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THE
ROVING EYE
(Just) alive and kicking in
Baghdad
By Pepe Escobar
BAGHDAD - "Saddam is in Baghdad." The former
University of Baghdad student, recently graduated, is
adamant. "Here he is very well connected, and as he has
so much money, he can bribe anybody," adds another.
This exchange takes place as the satellite
network al-Arabiya receives the latest (purported)
Saddam Hussein audio tape at its office in Baghdad.
Saddam tells the Americans, "Your withdrawal from our
country is inevitable, whether it happens today or
tomorrow, and tomorrow will come soon." He urges more
attacks, and "jihad by all means possible, financial and
otherwise". He even addresses the United Nations: "Iraq
and its leaders will refuse any solution that is made
while the country is under the shadow of occupation."
Baghdadis once again listen to that ghostly
voice from the past with cool detachment. But what the
former students are saying basically mirrors what a
Jordanian intelligence source with extensive contacts in
Iraq told Asia Times Online in Amman. Colonel Joe
Anderson, commander of the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade
in Mosul, is searching the wrong place, in the Kurdish
north of the country. "Elvis" - as the GIs call him -
has not left the building. Elvis-Saddam continues to
operate in the bowels of the Iraqi capital itself.
The future elite of Iraq is all dressed up with
diplomas - with nowhere to go. With the exception of one
graduate who, helped by family connections, received a
US$1,500-a-month job in Dubai in the United Arab
Emirates - a dream salary in Iraq - the vast majority
are unemployed. And all would jump at the opportunity to
leave. But those without a passport are even barred from
entering neighboring Jordan, which now only admits
Iraqis if they have Jordanian resident cards. A passport
on the Baghdad black market costs a fortune: 400,000
dinars ($200 at today's rate).
The students are
all Sunnis, the minority that dominated Iraq at the
expense of Shi'ites for many decades. They are not part
- yet - of the armed resistance, although they know
people who are. They definitely don't, and never did,
support Saddam. One says that "one Sunni equals 10
Shi'ites" in terms of fighting spirit, "and that's why
the Americans will be defeated". Another says, "An armed
group kidnapped three American women soldiers, two of
them black. They kept the black ones for their own fun,
but sold the white one for another group for 3 million
dinars." This is not the kind of story that one would
find in US-approved newspapers such as Iraq Today.
Especially because the euphemistically named Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) never admits that its
soldiers are being kidnapped.
A student suggests
a visit to the city morgue. "The Americans are killing
people like flies. In Ramadi they have footage of
American helicopters throwing dead bodies in the
desert." The CPA has in fact censored journalists'
visits to Iraqi hospitals. Special permission is now
required - and the wait can be eternal. As such, these
outlandish claims (including the kidnapping one) can in
no way be substantiated, although they do reflect
a certain mood on the street.
In its
de-Ba'athification drive, the CPA fired 436 professors
who were members of the former ruling Ba'ath Party, and
terminated an academic system skewed to benefit student
party members. But then it discovered that many of the
436 fired professors were in fact coerced to join the
Ba'ath, otherwise their careers would be over. At
al-Mustansariyah University they all got their jobs back
- of course after filling out forms denouncing the
Ba'ath Party.
Among the students, the popularity
of Ahmad Chalabi - founder of the Iraqi National
Congress, a Pentagon protege and now chairman of the
US-hand-picked 25-member Governing Council - is
virtually zero. "Who is he? Nobody knows him here,"
comments one student in reference to the long-exiled
Chalabi.
It was Chalabi who told the
neo-conservatives in Washington, who told the CPA, to
arrest brothers, sons, nephews and cousins of Ba'ath
Party members indiscriminately, as well as any males
between the ages of 15 and 50 if weapons were found in
their homes. "He's never been in Iraq. He doesn't know
how the country works, how people had to deal with the
Ba'ath Party, how we must have weapons to defend
ourselves from anarchy," says another student.
Indeed, some students envisage a future very
different from Chalabi's and Washington's dreams: "Iraq
is the pole of convergence, political and military, of
the Arab world. If the US mission fails here, then the
way will be finally open for a Great Arab nation, united
and free from all these corrupted governments."
