COLUMN ONE : A Sinking Feeling Grips Iraq : Beneath the stoic exterior of Hussein’s people lie fatigue and frustration. As the crisis wears on, the anxiety of war has given way to an unofficial malaise.

The old Iraqi shopkeeper’s heart was heavy Monday, a day that marked the beginning of yet another month in the crisis that has besieged his nation.

It was the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, the “Christmas Day” of the Islamic world, and yet, he said, there was so little to celebrate.

It was not so much that he and his family were worried about all the talk of a war that may soon be upon them. They were worried in the beginning, of course, but that ended some time ago, he explained, when he decided to uncrate his most fragile and valuable items and return them to his shelves from a bombproof storage room where they had languished during much of the first two months of crisis.

“I realized it made no sense,” he told a visitor from America in his crowded downtown shop. “If you listen to the radio every night, you think maybe the war will start tomorrow, and then you’re afraid to even get up in the morning. Sometimes, you wonder whether you’ll even be there when the next day comes.

“But for two months now, the story is the same, and still there is no war. So now, we just try to block these thoughts from our minds and live and work and pretend it’s all just normal.”

Finally, when his downtown shop had cleared of customers for a few moments, the old businessman leaned over and spoke of what was really in his heart.

“We are just like sheep now,” he added in hushed tones, lest someone overhear him through the doorway.

“I’ll tell you about the Iraqis. We must have two faces in order to survive here. There is the face we have to show if other Iraqis are around. And then, there is our real face, the reflection of what is really in our mind.

“And this, what I am telling you, is the real face of almost all Iraqi people right now. Everything now is in the hands of governments, your government and mine. The people, we have no influence over what will happen. And no one seems to care what the Iraqi people really think. So, for most of us now, it’s better that we try not to think at all.”

Such, it seems, is the true state of the Iraqi mind as the Persian Gulf crisis enters its third month today.

It is a reality of fatigue and frustration laced heavily with stoic resignation that adds a deeper, human dimension to the veneer of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s stubborn rhetoric and his Information Ministry’s sophisticated image-making machine.

Throughout the weeks of continuing military and political stalemate in the gulf crisis, the Iraqi leadership has tried hard to cast its 17 million people as tough, resilient and deeply committed to their authoritarian president.

New press guidelines were issued last week, for example, ordering Iraqi editors and journalists, all of them government employees, to concede that the international embargo of Iraq is hurting more and more but that the people and their million-strong army are capable of enduring it for months and even years.

Indeed, during 10 days of moving through Baghdad and listening to the Iraqis themselves, a reporter found that much of that image is reality. Like the old shopkeeper who endures by chasing away the mere thought of an American air strike, most Iraqis have tried to cruise through their daily routines on automatic pilot.

Baghdad’s outdoor carnivals are filled in the evening, when the blistering desert sun gives way to cool autumn breezes. Hotel discotheques, shut down in the initial days of the crisis, have reopened and are packed with couples in suits and sequined dresses twisting to Arab rock music.

And the city’s markets, jammed with the latest shipments from looted storage facilities in occupied Kuwait, are teeming with shoppers whose only complaint is the skyrocketing price of virtually everything.

Through it all, though, there is a distinctive, unofficial malaise that has spread through their society, according to the few Iraqis who agreed to speak openly.

“Everyone’s just going through the motions,” said one Iraqi businessman who--unlike most Iraqis, including Hussein himself--has traveled extensively in the Western world. “We’re laughing on the outside, but inside, deep inside, there is a lot of pain.

“It’s not fear. Really. No one, not a single Iraqi, is afraid of war. In that way, the government is telling the truth. Eight years of war has taught us to survive.”

But it was that brutal 1980-88 war with Iran, which left half a million Iraqis dead and as many as a million more widowed or orphaned, that he blamed for the deepening sense of despair here.

“It’s concern. It’s worry. It’s a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness,” he said. “Your American leaders say war is right around the corner. But we don’t believe that. What we see is months and months of just getting by, and, in a way, that’s harder than all-out war.”

The timing for the Iraqis’ latest test of endurance could not have been worse. The crisis and siege triggered by Hussein’s Aug. 2 conquest of Kuwait came just as the Iraqis were beginning to enjoy what most describe as the first era of personal freedom since Hussein came to power 11 years ago.

Within days of the 1988 cease-fire with Iran, Hussein lifted an eight-year ban on foreign travel that affected all Iraqis. Tens of thousands of battle-scarred soldiers came home to street celebrations and tearful reunions. Iraq’s Draconian military draft and occasional executions of deserters appeared to be near an end.

Despite a huge war debt, new privatization regulations sent new prosperity through Iraq’s grass-roots economy. And the survival mentality that had controlled the Iraqis’ lives for nearly a decade soon began to melt into a comfortable new world of relative freedom.

