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Five Days in Iraq - Before the War
Saul Landau
Radio Progreso Weekly 3 October 2002
We share the one-hour Gulf Falcon Air 747 flight from Damascus to Baghdad with dozens of Iranian women pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Karbala, who used knife sharpened elbows to get first in line through Syrian immigration and then onto the plane. "Saddam Hussein would be better off using them than weapons of mass destruction", said New Yorker writer Milton Viorst, a member of our delegation.
The Mission to Baghdad is led by Congressman Nick Rahall Democrat from West Virginia and former Senator James Abourezk from South Dakota , both of Lebanese descent. They intend to try to convince Iraqi leaders to readmit UN weapons inspectors and thus expose President Bush’s flimsy pretext to make war. This is a reasonable and logical political step, albeit it may prove unrealistic given President W’s Groucho Marx-like but very unfunny intention to make war.
Part of me wants to see Saddam pay for killing Iraqi friends I made in college. Part of me wants him to pay for his cruelty to all his opponents, especially to the Kurds, a people he has relentlessly persecuted. Another part of me hates the idea of US planes firing missiles at urban targets. Part of me is also a little frightened. Will there be armed cops and soldiers everywhere? Will Iraq be in full war mobilization?
As we arrive at the Baghdad airport and get ushered to the VIP lounge past the scowling Iranian pilgrims, I don’t see a single armed cop in the airport. The Iraqi officials eagerly inform us that they have arranged for us to inspect supposed sites of weapons of mass destruction. Abourezk tactfully assures our handlers that we wouldn’t know a soap-making factory from an anthrax production plant. So, we avoided that pitfall. The Iraqi handlers look pained. I feel little sympathy for them.
I rely on Scott Ritter, a former Marine Corps officer and also a Republican. He belonged to UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission, created in 1991 to inspect Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. Ritter, who looked all over Iraq, claims that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and was "qualitatively disarmed" when the team left in 1998 under orders from Clinton, not from the UN, just days before Monica’s then boyfriend renewed bombing raids during Operation Desert Fox. On the late night ride into Baghdad from the airport, temperature around 90, but pleasant enough in the air-conditioned Mercedes Benz, I see no indication of war preparations. Our handlers, Wadah a forty-year old Foreign Ministry official and his younger and beefier assistant Mustafah behave politely. I wonder if they’ll continue to wear suits and ties when the needle rises above one hundred as the newspaper predicts for the rest of the week. Or, is it that their uniform, the equivalent of the badge that tells people on the street that they are government officials? The chauffeurs all look like body guards, squat, tough-looking men in their early forties who have the hard-calloused hands of karate fighters. I note as they stash my suitcase in the trunk of the car driven by Mohamed our driver and of Abdul Amir’s car, which will take Abourezk, there are the barrels of AK-47s sticking out from small rugs meant to cover them
As we see in the street and in the souk (market), Iraq is a Third World country, hardly a clear and present danger to the United States . It’s military prowess, greatly exaggerated by Bush the First, has fallen to less than a fifth of what it was during the gulf war. Iraq has no navy and a very small air force. Bush has yet to explain how Iraq could pose a threat to US national security- even in his September 12 UN speech to the General Assembly. Well, we all know Saddam is evil and therefore, I suppose, capable of anything and besides "I don’t got to show you no stinkin’ facts".
At 2 a.m. , I involuntarily step on George Bush’s face as I enter the Al Rasheed Hotel. Some mosaic tile designer has inlaid A1’s portrait on the floor of the hotel entrance. "George Bush War Criminal", it says underneath.
Welcome, the smiling doorman says. The bellhops who carried my bag a few feet demand tips. I offered a dollar for the guy. One of them snarls nastily. I gave him five more. I go downstairs to the cafeteria. Welcome, says the manager, welcome, says the waiter. I’m really suspicious when I go the men’s room and get a huge, grinning "welcome" from the attendant there. He doesn’t follow me to the latrine. If I tip at the rate I started, I’ll be broke before we leave. We finish snacking at 4:00 a.m. I’m too exited to sleep. I look at Baghdad by night and wonder if this could have been the room where CNN’s Peter Arnett stood while he described US bombing and missile attacks. Only street lights twinkle; no flashes against the black sky. I now understand that those flashing lights, bombs and missiles hitting targets that CNN transmitted to the world, were equivalents of jumbo jets hitting buildings, some of which had people inside. I try to put myself into the position of a Baghdad resident who had to withstand the explosive and incendiary power of thousands of tons of bombs over a prolonged period of time. My admiration for them rises. I wonder if I could take it – a pounding worse than the V2 rockets gave to London.
