Inside Hussein’s Iraq : Fear and Devotion in the Capital of Saddamism

IT WAS JUST before sunset one scorching late summer day when we stumbled on a rare slice of the real Iraq.

We were just off Al-Rashid Street in central Baghdad, but out of range of Iraq’s Information Ministry guides, who have steered hundreds of reporters through one of the world’s most highly disciplined police states since Iraq made itself ground zero in the Persian Gulf crisis. The conventional wisdom was that the real Iraq was wherever the guides were not. So on that hot September evening, Thomas and I were on an unescorted “reality hunt” through some of the narrow, dilapidated lanes in the bowels of Baghdad.

Thomas, a young student from Germany, knew Baghdad inside and out--in fact, far better than he had hoped to when he crossed the Syrian border into Iraq in a crowded bus on July 29 as a backpacking student of Islam and the Arabic language. Four days after Thomas arrived, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. A few days later, the United States rushed its troops, ships and planes to the gulf, the world isolated Iraq, which promptly sealed its borders, and 22-year-old Thomas suddenly found himself a prisoner in his laboratory, part of Hussein’s human insurance policy against the prospect of oblivion.

But unlike most of the other foreigners detained in Iraq, who have been free to go anywhere except through the immigration booth at Saddam International Airport, Thomas had not been idle. He was biding his time by doing exactly what he came to do--study Iraq, speak its language and try to understand. He was a genuine guide.

And so it was that Thomas and I found ourselves on Al-Rashid Street in his favorite bookshop, a tiny cubicle of a place run by one of Thomas’ many friends. It was surprising, at first, to find so many books on the shelves. During another reality hunt a few weeks before, at another bookstore, even the shop owner nervously joined in our laughter when we discovered that his House of Wisdom Book Store in fact had not a single volume in stock. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where censorship is written into the constitution as an inalienable right of the state, such apparent contradictions are common.

But the shop owned by Thomas’ friend was packed floor to ceiling with books and pamphlets--Arabic-language textbooks, science, math and English texts and propaganda treatises issued by Hussein’s all-powerful Arab Baath Socialist Party. One shelf was filled with dogeared and yellowing English-language romance novels, but they had little to do with reality even in the West. In the center of them all, one clue to the real Iraq stood out.

The title was in Arabic, but there was no mistaking the large, black-and-white photograph on the cover. It was Adolf Hitler--and the book was “Mein Kampf.”

“Why are you surprised?” the bookshop owner asked with genuine confusion when he noticed my stunned expression. He had been talking with Thomas about a town he’d once visited in Germany.

“Well,” I said, “it’s only because George Bush, Margaret Thatcher and almost every other Western leader have been making such a big deal out of comparing your president to Adolf Hitler--you know, the guy who gasses his own people and tries to take over the world?”

The shop owner smiled knowingly. He walked over to the shelf, removed the book with Hitler’s photograph almost reverently and placed it on the counter.

“You Americans will never understand us,” he said softly. “ ‘Mein Kampf ‘ is one of my biggest sellers. It’s a brilliant work by a powerful man. Hitler was a strong man, and we Iraqis admire strength. He fought to rid the world of the Jews, and, as you know, we are still at war with Israel. But Hitler also had a vision for the future, and he followed that vision straight through his life. Hitler was a great man.”

Thomas and I listened in amazement. The shop owner paused, regarding our blank expressions. “You in the West just don’t get it. Here in Iraq, we like Hitler. Hitler sells.”

PENETRATING SADDAM Hussein’s Iraq is like breaking into a maximum-security prison. Brief moments like those in the bookshop offer an outsider the hope that, with enough real Iraqis voicing enough real thoughts, an accurate mosaic of the real Iraq might emerge. But such moments are rare.

Since taking power 11 years ago, the Iraqi leader has methodically constructed a monolithic order so relentlessly efficient in its promotion of strength, discipline and the cult of Saddamism that even Adolf Hitler would have admired it. Even before he engineered sole control of the presidency in 1979, Hussein, as second in command, laid the foundations for a three-tiered security apparatus that has been largely responsible for keeping him not only in power but alive.

