Last week’s suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon laid bare the complex love-hate relationship felt by many in the Arab world toward the United States. Even as Palestinians celebrated America’s “comeuppance” in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, there were outpourings of grief and expressions of condolence across the Middle East, from Libya to Lebanon. In Iraq-as I discovered during a week-long visit just before the massacres-attitudes toward the United States are steeped in similar ambivalence. In a country where hatred of the United States is official government policy, where a lobby-floor caricature of a snarling George Bush Sr. greets guests at the government owned Al Rasheed Hotel, the United States is almost unanimously viewed as an arrogant bully running roughshod over the poor and the weak. Yet for countless Iraqis America also remains a place of distant and forbidden allure. “If the U.S. Embassy were to open its doors again and start handing out visas,” one Western diplomat in Baghdad assured me, “you’d have a line stretching round the entire neighborhood.”
To be sure, many Iraqis make a firm distinction between the U.S. government and its citizens and culture. Ten years after the gulf war, newspapers and TV vilify the country around the clock, blaming the U.S. government for keeping Iraqis in poverty and for supporting the “Zionist entity.” The party line is scrupulously toed by Iraqis across all sectors of society. Iraqi doctors I spoke to in the southern port of Basrah held back tears as they blamed the United States for blocking the shipment of vital anticancer drugs to dying Iraqi children-an allegation dismissed as Saddam’s propaganda by Western diplomats in Baghdad. An affable American-educated translator who works for many U.S. news organizations insisted to me that the Holocaust was an invention and blamed America’s “Jewish lobby” for the “evil policy” of support for Israel. Taxi drivers, cafe workers, railroad employees, and university professors all professed the belief that the United States government, in league with its British ally, was refusing to lift sanctions because it wanted to subjugate the Iraqi people and maintain control over supplies of Iraqi oil.
INFORMATION BLACKOUT
Those ideas are bolstered by an almost complete lack of information from the outside world. Iraqi TV carries virtually no Western programming, and ownership of a satellite dish is punishable by six months in prison. Western newspapers, magazines and books are impossible to find, except for a few dog-eared NEWSWEEKs, Times and International Herald Tribunes brought into the country by taxi drivers who make the nine-hour journey across the desert from Amman, Jordan. Internet access in one’s home is illegal (and few people can afford a computer anyway) and the half dozen cybercafes that have opened in the past year are closely monitored and limited to a handful of members who have been screened by the government. Even foreigners have problems: on a plane to Amman I met an Egyptian businessman who had entered one downtown Baghdad Internet cafe and tried to log onto his Hotmail account-and was roughed up by two plainclothes Iraqi cops who claimed that they were acting “on orders of the president.”
Yet even in tightly controlled Baghdad, Western influence seeps in. True, you can’t find a McDonald’s or a Burger King, although I did stumble into one fast-food joint that was was selling something labeled “Kentucky” chicken. Countless music shops in the city’s commercial district offer pirated CDs for $1 apiece-Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys-most of them smuggled from the United Arab Emirates or Jordan. The pirated movie industry is even bigger. “Within 24 hours of any big Hollywood movie opening in New York,” a Western diplomat told me, “you can find a pirated laser disk of that film on sale in central Baghdad.”
Sultan, my 30-year-old driver in Baghdad, would almost certainly be at the front of the line for a U.S. visa. The glove compartment of his 1990 Chevrolet Caprice was stuffed with pirated cassettes of the Beatles and REM, which he played full blast as we cruised past the giant portraits of Saddam Hussein and ugly concrete monuments that adorn this dirt-brown capital. He chain-smoked Marlboro Lights-“American cigarettes are the best,” he said-devoured American paperbacks when he could get them and dreamed of making enough money to leave the apartment he shared with his parents to move in with his girlfriend, “just like you Americans do.”
DON’T WORRY ABOUT BUGS
Sultan kept his opinions about the Iraqi dictatorship tightly guarded, but sometimes revealed an irreverence that was rare in a country ruled by fear. One morning after returning from Basrah I checked into Baghdad’s Al Rasheed Hotel without a reservation, and joked not giving the management enough time to prepare for my visit. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “It’s a government hotel. You can be sure that every room already has a bug and a hidden camera.”
Helping fuel this wistful attraction to America are the thousands of educated Iraqis who studied or worked in the United States and retain vivid memories. The first person I met in Iraq was a former Iraqi Airlines chief steward turned taxi driver who was thrilled to be talking to an American-a rare beast in Iraq these days. In fluent English, he recalled his 1989 trip to Seattle to help bring back a new Boeing 747 to add to Iraqi Airlines’ fleet. Now the airline was banned from flying internationally, most of its planes were mothballed in Amman and Qatar, and the former steward was reduced to picking up occasional fares at the barely functioning airport. “Such a beautiful city, Seattle,” he said with a sigh, as we sped down the deserted highway toward the capital. “Someday maybe I’ll go back.” Days later I met a 34-year-old TV cameraman who had studied for 12 years in the United States. After graduating from a university in the Deep South, he returned to Baghdad in January 1990. His student visa expired, and shortly after that, Saddam invaded Kuwait-leaving him stranded in Iraq. Salim told me that he dreamed all the time of returning to the United States, but refused to apply for refugee status because it would be undignified. “I’d be the happiest person in the world if this regime fell tomorrow,” he whispered, brave words in a country where secret police and spies permeate every neighborhood.
Even the most hardcore government loyalists sometimes can’t mask their fascination for Americana. On my last day in Baghdad-24 hours before the World Trade Center attack-I said goodbye to my government minder in the Iraqi Press Office, down the street from the Al Rasheed Hotel. He stood with a group of colleagues around the TV, nodding approvingly at a report of another Palestinian suicide bombing in “the Zionist entity.” I slipped him 50 American dollars and then pulled another gift out of my knapsack-three John Grisham paperbacks. He accepted the gift graciously, then touched my shoulder as I walked out of the room. “Maybe you also have Stephen King?”