The old shopkeeper, for example, was planning a trip to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany. He tried to book airline tickets for his entire family of seven last July, but the first reservation he could get was Aug. 17.

“Now we’re stuck again, and for how long? No one knows,” he said mournfully.

A former soldier, who has worked as an auto mechanic since he lost his right foot to shrapnel on the Iran-Iraq War front six years ago, had been looking forward to his first trip outside Iraq--a second honeymoon with his wife in the Indian metropolis of Bombay.

“Now, maybe I die before I ever see anything of the world outside,” he said.

And another shopkeeper, who was booked on a plane to Rome three days after the invasion, said simply, “I think it’s just my fate to be born, live and die right here in Iraq.”

Clearly, it is a mood that Hussein’s government keenly senses in its people. It is the product of an internal policing system that ranks among the world’s most effective, complete with state security agents assigned to every block of every street in every district of the city and a human rights record that includes disappearances and execution.

In an effort to boost morale, Hussein’s recent speeches have been heavy with renewed emphasis on the vision that Iraqis are fighting a holy war for all Arabs and good Muslims, which longtime foreign residents here say appeals directly to the Iraqis’ once-elusive sense of national pride.

The same message was visible throughout this capital on Mohammed’s birthday: from the fence surrounding Iraq’s Central Bank building, where a banner declared in Arabic, “We Have the Right to Fight the Jihad (holy war) to Liberate Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina;” from corner newsstands, where state-run Arabic dailies bore similar proclamations above large photographs of Hussein reading the Koran, and from ever-present television screens in shops, restaurants and bars where the state’s two official channels offered a steady barrage of patriotic programming.

Through every medium, there was always the standard and now widely accepted message of justification: “Kuwait is, and always has been, a part of Iraq.”

Its impact was clear in a randomly selected stationery store on downtown Rashid Street--jammed with parents and students preparing for today’s reopening of secondary schools and universities throughout Iraq.

There were complaints about the high cost of everything. Notebooks that sold for the equivalent of $2.25 a year ago are now $3.75, and imported American pens that cost $12 are now nearly double that price.

But the friendly shopkeeper instantly began lecturing his American visitor on the history and geography of Kuwait, drawing maps on scrap paper that he said illustrated why and how Kuwait was taken away from Iraq by British colonial authorities.

At the same time, even the stationery store manager made it clear that, beyond that issue, he does not buy the official government line.

“The crisis in the gulf is between governments, not people,” he said through an interpreter after he learned that his foreign visitor was an American.

“We do not share the same language, it is true. But we are both the same. We are human beings. Governments are governments, and I don’t like governments. All I hope is that the American people will take some time to understand the Iraqi people before it is too late.”

Back at the old shopkeeper’s store several blocks away, it was clear that, for some, the dislike of governments--specifically Hussein’s--may well run far deeper than the Iraqi leadership would like to project.

Asked about Iraq’s adamant refusal to withdraw from Kuwait, the shopkeeper sighed and whispered, “It is not so much the Iraqi people who want Kuwait.

“Sure, it’s nice to have Kuwait. We have taken so many things from Kuwait. Kuwait has the sea, and maybe it should be part of Iraq. But it is Saddam Hussein who needs the oil fields and harbors of Kuwait, not the Iraqi people. Whether it is part of Iraq or not, I’m not sure any Iraqi believes that Kuwait is worth going back to what we had for those eight miserable years.”

Just up the street, there was a far more subtle moment that appeared to capture the same sentiment.

It took place on the street, outside a tiny clock shop, where two foreigners noticed a wall clock bearing Hussein’s portrait in Arab headgear superimposed on an artist’s rendering of an ancient battle between the Arabs and the Persians.

“Not For Sale--Exhibition Only,” declared a sign taped onto the clock’s glass face.

“Why isn’t this clock for sale?” one of the foreigners asked the shop owner in Arabic.

The owner explained that it was a collector’s item, but he quickly asked the foreigners their nationality. “America and Germany,” the customers answered.

Suddenly animated, the shop owner told of a trip he took by car from Baghdad to Vienna, an excursion he said he will never forget. He completed the drive just before a grenade blew up in his face on the Iranian front at the height of the war in 1982.

He then pulled out a photograph of himself looking decades younger and in full military dress that was taken during that trip. And finally, he showed that his left eye is glass and that his tongue remains badly deformed from his war wounds.

“You know, I’ve had this clock in here in this case for four years now,” the owner said, quickly changing the subject. “But I’ll give it to you now for just 75 dinars ($225 at the official exchange rate). I should charge 100, but you can have it for 75.”

Asked why he would sell it after all these years, the owner laughed and told one of the customers, “I don’t know, I like your face.” But then he cast his eyes down at the portrait on the clock face and thought for a moment.

“And maybe,” he added, “it’s just the right time.”