U.S. From Abroad : Iraqis...

Sgt. Suleiman Kadir is the living image of America’s new enemy.

A veteran paratrooper now assigned to a tactical squadron in this southern Iraqi city just two hours by road from downtown Kuwait, Sgt. Kadir already has been hardened by scores of combat jumps during Iraq’s brutal war with Iran. He was wounded once, re-enlisted twice and has no obvious doubts about his mission at hand.

Ask Kadir if he’s prepared to fight America, and his response is the official one: “We want peace, but we’re ready for war--with anybody. We are afraid of no one. And we will fight until we die.”

But, as the 25-year-old, battle-scarred soldier sat wearing his red beret and khaki camouflage battle dress on the Iraqi Airways evening commuter flight from Basra to Baghdad last Friday, Kadir gradually unveiled the human face of Iraq’s one million-strong regular army--a face not so different from that of the tens of thousands of U.S. Marines camped in the Arabian desert just 200 miles to the south.

The sergeant was en route to Baghdad for a week of leave with his family, he said, as he began a conversation with several foreign journalists who happened to be sitting near him on the plane.

After a bit of political chitchat in broken English, Kadir asked where the journalists were from.

“America,” one said.

Suddenly his face brightened. A smile broke the battle scars in both of his cheeks, and he gave a thumbs-up sign.

“George Bush bad, but American movies very good,” he said, beaming.

And then, he opened the top few buttons of his standard-issue uniform shirt to reveal a silk-screened color portrait of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo.

It was a startling image in a nation that President Saddam Hussein has so insulated from Western influences. But it underscored a new reality in Iraq that is largely unseen by the Americans who may soon find themselves Iraq’s opponent in war.

Just beneath the surface of this nation of 17 million, there is a fondness of, and compelling curiosity for, all things American--much of it the result of a gradual warming of relations between the two nations’ governments in the two years that immediately preceded the current Persian Gulf standoff.

The period of Iraqi-American detente began toward the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which had so toughened Kadir and his fellow soldiers by the time it ended in 1988. Iraq, a traditionally close political and military ally of the Soviet Union, had formed the cornerstone of Soviet influence in the gulf for decades after Iraq’s Arab Baath Socialist Party overthrew the monarchy here in 1958. But America, which had used Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran to protect U.S. interests in the region for so long, suddenly found itself with dozens of its nationals held hostage there and soon realized that the enemy of its new enemy could, indeed, be its friend.

When the cease-fire came after limited U.S. assistance to Iraq during the waning years of the gulf war, both Saddam Hussein and the American leadership, brought together by what diplomats call “mutual interest,” found themselves ready to work in an economic partnership.

And so was corporate America.

The U.S. government signed on to deliver as much as $1 billion a year in subsidized wheat to Iraq. American companies flooded Baghdad’s five-star hotels with representatives seeking to plant anchors in this oil-rich, although deeply debt-ridden, nation.

The theory was simple: Iraq was sitting on the world’s second-largest oil reserves; it needed a massive infusion of capital after a prolonged war that drained its national treasury, and its leader, Saddam Hussein, was a committed modernist interested only in state-of-the-art technology.

The result came quickly. Dozens of American businesses set up shop in Baghdad, most offering high-technology goods and services in the petrochemical industries. Hussein, a monolithic leader with absolute power, revolutionized the Iraqi economy almost overnight, granting a dizzying array of new freedoms to the nascent private sector. And, just as quickly, Iraq’s eyes suddenly were opened to a wonderful new world of capitalism and consumerism, one that had once been forbidden them.

Computer shops opened with the latest in American and Japanese gadgetry. In a nation where the mere possession of a typewriter had been illegal, dozens of Iraqis began buying American fax machines under the liberalized new laws. The video shops, once filled only with Turkish kung fu movies and Hindi-language romance films from India, were soon stocking Rambo, Rocky and Clint Eastwood. And, suddenly one night, the Bob Newhart Show began appearing on state-run Iraqi Television, a nightly feature that has continued even through the crisis.

For the first time, Americans were walking Baghdad’s streets in large numbers and driving the desert highways that slice through Iraq’s oil fields in late-model, four-wheel-drive Chevrolets, handing out baseball caps and T-shirts to their Iraqi colleagues as gestures of friendship. And, in almost every case, that friendship was eagerly returned.

It was a period that left behind enduring, if sometimes incongruous, images. Just last Saturday, for example, during an officially organized Iraqi children’s protest at the U.S. Embassy, one of the two small boys who presented an angry petition to an embassy staff member was wearing a Mickey and Minnie Mouse T-shirt. And, as they left, the Iraqi woman escort told them in perfect English, “Now, say bye-bye.”

It was because of this period of detente that there were so many Americans here at the time of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2--and why there are now hundreds being held hostage here.

Bob Vinton, a New Mexico resident, is now one of those being held here in the category of “detainee”--one of the several hundred Westerners and Japanese held under Iraqi military guard in dormitories at strategic military and civilian sites, places that Hussein fears the Americans will bomb in the event of an air strike on Iraq.