There are the Amn, the civilian state security bureau trained by the Soviet KGB; the Estikhbarat, the military intelligence wing that protects Iraqis and their interests abroad, and the Mukhabarat, the dreaded Baath intelligence network that is so autonomous it even spies on the other two. The Mukhabarat’s vast web is believed to include at least one agent on every block of every street in every city, town and village of Iraq. For Iraqis, a wrong thought voiced at the wrong moment means certain imprisonment--or death.

But aside from institutionalized mortal fear, there’s another, more complex, facet to this self-professed assassin’s hold on his 17 million people. And to understand that is to appreciate the fundamental contradictions in Iraq’s history.

Even the nation’s name defies logic. Iraq is Arabic for “the well-rooted country.” The name was given in the 7th Century to a place in roughly the spot Iraq now occupies. It was fairly accurate at the time. It was meant to honor the land known as Mesopotamia, home to the first known human civilization. But Iraq didn’t refer to an actual country until 1932, when the British washed their hands of it, leaving behind a friendly monarchy and borders drawn deliberately to keep Iraq weak by denying it direct access to the sea. That was merely the final act in a centuries-long drama of war and conquest that saw the land invaded, splintered, annexed, spliced, splintered again and finally respliced in the 20th Century.

After the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, Iraq was wracked by revolution after revolution, the last of which was a bloodless coup staged by the Baath Party in 1968. Once in power, Hussein liberated the Iraqis from their humiliating past. Spurred initially by a strong sense of Iraqi nationalism--his own and his countrymen’s--he later capitalized on that pride to perpetuate his rule. But at what price? ask those familiar with the brutalities of Iraqi life.

“These are people in a mental straitjacket,” observed one diplomat who speaks Arabic and has lived in Baghdad for more than a year but who, like many Western diplomats here, remains deeply frustrated by the Iraqis’ unwillingness to so much as invite him into their homes, let alone speak their innermost thoughts. “There’s only one brain in this country, and he thinks for everybody. But he’s only 36% human,” the diplomat added, “so what has developed here is a truly self-policing society. Despite the obvious police state, people aren’t really afraid of the knock on the door anymore because they know they’ve done nothing wrong. They’ve been totally conditioned. They haven’t even allowed themselves the luxury of thinking wrong.”

Iraqis are taught what to think, what to say and how to behave. And that process starts very early.

“DOWN, DOWN, BOOSH! Down, down, Boosh!” a little voice was shouting from somewhere deep within the crowd of well-dressed women and children protesting outside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’s affluent Al-Mansour neighborhood.

When it fell silent, another started up: “No for war! No for war!” And then another: “We love Saddam! We love Saddam!”

Several American television crews pushed through the sea of placards, searching for the source of the voices. Finally, a helpful Information Ministry guide produced one of them, sorting through a thicket of legs and pulling out a dark-haired boy, scrawny but well-groomed.

“His name is Naja,” the guide explained. “He’s 9, maybe 8, years old. And he speaks English. He is a very bright boy. Ask him a question. Ask him anything.”

“Why are you here?” someone asked the smiling boy as the cameras rolled.

“To tell Boosh we don’t want war.”

“Why don’t you want war?” the guide asked voluntarily.

“Because we want peace.”

“Who brought you here today?” a television reporter asked.

“My mother.”

“Why?”

“To tell Boosh all Iraqis want peace. To tell Boosh we want food and medicine. To tell Boosh we love Saddam Hussein.”

“Do you know who Boosh is?” another reporter asked.

Suddenly young Naja appeared to be stumped. He looked up blankly at the Information Ministry guide, who smiled sheepishly at the journalists and then turned sternly back to the boy, whispering in Arabic, “Boosh is president of America. Tell them.”

With renewed confidence, Naja almost bellowed, “Boosh is president of America. He takes away our milk. He takes away our medicine. No for war! No for war!”

