Iraq Starting to Feel Pinch of Sanctions : Rationing: Baghdad limits purchases of vital goods amid growing frustration and anger.

The knock came in the evening on the front doors of most Iraqi homes throughout the capital over the weekend, and the news was a mixed blessing--good for the West, bad for the Iraqis.

It was the ration man from President Saddam Hussein’s Arab Baath Socialist Party, and he had come to say that every vital commodity--flour, sugar and rice, in particular--could now be purchased only in limited quantities and from select shops.

Virtually all the bakeries of Baghdad have closed. So have the pastry shops and ice cream parlors. And, until the ruling party’s strict, formal rationing began Saturday, there were several days last week when many in Baghdad could not find even a single piece of bread at any price.

The sanctions, it would seem, are finally starting to bite.

“But, of course, there’s the ultimate question of how much bite is enough to change things,” a Western diplomat here said of the human impact of the world’s stranglehold on Iraq, an economic blockade that easily ranks among the most severe in history.

“It depends upon how much people are willing to pull in their stomachs, as well as how much they’ve stockpiled. And, even more importantly, it depends upon who they will blame when they start to suffer even more--President Bush or Saddam Hussein.”

In an effort to find out, The Times spent a week interviewing economic analysts, diplomats, Iraqi officials and the Iraqi people themselves as they stood in bread lines, searched shops for sugar and made their way through a daily life of international isolation.

The verdict from most Iraqi consumers, all of whom refused to be quoted by name for fear of retribution, was that the pinch had, indeed, begun to take its toll on their private lives. There was a growing sense of frustration. But, even more, there was a sense of anger and confusion about an outside world that is punishing them for “invading” a land they have been told for decades actually belongs to them.

“It is bad and getting worse,” said a 58-year-old professional man as he carried home from his assigned local supplier a ration of flour that he must now turn to bread himself. “But how does this make the world happy to make the Iraqis suffer? Who wins by this blockade? George Bush?

“We have been through a war, my friend. For eight years, you cannot know the cost. Nearly every family has lost a son. Now, again we must send our sons to the front. And your George Bush is going to win a war by taking away our bread? This, we don’t understand.”

What is more, most analysts said that the new rationing is less an indication of dwindling food stocks and more of the brutal efficiency with which President Hussein’s party can conserve his nation’s food stocks, which are variously estimated to be enough to last a minimum of three months and an average of six.

In wheat alone, Iraq is believed to have a 240-day supply in storage. It clearly is running short on sugar and rice, both of which are imported and consumed in huge quantities. And its fresh fruit supply is expected to run out Tuesday. But Iraq has plenty of meat--9 million sheep are estimated to be grazing on Iraqi lands--and it is virtually self-sufficient in barley and fresh vegetables.

“We are not rationing these things because we are out,” Naji Hadithi, the Iraqi government’s chief spokesman, told The Times over the weekend. “We are doing it to keep the promise that Iraq can resist this blockade indefinitely.”

And, when it comes to enforcing the new rationing system, Hadithi conceded, “Saddam Hussein has the most effective government machinery of any country in this part of the world.”

Increasingly, though, foreign economic experts who have lived in Baghdad for months or years are beginning to look at indicators other than food stocks to measure the impact of the U.N. sanctions. And even diplomats who sympathize with the Iraqi government concede that the nation is extremely vulnerable to the continuing blockade--in an area nearly as vital as food.

“The most effective means of hurting this country and putting psychological pressure on its people is simply the fact that the world has cut off all spare parts,” one Asian diplomat said. “They have no stockpiles of spare parts here. They can produce some of their own, but that requires machinery, which also needs spare parts to keep running. And I would say that, within a month, the entire infrastructure in Iraq is going to start falling apart.”

His Western counterparts in Baghdad, some of them economic specialists, heartily agreed. And, with Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil and the United States--all of them key suppliers of the parts that keep Hussein’s machine running--participating in the U.N.-sanctioned trade embargo, they said the first signs of machine failure are likely to show within weeks.

