by Tony Horwitz
Saleh said this with the grim but giddy urgency of a parachutist leaping from an airplane. “I could be shot,” he added, smiling wanly, “for what I've just told you.”
Saleh's job required him to write reports, and he'd 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 small acts of defiance that would have seemed petty in any other setting. While the walls of most Iraqi homes and offices dripped pictures of Saddam, Saleh displayed nothing more than a calendar adorned with the president's face. But he kept a carpet decorated with Saddam 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.”
A few days after my arrival, I was dozing through the afternoon heat when the phone rang. It was Mr. Mahn at the Information Ministry. “We have called this and this and that,” he said wearily, adding that item number 16 on my program had been arranged: an interview with his superior, the Minister of Information and Culture. I had listed the minister as an expendable, to pad out the program, but I could hardly afford to turn him down.
As the first point of contact for the foreign press, Information Ministry officials are often slick, Western-educated bureaucrats, adept at chatting amiably with journalists and offering innocuous statements on almost any topic. They are the governmental equivalent of corporate flacks.
But in Iraq, public relations wasn't very well developed. Arriving on the top floor of the Information Ministry, I wondered for a moment if I'd been sent to the wrong department. The elevator door swished open and I found myself staring down the barrel of a submachine gun. The guard holding it studied me carefully, then led me along a carpeted corridor to an enormous sitting room with a suitably enormous portrait of Saddam. The guard gestured toward a pair of couches, then, when I sat down, he said that I'd taken the minister's seat. It was indistinguishable from the other couch, except that its back was flush with the wall, providing a clear view of the corridor and elevator door.
Another man appeared, clad much like the guard in olive-drab fatigues with a pistol strapped to his waist. He had the stiff bearing and watchful gaze of a secret service agent. He was the Honorable Minister of Information and Culture, Latif Jasim.
Jasim spoke no English, nor did he go in for the usual Arab pleasantries. He also didn't reveal much about himself. Curious about his qualifications as the highest cultural officer in the land, I asked Jasim about his career before Saddam and the Baathist party seized power in 1968.
“I was a party member,” he said.
“At university?” I asked.
“Not necessarily.”
We moved on to matters of state, and his answers seemed crafted from the pages of the Baghdad Observer.
On Iraqi support for the Palestinians: “Israel is an alien body in this region. Science is advancing all the time, and I Israel should expect that one day rocks will turn into other things.”
On the law decreeing death for those who insulted the president: “We are not in the United States. Your head of state changes every four years. Here we cannot accept a leader being insulted.”
On the ubiquitous portraits of Saddam: “The president has nothing to do whatsoever with the portraits. It is a natural and spontaneous thing from the people.”
The interview lasted half an hour, during which Jasim managed not even the hint of a smile. He was the antithesis of slick, the last person most Arab governments would wheel out to present a warm and unthreatening image to the Western press.
As the man with the submachine gun saw me to the elevator, I wondered why Jasim took such precautions; after all, there were armed guards downstairs, and concrete pylons blocking the driveway. As usual, the only explanation I received was from a diplomat.
“It's always best to have your own private bodyguard,” he said. “Iraqi leaders don't have a history of dying peacefully in bed.”
The history of modern Iraq reads like Macbeth, only bloodier. Since 1920, there have been twenty-three coups, not counting the scores of attempted revolts, such as the one Saddam joined in 1959. Then aged twenty-two, he stood on a street corner and emptied his pistol at the car of a military strongman, Abd al-Karim Qasim, who had himself seized power only a year before in a bloody coup that killed Iraq's royal family. Qasim, who was wounded, later boasted that he had survived twenty-nine attempts on his life. His luck ran out a short time later and he was executed following a coup that briefly brought Saddam's Baathist allies to power.
Sixteen years, two coups, and many purges later, Saddam muscled his way into the presidency. He celebrated the event by sentencing twenty-two of his closest conspirators to death on trumped-up 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 ratting on their parents, teenagers returned dead to their families with fingernails extracted and eyes gouged out. Top generals keep going down in mysterious helicopter crashes, and Saddam has even liquidated members of his own family. The Minister of 1 Information could hardly be blamed for watching his back.
Between interviews, I wandered the streets of Baghdad, which for lack of a better word could be called “sightseeing.” It wasn't easy to play tourist in Iraq. There was, first of all, the matter of maps. There weren't any, and hadn't been since early in the war. Like the weather report, maps were banned because they could aid the Iranians in aiming their 1 missiles at the Iraqi capital. Maps could also, of course, aid dissidents in plotting assassinations or coups.
Broad areas of the city were sealed off, including the presidential palace, which flanked a long stretch of the wide and muddy Tigris. You could catch a glimpse of the complex from the eighteenth-floor bar of the Sheraton, but you couldn't photograph it: “For Security Reasons,” a sign announced, “It Is Forbidden to Take Photos in This Area.” It was also forbidden to photograph animals, which might make the country seem backward. Even photographing Baghdad's premier tourist attraction, a striking memorial to the war dead, could be hazardous. One Japanese visitor had attempted it at night and alarmed the guards with the flash on his camera. They responded with a burst of machine-gun fire, missing the Japanese man but riddling his car with bullet holes.