The convergence of views between Baghdad
students and the Jordanian intelligence official is
remarkable - and is widely shared by the popular voice
of the bazaars. The perception is that "the Americans"
engineered both the UN bombing that killed special envoy
Sergio Vieira de Mello, and the Najaf bombing that
killed Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim (the
Jordanian insists the Israeli Mossad was responsible for
the Hakim bombing, which benefits the Americans by
splitting the Shi'ites and pitting Sunnis against
Shi'ites). All agree on what the US agenda is: to
maintain a perpetual state of chaos, enforce the control
of the fabulous Iraqi sources of energy, and use this
new, sprawling military base in the heart of the Middle
East to harass Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, few in Baghdad appear able to
understand how US high-tech marvel is not capable of
finding Elvis-Saddam. All kinds of theories float on why
the Americans killed his sons Uday and Qusay in a
firefight instead of arresting them and bringing them to
justice. All are convinced that Nawaf Alzaidan, the
owner of the house in Mosul in which the brothers were
killed, was the one who tipped the Americans and bagged
the $30 million reward (not yet: the State Department
has not paid him in full, citing "security problems").
The family of Salah Alzaidan, Nawaf's brother, was
killed by Iraqis in revenge. But Nawaf and his family
escaped and are now in the United States.
The
resistance will get much stronger - and this has nothing
to do with Saddam's flurry of cassettes. There seems to
be an overall consensus in Baghdad that most Sunnis are
on "wait and see" mode for two more months before they
switch overwhelmingly to guerrilla struggle. And the
Shi'ites will also be waiting for another two months.
This seems to be the final window of opportunity for the
CPA and the Governing Council to alleviate the daily
hell faced by the Iraqi population.
Young
American officers paying for their spaghetti at the
brasserie of the Palestine Hotel with crispy $20 bills
at least get a glimpse of paradise, post-Saddam style.
In a city reduced to Fourth World status, the
Palestine-Sheraton complex remains a fortress, protected
by tanks, barbed wire, checkpoints and body searches -
totally remote from real life, which barely tends to
intrude via a procession of protesters. Like a ragged
group from the village of al-Kafel, near Babylon. They
have come a long way to ask for US help in getting rid
of their local government - which they say comprises
Saddam's people, terrorizing and stealing from their
families. But most of all they want jobs. Dejected, they
are directed to the major fortress in town, Saddam's
former presidential palace, which is the headquarters of
proconsul L Paul Bremer's CPA.
The Iraqi border
with Jordan - once a nest of baksheesh-demanding
spies - is now a World Trade Organization wet dream.
Customs officers just say "Go Baghdad OK". The CPA
extinguished all tariffs and duties on imports until the
end of the year. A deluge of merchandise - except, of
course, weapons of the non-mass destruction kind - flow
through at practically zero cost. Second-hand German
Opel Vectras landed in the Jordanian port of Aqaba join
the army of rusty 1970s Volkswagen Passats in the
intractable Baghdad traffic, where gas - not in the
black market - remains cheap: a full tank costs less
than a dollar. A great deal of the loot ends up in shops
or spilling on the pavements of Karrada In and Karrada
Out, the notorious Baghdad twin sister roads.
As
with any new order following the collapse of a
totalitarian regime, the usual suspects have surfaced:
satellite dishes, the Internet, exchange counters and
pornography. The clerk at a cinema in Saadoun Street
extols the merits of "Film sex Itali! Business very
good!" More than five months after the fall of Baghdad,
still there's no banking system, no checks, no credit
cards. The dollar is king - or rather a bundle of
"Saddams" or "papers" (250-dinar banknotes) held in
black plastic bags that can be stolen at any moment by
the roaming hordes of Ali Babas, themselves immune to
the roaming of Humvees filled with GIs. Policemen in
brand-new Toyota patrol cars can be seen in selected
neighborhoods - but "dozens are being killed every day",
according to a resident of Mansur district: "They get a
salary of $100 a month, but the family gets no benefits
from the Americans if they die."
The Bab
Alsharjee souk is popularly regarded as a looters'
paradise. Under the roar of military helicopters and
close to passing Humvees with GIs pointing their
machine-guns to the sidewalk, the audiovisual choice is
immense: from Britney Spears to the incendiary speeches
of firebrand Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, from the
Women of Wrestling to torture sessions supervised by
Chemical Ali. Last April, some of these Ali Babas now
converted into souk merchants ransacked everything in
half of Baghdad, and left a great deal of the population
literally in the middle of the street, with no
possessions, or even with no homes to go back to.
There's not a single working industrial plant
left in the city, according to a businessman now selling
satellite dishes. To wander around some parts of the
city on foot - a practice that can be quite a gamble -
is to be surrounded by rubble uncollected in five
months, a collection of instant ruins, piles of rubbish
and vermin, and the occasional clouds of fire with which
Baghdadis try to protect themselves against this filthy
avalanche. Baghdad mirrors Kabul in its squalor and its
lust for life, in its lacerated, bombed urban landscape
and its barely contained rage that so much, yet so
little, has changed for the better.