The demonstration was an orchestrated event, listed that morning as “Iraqi Children Protest at U. S. Embassy” on the marquee beside the Information Ministry’s permanent desk in the lobby of the Ishtar Sheraton. The Sheraton is one of several luxury hotels that have been home to foreign journalists who, as the number of foreign diplomats dwindles, have served as the world’s eyes and ears inside Iraq since the gulf crisis erupted. That evening, virtually every international television network covering the morning protest included footage of the event in its gulf roundup.

“Do you really hate America?” a few of us asked one of the protesting mothers during one of the rare, brief moments when the guides were out of earshot.

“America? America good. Very good,” she said, as her children shouted anti-American slogans. “We like America. Just Boosh. Boosh no good.”

THE GOOD BAATHIST runs quickly and well through a mine field; your weapon against the mines is your education,” Hussein once told his comrades at a party meeting. “You will be able to defuse the bombs if you are equipped with the principles of your party and with education.”

Since taking power, Hussein’s ministries of education and information have rewritten most textbooks to reflect not only the Baath Party’s ideological underpinnings but also Hussein’s own vision: The map is wrong, borders do not exist, the Arab nations should be one country with one leader. The clear implication is that Hussein would take charge.

On the first day of school this year--two months after the mid-summer conquest of Kuwait--children in every geography class in every city, village and town of Iraq found themselves drawing new maps of their nation that included a province once known as the nation of Kuwait. In history class, too, the lessons were changed. The new party line went like this: Kuwait is and always had been a part of Iraq. There never really was a country called Kuwait.

Outside Baghdad’s largest mosque one Friday as the imam bellowed the holy day’s sermon through the minaret’s loudspeakers, a friend and I came across a young soft-drink vendor in a ragged T-shirt. His stock included cans of Coca-Cola marked “Made in Kuwait” and priced in Kuwaiti currency, plundered goods that, along with food smuggled from Turkey and Iran, have helped Iraq so far withstand the United Nations embargo imposed in August.

The boy looked deeply puzzled when we asked, “Wasn’t this part of all the stuff that Iraq looted from Kuwait?”

“Looted?” the boy asked, nonplussed. “We own Kuwait. Kuwait is a part of Iraq. This is Iraqi Coke.”

But while rewriting the history and geography of the world illustrates the broad reach of Hussein’s indoctrination, it also highlights Iraq’s deep-seated isolation.

Young Naja, for instance, knew the right word to use for the American president. Boosh ,as Iraqi government newscasters deliberately pronounce President Bush’s name hundreds of times a day in radio and television broadcasts, is actually the Arabic word for “nothing” or, in its more derogatory meaning on Baghdad streets, “an empty hole.” But clearly, Naja didn’t associate the name with the American President himself. When later asked to name the U. S. President, Naja again shrugged his shoulders and looked around for the Information Ministry guide.

It was a telling moment, according to the diplomats remaining in town. “Sounds to me like that boy and Saddam Hussein have a lot in common,” one said when he heard about Naja. “I’m sure Saddam knows George Bush’s name, but he probably doesn’t know a whole lot more about him that that. And this is the crux of the whole problem.

“Iraq has become so isolated under Saddam Hussein that the Iraqi people no longer have a real understanding of what the outside world is all about. And that applies to Saddam Hussein, as well--especially to him.”

THE SCREEN ON the large television set inside the U. S. Embassy went blank for a moment, then the familiar logo appeared at the top of the picture: “Guest News,” it declared. Quickly, the handful of embassy diplomats and the six U. S. Marines who still remained in Baghdad gathered around to watch.

Since the gulf crisis began, “Guest News” has been a nightly feature on state-run Iraqi Television. Officials in the Information Ministry describe it as a humanitarian show that gives Saddam Hussein’s “special guests”--the hostages held under strict military guard at strategic targets throughout the country--an opportunity to send video messages to family and friends in the outside world. But this night was different. Tonight, Hussein was the star of the show.

