- BAGHDAD -- 'Do you have any
rooms?" we ask the hotelier. She looks us over, dwelling on my travel
partner's bald, white head.
-
- "No," she replies.
-
- We try not to notice that there are 60 room keys in pigeonholes
behind her desk - the place is empty.
-
- "Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?"
-
- She hesitates. "Ahh ... No."
-
- We return to our current hotel - the one we want to leave
because there are bets on when it is going to get hit - and flick on the
TV: the BBC is showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the
September 11 commission, and a couple of pundits are arguing about whether
invading Iraq has made America safer.
-
- They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where
the US occupation has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense
that it now extends not only to US troops, occupation officials and their
contractors but also to foreign journalists, aid workers, their translators
and pretty much anyone else associated with the Americans. Which is why
we couldn't begrudge the hotelier her decision: if you want to survive
in Iraq, it's wise to stay the hell away from people who look like us.
(We thought about explaining that we were Canadians, but all the American
reporters are sporting the maple leaf - that is, when they aren't trying
to disappear behind their newly purchased headscarves.)
-
- The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, hasn't started
wearing a hijab yet, and is instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism
with his usual foresight. Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs
like Baghdad Now, filled with fawning articles about how Americans are
teaching Iraqis about press freedom. "I never thought before that
the coalition could do a great thing for the Iraqi people," one trainee
is quoted as saying. "Now I can see it on my eyes that they are doing
good things for my country and the accomplishment they made. I wish my
people can see that, the way I see it."
-
- Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another
version of press freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper
run by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shia cleric has been
preaching that Americans are behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and
condemning the interim constitution as a "terrorist law." So
far, al-Sadr has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed
resistance, but many here are predicting that closing down the newspaper
- a nonviolent means of resisting the occupation - was just the push he
needed. But then, recruiting for the resistance has always been a specialty
of the presidential envoy to Iraq: Bremer's first act after being tapped
by Bush was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse to give them their rightful
pensions, but allow them to hold on to their weapons - in case they needed
them later.
-
- While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's
office, I found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism,
the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will start
producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture: Pepsi-Cola.
I figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing to defend the
Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company's
managing director. I was wrong.
-
- "All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremer,"
Khamis told me, flanked by a line-up of 30 Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He
didn't listen to Iraqis. He doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed
the country and tried to rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos."
-
- These are words you would expect to hear from religious
extremists or Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's
not just that his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US
multinational in Iraq's new "free market". It's also that few
Iraqis supported the war more staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam
executed both his brothers and Khamis was forced to resign as managing
director of the bottling plant in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday threatened
his life. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, "you can't imagine
how much relief we felt", he says.
-
- After the Ba'athist plant manager was forced out, Khamis
returned to his old job. "There is a risk doing business with the
Americans," he says. Several months ago, two detonators were discovered
in front of the factory gates. And Khamis is still shaken from an attempted
assassination three weeks ago. He was on his way to work when he was carjacked
and shot at, and there was no doubt that this was a targeted attack; one
of the assailants was heard asking another, "Did you kill the manager?"
-
- Khamis used to be happy to defend his pro-US position,
even if it meant arguing with friends. But one year after the invasion,
many of his neighbours in the industrial park have gone out of business.
"I don't know what to say to my friends anymore," he says. "It's
chaos."
-
- His list of grievances against the occupation is long:
corruption in the awarding of reconstruction contracts, the failure to
stop the looting; the failure to secure Iraq's borders - both from foreign
terrorists and from unregulated foreign imports. Iraqi companies, still
suffering from the sanctions and the looting, have been unable to compete.
-
- Most of all, Khamis is worried about how these policies
have fed the country's unemployment crisis, creating far too many desperate
people. He also notes that Iraqi police officers are paid less than half
what he pays his assembly line workers, "which is not enough to survive".,
The normally soft-spoken Khamis becomes enraged when talking about the
man in charge of "rebuilding" Iraq. "Paul Bremer has caused
more damage than the war, because the bombs can damage a building but if
you damage people there is no hope."
-
- I have gone to the mosques and street demonstrations
and listened to Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters shout "Death to America,
Death to the Jews", and it is indeed chilling. But it is the profound
sense of disappointment and betrayal expressed by a pro-US businessman
running a Pepsi plant that attests to the depths of the US-created disaster
here. "I'm disappointed, not because I hate the Americans," Khamis
tells me, "but because I like them. And when you love someone and
they hurt you, it hurts even more."