At 9, the late middle aged Minister of Health Dr. Omid Medhat Mubarak, a former cardiologist, clad in his spinach green government uniform, tells us how the UN sanctions interfere with the integrity of the Iraqi health system. "It’s not the UN", he says, "it’s the American and British delegates overseeing the oil for food program who veto our medical purchases". He explains with a grim, mildly depressed look on his middle-aged face how by refusing one part of the cocktail of chemotherapy drugs you nullify the whole treatment and by omitting one part of a surgical hookup you invalidate the whole procedure. "It destroys the integrity of our health care system", he concluded.
As if to prove his point, we’re whisked to a nearby pediatric hospital where we see small children suffering from leukemia and other cancers. I see Abourezk trying to cover a tear as he observes blood oozing from the mouth of a frightened and whimpering five-year old Kurdish girl from the North. She clung to her mother. According to the doctor, they lived too close to fragments of a bomb dropped by the US air force made of depleted uranium. Because of the UN sanctions, Iraq could not buy medication to treat her. At least that’s what the pediatrician told us.
"My daughter’s about that age", Abourezk says. I recall that former Secretary of State Madeline Albright when asked in a May 11, 1996 interview with 60 minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl whether the over 500,000 Iraqi children killed by the sanctions was worth it, Albright said, "It’s a hard choice, but I think, we, think, it’s worth the price". I never understood exactly what price Ms. Albright had to pay.
The children’s mothers, however, have paid dearly. They sit on the sides of the beds, fanning and comforting their cancer-ridden offspring. They implore us to help them get medicine. We stare. With IVs stuck in their toothpick like arms, the emaciated kids cry or whine softly. After seeing six of them, the nausea hits me – and I worked for years in a hospital.
What blame do Saddam and company carry for the plight of these kids? He invaded Kuwait and they pay the price exacted by US power. I bet Saddam and the Iraqi leaders don’t go without medicine or surgical procedures if he needs them. The victims in the pediatric hospital are poor. So, what’s new?
The doctors drone on as did the Health Minister about the thousands of bombs the American planes dropped during the war and afterwards in the no-fly zones, areas arbitrarily created by the US and U.K. The Pentagon claims that Iraq fires anti-aircraft at the US bombers flying over Iraqi territory. Therefore, the US must retaliate with missiles or bombs. Later, kids play near those targeted areas.
The worried mothers dressed in black, except for a Kurdish woman in a long grey dress, plead with us for help - medicine. Congressman Rahall, like Abourezk, shows emotion on his face. According to Tun Myat, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, and Sanjiv Kumar, UNICEF Project Officer for Health and Nutrition, the under age 5 mortality rate in Iraq has increased from 56 per 1,000 in 1985-89 to 131 per 1,000 during 1995-99. The two UN officials also report that one in every eight Iraqi children dies before his or her first birthday, sixty percent of mothers are anemic and one child in three suffers from chronic malnutrition. The sanctions have worked – but for what end?
It’s over 100 degrees outside as our Mercedes limousines push their way through chaotic Baghdad auto and bus traffic. Exhaust fumes pour out and mix into the dusty heat. We visit a turbulent souk, in which peddlers and hawkers offer local crafts, canned and fresh – well, sort of -food, plastic toys, electronic gadgets, CDs, video cassettes of X-rated movies and regular Hollywood fare. The women wear the traditional long black dresses, with the black shawl covering their heads, not their faces. A few wear only the hijab and occasionally I spy a woman wearing western garb. About half the men sport the dishdashas, the long white robe, with or without the kefiya on their heads.