Dressed in a fine gray suit and tie, the Iraqi president appeared in a modern, cavernous conference room ringed by about two dozen hostages from the United States, Britain and France--the people he believes are guarding his nation against a U. S. air strike. It was Hussein’s second “Rocky Horror Hostage Show,” as one person in the U. S. Embassy’s TV room dubbed it. Two weeks before, during a worldwide broadcast, he had ignited an international furor by hugging and patting on the head a young British boy named Stuart Lockwood. And here was Hussein again, patting young girls on the cheek and running his hands through their hair.

“Ugh! Christ Almighty!” shouted one of the Marines watching that night as he fell to the floor, sprawled flat on his back with his arms outstretched toward the sky. “C’mon, you guys. Here it is. Ground zero. Drop the nuke on my coordinates.”

Hussein went on with his 90-minute show, devoting an hour to a speech that included what aides later said the Iraqi president considered to be a heartfelt apology to the hostages.

“From a human point of view, I am in as much pain as you are,” he told them in Arabic. “Let me say how painful for me it is to see a situation come about that has put you where you are now. I wish that your stay in a manner of forced hospitality, let us say, will not be long.” (Access to the strategic sites was prohibited, however, so no one knew then how detainees were being treated. It was only after some French hostages were freed in October that harsh conditions--some Americans were said to be near the breaking point--were reported.)

Then, an extraordinary thing happened. Hussein admitted how little he understood about his “guests”--and their politicians and nations. He announced that he was utterly confounded by the outrage in the West after his previous hostage show.

“I read that they were annoyed with me,” Hussein said. “I don’t see why they should be annoyed.” And then, he added his own interpretation of that “annoyance”--a classic illustration of how Hussein’s personal alienation from the West has layered misunderstanding upon misunderstanding in the last 3 1/2 months. “It seems to me these officials were annoyed with my meeting with the British people because they don’t want the facts to be told, except through them and on their own channels. . . .”

Soon after, the Marines announced with a string of unprintable curses that they wanted to switch Hussein’s channel off, then left to have a few beers.

SADDAM-WATCHING, as it has been called by some in Iraq, was the favorite and most perplexing pursuit of the diplomatic corps in Baghdad. Critical clues in the reality hunt, the diplomats’ perceptions have helped to form not only U. S. policy in the gulf crisis but also the images of Iraq appearing in the tens of thousands of column inches of newspaper reports that have been published and the hundreds of hours of American television coverage that have aired since Aug. 2. Where the diplomats--a mixed bag of Arabists and career bureaucrats from virtually every nation of the world--were free to speculate, the Iraqis were afraid to think.

But in the diplomats’ necessarily prismatic view, there was only one facet of Hussein’s character on which all of them seemed to agree. It is that this strong-willed, ironfisted man, who has stamped his own image on an entire nation in just over a decade, has gleaned virtually all of his knowledge of the Western world from books and advisers. With the exception of a single trip to France years ago, Hussein, 53, is believed to have never set foot outside the Arab world.

“He never really visited the West, and, you know, Hitler, too, never visited the outside world,” a German diplomat said. “With Saddam, it’s the same as Ceaucescu or Hitler. No one is telling him the real information.” Which, he added, relates directly to Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

“I believe Saddam miscalculated the whole thing because his picture of the world is a little bit different from reality,” the diplomat continued. “Before the invasion, he got the information filtered. And so, since he had no frame of reference of his own on how the West would react, he went ahead with it. It was a mistake, and I think he realizes it was a mistake.”

“Well, I think he’s brilliant,” said another diplomat in another embassy. “He’s a brilliant strategist--very good at keeping his opponents off guard. As much as he is in a corner, he has placed the rest of the world in a corner as well.”

But then, that same diplomat quickly caught himself. He was born and raised in a democratic Western nation where men like Hitler and Hussein don’t play too well. “Look, I would hate to say anything good about Saddam. He’s a vicious man. He’s frighteningly brutal. He would happily sacrifice half his people to take on the rest of the world. He has gassed his own people. He has sent everybody’s sons to war.

