Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  The man pointed me to the back of a government sedan. As soon as I climbed in, windows eased up, locks clicked shut. We nosed onto a four-lane highway toward the city, past a huge sports stadium, past huge modern mosques, past huge billboards of Saddam, illuminated in the night.

  My escort worked for the Information Ministry, which, by definition, made him a poor source of information.

  “Is this near the presidential palace?” I asked as we passed a heavily guarded compound.

  “Not far,” he said.

  “And where is the Foreign Ministry?”

  “Also nearby.”

  Searching for neutral topics, I commented on the weather. Yes, he said, it is very hot. How hot he could not say. The weather in Baghdad was classified information, “for security.”

  We pulled up on the street in front of the hotel. Concrete pylons blocked the driveway. Pylons blocked the entrance to every hotel and government building we’d passed: security against car bombers. As the locks clicked up, I asked my escort if I needed to check in at the ministry the following day.

  “It has been arranged,” he said.

  In the hotel room, Big Brother gazed out from the television screen as a chorus of voices sang in the background:

  “We will challenge them if they cross the border, oh Saddam.

  The victory is for you, oh Saddam.

  With our blood and with our soul

  We sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Saddam.”

  In Iraq, paranoia comes with the territory. The arid Mesopotamian plain has been overrun repeatedly by foreign armies: Greeks, Assyrians, Persians, Mongols, Turks, and now Persians again. It was this last incursion that I’d come to report on. Or rather, it was the war’s recent turn in Iraq’s favor that had prompted Baghdad to grant my months-old request for a visa.

  Iraq never acknowledged that the war had ever tilted the other way, though it had for five or so years. The morning’s Baghdad Observer, a slim and Orwellian paper, devoted the upper half of its front page to a picture of the president, as it did every day, apropos of nothing. Alongside the picture, War Communiqué No. 3221 announced that Iraqi troops had “liberated 13 strategic mountain peaks at the northern sector” and inflicted “thousands of enemy casualties.” The enemy’s original taking of the now-liberated peaks had never been reported. In eight years of war, no Iraqi defeats and no Iraqi casualties were ever reported.

  * * *

  At the Ministry of Information, Mr. Mahn, director of protocol for the foreign press, sat behind his desk with a red flyswatter in one hand and my requested “program” in the other. The fat, flyswatting official reminded me at first of Sydney Greenstreet in the movie Casablanca. Except that Mr. Mahn looked even more like Saddam. It was an unspoken rule that officials not only draped their walls with Saddam portraits and wore a Saddam watch, but also mimicked the president’s squarish haircut and thick, well-manicured mustache. Unfortunately for Mr. Mahn, Saddam had recently decided to lose weight, and officials across Baghdad were now on what was known as the “Saddam diet.” Officials’ target weights were published, and those who failed to lose the proper weight lost their jobs instead. By my third visit to Iraq, Mr. Mahn had shed fifty pounds.

  I’d been warned of the difficulty of seeing Iraqi officials and had listed every person I could think of on my program, beginning with Saddam Hussein. Mr. Mahn took out a red pen and crossed out the president’s name. “His Excellency, of course, is too busy to see you,” he said. Saddam’s face was everywhere, but the man himself was elusive; he’d held one press conference for the Western press in ten years.

  “This is no,” Mr. Mahn said, crossing out the next official I’d requested.

  “This is also no.” He continued down the list, alternating strokes of the red pen with slaps of the red flyswatter.

  “This is no.” Thwap.

  “Never mind.

  “No.

  “Still no.” Thwap.

  “Never mind.”

  After five minutes, Mr. Mahn had squashed a dozen bugs and reduced my epic-length list to three or four requests. One of them was to “see current fighting on the southern battlefront.”

  “This maybe you can see,” Mr. Mahn said. “On video.” He stuffed the list in his breast pocket. “Now you can go back to the hotel and wait. We will see what we can do with your program.”

  Wandering back to the hotel, shielding my eyes against the blinding sun, I seemed to be touring a city-wide portrait gallery devoted to a single subject. The traditional Islamic ban on representation of the human form had been overcome in Baghdad, in a very big way. Saddam’s face perched on the dashboards of taxis, on the walls of every shop and every office, on clock faces, on ashtrays, on calendars, on billboards at every major intersection—often four pictures to an intersection. Some of the portraits covered entire building fronts. And to ensure that your eye didn’t ignore the pictures from sheer repetition, Saddam appeared in innumerable guises: in military fatigues festooned with medals, in bedouin garb atop a charging steed, in pilgrim’s robes praying at Mecca, in a double-breasted suit and aviator sunglasses, looking cool and sophisticated. The idea seemed to be that Saddam was all things to all people: omniscient, all-powerful and inevitable. Like God.

  “There are thirty-two million Iraqis,” went a popular Western joke in Baghdad. “Sixteen million people and sixteen million pictures of Saddam.”

  Iraqis didn’t tell that particular joke. Article 225 of Iraq’s penal code stated rather baldly that anyone who criticized the president, his party or the government, “for the purpose of raising public opinion against authority,” would be put to death.

  Technically, Iraqis required government permission to chat with foreigners. Those who did so regularly were likely to be questioned by the regime’s five security forces, which spied not only on the people but on each other. The first man I approached on the street, to ask the time, held up his arm as if warding off demons and scurried away. More often, pedestrians or shopkeepers responded to my approaches by stating politely that their English, or my Arabic, was not so good.

  “People just don’t talk to you much, particularly about politics,” complained a United Nations worker named Thomas Kamps, who had worked in Iraq for three years. “They know that’s the fast lane to the electrodes and the dungeon.”

  Expatriates in Baghdad made a grim hobby of collecting police-state horror stories. One diplomat’s wife had spent much of her two years in Baghdad pushing infants in strollers. She said not a single Iraqi had stopped on the street to smile at her babies or utter so much as a “koochie-koochie-koo.” “They’re scared even to be seen talking to infants,” she said.

  A Turkish diplomat attended the unveiling of a new wing at the arts center—Saddam Arts Center. Each time the opening speaker mentioned the president’s name there was a twenty-second pause for the audience to applaud. “The speaker mentioned Saddam a lot, and his speech ended up taking an hour and forty-five minutes,” he said, yawning in his office the following day.

  A Japanese diplomat lost his way one night in the neighborhood of the massive presidential palace. Soldiers opened fire on his car, as they did at any vehicle motoring slowly by, or making a suspicious U-turn in the vicinity of Saddam’s residence. “The policy is ‘Shoot first and don’t ask questions later,’” explained the diplomat, who escaped unharmed. He said two Westerners had been killed at the same spot several years before.

  There were genies inside every telephone and telex. A United Nations worker from Ethiopia told of phoning a colleague in New York and switching, midsentence, from English to his native Amharic. A voice quickly cut in, instructing him to “please continue in a language we can understand.”

  The state forbade direct calls overseas and limited operator-assisted calls to three minutes. Western publications were often seized at the airport, as were short-wave radios. Censorship of the domestic media was total. An
d ordinary Iraqis were barred from traveling abroad, even to Mecca. Baghdad was airtight, hermetically sealed against the outside world.

  At a stall in the city’s cramped bazaar, under cover of commerce, I struck up a conversation with a youth named Tariq, who sold Smurf T-shirts and Adidas sweatsuits. “Born in the USA” blared from a nearby boom box, drowning out the tap and clink from the centuries-old copper market, where men crafted giant urns, plates, ashtrays and wall hangings with Saddam’s face adorning the center.

  “I not understand you Americans,” Tariq said genially. “You make good clothes and music. You have California girls. But you start this war on us to help Israel. Why you do this?”

  I tried to explain that most Westerners believed Iraq had started the war. Tariq looked at me blankly. Big Brother was watching from life-sized photos on two of the stall’s three walls.

  Tariq’s neighbor, who owned the boom box, wandered over and began jabbing his finger at me. “He says you can have your Bruce music, you can have it all back,” Tariq translated. “Now that we win the war, we not need to beg America for anything anymore.”

  Back at the hotel, I tried to telex New York, to give an editor a contact number. The telex machine was mysteriously broken. Three hours later, I returned to the desk to find other telexes sent, but not mine. “Machine still broken,” the operator said. When I complained, a French manager appeared and took me into a back office. The telex operators, he said apologetically, all worked for security and were under strict orders to vet journalists’ telexes with the Ministry of Information. It was the weekend and no censors were available.

  I used the hotel’s Xerox machine. The staff made copies of my copies, “for security.” Hotel staff watched me carefully each time I went in and out. I tried to call New York. There were no open lines. In three visits to Iraq, there was never an open line. Apart from the stilted reports of the Baghdad Observer—and faint crackles of the BBC World Service—I received no news at all of the outside world.

  This isolation unsettled me much more than the distance I’d felt in a country such as Yemen, cut off from the world by a Third World phone system and by the genuine remoteness of the place. Here there were touch-tone phones, five-star hotels and bland modern buildings of steel and glass. But I might as well have been on Pluto. America could vanish in a mushroom cloud and I’d still be sitting there watching Saddam on television as a chorus sang, “The people love you, oh Saddam, and you love the people.”

  * * *

  Not all people loved Saddam, of course, and I eventually located a few Iraqis brave enough to speak out. An office worker whom I will call Saleh chatted politely over tea until his colleagues filed out for lunch. Then he turned up a radio and leaned across his desk, speaking in an almost inaudible whisper.

  “My phone is tapped, this office is bugged, and for all I know my grandmother is wired for sound,” he said. “But sometimes a man must speak his mind. Saddam Hussein, he is the worst dictator ever in the history of man.”

  Saleh said this with the grim but giddy urgency of a parachutist leaping from an airplane. “I could be shot,” he added, smiling wanly, “for what I’ve just told you.”

  Saleh’s job required him to write reports, and he’d applied several times for an Arabic typewriter. Each request had been denied, so he’d reapplied for a machine with English characters. He’d been waiting a year. “What am I going to do with an English typewriter?” he wondered, laughing. “Incite tourists to riot?”

  Like most Iraqis, he’d stopped seeing anyone but his family and closest friends. “Who else can I trust? Can I even trust them?” And he limited himself to small acts of defiance that would have seemed petty in any other setting. While the walls of most Iraqi homes and offices dripped pictures of Saddam, Saleh displayed nothing more than a calendar adorned with the president’s face. But he kept a carpet decorated with Saddam rolled up in the front closet of his home, just in case. “If there is a knock in the night, I can roll it out before answering the door,” he said. “A man must be brave, but he must not be reckless.”

  * * *

  A few days after my arrival, I was dozing through the afternoon heat when the phone rang. It was Mr. Mahn at the Information Ministry. “We have called this and this and that,” he said wearily, adding that item number 16 on my program had been arranged: an interview with his superior, the Minister of Information and Culture. I had listed the minister as an expendable, to pad out the program, but I could hardly afford to turn him down.

  As the first point of contact for the foreign press, Information Ministry officials are often slick, Western-educated bureaucrats, adept at chatting amiably with journalists and offering innocuous statements on almost any topic. They are the governmental equivalent of corporate flacks.

  But in Iraq, public relations wasn’t very well developed. Arriving on the top floor of the Information Ministry, I wondered for a moment if I’d been sent to the wrong department. The elevator door swished open and I found myself staring down the barrel of a submachine gun. The guard holding it studied me carefully, then led me along a carpeted corridor to an enormous sitting room with a suitably enormous portrait of Saddam. The guard gestured toward a pair of couches, then, when I sat down, he said that I’d taken the minister’s seat. It was indistinguishable from the other couch, except that its back was flush with the wall, providing a clear view of the corridor and elevator door.

  Another man appeared, clad much like the guard in olive-drab fatigues with a pistol strapped to his waist. He had the stiff bearing and watchful gaze of a secret service agent. He was the Honorable Minister of Information and Culture, Latif Jasim.

  Jasim spoke no English, nor did he go in for the usual Arab pleasantries. He also didn’t reveal much about himself. Curious about his qualifications as the highest cultural officer in the land, I asked Jasim about his career before Saddam and the Baathist party seized power in 1968.