I went, without camera, to see the war memorial, which is shaped like a huge broken egg and called the Monument of Saddam's Qadissiyah Martyrs. The name says something about the Iraqi mind-set—and about the long memories fueling conflict across the Middle East. Qadissiyah was the seventh-century battle at which Mohammed's general, Khalid ibn Walid—nicknamed “Sword of Islam”—drove the elephant-riding Persians out of Mesopotamia. Saddam's constant invocation of Qadissiyah was a way of reminding Iraqis that their war with Iran was the culmination of a millennial battle against Persian aggressors. Like Mohammed's horsemen, they too would ultimately triumph.
On the Iranian side, Khomeini cast the conflict more explicitly in religious terms. He named the repeated Iranian offensives after the Iraqi city of Kerbala, and spoke constantly of liberating both it and the neighboring city of Najaf. Iranians revere the two cities as the burial sites of seventh-century “martyrs”—Ali, Hassan and Hussein—whose deaths sparked the great schism in Islam between Sunni and Shiite. By invoking Kerbala, Khomeini was reminding Iranians that their cause was no less than a crusade against infidels.
The two leaders had one message in common: both advertised the conflict as a holy war, so those killed in battle were sbaheett—martyrs—and entitled to a free pass to paradise. After eight years of war, Kho
meini had reached Kerbala V, Saddam was busily erecting new monuments to Qadissi martyrs, and a million men had gone off to heaven, leaving the two leaders no closer to victory.
Beneath Baghdad's war memorial was a museum to Saddam's life, including a family tree tracing his ancestry to Mohammed, his birth certificate and his fifth-grade report card°(he scored an 89 in history, his best subject). Not featured, though perhaps more revealing of his childhood milieu, is a pamphlet authored by his foster father, Khairalla Tulfah, titled: “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies.” However, there was a photograph of the car Saddam filled with bullets while trying to kill Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1959. Saddam was wounded in the attack and reputedly dug the bullet from his own leg while escaping to Syria. A statue downtown marks the site where the shooting took place. Iraq was the first country I had ever visited that enshrined an assassination attempt as the most glorious event in the nation's history.
The rest of the capital seemed rather drab. As far back as the twelfth century, an Arab traveler lamented of Baghdad: “There is no beauty in her that arrests the eye, or summons the busy passerby to forget his business and gaze.” The flat, sunbaked plain surrounding the city 6ffered little to build with, except mud. Invaders had periodically leveled most of the great buildings that did once exist. And Iraq's vast oil wealth had finished the job, with swaths of the old city ripped down to make space for towering hotels and housing blocks.
To his credit, Saddam also spent much of Iraq's wealth on improving the lives of ordinary people. The onetime Ottoman backwater was now among the more prosperous countries in Arabia, with villages electrified and schools and hospitals dotting the countryside. This modernization, though, was hard to see firsthand. Traveling outside Baghdad required official permission and an official escort. Two escorts, actually. Ministry of Information officials weren't permitted to travel alone with foreigners, as there would be no one to listen in on the conversation.
This arrangement seemed rather cumbersome, so I opted instead for a day trip I could take on my own, to Babylon. The ancient city lies sixty miles south of Baghdad along a dull road bordered by date palms, mud-brick villages and fifty-foot-high placards of Saddam. Just outside Babylon, I came 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.”
Most of what was once Babylon has been pilfered by archaeologists or carted away to provide bricks for nearby towns. The Iraqis have rebuilt the ruins into a kind of fairytale castle with gaudy, blue-painted walls simulating the original glazed brick of the Ishtar Gate. A museum inside records some of Nebuchadnezzar's haughty words: “Let everything my hand has made be immortalized for eternity.” Not to be outdone, his modern-day heir has inserted several bricks in the rebuilt Babylon, inscribed with the information that they were laid “in the era of the leader Saddam Hussein.”
On the day I visited, in mid-June, the temperature was about 110 degrees. There were no other tourists, only a handful of bedouin hustlers lurking in slivers of shade cast by free-standing pillars. One of them grasped my sleeve and unfolded his fist to reveal a tiny cuneiform tablet and a statuette of a Babylonian king.
“Very ancient,” he said. And very cheap, at only ten dollars.
Another man offered to guide me to the Tower of Babel, a short drive away. His car looked as though it had recently been unearthed in the excavations. We stalled beside a mound of dirt, about like your average landfill. “This is Babel Tower,” he said, adding in a hushed voice, “You need something old? You need a King Hammurabi?”
Depressed, and depleted by the heat, I drove back to Baghdad through the onetime Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and Euphrates, as a voice on the radio wailed:
“You are the perfume of Iraq, ob Saddam, The water of the two rivers, ob Saddam. The sword and the shield, oh Saddam.”
