Baghdad’s Laid-Back Lifestyle Cloaks Rumblings of War : Mood: The battle fever of the front lines has not reached Iraq’s capital. But there’s apprehension in the air.

It was midday Sunday, and the grandstand was packed at the Baghdad Horsemanship Club, where thousands of Iraqis were taking a flyer on the ponies, shouting them home.

It was Sunday evening, and four officials of the Australian Wheat Board were tossing a barbecue on the lawn of the diplomatic haven where they pass their days, captive “guests” of the state.

In the 10th week of the Persian Gulf crisis, Baghdad seems as laid-back as Laguna on a sunny summer day--on the surface.

This is a city where voices are raised only to pass cheerful pleasantries, or after a few too many araks at the fish joints along the Tigris. It’s a place where life moves within limits, and deviations from the official line are spoken only in whispers.

Like their president, Saddam Hussein, Baghdadis are proud people, comfortable both in their secular culture and their Islamic culture.

“But they’ve had it, they’ve had it with war,” one Iraqi with the courage to speak to a foreign visitor said, albeit discreetly. “We’ve been through a horrible war with Iran, and now Saddam is drawing us into another. What for? What on earth for?

“I can tell you truthfully, there were many men who survived the last war and simply could not face another. They (would) get their pistol and put it to their head. Bang!”

Is that the ring of truth? Or is it in the words of Ala Salim Hamas, a 21-year-old education student drilling with the popular army, who told a reporter, “According to the national duty, I volunteered.”

Whichever, the war fever that grips the border area between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia has not carried north to Baghdad.

Diplomats say the city is ringed by military forces, and a few armored vehicles can be seen outside high-security government compounds. But the only open collection of uniforms is seen on the popular army at drill.

As a militia, it doesn’t seem particularly militant. Marching in Iraqi style, with high-swinging arms and clenched fists, the younger men, mostly students, look determined. But their elders, bureaucrats in their 40s and 50s, step along with little vigor, their glum faces indicating they’d rather be back behind their desks.

The women’s corps, about 500 physical education students from Baghdad University’s College of Education, are more sprightly. Performing this week for the assembled foreign media, they marched round and round a concrete playground to the beat of a black-bereted drum-and-bagpipe band from the regular army.

One company, drilled by a man wearing a University of Kansas sweat shirt, provided an irresistible photo opportunity for camera operators looking for a message. They focused tightly on a young woman wearing a blue T-shirt bearing the words, in gold, “I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka.”

Taking a break, the women happily chanted a few choruses of “Down, Down, Bush!” for a Dutch radio reporter, finishing off with a trilling Arab ululation that put the bagpipers to shame. Nothing seems further from their minds than war with President Bush’s troops.

But the echoes of the Persian Gulf crisis are clear enough in Baghdad. The embargo hurts, and drivers are complaining about the rising price of spare parts.

“Oil filters, too much,” said the man behind the wheel of one of the city’s rattletrap taxis. “Fluid for the gear box--we only have Iraqi now. No good.”

Reporters entering shops along the main streets find the shelves well stocked and the merchants insulted when asked where they get it all.

“What did you think?” one replied. “Did you think Iraq was starving?”

Iraq isn’t starving, but food prices are rising, and on Iraqi salaries a price increase of 10% pushes some items off the budget. Week by week, Baghdadis are developing a no-frills diet, with only the price of fresh fruit and vegetables holding firm, according to informal surveys.

Expensive car parts and rising food costs are aggravating, and many people, particularly the poor, are getting steamed, diplomats say. But no one suggests they’re getting rebellious.

Baghdad went through far worse than this in its eight years of war with Iran. It can tighten its belt, Iraqi officials insist. And there’s no argument--it can.

A foreign analyst and frequent observer of life on Baghdad’s streets put it this way: “They’re apprehensive--not so much about war. That’s there, but it’s not the main point. There’s just a lot of unease about what they’re getting into now, and whether it’s worth it.”

The Baghdadis who will talk about Kuwait don’t see the issue as it is viewed in the West. For them, the principles of the inviolability of sovereignty, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter, do not apply in terms of Iraq and Kuwait.

For one thing, as Hussein says, Iraqis think Kuwait is part of Iraq. They produce history books to prove it. For another, they don’t like Kuwaitis, who strode around Baghdad with fat purses for years, enjoying a little respite from the Islamic restrictions at home and developing a reputation that Iraqis illustrate with a gesture familiar in the West: the nose pushed up with the point of a finger.

(The reverse is true as well: There’s a slang Arabic verb that means, roughly, to be a Baghdadi, which is meant to imply that someone is sleazy.)

But to incur the opposition of the Western world and a fair proportion of the Arab states is worrying. Iraqis make no apologies for their culture, but they admire the West and its arts. Some traveled in Europe and the United States before the war with Iran, and it seems to be hard to find an English-speaking Iraqi who doesn’t have an uncle in Michigan.

In isolated diplomatic compounds, the mood in Baghdad can be measured more openly and personally. This is where several hundred foreign workers have found asylum. They can’t leave Iraq, and if caught out in the streets by the omnipresent security apparatus--this seldoms happens--they could become “special guests” sent off to strategic sites as human shields against attack.

At the Australian Wheat Board barbecue, a man from Perth described his existence:

“You know, it’s really like we’re on holiday. We don’t do much of anything. We read or look at videos or play cards.

“We can call home. I used to call once a day, but there got to be so little to say that now I just call a couple of times a week. The kids say, ‘When are you coming home, Dad?’ I tell them the truth, that I don’t know. I hope it will be soon.

“But that’s the thing, isn’t it? I don’t know when it will be. That’s the damn thing.”