  “I was a party member,” he said.

  “At university?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily.”

  We moved on to matters of state, and his answers seemed crafted from the pages of the Baghdad Observer.

  On Iraqi support for the Palestinians: “Israel is an alien body in this region. Science is advancing all the time, and Israel should expect that one day rocks will turn into other things.”

  On the law decreeing death for those who insulted the president: “We are not in the United States. Your head of state changes every four years. Here we cannot accept a leader being insulted.”

  On the ubiquitous portraits of Saddam: “The president has nothing to do whatsoever with the portraits. It is a natural and spontaneous thing from the people.”

  The interview lasted half an hour, during which Jasim managed not even the hint of a smile. He was the antithesis of slick, the last person most Arab governments would wheel out to present a warm and unthreatening image to the Western press.

  As the man with the submachine gun saw me to the elevator, I wondered why Jasim took such precautions; after all, there were armed guards downstairs, and concrete pylons blocking the driveway. As usual, the only explanation I received was from a diplomat.

  “It’s always best to have your own private bodyguard,” he said. “Iraqi leaders don’t have a history of dying peacefully in bed.”

  * * *

  The history of modern Iraq reads like Macbeth, only bloodier. Since 1920, there have been twenty-three coups, not counting the scores of attempted revolts, such as the one Saddam joined in 1959. Then aged twenty-two, he stood on a street corner and emptied his pistol at the car of a military strongman, Abd al-Karim Qasim, who had himself seized power only a year before in a bloody coup that killed Iraq’s royal family. Qasim, who was wounded, later boasted that he had survived twenty-nine attempts on his life. His luck ran out a short time later and he was executed following a coup that briefly brought Saddam’s Baathist allies to power.
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br />   Sixteen years, two coups, and many purges later, Saddam muscled his way into the presidency. He celebrated the event by sentencing twenty-two of his closest conspirators to death on trumped-up charges of treason. Saddam served as a trigger man on the firing squad. Ever since, Amnesty International’s annual reports on Iraq have read like transcripts from the Spanish Inquisition: prisoners fed slow-acting poison, children tortured into ratting on their parents, teenagers returned dead to their families with fingernails extracted and eyes gouged out. Top generals keep going down in mysterious helicopter crashes, and Saddam has even liquidated members of his own family. The Minister of Information could hardly be blamed for watching his back.

  * * *

  Between interviews, I wandered the streets of Baghdad, which for lack of a better word could be called “sightseeing.” It wasn’t easy to play tourist in Iraq. There was, first of all, the matter of maps. There weren’t any, and hadn’t been since early in the war. Like the weather report, maps were banned because they could aid the Iranians in aiming their missiles at the Iraqi capital. Maps could also, of course, aid dissidents in plotting assassinations or coups

  Broad areas of the city were sealed off, including the presidential palace, which flanked a long stretch of the wide and muddy Tigris. You could catch a glimpse of the complex from the eighteenth-floor bar of the Sheraton, but you couldn’t photograph it: “For Security Reasons,” a sign announced, “It Is Forbidden to Take Photos in This Area.” It was also forbidden to photograph animals, which might make the country seem backward. Even photographing Baghdad’s premier tourist attraction, a striking memorial to the war dead, could be hazardous. One Japanese visitor had attempted it at night and alarmed the guards with the flash on his camera. They responded with a burst of machine-gun fire, missing the Japanese man but riddling his car with bullet holes.

  I went, without camera, to see the war memorial, which is shaped like a huge broken egg and called the Monument of Saddam’s Qadissiyah Martyrs. The name says something about the Iraqi mind-set—and about the long memories fueling conflict across the Middle East. Qadissiyah was the seventh-century battle at which Mohammed’s general, Khalid ibn Walid—nicknamed “Sword of Islam”—drove the elephant-riding Persians out of Mesopotamia. Saddam’s constant invocation of Qadissiyah was a way of reminding Iraqis that their war with Iran was the culmination of a millennial battle against Persian aggressors. Like Mohammed’s horsemen, they too would ultimately triumph.