They push their wares in our faces, at very low prices, the result of the Iraqi middle class having to sell their personal and household belongings in order to buy food in the years following the Gulf War. Harold, a member of the group, stops at a rug merchant and begins the bargaining process in English. I ask him how he feels about the war. The rug peddler smiles. "Why you want war? What good is from war? We have plenty of war. We know bombs. We know destruction. What we do to you?" Harold nods approval and the rug merchant immediately resumes his sales pitch. He makes a sale.
Other people in the area grow curious, crowd around us. Our nervous handlers, push them away, usually kids and teenagers whom they feel might be threatening and finally say "enough" and herd us back into the Mercedes.
We’re set to see Tariq next, the English speaking Deputy Prime Minister, former Foreign Minister. Slightly built, with neatly combed gray hair and a trimmed mustache, he looks out at us through thick eyeglasses. Rahall and Abourezk held a private meeting with him while the rest of the delegation stared at Saddam Hussein portraits in the waiting area. In three hours, I’d already counted eight different Saddam poses. I asked our foreign ministry guide how many there were. He glared at me scornfully. I said I liked the one of Saddam in the black derby holding a rifle in the air. He snorted. By the end of the trip I had stopped counting.
It becomes clear very quickly that this secular dictatorship has nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism. You don’t need Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA's counterterrorism office, to assure you that Iraq has no links to Al-Qaeda. To rev up the war engines, the White House had been desperately pushing a bogus Prague meeting between September 11 villain Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer. One of our foreign ministry guides assures me with murderous intensity that an Al-Qaeda operative in Baghdad wouldn’t last five minutes. Bin Laden, I’m reminded by our guide, offered to mobilize 100,000 fundamentalists to resist the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait so the Americans wouldn’t have to come in. Unlike Saudi Arabia , Iraq has no religious police. The more myths dispelled about Iraq , the better, I think. I’ve seen women with pony tails in tight slacks walking next to those in long black robes.
Deputy Prime Minister and a Christian to boot, Tariq Aziz emerged from his office with Rahall and Abourezk, and then held forth at length in a large conference room as Rahall pressed the case for readmitting the inspectors. Aziz described them as spies, a conclusion backed by Scott Ritter. "And we didn’t kick them out", he reminded us. They left "voluntarily under Clinton ’s orders" two days before Clinton bombed us in 1998.
Aziz, a man who appears to be in his early seventies, clad in his pressed sea green uniform, sighed. Bush’s UN speech threatened war even if the inspectors are admitted, he said, locking his fingers over his tiny paunch. " America ", he said softly, "is a threat to world peace. If Bush wants to change the regime in Iraq he must come into Iraq city by city and occupy each one. Everyone endangered by the invasion will fight".
Abourezk interrupted to try to clarify Iraq ’s position on accepting the inspectors.
"We’re doomed if we do let them in", Aziz said, wringing his hands, "and doomed if we don’t". He shook his head. We shook our heads. This avuncular looking Christian high in the Cabinet of a Muslim country exudes a kind of frustrated fatalism. " If you don’t have guarantees that Bush won’t invade why expose ourselves to foreign inspectors? They’ll inspect military barracks, tanks, aircraft, artillery. Why let them in if we’re going to be attacked anyway".
Aziz belongs to the fraternity of Ba’ath Party members who created the nationalist regime that overthrew the Revolutionary Command Council led by President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr on July 16, 1979 . Saddam, with his Ba’athist Muslim and Christian comrades, has ruled since then as the President and chief ideologue of Ba’thism, a kind of mélange of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist doctrine. Similar to nationalist movements throughout the third world, the Ba’athists stressed true Arab independence from all forms of colonialism. But most of the nationalism of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, epitomized by Egypt ’s Gamel Abdul Nasser and Tanzania ’s Julius Nyerere, has disappeared. Indeed, Saddam’s Iraq represents that last disobedient obstacle to US domination of the Middle East . I wonder if that’s how the Iraqi people perceive Saddam? He may be a tough, cruel bully, but do Iraqis see him as a protector from the American bully?
In addition to his own palaces, he has led his people to build a modern country, with a solid infrastructure – until the United States et al bombed much of it into stone and sand. In the ensuing twelve years since the Gulf War when US missiles and bombs destroyed Iraq ’s infrastructure, the regime has rebuilt the highways and hospitals, the water and sewage treatment plants and pushed the economy into forward motion. And now, says Aziz, we who have done nothing to provoke or threaten the United States are about to be attacked again.
