A ‘Sense of Relief’ Fills the Streets of Baghdad

They had been only hours away from a devastating military bombardment, and many Iraqis awoke Sunday still wondering if the U.S. missiles and jet fighters gathering in the Persian Gulf would be unleashed against them.

But by day’s end, they had their answer. President Clinton confirmed in Washington that the United States would acknowledge the Iraqi government’s promise to resume unconditional cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors, thereby removing the immediate danger of a military attack.

Iraqis responded with broad smiles and thumbs-up signs as they heard the news Sunday night. Their leaders, predictably, were quick to portray what amounted to a 180-degree turnaround by President Saddam Hussein on the issue of U.N. weapons inspections as a moral triumph for Iraq over its American foe.

Iraq managed “to prove to the whole world that our views are correct,” Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan told state television. “This is the foundation and basis of our victory.”

“There is a sense of relief,” political scientist Wamidh Nadhimi said. “The country has avoided a military strike.”

For Nadhimi, a professor at Baghdad University, the crisis was a mixed bag for Iraq. In comparison with earlier confrontations with the West, he said, the Iraqi government was not as successful thistime in preparing support for its position among Arab states and sympathetic countries on the U.N. Security Council. The Iraqi leadership will draw a lesson from this, he added.

But he praised Hussein’s timing in defusing the crisis by rapidly responding to a letter sent Friday by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealing to him to resume cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Annan’s letter was received in Baghdad about 4 a.m. Saturday. Within 12 hours, Hussein had convened his Baath Party leadership and the Revolutionary Command Council, and an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official was on the phone to U.N. offices here, telling Annan’s special envoy, Prakash Shah, that a positive reply was on its way.

Hussein realized that there would be no further mediation and that, therefore, the U.S. would hit Iraq soon, and so he reacted with alacrity, Nadhimi said. The Iraqi leader “was very clever,” he said. “He acted as though he knew it was a race against time.”

On the streets of Baghdad, Iraqis offered different views Sunday of what they felt their leader had accomplished in his two-week standoff with the U.N.

For some, the main success was that Iraq had gained a hearing by the international community of its demand that sanctions imposed since the country’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990 be lifted soon.

For others, the achievement was simply that their president had thwarted the intention of the United States and its British ally to launch an attack, and that, at the last minute, Hussein had again driven a diplomatic wedge between Washington and countries sympathetic to Iraq, such as France, Russia and China.

Despite news reports that U.S. bombers already were in the air at the moment that Iraq’s decision to cooperate with the weapons inspectors was conveyed to the United Nations, many Iraqis maintained that they always expected their government to find a way out of the crisis.

“I was sure that the government would have taken a compromise just before the attack,” said Abdul Tigri, a money-changer, who added that the Iraqi currency, the dinar, strengthened against the dollar Saturday afternoon when news began leaking that Hussein had decided to reconcile himself to the Security Council demands.

When the compromise came, it was not accompanied by any humility on Iraq’s part. Even after the government had agreed to the return of the inspectors, government officials and state newspapers were quick to reiterate their complaints about the sanctions and their desire to confront the West.

Iraq will “continue by all means to confront the American threats and lift the siege. We are certain that complete victory will eventually be on the side of our nation’s people,” Vice President Ramadan told thousands of Iraqis gathered in a stadium for the annual pageant marking Baghdad Day, which celebrates the 1,200-year-old city’s founding.

Meanwhile, Al Thawra, the newspaper of the ruling Baath Party, exulted in Iraq’s change of course just as it had earlier enthusiastically approved of the decision to cease cooperating with the weapons inspectors.

The decision to cooperate again “pulled the carpet out from under the feet of the American administration, which has become used to distorting the facts relating to Iraq and engineering excuses to commit aggression against it,” the paper said in an editorial.

Although there was widespread relief Sunday that an attack had been averted, many people last week had seemed, outwardly at least, not to care about the possibility of an attack, saying it was all the same to them whether foreign aircraft struck or not.

“We were not scared,” a 60-year-old retiree who identified himself as Hadi said in a typical response. “We are dead already from the sanctions.”

Another man, bookseller Basel Nasr, quoted an Iraqi proverb that says: “A wet man is not afraid of the rain.” After years of economic sanctions punctuated by the occasional military strike by the United States, he explained, “we are already wet. So let it rain.”