained an impressive stream of men whom she introduced as her relatives. In the year I spent in Baghdad, she let me adopt her two boys as surrogates for my own children I'd left behind in London.

But on my last visit to Baghdad she apologetically tells me that foreigners should no longer mix with Iraqis. An Iraqi friend of hers was killed along with a busload of Christian washerwomen he was driving to an American base. She is terrified because her children told their school friends an Englishman lived in their house. She fears I could face the same fate. "Don't be angry with me," she begs. "Be angry with the Muqawama, the resistance." She then bursts into tears and says she has changed her mind. But I know she was probably right--she is safer without me.

Many Iraqis are bravely--almost suicidally--resisting a revival of the reign of terror. A friend of mine, Fahmi Jarrallah Rabia, who managed to keep his prewar job as senior advisor to the finance minister, found a black banner posted at the end of his street announcing his memorial ceremony on July 3. Fahmi ignored the death threat, defiantly going to work as always. But he forgot to inform his in-laws that the message was bogus. "My relatives turned out to mourn for me in the afternoon," he says, laughing. "And I joined them for my funeral cakes."

But for every Fahmi, there are many Baghdadis whose fears have sentenced them to self-imposed house arrest. Locked down in their homes, Iraqis search for new ways to resist the temptation to go out. My former next-door neighbors, engineers who worked for the Egyptian mobile-telephone provider, ordered call girls for their Thursday-night relief. They plied them with vodka and undressed them as they twirled to the sounds of their stereo. But they too have left. Others enjoy their newfound freedom to surf the Net, pan their satellite TVs and establish sexual and other contacts without venturing past the walls of their homes. My landlady's sons, no longer allowed on the streets after dark for fear of kidnapping, are hooked on the Internet. Iraq's latest hit, "Orange"--a gypsy video about a man who wants to peel his girl like a piece of fruit--has been banned in more-regulated Arab states but is probably Iraq's most popular screen saver. "Orange, Orange, why are you torturing me so?" sings Alaa Saad as a posse of gypsy girls performs the "dagger dance," a routine that requires them to thrust their clenched fists toward their pelvises.

"He who can't eat meat slurps soup," says Ahlam, the office cook, in feigned disgust at the sex-starved researchers goggling in the office.

But Ahlam isn't sure who is most to blame for turning Iraq into a nation of insomniacs. When the power is on, children are up all night online. When it's not on and the fans and air conditioners have ground to a halt, the stifling heat makes it too hot to sleep. "The worst criminal in Iraq is the electricity minister," says Ahlam, waving a carving knife. "I'd slice off his fingers, centimeter by centimeter."

My landlady spends her evenings filling out visa lottery forms for America or visiting chat rooms in pursuit of a foreign husband to whisk her away to a less frantic world in which her glass menagerie will no longer be rattled by car bombs. On the July day when the fledgling authorities began reissuing passports, Baghdad ground to a halt as its nationals queued in thousands to exit Iraq.

Hundreds of thousands have already left. Alaa Saad, the gypsy vocalist, like many favorites of the former regime, has fled to the air-conditioned ice cooler of Dubai. More have sought refuge in blackout-free neighboring Jordan, where the Baathists who sponsor Iraq's current killjoys have turned what was once the Arab world's dullest city into one of its more playful. Pimps tout the Iraqi cafes of upmarket Amman, distributing invitations for Arabian nights at hotels such as Takit, where the girls wiggle for cash, or Club Juliana's, where Filipinas entertain the same Iraqis who support the kidnapping of their fellow nationals in Iraq. "When the cat's away, the mice must play," says a recently exiled general, released from 26 years of serving Saddam. If only his country had such luck.

Before leaving Iraq, I drop by my old apartment to tell my landlady she can have my furniture. With the roads to Jordan closed, organizing a shipment is too complicated. She will keep it until my family finally visits. But we both know that won't happen. For months Baghdadis were sitting on the fence, waiting to see if America would deliver a brighter Iraq. With the exception of Alousi, I don't know anyone in the capital who hasn't now given up hope.

Some Baghdadis hope to recapture an era when men retired to clubs to drink. Iraq was the Arab world's largest importer of scotch--the real thing, not the fake brands that later flooded the country.