"Why?" The question echoes from the lips of every street person we ask. "Why you want war?" asks a rug merchant. "Peace", he screams into our camera.
As soon as people discern that we’re Americans, they use their poor English to plead, beg, demand, exhort us to not bomb them again – as if a small US delegation had any more control over our government than they have over theirs.
That night we meet "intellectuals", a group of English speaking men and women who discuss with us "the situation". Rahall and Abourezk stoically endure an anti-Zionist rant from a former Iraqi diplomat, a retired general, an English lit teacher and several other party-liners. The Zionist lobby runs America and the entire anti-Iraq scheme was cooked up in Israel . I wonder if the "blame Zionism for everything" explanation comes from decades of propaganda or is it just that Iraqi intellectuals cannot conceive that the United States truly intends to enjoy "full spectral dominance", the words from the White House.
On Monday, September 16, we wander into the Sixth Iraq Solidarity Conference. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the neo-fascist and anti-Semitic Russian presidential candidate reiterates the Zionist-plot charge. "Oil, oil and control by Israel lobby", he shouts at me.
Later, we visit a bomb shelter that took two smart bomb hits in the 1991 Gulf War. The government has converted the former shelter into a museum. Twelve years ago, our intelligent weapons transformed 408 women and children from flesh into ashes. The guide, Intesar, a beautiful and bitter neighborhood woman in her mid thirties, whose head is covered by a hijab, states that "the Pentagon discovered its mistake and four days after killing the people huddled in the shelter it said sorry. Too late".
Inside, the photos of many of the deceased line the walls. Wires and bent iron rods that once reinforced the concrete dangle from the ceiling. "This, Intesar says, "is what war does". She points to what looks like the outline of a woman etched into the wall. The bomb literally burned her into the side of the shelter so that her image, with her clothes remains embedded there.
That night I had a nightmare that I had agreed to help kill my daughter. At first, I watched as some men manipulated a machine to deprive her of breath and then I actually participated in cutting off her oxygen supply. She stared at me in disbelief that I could be an accomplice to her murder. That ended my short sleep for the night.
The next day, as I still shook from both the nightmare and the appalling scene of the bombed shelter that I felt had produced it, we begin our feast of mosques. We had already seen Al Kadhimain, an enormous gold painted structure in south Baghdad . Men and women enter this mosque like they do a subway station, only they kiss the door before entering or utter a brief payer. Inside, whole families eat lunch or take naps, "feeling their spiritual roots", the Imam tells us. Thousands of people enter and leave or remain inside. I counted. Outside the mosque on the busy street I see fast food places but no McDonald’s or KFC as they apparently have built in the Holy City of Mecca in Saudi Arabia .
Across the street, a dark souk lures me. Just outside a woman extends her hand, begging. Her face seems to have the pose used by Edward Munch in The Scream. Other women, some with children clinging to their black robes, also beg without saying anything. A woman of about thirty frantically digs through a pile of garbage, swatting at the flies that compete with her for the goodies in the pile. Another woman pulls rags and pieces of plastic from a pile of refuse.
Inside the market, I feel like a character in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Men thrust objects in my face, shouting in Arabic. I assume they want me to buy their wares. It doesn’t sound like "Yankee Go Home", but I don’t have a chance to find out as my chauffeur-body guard yanks me out and steers me back to the car.
In the late after noon we rent a small boat for a ride on the Tigris River, one of the waterways along with the Euphrates that produced the Fertile Crescent, the source of agricultural wealth for Mesopotamia (land between two rivers) The names now take on meaning. During the Gulf War, raw sewage poured into the Tigris, polluting it. Like other damage caused by the Allied bombing, the sewage treatment plant has been mostly restored by Saddam’s government. Does fixing the infrastructure justify his killing a few hundred opponents each month, I ask myself. I try to forget about the thousands of communists and other political opponents he whacked on his road to absolute power in the 1970s.
Was he much different than King Nebuchadnezzar or from Hamarabi who also eliminated opponents whom they deemed unreasonable? Hey, if they didn’t, the opponents would kill them. That’s been a political axiom in the region for a few thousand years.