Practically
none of the public services work. There are very few
operating police stations. All the ministries remain
closed - or totally destroyed. There is no postal
service - although an extreme minority can now use DHL
of Fedex. Telephones in some neighborhoods do work - and
once again the extreme minority can buy a Thuraya
satphone on the spot, plus refill cards. Any brand-new
BMW is assumed to be driven by a looter.
The
Americans stay on another planet - in bunkers. Humvees
venturing out on patrol are subject to all number of
attacks in broad daylight. Like this Wednesday, when a
still sweating resident of Zayouna tells how he saw,
through his rear-view mirror, a Humvee being hit by a
roadside bomb and another backing up to collect two dead
American soldiers and speed away. He can hardly believe
that his car was not hit. Locals inevitably tell a
foreigner: "Don't be near any Humvees or jeeps, even
walking in the street. The American soldiers are so
frightened they start shooting at random every time they
hear an explosion."
Even if in theory there's
total freedom of the press in Iraq for the first time
since the 1960s, and there are now more than 50
newspapers in the Baghdad market alone, a lot of people
don't bother to read them. "They are censored by the
Americans - they can't say what's really happening, and
they just print rumors about Saddam and the Ba'ath
Party," says a former army officer, now unemployed.
Bremer officially said that "incitement to violence" is
in fact an excuse to close down any newspaper or TV
station the CPA doesn't like. Any newspaper critical of
the occupation is inevitably "visited" by American
soldiers.
A whole neighborhood of army officers,
Baladeiat, is unemployed since the United States decided
in late May to dissolve the Iraqi army. They stay at
home because there are no jobs, except turning your car
into a taxi, and there are too many taxis already. They
live close to the dreaded building of General Security,
which the Americans, with no sense of irony, turned into
a prison, "attacked every night with bombs and mortars",
according to a resident.
The now-unemployed army
officers tell endless tales of "disappeared" in Saddam's
presidential palace - with the Americans re-enacting the
antics of the US-trained Latin American dictatorships of
the late 1960s and 1970s. Some of the "disappeared" are
released only months later. They are never told why they
were arrested in the first place: inevitably they are
assumed to have been Ba'ath Party members, but the
Americans don't seem to make the distinction that
everybody who wanted to do something in Saddam's Iraq
had to be a party member. Most "disappeared" are
interrogated only once or twice, and then transferred to
the makeshift prison at Saddam International Airport, or
to the infamous Abu Graeb prison in the outskirts of
Baghdad. They are prevented from any contact with the
outside world. And since there is no judicial system,
nobody can check what the Americans are up to.
The CPA says there is no timetable for putting
the judiciary system in place. The CPA also doesn't know
when the former Saddam International Airport will
reopen. It may take very long, as it holds a huge US
military base, plus a sprawling prison with at least
3,000 inmates. It is attacked practically every night by
the resistance with grenades and mortars - and there are
plenty of surface-to-air missiles expecting to greet
incoming aircraft. "What kind of liberation is this?"
asks an 83-year-old retired army officer trained "in
Tunbridge Wells, in England". He used to hate Saddam and
the Ba'ath Party silently; now he vocally hates the US
occupation.
Al-Sharif Ali, leader of the
Constitutional Monarchy Movement, has stressed in a
conference attended by no fewer than 80 political
parties, 43 religious leaders, 43 military commanders,
33 ministers and diplomats and 109 tribal sheikhs that
the Iraqi population simply does not trust the Governing
Council. The conference decided that restoration of
national sovereignty and independence must be the common
objective for all. In other words, real democracy. This
is not exactly what the CPA has in mind. Whatever the
spin during Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to
Baghdad, the CPA - the Iraqi arm of the Washington
neo-cons - wants in fact what neo-con Daniel Pipes
described as "a democratically minded strongman who has
real authority", who would be "politically moderate" but
"operationally tough". In plain English: another Saddam,
but pliable to US interests.
As much as the
occupiers remain in their Baghdad bunkers, impervious to
the ghastly real life around them and with no idea
whatsoever as to how they are perceived by average
Iraqis, the irreversible US failure still has to be
fully understood by the West. Another graduate of
Baghdad University goes straight to the point: "The
Americans now want help from the UN. And they want an
Iraqi army working for them. Even if they managed to
have both, this is just talk. They want our oil and they
want to stay here forever."
Meanwhile, "Saddam
is in Baghdad." "Elvis" has not left the building, and
in each passing day the distress of the unemployed, the
doomed and the damned grows, and for many of them it's
much worse than under Saddam.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
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