“It’s just that when you live here long enough, you begin to understand and appreciate not only the perspective of Saddam but of the millions of people who still do support him here. People should not distinguish too much between the way Saddam Hussein does things and the way the Iraqis do things. There simply isn’t that much difference.”

“BASTARD!” SCREAMED my taxi driver after a battered, white-and-yellow taxi cut him off in heavy traffic. “Do it again and I’ll tear your heart out!” he shouted out the window as we sped down a palm-lined boulevard, dodging the potholes that have multiplied as sanctions have begun to wear down Baghdad’s once-efficient infrastructure.

Two blocks later, the same taxi driver deliberately swerved into our path.

“One more time, and I’ll smash your bones to dust!” my driver yelled, this time with so much force that I thought he would crush the steering wheel instead.

The other taxi driver flipped his hand at us as if he was swatting a fly, and, sure enough, a few minutes later, he cut us off again. My driver had been nothing but sweet and soft-spoken all day, but now his kindly face twisted into something that resembled a rubber Halloween mask. His fingers gripped the wheel like metal vises, and he pushed his right foot to the floor with his entire body behind it. The car lurched forward. We careened down the road, and my driver didn’t stop until we sideswiped the taxi, forcing it onto the sidewalk and into a telephone pole.

In an instant, the madness drained from my driver’s face. Then he leaned out the window in the direction of the other driver, who was busy looking for his door, and said, “Sorry, but I warned you.”

This incident, similar to accidents that occur frequently on the crowded thoroughfares of Baghdad, provided an almost too-perfect metaphor. A few days afterward, I found myself chatting with the same diplomat who had called Hussein brilliant. “It’s like I said,” he told me this time. “The Iraqi style is they warn you, they warn you again, they might even warn you again, and then they hit you--hard.”

Another diplomat shared the same perspective of Kuwait-invasion-as-traffic-accident: “The last thing you want to do in this situation is what that taxi driver did. Don’t provoke, and don’t push Saddam into a corner. The worst kind of situation is the one that exists here today--where no one’s willing to talk to Saddam. Push him too far, and he’s the kind of guy who’ll opt for driving you off the road. And, in this case, I’m afraid that’s Armageddon.”

On the surface, it may seem that these particular diplomats had been in Baghdad too long. But their theory was validated by the Iraqis themselves.

NAJI AL-HADITHI’S spacious corner office on the eighth floor of Iraq’s Ministry of Information and Culture is an oasis of Western sophistication in the heart of Baghdad--at least on the surface. There are photocopiers, a fax machine, half a dozen telephones, an intercom system, a wide-screen television set and well-equipped kitchen for the many late nights that Iraq’s director general of information and culture has spent here.

The office has served as Al-Hadithi’s command post since early August, when fears of all-out war gave way to a military stalemate in which image and information were the only effective weapons. Al-Hadithi, who was Iraq’s senior press attache in London during the mid-’70s and who edits the Baghdad Observer, Iraq’s only English-language newspaper, had all the makings of a brilliant field general for this battle. He was among the few senior Iraqi officials with an intimate understanding of the Western media, and he was fiercely loyal to the Iraqi leader.

Once inside Al-Hadithi’s office, the superficial trappings of the West melt away into a strange and separate reality. It begins with small details, such as the paperweight beside the imported TV. It was one of those glass bubbles similar to the ones with snow that swirls when you shake them. But inside Al-Hadithi’s paperweight, there was only reddish sand, with a small Iraqi flag planted in the center. The inscription read, “The earth of Al Faw mixed with the blood of Iraqi martyrs”--a commemoration of the battles for the strategic Iraqi city in which at least 52,000 Iraqis and as many as 100,000 Iranians died during the 1980-1988 war with Iran.

“We have to tell the world that we are powerful and that we can destroy all the allied forces that are here,” Al-Hadithi explained. “This should be made clear to everybody to give people second thoughts about attacking Iraq. They have a goal. Their goal is to end something called Iraq. And we have a goal--to survive.”