That night I went to visit Mohammed the fishmonger at his restaurant by the Tigris. He was clubbing and gutting fish while the radio reported another advance by Iraqi troops. The war was fast approaching its end, with the borders back to where they had been when Saddam first invaded Iran in 1980.
“Our enemies should not forget,” Mohammed said, in a husky imitation of Rambo, appearing that week in Iraqi cinemas, “how we kicked Khomeini's butt.”
The restaurant was empty except for four men riveted to a small television set, watching Iraq play soccer in the Arab Cup finals against Syria. Damascus had supported Iran throughout the eight-year Gulf war, exacerbating a longstanding feud between Saddam and the Syrian dictator, Hafez al-Assad. Their murderous rivalry was now being played out on the soccer field.
“This game is almost as important as beating the Persians,” Mohammed said.
At halftime, with the scored tied at zero, Mohammed suggested we slip across the street for a beer. Though strait-laced in most respects, Iraq is remarkably unbuttoned when it comes 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 who is famed for his erotic verse.
At one time, hundreds of Filipina and Thai “bargirls” plied their trade on Abu Nawas Street, but Iraqi women, some of them war widows, had recently inherited the trade. “The local talent,” Mohammed warned, “is not so good.”
We entered the first club just as two doormen carried out a white-robed Kuwaiti, feet first, smelling of whiskey and perfume. The Kuwaitis, barred from drinking at home, were among Abu Nawas Street's best customers and were renowned for being cheap drunks.
Inside, the scene was reminiscent of the New Arizona in Cairo, with men huddled around whiskey bottles as three musicians played an atonal tune on tambourine, drum and violin. Mohammed picked out a rear booth upholstered with fake red velvet and cigarette ash. It was so dark that I couldn't see Mohammed's face. We were barely seated before a woman squeezed in beside me, whispering in my ear, “Pretty boy want to fickey fickey? Madame good, very good.”
Mohammed 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.
Mohammed had chosen the dark to attract the bargirls, who collected fifty dollars for a beer and a brief cuddle. As a Westerner, I served as bait. No sooner had the first woman departed than another muscled in, clutching me in a playful hammeiiock.
Mohammed lit a second match. “Good grief!” he groaned. “What species is this?”
He yelled at the bartender to bring him “good girls, not so ugly,” and the procession continued, though the quality remained the same. In half an hour, Mohammed had exhausted his matches and the supply of women in the bar.
A dancer in a sequin dress took the stage and began a vague sort of gyration that was billed as “Oriental dance.”
After five minutes of dancing, the woman began singing, and the acoustics were so bad that I couldn't catch a word.
“What's she singing?” I asked Mohammed.
He shrugged. “ 'We love you, Saddam,' something like this.” He scanned the bar for partners. The woman began dancing again, and perfumed, drunk Kuwaitis stood up to shake with her. One tumbled in a giggling heap and had to be carried off the stage by his friends.
Mohammed sank deeper into the gloom. “I not have girlfriend in three years,” he moaned. “Who knows. Maybe when the war ends these Iraqi women get married and the Filipinas come back.” Draining his beer, he suggested we move on to a club called the AH Baba.
As we stepped outside, the Arabian night exploded with machine-gun fire. Bright-red tracers streaked across the Tigris from antiaircraft guns positioned on the opposite bank. All Baghdad was celebrating. A guard by the door gave us the news. Iraq had outdueled Syria in overtime, two to one.
Mohammed smiled. “Iraq,” he said, “has kicked another butt.”
8—THE IRAQ-IRAN FRONT
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To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till be find it stopping a bung-hole?
—HAMLET
The telephone shook me awake at six in the morning and a voice at the other end declared, “There has been another great victory.”
Half asleep, I wondered for a moment if I'd left the radio on. “Come to the airport immediately,” continued the voice, which I groggily recognized from my visits to the Ministry of Information. “Today you will go to the southern front.”
There were several dozen reporters already gathered at the airport, an international hodgepodge of Turks, Russians, Chinese, French, Americans and locally based Arabs.
“Where is your water?” asked one of the Iraqis, a veteran of trips to the front. I told him that I'd assumed water would be provided. “Are you kidding?” He cradled two water bottles as though they were vintage Moe't. “And food—in a few hours, you will only dream of it.”
Information was also scarce. Even in victory, the Iraqis rarely disclosed strategic details or even the precise location of the battlefield. “Bodies, that's all you get,” said an American cameraman. A few months before, the Iraqis had driven him for six hours through the desert, then stopped at a flat plain covered with Iranian corpses. “This Iraqi guy ran ahead of us shouting, 'Here! Here! More murdered Persians!' We filmed for an hour, then they drove us back to Baghdad. I never even found out where we'd been.”
Our trip was following a similar formula. During a long, unexplained delay at the airport, we inquired about the “great victory” we were being taken to see. One of our escorts responded by turning on a television, to show us a “victory tape.” It was stock footage of bombs bursting and rockets flaring, with Saddam's face superimposed and a Wagnerian chorus singing in the background:
