Iraq's Citizens Vow to Fight American Imperialism, Hate Bush and Saddam [NYTimes]

["M. Junaid Alam" <redjaguar@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Stones of Baghdad
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


AGHDAD, Iraq - From their perch in Washington, President 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. That looks like a potentially catastrophic misreading of Iraq.

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?

"I will throw stones at them," Dahlia said.

"Maybe I will throw knives," Intidhar said brightly.

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.

After scores of interviews with ordinary people from Mosul in the north to
Basra in the south, I've reached two conclusions:

1. Iraqis dislike and distrust Saddam Hussein, particularly outside the
Sunni heartland, and many Iraqis will be delighted to see him gone.

2. Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam,
and they are even more distrustful of America's intentions than Saddam's.

"America is a new colonial power that wants to dominate," warns Rahim Majid,
a farmer from Karbala.

"Americans are not coming to help us, but for our oil," frets Naseem Jawad,
a merchant in Najaf.

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 drink, before conversations even
begin to get interesting.

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.

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 bribe 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.)

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
U.S. after 11 years of economic sanctions.

"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.)

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 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

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.

"We blame the U.S.," sputtered Dr. Amir Nissa, an obstetrician in Basra. "It
was the U.S. that put in sanctions against Iraq. Every Iraqi blames the U.S.
100 percent."

So if Saddam thinks the average Iraqi is going to miss him, he's deluding
himself. But if President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go
smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then he too is deluding himself.