NO, THIS CITY is not as I thought. Nowhere ever is. I have not been here before and can only compare it with other distressed cities and with its media image. But then to outsiders the Iraqi capital is not a place but a giant question mark. Is it better, or is it worse? From the corkscrew flight path of the landing aircraft to the rubbish fires rising into the desert sky, Baghdad seems haloed with queries.
Baghdad is bigger and more handsome than I expected. It has the spacious boulevards of dictatorship, but pleasantly tree-lined and planted with flowers. The poor suburbs are those of any Third World country, but the smart ones might almost be Milton Keynes. Sanctions are always kind to the rich. Baghdad has little of the tedious monumentalism of Stalinist East Europe, rather the Sixties ostentation of a banana republic.
Saddam created astonishing structures. The daring geometry of his parade ground would win a RIBA award. The stupendous al-Mansour mosque still stands three-quarters complete, bigger than St Paul’s Cathedral. Even bigger was to be the adjacent Saddam mosque, intended as the largest place of worship on Earth. It is a giant folly, its arches and unfinished piers rising hundreds of feet into the desert sky, attended by four giant cranes. American helicopters huddle like pygmies round its base. This is pure Ozymandias.
On the bank of the Tigris stands the old British Embassy, to which the “liberating” British apparently dare not return. The graceful building decays into its garden while boats scurry across the river beneath its terrace. Next door is the secluded Arabic Music Centre, guarding its instruments from the surrounding anarchy. Across the river stands the ancient Mustansiriya College, claiming to be the oldest university in the world. This is a charming spot, in a city I could well come to love. The horizon from the hotel roof is still one of minarets, palms and eucalyptus trees.
But then cities survive anything. As Tolstoy said of Napoleon in Moscow, no invader can hold such a place in thrall for long. Sooner or later it goes back to its business. The markets, souks, bandits and smuggling mafiosi of Baghdad are up and running, free of all taxes and policing. What hell’s teeth are being sown thereby only time will tell.
I have known many cities that have seen regime change, such as Saigon, Beirut, Berlin and Pretoria. In none of them did the incoming regime permit, indeed perpetrate, the destruction of the entire security and administrative apparatus of the capital city, with nothing to put in its place. After the invasion the Pentagon rejected all advice (including from its own State Department) and decided to run it through its favoured satrap, Ahmed Chalabi. It has been a catastrophic bungle. The result has re-enacted Lawrence of Arabia’s notorious three-day rule of Damascus, except that it has gone on for six months.
But the coalition publicists are right. Baghdad’s electricity and water are working again. Schools are in use. Some rubbish is collected and the main streets are remarkably clean. The trains run and the theatre has a show on stage. In the battered Iraq Museum statues line the corridors like Sumerian warriors awaiting death, but they too are being restored. Things are improving, but after six months it would be strange if they were not.
What is astonishing is what no longer works. There are no phones. After the Americans bombed Baghdad’s Karada Kharj exchange in 1991, it took Saddam’s regime two months to repair it. The Americans bombed it again in April and have left it in ruins. With no civil service there are no pensions paid. Traffic lights do not work. When I asked a driver why he had just risked my and his life disregarding another red light, he blandly replied, “No police”.
Then there are the much publicised explosions. Such outrages are the grim furniture of many cities. In my view they do not mean that the Coalition Provisional Authority must be failing, merely that its foes are getting bolder. I have some sympathy for the hard-pressed CPA officials whose efforts to rectify the ineptitude of the military are negated by news of yet another blast echoing round Washington and London.
Yet the explosions are a sign to every Iraqi of what has apparently failed to materialise, at least in Baghdad and its surrounding region, which is order. Sitting in the bomb-gutted office of the American-appointed Mayor of Fallujah yesterday I could sense his despair. He had survived five assassination attempts and had just read of $87 billion being devoted to the rebuilding of Iraq. None was coming his way. There was no American soldier near his building. Requests for flak jackets and better guns had been ignored. His pathetic bodyguards were huddled behind sandbags, awaiting the next rocket. It reminded me of the Alamo.
Just up the road stands Saddam’s appalling Abu Ghraib prison camp. It passes belief that what should have been bulldozed as a publicity gesture was blithely reopened as the local Guantanamo Bay. A crowd outside was desperately seeking news of inmates. One had a son arrested two months ago after an Apache helicopter had seen him on the roof of the family home looking out after an explosion. He had vanished. Most of the crowd had news of relatives only from smuggled pieces of paper.
What enraged the prison crowd, as I found so often in Iraq, were the small insensitivities. They pointed out that Saddam had allowed family visits to Abu Ghraib. The prison had built shelters for mothers waiting in the sun. The American made them wait in the burning heat. In an entrance bunker I encountered a heavily armoured reservist, a salesman from San Francisco, surveying the chaos. “Don’t ask me, I just want to go home,” he said, his face a mix of exhaustion and shame.
I am fairly hardnosed about these stories. They occur in most conflict-ridden countries and American forces have good reason to be scared in the Fallujah area. Most Americans in Iraq sincerely want to see its infrastructure restored and some risk life and limb to that end. What beggars belief is the antagonism they seem wilfully to engender in the process.
Much of the trouble is that the CPA operates under military rules which reduce to total absurdity the doctrine of “total force protection”. It is as if Genghis Khan had been expected to invade Mesopotamia with the Health and Safety Executive round his neck. American servicemen abroad used to fraternise with those they liberated. In Iraq they do not dare. They are confined to massively fortified barracks.
The most prominent symbol of this syndrome is the extraordinary decision to house the CPA and its boss, Paul Bremer, in Saddam’s own hated Republican Palace, covering a huge chunk of central Baghdad. It is as if Tony Blair had decided to curry favour with London by commandeering a site stretching from Tower Bridge to Lambeth Bridge along the South Bank.
The massive Forbidden Palace encampment now extends to embrace adjacent office blocks and the al-Rashid hotel and has been made all but invisible behind a gigantic bomb-proof wall covered in razor wire. Officials cannot leave the palace without armour and bodyguards, and many never do. It makes the Kremlin seem like the shop around the corner.
Baghdad’s citizens are not wholly stupid and deeply resent being treated as conquered subjects. Of course they welcomed the downfall of Saddam, though they constantly point out that the United States once backed him. But everyone I have met finds present American policy incomprehensible. As I listened to yet another tale of scared soldiers killing in cold blood, of homes invaded and wives humiliated by searches, of tanks crashing into uninsurable cars, I wondered if the unimaginable were happening. I wondered if some fiendish Pentagon theorists had decided after all that Saddam should be made to seem the lesser evil. They would give him back Baghdad and retreat to Kurdistan and the South. In Baghdad I do not wonder alone. America let him off the hook in 1991.
Either way, if this city revives from its present humiliation as the handsome city of the plain, it will be thanks to the gutsy resilience of its hard-tried populace. It will not be thanks to the latest bumbling authoritarian in the palace by the Tigris.
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