July 23 — The revolving restaurant on the bright
blue communications tower is a good vantage
point for observing Baghdad and some of its
many contradictions. Destroyed in the gulf war,
it was rebuilt in 1994 and renamed the Saddam
Tower. “We made it 108 meters high, so it
would be 8 meters higher than the Tower of
London,” says Uday al-Faie, editor in chief of
the Iraqi News Agency. Why bother to top
London’s tower? “Because it was a British plane
that destroyed it,” he says. These days, the
restaurant revolves fitfully, if at all.
DOWN BELOW, the once mighty Tigris River has been
shrunk by two years of drought—one of the few problems
official Iraq doesn’t blame on United Nations sanctions. As
the restaurant revolves eastward, a huge compound of
nearly finished buildings comes into view. The compound is
so big, and the sputtering tower so slow, that 20 minutes
pass before all of it is visible. The guide assigned by the
Ministry of Information nervously professes to have no idea
what the mammoth complex is for. It is, of course, yet
another of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. With his people
suffering from sanctions, Saddam is on a spending spree.
And not just Saddam. In the revolving restaurant, one
dinner costs about a month’s salary for a government
worker. Yet there are plenty of patrons.
Ten years after Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait and
started the gulf war, the conflict still isn’t over. Punitive
sanctions remain in force, blocking most exports and
imports until Iraq allows U.N. weapons inspectors to
resume their work. The sanctions haven’t made Saddam
back down, but they have
been devastating to
ordinary Iraqis. Because
of chronic malnutrition and
a shortage of medicine,
500,000 more Iraqi
children have died under
sanctions than would have
been expected from
prewar trends, according
to UNICEF studies. Saddam, 63, rules most of the ground
with an iron hand, but he can’t even control his own
airspace. U.S. and British warplanes enforce no-fly zones
over northern and southern Iraq in a partly successful
attempt to protect local rebels. So far, the Iraqis have failed
to shoot down a single allied plane, though they keep trying.
To most Americans, the gulf war is a fading
memory—a short-lived triumph followed by years of
gnawing suspicions that the victory may have been hollow.
President George Bush, who organized the coalition that
expelled Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, was voted out of
office less than two years later. Now his son is running for
president, and George W. Bush doesn’t talk much about
getting tough with Saddam, perhaps for fear of having to
make good on any threats. “Bush could get into a ‘read my
lips’ syndrome,” says one of his father’s former advisers. Al
Gore isn’t beating his chest about Iraq, either. The Clinton
administration struggles to maintain the sanctions, hoping
that eventually someone—preferably a mainstream Sunni
strongman from central Iraq—will end the stalemate by
getting rid of Saddam.
There’s no sign of that happening soon. “After 10
years, Saddam Hussein is stronger than ever, and the
government is more stable than ever,” says A. K. al-
Hashimi, who runs an
ostensibly
nongovernmental group
called the Organization of
Friendship, Peace and
Solidarity. An international
agency official, no fan of
Saddam’s, agrees.
“Sanctions haven’t
accomplished their aim, which was to weaken the regime,”
he says. “Instead, they’ve strengthened it.” The government
remains very much a family business. Saddam’s chosen
successor appears to be his older son, Uday, 35, a
notorious thug who is still recovering from wounds sustained
in a 1996 assassination attempt. Another son, Qusay, 33,
runs the secret police and other security forces and could be
a less controversial contender for the succession.
Internal opposition seems to have been completely
suppressed, and while the Kurds in the north remain
quasi-independent, Saddam’s control elsewhere is total. In
the south, the vast marshes where Shiite Arabs mounted an
insurgency after Iraq’s defeat in Kuwait have been drained,
depriving the rebels of cover. Overseas, Iraqi exile groups
have feuded so much with each other that the Clinton
administration has yet to release most of the $97 million
Congress voted for them. Last week, one group, the Iraqi
National Accord, pulled out of the U.S.-backed exile
coalition.
Now U.S. allies and some officials in Washington are
arguing for “smart” or “targeted” sanctions. An example
would be to penalize the regime’s leaders with travel bans
or freezes on overseas bank accounts, which would not hurt
ordinary citizens. The U.N. Security Council has already
greatly softened the sanctions. When Iraq verged on famine
in 1996, an “Oil for Food” program was begun. Iraq was
allowed to sell some oil, putting the proceeds into a
U.N.-administered account, to verify it was being spent
properly. Later, the program was expanded to include other
humanitarian purchases.
But Oil for Food has not been able to stop an alarming
decline in health, especially among children. Every Iraqi
receives a food basket paid for by the program, but many
end up selling the food because there is little cash for
anything else. The Iraqi dinar has collapsed so badly that
most salaries are worth less than $10 a month. The result is
that one in five Iraqi children is chronically malnourished, to
the point where growth is stunted. “Chronic malnutrition is
extremely difficult to reverse,” says the local UNICEF head,
Anu Pama Rao Singh. She says the country faces “a lost
generation,” not only due to poor health, but because
schools have deteriorated so badly.
At the same time there is such opulence in Iraq that it’s
hard to stir up much interest among foreign-aid donors. Oil
smuggling keeps Saddam, his relatives and his supporters
well heeled. Stores in the elite shopping districts of Baghdad
are crammed with luxury goods, and there seems to be
plenty of customers. Smuggling revenues have also helped
the Iraqis rebuild their monuments, if not their schools. A
mosque claimed to be the largest in the world is going up in
the middle of Baghdad—a building so big it will be visible
from space. The city abounds with statues of Saddam in
every conceivable costume, and portraits of the dictator
adorn every government office and most street corners.
The palaces are another sign of excess. No one knows
how many there are now; Saddam had 19 when weapons
inspectors were last here in 1996, and many more have
gone up since—apparently for family and cronies, as well as
Saddam. “These palaces don’t belong to Saddam himself,”
insists al-Faie. “Every single man in Iraq has the right to go
to the palaces here.”
The Big Lie thrives in Baghdad, where local news
media are totally controlled. Iraqis insist, for example, that
they won the gulf war. “The [U.S.] Seventh Corps was
surrounded, and a disaster was going to take place,” says
al-Hashimi. “Bush was forced to ask for the ceasefire.” The
U.S. goal was to take Baghdad, depose Saddam and seize
Iraq’s oil reserves, he adds. That was never the objective,
says Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s national-security
adviser during the war. “We had absolutely no support at
the time for [going all the way to Baghdad], either from our
allies or the Arab nations,” he says. In hindsight,
Scowcroft’s one regret is that the ground war didn’t go on
for “another 24 hours or so,” in order to destroy Saddam’s
Republican Guard. On balance, Scowcroft argues that “Iraq
is less of a threat to the region than it was 10 years ago. It’s
clear their Army has not much offensive capability. It’s clear
that they do not yet have a nuclear capability.”
But no one in Washington believes Saddam has given
up his ambition to build weapons of mass destruction. The
former boss of the U.N. weapons inspectors, Richard
Butler, told Israel’s Knesset last week that the Iraqis have
the expertise to build a nuclear weapon within a year,
provided they could get the raw materials. Ending the
sanctions would give Saddam vastly increased oil revenues
and freedom from import controls, making it easier for him
to buy the nuclear supplies he needs. Because of that, the
current ugly stalemate—half war, half peace—may drag on
indefinitely. There seems to be little relief in sight for
Saddam’s long-suffering people.
With Michael Hirsh in Washington
© 2000 Newsweek, Inc.