“It’s going to start to run into blackouts or brownouts, and they’re going to have a problem with water supply,” one Western economist here said Sunday. “The utility systems will start breaking down, and that will have a real effect.

“That will have an effect on the people’s imaginations well before the food supply. And eventually, the entire transportation system will break down, which would certainly cripple the country’s ability to function day-to-day.”

Already, the price of a set of tires for a passenger car in Baghdad is 1,000 dinars ($3,330 at the official rate) and double the price of a month ago. One truck tire alone now costs the same amount, and engine parts needed to power the trucks that drive Iraq’s import economy are running so low, mechanics say they’re already starting to cannibalize other vehicles to keep them on the road.

Deepening the dilemma is the exodus of both professional and skilled foreign labor, some fleeing as refugees and others to avoid being taken hostage.

To build and maintain its $15 billion-a-year petrochemical industry, Iraq has had to rely heavily on Western technical assistance. And, if Iraq means to profit from its occupation of Kuwait, the wealthy Persian Gulf state that it has now annexed and renamed Province 19, it must depend upon the thousands of foreign technicians and experts who are now in hiding and are hardly expected to lend a hand.

Even on the basic level of food, one diplomat said, “There’s the question of who is going to pick the vegetables in the Iraqi farms, now that the migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia are fleeing.”

The first subtle signs of the real squeeze are in the streets of Baghdad.

Once immaculate boulevards are now scattered with litter. Trash is piling up routinely outside private homes, sometimes for days, in a city that once ran with clockwork precision. And longtime residents say they’ve seen rats in the street for the first time in decades.

It is all the result of the flight of tens of thousands of contract workers from Egypt and Somalia, which are both participating in the blockade against Iraq. So great is the Egyptian flight from Baghdad, that those fleeing have pushed the black market rate for dollars up 300% in a month in their frenzy to trade in their savings of Iraqi dinars for hard currency.

“If you can’t feed them, and they’re not getting paid anything, you really can’t expect these people to stay, especially when there’s been no real love between their governments and Iraq in the past few months,” a Western diplomat said.

“The signs of this problem are going to multiply quickly in the near future. As soon as the water works start backing up, and all the city goes brown at once, the people’s imaginations are going to start turning their anger and frustration into something else.

“I have great hopes that actually this economic embargo will work.”

There remains, however, a far more immediate problem, the analysts said. In the military stalemate that has become something of a contest of wills between Hussein and President Bush, time is clearly on the side of the Iraqi president.

Most Iraqis interviewed in the streets and city bazaars of this ancient capital, among them well-educated men and women who actually criticized President Hussein, fervently echoed their president’s stand on Kuwait.

And, in doing so, they reflected a strong sense of the pride in their country and resentment toward a Western world that colonized and exploited them--an Iraqi nationalism that President Hussein has both nurtured and used time and again to remain in power.

“They’re at the point where they’re wondering why the whole world is against them,” an Arabic-speaking foreigner who has lived in Baghdad for more than a year said of a popular mood that he said “is getting uglier.”

“They can’t understand why this little piece of sand called Kuwait, which they do believe is theirs by birthright, should be worth all of this trouble and effort by the outside world.”

And it is against that backdrop of hardened public opinion here that even the most optimistic of Western diplomats in Baghdad doubt whether the sanctions will deliver the final blow to Iraq’s iron-fisted leader.

“What it comes down to is that both Saddam Hussein and George Bush have a lot to lose now if either one of them backs down, and the problem is they have different time frames,” one said. “For President Bush, the longer he waits, the more he loses; the better the chances of food and medicine getting into Iraq as humanitarian aid, and the weaker the Western alliance he has managed to keep together so far.

“For Saddam, the longer he waits, the more he gains. His country may fall apart, but it will be a long time before his army does. Everyone has too much to lose. So, no matter how fast they take effect, in the final analysis, I’m afraid the sanctions are going to be too slow for George Bush.”