With his genteel style and American idioms, Al-Hadithi has the uncanny ability to describe the Iraqi position in a way Westerners can understand. “You have to look at Iraq in 1968 to understand all this,” Al-Hadithi said, explaining the invasion and Iraq’s Orwellian overtones. “Until the (Baathist) revolution that year, there had been a serious contradiction in this country--a rich country with a great potential for oil, a great potential for agriculture, a great potential for development. But, with all this, in 1968, if you tell somebody you are from Iraq, they think only of Iran. You say Iraq, he knows only something about the Arabian Nights. You say Baghdad, and he thinks only of feature films.

“The country was in a lousy state. It was ruled by foreign embassies with spies everywhere. And the Iraqis had no place on the map. Saddam Hussein was able to shift Iraq from that state of backwardness to the state it is in now, where George Bush can say Iraq has the fourth-largest military in the world. Saddam Hussein aroused the pride in every Iraqi who was humiliated.”

Asked at one point during the crisis whether the Iraqis were concerned about the prospect of war, Al-Hadithi made a subtle but, he said, crucial distinction between the words worry and fear.

“The most powerful man in the world doesn’t want to be hurt or killed,” he explained. “He has to be worried so that he prepares himself to defeat you. We have to be worried, of course. The only one who is not worried about war is the one who is not interested in life. But are we afraid of war? No. After eight years, we know what is war. Unlike the Americans, you see, sacrifice is a way of life in Iraq.”

That resilience in a nation already drained by war may explain why sanctions have not been as effective as the United States had hoped. Foreign trade has all but ceased, and Hussein’s modern state has shown signs of crumbling, with power outages and shortages of industrial goods. However, most food staples have remained plentiful, thanks to rationing and supplies from Kuwait. And a popular uprising is unlikely, no matter how dire things get.

Most Iraqis seem happy to blame Kuwait for their misery. In their view, the gravity wells the Kuwaitis used to pump oil out of the Rumaila field, which straddles the Iraqi border, were stealing millions of barrels of Iraq’s only marketable resource. The Kuwaitis, Iraqis insisted, were deliberately glutting the world’s oil market to keep gasoline prices down in the West.

Furthermore, Iraqis considered Kuwait’s emir and his ruling Al-Sabah family corrupt, arrogant spendthrifts who deserted their tiny, 27-year-old gulf state every summer to gamble in Monte Carlo or loll on the French Riviera.

“Who cares about the Sabah family?” remarked a smiling, almost gleeful, Hicham Abdul Alim, a pharmacist approached at random in a Baghdad market. “These are people gone with the wind.”

FOR DECADES,a bronze statue of an anonymous Arab warrior on horseback stood in the Square of the Arab Knight, near the center of Baghdad. Soon after the invasion of Kuwait, however, government workmen removed the monument. A few days later, they erected a new, 3 1/2-story-high bronze likeness of Saddam Hussein, his right arm outstretched toward Saudi Arabia, Iraq’s newest enemy and temporary home of the U. S. troops massed in the desert.

There are thousands of Stalinesque statues and posters of Hussein in Baghdad, but none as large as the Arab Knight. And, in the days that followed the statue’s installation, Hussein’s party agents supposedly went throughout the city, looking for cafes, shops or hotels that bore the common Arabic name, “The Arab Knight.” When they found one, they ordered the owner to remove his sign and change the name, adding simply, “There is now only one Arab Knight in Iraq.”

Near the square one evening, I approached an elderly date seller as he made his way home. He seemed fearful at first, but when asked his opinion of the new statuary, he relaxed a bit.

“It’s good, very good,” he said with a largely toothless grin. “It shows the world how big we Iraqis are now.”

Reminded that the statue is not of just any Iraqi, but of their one and only ruler, the old man seemed offended.

“He is our president, that is true,” the date seller said, turning toward the statue. “But he is an Iraqi, too. And look how tall and how strong he is. This makes us very happy because Saddam’s strength is our strength. And never before have we Iraqis been as strong as we are now. Look, even you Americans are afraid of us now.”