On the day before he was picked up at his Baghdad home by Iraqi security police, though, Vinton spoke to The Times about just why he was here and why he continued to harbor no fears for his safety even during the present crisis.

Vinton, who was the Baghdad representative for Johnson Controls International of San Francisco, said he came to Iraq to open up a new line of instrumentation control systems for commercial and petrochemical processing.

“The Iraqis want a technology transfer, and, on an individual basis, there’s nothing for an American to fear here. The Iraqis are wonderful people, and, on every level, there are friendships that will endure even through this crisis.”

Gus Cero, another American businessman, said he has developed such a fondness for Iraq and his Iraqi counterparts that, despite his position as a potential hostage, he would agree to leave only if he were promised a return visa.

“I’ve seen Baghdad go from oil boom in 1982 down to absolutely nothing in ’87 and ’88 at the end of the war, back to boom in the past two years,” said Cero, a New Jersey native who has spent much of the last eight years as a financial and commercial consultant in Iraq. “You witness that, and you do develop a strong interest in what happens here. You also build some very close friendships.”

Cero was working in Basra when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Concerned that he might be caught up in fighting, he drove up to Baghdad, where U.S. authorities persuaded him to take refuge along with several dozen other American citizens at diplomatic compounds throughout the city to avoid getting picked up.

After a few weeks, Cero managed to obtain an exit visa with the help of his Iraqi friends, and he quietly left the country last week. Before he left, though, he added this:

“My overall theme is, I like this country very, very much. I liked it before this happened, and my feelings have not changed. I’m still enjoying it, and I’m more than willing to sit it out and let diplomacy take its course.”

And the feeling, it would seem, is more than mutual among the Iraqis.

In a society as tightly controlled as Iraq’s--there are no fewer than five separate internal security agencies--it’s difficult and sometimes dangerous to interview average Iraqis in the markets and shops of Baghdad and Basra.

The few who would agree to speak beyond the official, anti-Western party line insisted on anonymity. And, without exception, each one expressed a strong affection and curiosity for the nation and the people they were just getting to know when war rhetoric tore them apart.

“America and American people are different from George Bush,” one taxi driver told a reporter he was seeing for the fourth time. “This is something we know. We do not like Bush, this is true. He is behind this blockade that is making everything too expensive here. Of course, he is hurting Iraqi people. But this is politics.

“I remember one American I drove around for many weeks. He was a very good man. Always, he talked very nice to me. And when he left, he gave me a T-shirt from Houston, Tex. Very nice shirt. I like it very much. But I know George Bush is from Texas. And I don’t know, how can this be?”

The question was as revealing as those that followed.

“In America, do you have soldiers on all the bridges?”

“In America, what do you call these security people who watch you all the time?”

“How much do you pay for gasoline in America? Iraqi newspapers say it is now $20 for a gallon. Is this true?”

Waves of Baghdad residents have visited the U.S. Embassy’s cultural section to read books and watch films about life in the United States. And several of the Iraqis interviewed reflected this genuine interest in how America works.

“Do you have more than two channels on television?” one asked.

“Does everyone wear a tie in America?” asked another.

“What is baseball?” asked a third.

And a fourth, who, like most Iraqis, loves the sport of soccer--called football here and almost everywhere else--said wonderingly, “America is so big, so rich, so great, but so very bad at football.”

Among the middle class, of course, the knowledge of America is far broader and more intimate. Although most Iraqis have not traveled abroad--throughout the gulf war, it was illegal for almost any citizens to leave the country--hundreds of thousands of them have relatives in the United States.

Detroit, in particular, has been a traditional resettlement site for the Iraqi-American community, with an estimated 100,000 Iraqis having moved there, many of those from a single town, Talkaif, five hours north of Baghdad.

But there are also many Iraqis who have migrated to New York and Los Angeles, among them large, extended families that are now horribly split by geography and the prospect of war between the two nations.

During the dramatic evacuation of foreign women and children whom President Hussein allowed to leave, tearful scenes were daily occurrences outside the modest U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, which served as a staging ground for the freedom flights.

Mothers and children, faces streaked with tears, hugged parents, sisters and brothers as they returned to husbands in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit.

They made little public comment, but privately they shared their fear of the future.

One Iraqi-American mother was returning with her children to California to rejoin her husband, who had not been able to accompany them on her annual summer trip to visit their parents in Baghdad. She spoke to a Times reporter of the irony of leaving behind relatives who are now being threatened by American bombs.

“Without a doubt, we have one foot in both countries,” she said. “Our family is being torn in half.

“We pay American taxes. The taxes buy bombs, and the bombs may fall here. But we live in America. We voted for Bush. We also want America strong, and I don’t want to pay $20 for a gallon of gasoline.

“There is much at stake for us, for our whole family. There is much emotion. But there is so much more at stake for the whole world.”

She paused, as if to think for a moment about the magnitude of such a war. Finally, she shook her head.

“There won’t be a war. If there is such a war, both sides--both America and Iraq--will lose. Such a war cannot happen. Can it?”