As we stare at the acres of reconstructed palace of King N the II, built in circa 600 BC, I begin to understand tradition. In the United States a fifty-year old house gets landmarkedAnthropology Professor James Jennings, another member of the delegation, accompanies us and explains where the hanging gardens once hung, the spectacle that amazed all visitors. Jennings talks about how the kings designed their complex palaces and how they also made war and, like Hamarabi, issued law codes. He reads inscriptions still visible on the original bricks in ancient languages that predated Hebrew and Arabic.
We rent a boat for a ride down the Tigris and see kids dive into the river for a swim in the 105 degree heat. A man in a long white robe casts his net. A pesky jet skier revs his engine alongside the boat. You find showoffs everywhere. At dinner, on the banks of this Biblical river we watched a boatload of teenagers rocking to hot rhythms, Algerian "Rai" music, I’m told. Other boats pulled alongside and people jumped on board to join the party. The restaurant goers smiled their approval. Hardly the kind of atmosphere that the Taliban would welcome, I thought.
Next day we took the road south to Babylon . Once we get outside of Baghdad , I see women dressed only in the traditional black robes that cover their heads, men dressed in the white dishdashas, white robes, with checkered Kefiyas covering their heads. In the mosques at Kerbala and Najuf, the two holiest cities for the Shiites, cities inside cities, I see whole families eating their lunch on the mosque marble floor, or sleeping on makeshift blankets. Men and women kiss the door of the Kerbala mosque and men pray as they leave.
Inside, the men put their foreheads to the ground in submission to Allah and rise, five times, in prayer. The Mosque is painted gold, its inlaid wall tiles and marble floor bespeak of the wealth and power of the religion here.
We drive back through Baghdad and its four plus million people and hundreds of thousands of cars – not quite LA – and onto the four lane highway south to Babylon . I had remarked earlier to Warren Strobel, the Knight Ridder reporter, that I had seen no preparations for war on the streets, no mass mobilizations, no parades of military vehicles; not even a demonstration. "Yes", he agreed, "but how do you prepare for The Leviathon?"
Finally, we see our first indication that Iraqi leaders are doing something to get ready for the imminent war. Wahad leads us to the National Museum and has angry words with people who appear to be its directors as we wait in the lobby with a crowd of unshaven men in dishdashas and kefiyas. They look surly and unfriendly, some of them casting downright suspicious stares at the US delegation. "They are preparing for a civil defense exercise", Wadah announces. "So, the museum is closed".
"I assume that the guys in White work there and will defend the museum? I ask.
Wadah shrugs. As I change clothes I see the TV in my room showing pictures of Iraqis preparing for civil defense drills. But on the street, I’ve seen nothing but casual civilian life.
We have a session with Sa’doun Hammadi, the Speaker of the Parliament, in his well-furnished and very spacious office. A University of Wisconsin PhD in economics in the late 1950s, the now frail scholarly looking man, in a neatly tailored gray suit, repeats Aziz’ arguments, offers numbers and facts on the perfidy of the weapons inspectors.
UNSCOM, he says, has sent 476 inspection teams to Iraq , with 3,485 experts, who inspected 3,392 sites and set up an on-going monitoring system over 365 sites, with 10,256 visits to those sites. They installed 130 sophisticated cameras plus 30 advanced inspection units. Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. The allegation that we’re building a nuclear bomb is a pretext for beating the war drums. The UN inspector who resigned in 1997 said Iraq was basically disarmed.
"We had reached an agreement on more than 400 cases. We disagreed over 5. I think that is a very good rate of cooperation, But instead Iraq was bombed. Instead of lifting the sanctions we got missiles and bombs against our infrastructure.
"We have no relation to Al-Qaeda, bin Laden or Taliban, no link to 9/11. We’re anti-terrorist. If war is made", he says his voice in full throttle barely rising above a whisper, "our people will fight. I personally will fight, but at the end of the road this adventure will fail and you can estimate what damage will be done to the United States ".
Hardly more of a threat to the Pentagon than the sharp elbowed Pilgrims, Sa’doun nevertheless reflects the anger of even the most reflective of officials. As he rises and walks slowly to the door, I notice the worry lines etched in his face.
