- BAGHDAD -- From their perch
in Washington, President George W. Bush and his advisers seem to have convinced
themselves that an invasion will proceed easily because many Iraqis will
dance in the streets to welcome American troops.
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- That looks like a potentially catastrophic misreading
of Iraq.
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- Consider Dahlia Abdulrahim and Intidhar Abdulrahim, two
young women I met at an English-language used-book shop in Baghdad. Dahlia
reads romance novels, while Intidhar favors Thomas Hardy. So will they
be cheering the American troops rolling through Baghdad?
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- "I will throw stones at them," Dahlia said.
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- "Maybe I will throw knives," Intidhar said
brightly.
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- Those two women are broadly representative of Iraqis
I spoke to. If American military strategy assumes popular support from
Iraqis facilitating an invasion and occupation, the White House is making
an error that could haunt us for years.
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- After scores of interviews with ordinary people from
Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, I've reached two conclusions:
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- 1. Iraqis dislike and distrust Saddam Hussein, particularly
outside the Sunni heartland, and many Iraqis will be delighted to see him
gone.
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- 2. Iraqis hate the U.S. government even more than they
hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America's intentions
than Saddam's.
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- "America is a new colonial power that wants to dominate,"
warns Rahim Majid, a farmer from Karbala.
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- "Americans are not coming to help us, but for our
oil," frets Naseem Jawad, a merchant in Najaf.
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- Public opinion is very difficult to gauge in a dictatorship
as brutal as Iraq's, where reporters are mostly accompanied by government
minders and where anyone who criticizes Saddam risks having his tongue
amputated. It takes quite a bit of arak, the national alcohol drink, before
conversations even begin to get interesting.
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- Still, Iraq is not as Orwellian as North Korea, and Iraqis
listen openly and constantly to the BBC, Iranian radio, Israeli radio and
especially to an excellent new American broadcast called Radio Sawa, which
mixes popular music with news - and is a triumph of the Bush administration's
focus on public diplomacy abroad. Furtive conversations with Iraqis leave
a strong impression that most people know what's going on, worry about
a war and hate what Saddam has done to their country.
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- Corruption is so widespread and morale is so poor that
it sometimes seems the whole Iraqi system is close to disintegrating. A
company of marines could perhaps slip through an Iraqi army checkpoint
on payment of a modest bribe. (But carrying all the bribery money would
slow the marines down, for the Iraqi dinar is almost worthless. When I
paid a hotel bill, I had to lug a shopping bag with 20 pounds of dinar
bills to the front desk.)
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- Still, while I found few people willing to fight for
Saddam, I encountered plenty of nationalists willing to defend Iraq against
Yankee invaders. And while ordinary Iraqis were very friendly toward me,
they were enraged at the United States after 11 years of economic sanctions.
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- "You see this?" asked a seething university
president, waving a pencil in the air. "It took 15 months just to
import pencils for our students." (The reason was both bureaucracy
and the possibility that graphite could be misused for weapons.)
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- Worse, U.S. bombing of water treatment plants, difficulties
importing purification chemicals like chlorine (which can be used for weapons),
and shortages of medicines led to a more than doubling of infant mortality,
according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
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- In addition, every Iraqi knows that Basra is suffering
a surge in cancer, childhood leukemia and grotesquely deformed fetuses.
Some foreign and Iraqi specialists blame American use of depleted-uranium
shells during the Gulf War, and most Iraqis take this as established fact.
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- "We blame the United States," sputtered Dr.
Amir Nissa, an obstetrician in Basra. "It was the United States that
put in sanctions against Iraq. Every Iraqi blames the United States 100
percent."
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- So if Saddam thinks the average Iraqi is going to miss
him, he's deluding himself. But if Bush thinks a U.S. invasion and occupation
will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome Americans, then he too is
deluding himself.
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- The New York Times
- Copyright © 2002 the International Herald Tribune
All Rights Reserved
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