-
- When we leave the bottling plant in late afternoon, the
streets of US-occupied Baghdad are filled with al-Sadr supporters vowing
bloody revenge for the attack on their newspaper. A spokesperson for Bremer
is defending the decision on the grounds that the paper "was making
people think we were out to get them".
-
- A growing number of Iraqis are certainly under that impression,
but it has far less to do with an inflammatory newspaper than with the
inflammatory actions of the US occupation authority. As the June 30 "handover"
approaches, Bremer has unveiled a slew of new tricks to hold on to power
long after "sovereignty" has been declared.
-
- Some recent highlights. At the end of March, building
on his Order 39 of last September, Bremer passed yet another law further
opening up Iraq's economy to foreign ownership, a law that Iraq's next
government is prohibited from changing under the terms of the interim constitution.
Bremer also announced the establishment of several independent regulators,
which will drastically reduce the power of Iraqi government ministries.
For instance, the Financial Times reports that "officials of the Coalition
Provisional Authority said the regulator would prevent communications minister
Haider al-Abadi, a thorn in the side of the coalition, from carrying out
his threat to cancel licences the coalition awarded to foreign-managed
consortia to operate three mobile networks and the national broadcaster."
-
- The CPA has also confirmed that after June 30, the $18.4bn
that the US government is spending on reconstruction will be administered
by its embassy in Iraq. The money will be spent over five years and will
fundamentally redesign Iraq's most basic infrastructure, including its
electricity, water, oil and communications sectors, as well as its courts
and police. Iraq's future governments will have no say in the construction
of these core sectors of Iraqi society. Retired rear admiral David Nash,
who heads the Project Management Office, which administers the funds, describes
the $18.4bn as "a gift from the American people to the people of Iraq".
-
- He appears to have forgotten the part about gifts being
something you actually give up. And in the same eventful week, US engineers
began construction on 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq, capable of
housing the 110,000 soldiers who will be posted here for at least two more
years. Even though the bases are being built with no mandate from an Iraqi
government, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations
in Iraq, called them "a blueprint for how we could operate in the
Middle East".
-
- The US occupation authority has also found a sneaky way
to maintain control over Iraq's armed forces. Bremer has issued an executive
order stating that even after the interim Iraqi government has been established,
the Iraqi army will answer to US commander Lt General Ricardo Sanchez.
In order to pull this off, Washington is relying on a legalistic reading
of a clause in UN security council resolution 1511, which puts US forces
in charge of Iraq's security until "the completion of the political
process" in Iraq. Since the "political process" in Iraq
is never-ending, so it seems is US military control.
-
- In the same flurry of activity, the CPA announced that
it would put further constraints on the Iraqi military by appointing a
national security adviser for Iraq. This US appointee would have powers
equivalent to those held by Condoleezza Rice and will stay in office for
a five-year term, long after Iraq is scheduled to have made the transition
to a democratically elected government.
-
- There is one piece of this country, though, that the
US government is happy to cede to the people of Iraq: the hospitals. On
March 27 Bremer announced that he had withdrawn the senior US advisers
from Iraq's health ministry, making it the first sector to achieve "full
authority" in the US occupation.
-
- Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling
picture of what a "free Iraq" will look like: the United States
will maintain its military and corporate presence through 14 enduring military
bases and the largest US embassy in the world. It will hold on to authority
over Iraq's armed forces, its security and economic policy and the design
of its core infrastructure - but the Iraqis can deal with their decrepit
hospitals all by themselves, complete with their chronic drug shortages
and lack of the most basic sanitation capacity. (The US health and human
services secretary, Tommy Thompson, revealed just how low a priority this
was when he commented that Iraq's hospitals would be fixed if the Iraqis
"just washed their hands and cleaned the crap off the walls".)
-
- On nights when there are no nearby explosions, we hang
out at the hotel, jumping at the sound of car doors slamming. Sometimes
we flick on the news and eavesdrop on a faraway debate about whether invading
Iraq has made Americans safer.
-
- Few seem interested in the question of whether the invasion
has made Iraqis feel safer, which is too bad because the questions are
intimately related. As Khamis says: "It's not the war that caused
the hatred. It's what they did after. What they are doing now."
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1184993,00.html
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