In five days I have seen the palace of King Nebuchadnezzar , the ancient Mosques in Kerbala and Najef and the fascist-like modern government buildings in Baghdad . George W. Bush, who probably can’t count the number of days since he last visited a library, prepares to authorize bombing of a place where libraries existed while western Europeans were throwing rocks at each other. Does our semi-literate President realize that another war here could destroy the cradle of civilization? Doesn’t Armageddon refer to such an event?
The last day in Baghdad . A woman with dyed blond hair and tight pants runs a shop. She tells me she has just returned from a vacation with her Algerian live-in boyfriend to Barbados and Martinique and "I could hardly wait to return home. I love it here".
I ask her how she will respond if war comes. She shrugs. "I am Christian", she declares, "and I love my president because he is strong and protects us. Without a strong president like him, we would be persecuted. All of Iraq would be chaos, disorder. I stand with him against Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Bin-Laden and George Bush". Her Algerian boyfriend grins in agreement.
The despotic Saddam, like the late Tito in Yugoslavia , simply does not permit ethnic or religious friction in public. What I have seen of Iraq confirms that the people are deeply religious, predominantly Muslim – both Shia and Sunni – but nevertheless have a secular society and government. Saddam’s war against the Kurds aims to crush their desire for autonomy. According to the government spokesman, he has no trouble admitting them as Iraqis. "See the woman in the hospital", he lectures. "As a Kurd, she has the same right as all Iraqis to medical treatment". The Kurds have taken a licking for wanting nationhood, from Iraq , Turkey and Syria . The United States has offered them support on several occasion, but always withdrawn it in the interests of regional stability or for some more banal reason.
The dozens of people with whom I spoke said the same thing: "Why?" They refer to what they see as Bush’s intention of killing innocent Iraqis and reducing their developed infrastructure to rubble as his father did almost twelve years before. To a person, they cannot see how Iraq threatens the United States . Indeed, they point out that none of their neighbors – even the recently invaded Kuwait - complains about them as a threat. So, for lack of another explanation, they fall back on the Zionist conspiracy. They don’t get the nuance of US politics. Above and beyond achieving imperial dominance, the neo-cons strategic goal, starting a war against Iraq will artificially pump up Bush’s poll ratings – along with oil prices - and keep corporate scandals, economic problems and health care crises, for which he and his party are blamed, off the front pages.
The day before we leave Iraq announces it will readmit the UN inspectors without conditions. The Iraqi foreign ministry official tells us that our trip has been successful. Abourezk smiles and says, "yes, with a little help from Nelson Mandela, the Arab League and Kofi Annan, all of whom strongly urged Saddam Hussein to accept the inspectors".
British MP George Galloway, also attending the Iraq Conference, rejoices over the news. "The fox is shot as we say in Britain ", he declares. "It means you must stop the hunt if the fox is dead". Then he says that the United States presents a frightening posture to the world. "Naked imperialism", he calls Bush’s behavior. "They use the chilling phrase: `full spectral dominance’".
Abourezk, also delighted with the news that the Iraqis have taken his and Rahall’s advice on the inspectors’ hopes that Congress will now show some backbone. Within two days he finds out that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who once worked for him as a Senate legislative aide, has all but rubber stamped Bush’s demand for sweeping military powers. Abourezk agrees with Galloway . "It’s naked power", he says and "George Bush refuses to take yes for an answer". Galloway , a left Laborite said we should refer to Shakespeare for clues as to why George Bush 43 blindly pursues Saddam Hussein.
I think about the centuries during which the west tried to dominate Islam. The Crusades exacted an enormous toll and although most Westerners know little about it, the history remains alive in Iraq . Tradition!
We say goodbye to the friendly and tip-crazy hotel staff and to our guides and chauffeurs and give sighs of relief that the sharp elbowed Iranians are nowhere to be seen. As we watch from the plane to Damascus and see the lights of Baghdad , I think about Abourezk’s words. "If we can remember the absolute horror we all felt on September 11th, we can imagine such destruction being wreaked on the Iraqi civilians every day that American bombers drop their deadly loads".
Copyright 2002 Radio Progreso
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