Hardly ‘Arabian Nights’ : Baghdad: A City Tries to Ignore War

Nobody goes bowling in Baghdad any more.

“Business very bad,” the attendant concedes at one of the several bowling alleys that have sprung up around town in recent years to cater to the passion that many middle-and upper-class Iraqis have inexplicably developed for the sport.

“It is the missiles,” he adds gravely, pausing as if to consider the profundity of his next statement. “Missiles very bad for the bowling business.”

Thanks to the government’s determined effort to insulate most Iraqis from the nastier aspects of the war, Baghdad still looks and behaves in many ways like a city that doesn’t seem to realize it is only 85 miles from the front lines of a conflict that has now lasted longer than World War II.

Life Goes On

The well-heeled still prowl the discotheques of Baghdad’s five-star hotels on Thursday nights, or go to the races on Fridays. Those with less money and more time to kill can be found crowding the video game parlors downtown, practicing for war by waging imaginary battles against incoming waves of enemy spaceships.

It all seems a bit unreal, but no more so than the daily drone of communiques that describe to Iraqis the crushing defeats and horrendous casualties their army has inflicted upon the real enemy that day.

The real enemy, of course, is Iran, with which Iraq has been locked in a war that neither side seems able to win but that Iran, after more than six years, still refuses to end.

‘The War Without End’

Indeed, they sometimes call it that here--”the war without end.” In the sleazy video parlors, the smoke-filled tea rooms along Saddoun Street, in shops and restaurants, people shrug their shoulders or shake their heads when asked when they think the war will end.

“Who knows?” says a cab driver to whom the question is put. “Maybe tomorrow or maybe never. No one knows. Only God. He knows.”

The government’s policy is to maintain the appearance of normality as far as possible, and Baghdad’s 4 million residents oblige by taking much in their stride and coping as best they can.

Yet if the war seems only to have scratched the surface of Baghdad in a physical sense, it has cut much deeper in other, more profound ways--emotionally, socially and economically.

The war has now claimed more than 100,000 Iraqi lives--twice as many servicemen as the United States lost in combat in Vietnam. Although Iranian casualties have been much higher, the loss of so many young men is especially devastating to a small country like Iraq, which has only 14 million people.

“There is not a family that hasn’t lost a relative in this war, and many families are now losing their second and third members,” a Western diplomat said here. “The Iraqis did really well in developing their country in the past, but now they are losing an entire generation. That’s the killer.”

The government has contrived an elaborate ruse to cushion the shock of seeing the dead come home. From the southern front near the port of Basra, the bodies are sent to Baghdad by overnight train, then transferred in the cold, gray hours before dawn to trucks that take them to a giant refrigerated warehouse west of the capital.

Bodies Released Gradually

Gradually, over a period of weeks, they are released in small batches to their relatives so as to prevent any mass spectacle of grief that might be damaging to morale. Public funerals are banned in Baghdad for the same reason, and there are now restrictions on the number of black banners that people may hang outside their homes to signify the loss of a family member, diplomats say.

If the government tries to coddle its civilian population, it also goes to considerable lengths to make the war as convenient as possible for its one million soldiers. Troops are given a week’s leave every five weeks and are posted to the front closest to their homes to make visits easier. One of the war’s more incongruous sights is the parking lots near the fronts where soldiers leave their cars.

Still, after all this time, the veneer of normality has worn thin and cracked in places, and there are growing signs of hardship and suffering that can no longer be concealed.

Food Shortages Now

There are food shortages now where none existed before. They are still sporadic--no eggs one day, no butter the next. But long queues of shoppers outside grocery stores are now a common sight. Prices have soared too, especially on the black market, where scarcer items can sometimes still be found.

“Fish,” a cabbie muttered after he was coaxed into sharing some of his grievances with a foreigner. “Now you have to be a rich man to afford to eat fish.”

One does not walk far down a main street in Baghdad these days without seeing someone who has been wounded or a shop window criss-crossed with tape to prevent it from shattering in the event of an explosion nearby. The national museum has been closed for two years, ostensibly for renovation but in fact because the exhibits have all been moved to basement bomb shelters.

Where most hotels post fire instructions, those in Baghdad tell guests what to do in case of an air raid. And with fighting raging on the southern front near Basra for almost all this month, black flags are beginning to appear all over town, regulations or no.

Worst of All, the Missiles

Then, of course, there are the missiles.

There were six attacks on Baghdad by Iranian long-range missiles in the last four months of 1986. This year, there were that many attacks in the first three weeks of January. The one on Jan. 22 was the worst. It landed in a residential neighborhood, destroying several homes and killing or wounding about 100 people, according to witnesses and residents of the area.

“The missiles are like Russian roulette,” one diplomat said. “You never know when they are going to hit.”

The war has bled Iraq’s oil-based economy dry and continues to cost every penny of the estimated $7 billion to $8 billion that the country earns annually from oil exports of about 1.8 million barrels a day.

The economic hardship is far worse in Iran, where oil exports have been severely disrupted by Iraqi air attacks on refineries, pumping stations and tankers in recent months. But Iran has been on a war footing since the outbreak of hostilities in September of 1980, whereas Iraq’s attempts to maintain a “guns and butter” economy have exhausted about $35 billion in prewar foreign exchange reserves and run up an estimated $25 billion in debt to Western creditors alone.

‘Pampered Our People’

“We have not done enough to adjust our import-export mechanisms to cope with the war situation,” a senior Iraqi official conceded in a recent interview. “We have pampered our people too much.”

Only last year, after the collapse of oil prices, did the government make a serious attempt to begin cutting back, with the result that ordinary people are now starting to feel the pinch. Electricity, education and medical care are still free, but the hospitals are so full of war casualties that civilians are admitted only in emergency cases.

Last fall, when the government tried to eliminate free transportation to work for civil servants, many workers protested by staying home until the order was partially rescinded.

“For 35 years, Iraqis have been used to a steadily rising standard of living,” a Western diplomat said. “While they are still not badly off compared to many other Arabs, for the first time their living standards are falling.”

Death for Criticism

Judging public perceptions and attitudes about the war is not easy in a country with a regime as authoritarian as Iraq’s. But diplomats note that the government recently felt obliged to publish a new law making criticism of an Iraqi official punishable by sentences ranging from seven years’ imprisonment to death.

Security in Baghdad has also been increased in recent months, with concrete planters popping up in front of the main Iraqi airlines office on Saddoun Street and more tanks and troops in evidence around key government buildings.

“Iraqis still put on a brave face and do their best to adjust,” one diplomat said. “But a certain sullenness that was not here before appears to be settling in.”

There are still street weddings, but fewer of them. The discos still attract sizeable crowds, but the people come less often and leave earlier than before.

And over at the Alghazal bowling alley, most of the team slots for the “Iraqi Army Victory Bowling Tournament” have been filled by Filipino hotel workers because the Iraqis don’t come any more.

At the Space Cadet video parlor on Saddoun Street, a middle-aged man edges up to an American visitor and says: “I am very sorry. These games not as good as the ones in America. The ones in America much better. I have been there. I have seen them. Please, can you help me to get a visa?”

It is one of the signs that the people of Baghdad are finally realizing that 85 miles from the front is not so far from the war after all.