Iraq Opens Door to Outside World : Mideast: Saddam Hussein loosens the reins, and Iraqis enjoy some of the ‘rewards of war.’ Some even smile now.

For 10 hard years, the 17 million people of Iraq were caged in a smothering cell of security, a nation at war.

No one was permitted to leave the country except on official business or for emergency humanitarian reasons. Overseas phone calls were forbidden without government approval, which was routinely denied. With Baghdad subject to missile attacks by the Iranian enemy, a call to Europe might be used to pass on target information.

Outsiders’ every movement was watched by legions of police, uniformed and undercover. Iraqis did not talk with visitors, and among themselves, they rarely talked outside their homes. Many of those who did disappeared.

“Then came January,” as Western diplomats here say.

January, nearly a year and a half after the war ended in an edgy truce, was a turning point in the postwar period. In January, the iron-fisted regime of President Saddam Hussein opened the cage.

For the first time in a decade, Iraqis were given limited permission to travel abroad. And they have jumped at the opportunity.

Outside the U.S. Embassy the other day, in the blistering heat of early summer, nearly 150 applicants for visas lined up at the door of the consular section, overwhelming the small staff inside. A suffocating wind blew away the applicants’ patience.

“I’ve been to Los Angeles,” William George, a retired chemist, said. “I went to L.A. and Vegas in the summer of ‘79, just before the war, with my brother. He had a medical practice in Flint (Michigan). L.A.’s beautiful. The consul must not know how beautiful it is, or he’d give me the visa.”

George, whose name reflects his Christian religion, had been waiting for four days, taking a number at night, then lining up before dawn in the hope that his number would be called. He said he wanted to visit his family again in Michigan, as well as his wife’s family in Chicago. Their son, a college student in Baghdad, will stay behind.

Men between 18 and 45 are subject to the draft for Hussein’s million-man army and are refused exit permits by the government. Western embassies--the same scene was being played out elsewhere in the capital--place their own restrictions on applicants for tourist visas, concerned that once out they would not return. Each prospect gets about two minutes to make his case with a consular officer, and the Americans are turning down about half of those they see.

But the rejection rate has not dampened hope. A decade of privation in war makes any open door irresistible.

Light is streaking into Iraqi life in ways unimaginable just two years ago, bringing the populace some of the “rewards of war” that Hussein had promised.

“It’s loosening up,” a member of the small Western diplomatic community here said. “The average Iraqi still prefers not to talk to foreigners, but I get the sense they’re a lot more relaxed, happier. Now they’ll joke a bit. Before, they wouldn’t crack a smile. Of course, they don’t joke about the president.”

The cafes are busy; women are wearing makeup. “When a man and a woman enter a restaurant,” the diplomat said, “the waiter doesn’t set up two cups of coffee, as he might in the West. He puts down two glasses and a 14-ounce bottle of Johnnie Walker--and that’s Black Label.”

The high life in secular Baghdad might seem shocking to the rural poor, but the people caught up in it are the relatively well-off bourgeoisie, the same class that fills the visa lines at the Western embassies.

Other forms of relaxation from the wartime and immediate postwar regime cross class boundaries. For example, last fall’s uprising against dictatorial governments in Eastern Europe was shown on television here, at length and with no political spin. When Middle East editorialists warned that “Arab Ceausescus” should take note, Hussein was among the obvious targets, but the Iraqi president let the TV drama proceed unhindered.

Photocopiers, fax and telex equipment, even typewriters, which were tightly restricted under wartime censorship, can now be found and used in Baghdad.

This is not a Third World capital. Its commercial sector, hard hit by the shortages of war, has regained vigor under a government campaign to privatize almost all business except heavy industry and military-related production. Spot shortages persist--some foods are strictly seasonal--but life in the city reflects Iraqi resources.

Iraq is situated atop oil deposits deemed second in size only to Saudi Arabia’s, and the government plans to expand its petrochemical potential. The Japanese and Europeans seem particularly eager to get in on the development, diplomats say. U.S. companies are also knocking at the door. The huge war debt, estimated at more than $50 billion, is a dead weight on the military-oriented budget, but Hussein’s financial people have been successful in renegotiating it in bits and pieces.

The 53-year-old leader is both generalissimo and top sergeant of Iraq’s revival. He is seemingly everywhere: on the cover of Newsweek magazine as the Black Knight of the Arab World, an image he nurtures in the Middle East but dislikes seeing splashed in an American publication. The author of the Newsweek piece was denied a visa to cover the recent Arab League summit conference here.

Hussein thunders at the West when it condemns his attempts to collect big-league weaponry; he threatens Israel with awesome retaliation; he struts, not like Libya’s Moammar Kadafi, but rather as a man who believes--rightly, diplomats say--that he ought to be paid close attention.

There is talk that Hussein is the next Nasser, the man to bind the Arab nation. He has advantages that were denied Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser during his heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, among them a solid economy and a top-class army and air force. But Hussein is no spellbinder. Around the Middle East, Arabs will tell a Westerner reverently that “I was standing right here in this square when Nasser spoke.” No one is likely to say that about Hussein.

Nevertheless, one diplomat said, “he’s a very, very clever and able politician, and the people seem to genuinely admire him.”

But he has problems. He has not traveled in the West and does not understand democratic systems. The National Assembly is writing a new constitution to give the people a greater voice, but no one expects Hussein and his coterie of relatives and old comrades from the town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, to give up much authority. Politics here is a matter of family and region, although the president is considered well advised within the palace, where American-educated officials have his ear.

There is also the matter of narcissism, at least as far as government poster-makers are concerned. Portraits of the leader, ubiquitous during the war, show no sign of abating since the truce. The costume changes, from military uniform to dress suit to Arab cloak, but the visage is on every corner and in every shop--a tall, dark-haired, mustachioed man, a bit jowly, with a broad smile.

The president can be seen nightly on television, touring the country, taking questions from the crowds--some quite candid in their complaints--and checking up on the efficiency of government.

Sometimes he scolds a questioner, saying he expects too much.

“The Kurds tell him they’re getting a bad shake,” an observer said. “He tells them, ‘It’s your fault. You chose the wrong side in the war.’ ”

The presidential requirement that there be no foul-ups was illustrated in January’s Army Day parade in Baghdad. For four hours, 100,000 troops and more than a thousand tanks and armored vehicles passed the reviewing stand. Military jets and helicopters roared overhead. And there was not one breakdown, the diplomat said.

“If a tank had broken down,” he added with a wry smile, “who knows how long it would have been before the driver was seen again?”