Media : Iraqi Papers Provide Peephole Into Dissent Amid Dictatorship : Double-entendre and Orwellian doublespeak fill the front pages and pass for political discourse. Look carefully, readers . . .

On the morning millions of Americans cast ballots for their new President last week, Iraqis awoke to a torrent of Bush-bashing in the Baghdad press.

There were cartoons of a wiry George Bush falling off cliffs; headlines that declared, “Iraq Will Win the American Elections,” and extensive accounts of the most recent pronouncements of Iraq’s own President Saddam Hussein--who had vowed to outlast the American leader behind the multinational attack that drove Iraq from Kuwait last year and the crippling trade sanctions that have impoverished millions here ever since.

But then, there was also the front page of Al Iraq, a semiofficial daily run by largely pro-government members of Iraq’s Kurdish minority. It contained nary a mention of Bush or the U.S. elections.

Instead, beneath two large photos of Hussein waving to massive and adoring crowds, there was this banner headline: “This Is How the Leader of Our People Is Elected.”

It was, in the Orwellian doublespeak of Iraq’s tightly controlled society, a classic example of political double-entendre--the only safe form of even remotely critical expression in a nation where journalists have been jailed, or worse, for even the mildest of literary dissent.

“The genius of this headline is you could read it either way,” said one of the many Iraqi intellectuals who spend hours each day poring over the country’s state-run press like fortunetellers sifting through tea leaves. “It will please those who hunger for democracy here, and yet it won’t anger the regime.”

The incident provided a glimmer of another reality beneath the image of authoritarian control here. Although the Iraqi press serves largely as a vital mechanism of that control, it is also something of a peephole into the regime itself. And, between the lines, it serves as a marketplace of ideas for creative and highly skilled columnists to debate the topics of the day.

“The outside world thinks that each and every one of the newspapers and radio stations here is merely the mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein, and to a certain extent that ultimately may be true,” said the Iraqi intellectual, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But there is a whole world of debate going on in there each and every day. You just have to know how to read it.”

Clearly, much of that debate is accomplished through double-entendre, indirect satire and the kind of tight-wire act evident in Al Iraq’s headline last week.

Another illustration early this year was more profound and so subtly dramatic that it helped form the basis for continuing speculation that divisions are growing within Saddam Hussein’s own family, many of whom are key Cabinet ministers and heads of security departments.

The suspicion began when Barzan Tikriti, the president’s half-brother who serves as Iraq’s ambassador to U.N. organizations in Geneva, authored a three-part series that appeared in the Baghdad newspaper owned by Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday.

On the surface, the series seemed innocuous enough: “Some causes for the collapse of the Soviet Union.” But, to the intellectuals and analysts both within and outside Iraq who use the Iraqi media as their encoded, daily reality check on Baghdad, the series was nothing short of extraordinary.

One excerpt, for example, declared: “The most important factor that ruined this superpower from within was the establishment of the Soviet Union as an absolute dictatorship, the closed one-party system in every sense of the word. This reminds me of a proverb: One hand cannot clap.”

There was, of course, no mention of the fact that Iraq, too, is ruled under the single, unchallenged power of Saddam Hussein’s Arab Baath Socialist Party.

And there was much more. Tikriti, a trusted member of both the family and the ruling party, wrote that the Soviet Union was further destroyed by “the forms of terror and violence used across the country,” again stopping short of making any link to the widespread allegations of state terror under the Iraqi regime.

“But my God, this was, all by itself, amazing,” said one diplomat who studies the Iraqi press. “Throughout this series, all you had to do is substitute the word Iraq for the words Soviet Union , and the meaning was clear.”

But the Baghdad wags who specialize in such interpretations quickly added that Uday Hussein’s daily newspaper, Babel, which now ranks as the nation’s most widely read, has become famous for such subtle critiques.

In recent days, Babel has featured a story on a family that was wiped out when their home was machine-gunned by masked men. “Armed Assault on a Peaceful Family in the Absence of the Law!” declared the headline over a story that indicted the Baghdad police. Another recent article reported how a gunman shot and killed a police officer who was driving the gunman’s relative to court.

The explanation offered by one veteran Iraqi journalist: “There is a struggle or competition going on between the son, Uday, who owns the paper, and the uncle, Wathban Ibrahim Hussein, who is the interior minister in charge of the police.”

Veteran journalists here said similar behind-the-scenes tensions also exist at Baghdad’s three other daily newspapers: Al Jumhuriya, which is the voice of the government and bureaucracy; Al Qadissiya, the organ of the Iraqi military, and Al Thawra, the mouthpiece of the ruling Baath Party.

In fact, the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein is hardly as monolithic as it appears to most outsiders. Experts here say there is almost constant debate and power jockeying taking place beneath the veneer of a nation plastered with literally hundreds of thousands of Hussein posters, statues and portraits.

“These are the internal struggles that most Iraqis read into the papers and radio broadcasts each day--presumed plots, intrigues and conspiracies that really do help sell the papers,” the veteran Iraqi journalist concluded. “We have become conspiratorial by nature. First, the British colonial rulers played havoc with us by these plots. But, unfortunately, conspiracy theories are now the sad result of a nation where there is no free press and no freedom of speech. I’m afraid the most popular phenomenon in this country is conspiracy theorizing.”

Apart from such theorizing and tea-leaf reading, of course, the media’s central function in Iraq today--as it is in the world’s few remaining authoritarian societies--is to impart the official line. It’s a vital function in a land where a wrong word or phrase uttered even among friends can invite a visit from Iraq’s omnipresent state security agencies.

There was no clearer example than last week’s U.S. elections. Iraqis interviewed throughout Baghdad on Election Day expressed deep personal hatred for Bush, but, in keeping with the day’s editorials in all four newspapers and on Baghdad radio, all said they feared Bill Clinton would pursue the same policies as Bush against Iraq. “For us, they’re both the same,” was the typical man-in-the-street response.

The following day, when the Iraqi press rejoiced at Bush’s defeat--each giving prominent display to photographs of Hussein firing a full clip from his automatic pistol into the air in celebration--every Iraqi interviewed in public echoed the official euphoria.

But there are increasing signs that the devastating trade embargo, which inspired widespread Iraqi hatred for Bush, is taking as great a toll on the media as it is on the society as a whole. Facing critical shortages of the newsprint that carries the day’s vital messages to the masses, the government has sharply cut circulation and restricted all four newspapers to publishing just five days a week.

Yet the embargo has also revealed how popular these apparent propaganda sheets have become in a nation where so few outside publications are permitted. Within hours each morning, every paper is sold out--most for four times their official price.

And the nexus of crises has spawned a new industry on Baghdad’s streets: an army of children who line up each morning outside the printing plants to collect the day’s news, hawking the papers to supplement family incomes that now fall so far short of their needs.