9 Nov. 02  Baghdad

"Letters From the Road" #1

by Elias Amidon

We arrived in Baghdad at 1 AM in the morning to a decaying six-story
hotel next to the Tigris River. The lobby smells of kerosene used to
wash the floors in the absence of detergent. A monkey behind the
registration counter climbs to the top of his cage and peers at us
curiously as we surrender our passports. A parrot sleeps in another
cage, her head buried in shoulder feathers. 

Our room is cramped and decrepit. On the wall is a single painting of
two ghostlike soldiers with mournful expressions, painted in a pale
transparent blue. One sits in a boat, waiting, his head in his hands,
while the other gives a brightly colored doll with hollow eyes to a
little girl who accepts it sadly. Her mother stands behind her with the
vacant look of a new widow. The painting casts a pall over the room, a
constant reminder of the broken lives of this sad land.

In recent weeks the Iraqis have restricted the number and duration of
visas being issued to all foreigners. Most reporters have had to leave
and are only gradually being re-admitted. The Iraq Peace Team’s ranks
have thinned from about twenty five down to eight. The vision of
bringing in hundreds of Americans to witness conditions for Iraqi
citizens before and during a U.S. attack is still held, but no one is
sure when it will be realized. Kathy Kelly, the head of IPT, is a very
special human being – a brilliant, articulate activist with compassion
and kindness for everyone. Rabia says she looks like an angel. “You 
have to understand how the Iraqis feel,” Kathy says. “They’re at war and
we’re from the aggressor country. What if people from Osama Bin Laden’s
home town wanted to wander freely around the U.S.?” With that insight
our “minders” from the  Department of  Intelligence become more human.
They worry we will stray and they will be held responsible. They get
tired from looking after so many of us, and want to see their families.
They dread the war we all sense is coming.

In the morning we drive across Baghdad to visit a children’s hospital,
getting to see the city for the first time in the morning light. Though
it looks generally like I imagined, I am shocked by the recognition 
that this is the capital city of the “enemy”. The neighborhoods are a jumble
of two- and three-story buildings, tired and dusty, strung with
makeshift electrical and phone wires, the sidewalks broken. There are
larger buildings here and there, some in better shape, but the overall
impression is one of exhaustion – the city is exhausted and worn out.
The cab we ride in is a good example. The dashboard has a large section
broken off, the inner panel of the door is missing, as is the window
crank, the speedometer doesn’t work, and the body is an assemblage of
colors, its sections repaired over time from different wrecks. It
reminds me of Managua and Havana, other erstwhile enemy cities brought
down by American sanctions. On the streets are thousands of vehicles
like our cab, all groaning forward, belching smoke, sagging buses with
dirty windows and dented sides, filled with people who fit the overall
theme of the city, tired and cheerless.

This is our enemy? This is what the U.S. considers a threat to the
geopolitical balance of power in the world? It is incomprehensible. As 
I write this we have been here for four days and have made several trips
around the city – this impression has only grown stronger. The U.S.
wants to bomb this place? What misguided cruelty is this? I think of
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz gliding around
Washington in their sleek black limousines on smooth roads with curbs,
tidy tree-lined streets, impressive buildings with elevators and
computer-operated security systems, buildings whose windows are washed
on schedule, carpets vacuumed each evening, with their computers 
humming vast interconnected information systems. Here in Baghdad completing a
simple telephone call is a major achievement. 

Today all the talk is about the unanimous U.N. Security Council
resolution to send in weapons inspectors. Over lunch I naively suggest
it may not be such a bad thing – the Iraqis have the opportunity to 
make an aikido move and allow the giant aggressor to fall on its face by
submitting to all inspections. The old hands here patiently describe to
me how the U.S. will make it impossible for Iraq to comply – in the 
past they have accused the Iraqis of blocking access because of a traffic
jam! Because of a blown tire! Because of a lost key! But all this is 
not the point, I am told by a well-spoken Irishman on the Peace Team. The
U.S. is not interested in making successful weapons inspections, he
says. They want them to fail. They are interested in the huge sea of 
oil underneath this land, and in controlling its sale so that the cash 
spent for it is recycled back into the U.S. economy through purchase of U.S.
goods. 

I go away hoping he’s wrong, hoping against hope that my government’s
only motive is to eradicate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But
later in the afternoon I read an article on the internet from today’s
New York Times that contains this passage:

Despite the administration’s professed confidence in the inspections,
there is a deep-seated unstated fear that President Saddam Hussein of
Iraq will only seem to cooperate and the inspectors will find little or
nothing incriminating. That would leave the administration with
insufficient evidence to persuade the Security Council, its potential
allies – or even Americans – that a war is necessary.

Which means to say the judgment has already been made. It is impossible
for Iraq to successfully comply with these inspections even if it 
tries.
 

The bridges over the Tigris, most of them bombed out during the Gulf
War, are now repaired. As we drive over one I look out at the city and
imagine another U.S. attack, this time even more ferocious since it
would be followed by invading U.S. and British troops with their
high-tech gear, M-16’s, Bradley tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and
Humvees. I ask the soft-spoken cab driver, an out-of-work architect and
father of five, what he thinks would happen if American and British
troops entered Baghdad. 

He said – and Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, listen carefully! – he said,
“Let me tell you something. The people here would resist them. Even
people who might have disagreements with the government here would 
fight the invaders. Excuse me, but we will fight the Americans if they invade
our city. We will not stand for an American occupation.”    
   
At the children’s hospital we spoke with the sad-faced director who
recited the now familiar statistics – lack of medicines, broken,
un-repairable equipment, no money to pay staff, post-natal child
mortality rates now eight times what they were in 1990. “Iraq has eight
machines for radiation therapy to treat cancer. Five are completely
broken. The remaining three have no radioactive source. We need cobalt
for this, not uranium! But the sanctions do not permit the import of
cobalt.”  

Two days ago several of us went out to the U.N. headquarters to hold a
vigil, a daily occurrence. We stood next to the busy highway holding
banners which read, “No U.S. War on Iraq!”, “Peace” in English and
Arabic, “Let Iraq Live!”, etc. Cars honked, drivers waved. The Iraqi
guards around the U.N. building were solemn-faced. After about 15
minutes two cars pulled up delivering several reporters hung with
cameras and microphones. Then a bus drove up and out spilled a most
amazing sight – twenty Italian musicians with drums, saxophones, 
violin, tambourines, and they immediately greeted us with rambunctious,
infectious gaiety! In a moment they were wailing away wild jazzy tunes,
dancing up and down, laughing and grinning. They had come to Iraq for
the week as ambassadors of good will, and good will it was! The scene
quickly became something out of the sixties – everybody grinning,
dancing, the guy on the saxophone bobbing and jumping, his eyes 
squeezed shut. Cars pulled over, people got out, more soldiers came out of the
buildings to keep a lid on things, but the Italians were irrepressible.
Soon even the soldiers were grinning and clapping to the music, posing
for photographs with the musicians, and everybody was interviewing
everybody, the buttoned-up lady from the Christian Peacemaker Team was
surrounded by Italian drummers, each taking snapshots of each other,
everybody was laughing, swaying, clapping – as if, for a moment, all of
us forgot the poverty, the need, the threat of war, and peace just 
broke out, happy careless loving peace, right there on the side of the road.