Spirit of Iraq Also a Casualty of War, Revolt

It was just before midnight Wednesday when the mid-level Iraqi bureaucrat wandered into the fifth-floor suite at Baghdad’s Rashid Hotel, the headquarters of CBS Television’s news operation in the Iraqi capital.

His mission: To ensure that the American news crew was packing up to leave, adhering to President Saddam Hussein’s order that all Western journalists who were legally in Iraq depart Baghdad before 4 p.m. Friday.

But there was something else on the bureaucrat’s mind that night, something dark and full of pain and fear.

He opened a beer. He wanted to talk.

“Big things are going to happen here,” he replied when the crew asked him why the journalists were being ousted. “Bad things. This unrest in the country, well, something will be done about it.”

His message was clear. The revolt spreading through the extreme south and north of Iraq, in the wake of its bitter defeat in Kuwait last week, was about to be crushed by Hussein’s regime, and, along with it, much of the Iraqi spirit. It was not a thing for the outside world to see.

“You can rebuild this city, you know, with bricks,” the bureaucrat said. “Maybe it will take a couple years. But things can happen here more quickly--very quickly. It’s the difference between life and death. And it will take so many more years to rebuild our morale.”

Such were the parting words and images from inside Iraq’s war-ravaged capital, as the last of the Western world’s eyes and ears made their final trek across the Western Iraqi desert and into Jordan on Friday.

As they pulled out of Baghdad, the journalists saw no evidence of open revolt against Hussein’s regime, as several exiled Iraqi opposition leaders have boasted. But the images they did witness were somehow even bleaker. The desire to speak out was strong, they said, but the sheer fear of doing so was far stronger.

And as Baghdad again sealed itself off from the outside world, after its months-long international propaganda campaign ended on Friday, the enduring images were those of a people now trapped on the brink of total isolation and a ruthless purge by an embattled regime, all against the backdrop of the grass-roots grief and anger of defeat.

The bureaucrat was hardly alone in his pain and fear.

For most of the journalists permitted to stay in Baghdad until the bitter end, there had been a steady procession of confessions by concerned Iraqis, although strict censorship restrictions kept them from reaching the outside world.

None of the Iraqis would permit their names to be used. Yet, the very fact that they would speak at all, even in whispers, in one of the world’s most repressive police states was a clear indication of the depth of the dissent in postwar Iraq.

At the heart of it, it seemed, was not only the sense of defeat--”Throughout modern times, Iraq has never lost a war before,” many said, scratching their heads--but also one of deceit.

“We had been told one thing,” another Iraqi government worker told several journalists in Baghdad this week. “We had been told this was a victory for Iraq. Saddam said (President) Bush called for a cease-fire because our forces pushed them back. And we believed him. We celebrated.

“Now, our people are coming home,” he said. “Families of soldiers are being told it wasn’t that way at all--that, in truth, we were defeated in Kuwait.”

The result, he added, was that many Iraqis who never questioned their powerful regime before suddenly are having second thoughts.

Hussein, the Iraqi government worker speculated, would probably endure.

But as an indication of the “unofficial line” that many Iraqis are now hearing from relatives who were on the southern front, another bureaucrat, speaking in a whisper, shared with one veteran television producer this week his brother’s account of what Hussein had called “the mother of all battles” in Kuwait.

His brother had been a soldier in Iraq’s regular army when the allies’ 100-hour ground war began. He was one of the lucky ones, those who escaped both death and allied prison camps. But after dozens of days and nights under allied B-52 bombing runs, he was still too weak and shattered to move from his bed, the bureaucrat said.

“He said it was all just chaos down there,” the bureaucrat related. “Officers were deserting. Some of them were shot by internal security people. Some enlisted men were shooting officers who were deserting them. Other officers were shooting enlisted men who tried to run. He said it was anarchy, total anarchy.”

In Baghdad itself, where 42 days and nights of strategic allied bombardments left the city largely without water, power, gasoline and sewage facilities, almost every family now bears deep psychological scars.

A government official confided this week that his 13-year-old daughter has a new way to chase her pesky little brother away. “She runs up to him, makes a sound like a bomb and pretends she’s an airplane,” he said. “The 5-year-old shrieks and cries and runs and hides.”

The other day an Iraqi professional with a doctorate in linguistics found himself on the banks of the Tigris River with his wife, who has a master of science degree. They had come to fetch water for washing, he recalled. As the couple started toward home, his wife turned to him and said, “Look at us. We’re highly educated people, and here we are carrying buckets of water up from the Tigris. This is what it’s come to.”

And, in almost every case, the journalists said, the conversations ended with a desperate appeal for dollars and a clear indication that these Iraqis, at any rate, wanted to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, and at any cost.

“Many said they wanted to get out for the children. They said the kids were completely traumatized,” said one American television producer who spent several months in Baghdad. “And an enormous number of people gave us telephone numbers in Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles and other American cities, asking us to call their relatives for them when we got out. They said, ‘Tell them we’re fine, and we hope to see them soon.’ ”

It was that feeling of looming isolation that seemed to affect educated Iraqis the most deeply. “Some are just fed up with the government, but mostly they want to get out because they feel that their country is about to be completely cut off from the outside world,” the producer added. “It’s like nobody wants to be an Iraqi any more.”

But it wasn’t just in private that the Iraqi government officials were desperately seeking dollars during the journalists’ final days in Baghdad. Virtually all Western embassies in the Iraqi capital were closed more than two months ago, on the eve of the allied air war on Iraq. And the Western journalists were Iraq’s last chance to obtain foreign exchange.

During the last week or so, the price of everything shot up from day to day--usually charged in dollars, rather than the all-but-worthless Iraqi dinar. By Friday, a breakfast of juice, toast and a single egg at the Rashid coffee shop cost $200. The hotel began renting “garden space” for the television networks’ satellite phones--$1,000 a day. And, as they pulled out of the Rashid for their final journey, through the great iron gates that had locked them inside the hotel compound during their last three days in Baghdad, government security guards demanded yet another new fee--an $80 departure tax.

“Every day, they came up with a new way to soak you,” said one U.S. television correspondent. “It was nothing but sheer desperation and panic.”