OUR FRIENDS IN BAGHDAD
Andrew Gilligan identifies Nice Iraqi Syndrome — the way in which locals are hying
to distance themselves from Saddam
Baghdad EVEN under Jack Straw's law-and-order policies, few BBC offices in Britain yet have an anti-aircraft artillery battery on their roofs. Our bureau in Baghdad does. Two weeks ago, the big gun burst ineffectually into action as US and British missiles slammed with pin-point accuracy into — or at least quite near to, or somewhere in the very approximate vicinity of — suspect radar stations around the city. Arriving in Iraq the following day for the first time, I felt entitled to be apprehensive. How would a visiting Iraqi be treated in Britain if his country had just bombed Birmingham? This kind of thinking was a mistake.
'Well-come,' said the hotel porter, carefully laying out my shaving things and going away to find me one of the hotel's limited supply of toilet rolls. 'Well-come,' said the other people in the lift. 'From England? Ah, William Shakespeare, Graham Greene. How is old England now?' Old England was fine, I said. The levels of childhood leukaemia, infant mortality, malnutrition and diarrhoea in Iraq will be familiar to all viewers of concerned documentaries by John Pilger. But in that hotel lift I started to feel the premonitory symptoms of another, equally important local disease, which the great journalist and humanitarian seems to have missed. It affects only visiting Westerners, and there is no cure. Without exception, we have all succumbed to Nice Iraqi Syndrome.
In the days since the bombing, and to the evident disappointment of our various employers, neither I nor any other colleague here has experienced a single act of hostility or even unfriendliness. There are, of course, regular demonstrations against the imperialist aggressors, but these tend to consist of children who have been given the day off school for the purpose. There are several monuments to what the official media call the American occupation of Kuwait' — a particularly enjoyable one has a moody-looking 30-foot-high Saddam with pygmy figures of Margaret Thatcher, George Bush senior and Francois Mitterrand cringing at his feet — but these are not places of pilgrimage for the average citizen. Iraqi niceness to foreigners, as well as being innate, is a way of passively expressing distance from the regime.
The British are particularly vulnerable to Nice Iraqi Syndrome. The English language is still strong here, though not always faultlessly rendered. A character called Gordon Blue makes frequent appearances on the Baghdad restaurant menus. He is not a distant relative of our own dear Chancellor, but a dish of chicken. In the old part of town, customers at the Fridaymorning book market look through frayed second-hand copies of Tarka the Otter, Enid Blyton and such other wholesome reading as the government deems suitable. One of them is so pleased with my weekold copy of the Times that he has to sit down even though the headline on the front is 'RAF jets blitz Baghdad'.
The traditional charge — which we have all been most disappointed not to hear from Alastair Campbell during this round of bombing — is that Nice Iraqi Syndrome leads to Enid Blyton-type reporting, full of sick children suffering under sanctions. This is true to the extent — and only to the extent — that no other side of Iraq is ever exposed to public view by the authorities. But journalists are versatile people. We can remember, without being shown them, the Nasty Iraqis; those who, according to German intelligence, are stepping up their efforts to produce chemical weapons and missiles which, within four years, will be capable of reaching Europe; they are the ones who pillaged Kuwait and murdered so many of its citizens. Some of them must be the same people as those offering tea and sympathy on the streets of Baghdad. We can ask Saddam's minister of trade. as I did, whether he regrets anything his country has done in the last decade, and broadcast his hollow laughter in reply.
Yet if the regime is lucky in the temperament of its people, it is also lucky in its enemies. No one can fail to perceive the utter confusion in Western policy towards Baghdad. Iraqi officials like to present the country as groaning under a rack-tight embargo. This is still true of exports — hence the poverty here. Many of the industries which once employed people making goods to sell abroad no longer function. But. in the case of imports, UN officials in the region admit that sanctions are barely enforced. The UN may only inspect cargo aircraft arriving at Saddam International Airport if it gives seven days' notice to the Iraqis. At the land borders, UN contractors may only look at goods arriving under the oil-for-food programme. They are not allowed to inspect any illicit shipments. Dhows depart daily by sea from the socalled 'Iraqi dock', just behind the Sheraton Hotel in Dubai, piled with sanctions-busting items. You can walk along the quays, as I did, and find three or more vessels loading.
The most alarming fruits of all this were freely on display in Baghdad earlier this week at the Saddam Exhibition and Trade Fair, a sort of Iraqi Earls Court. One trader, complete with US military training videos as a come-on for the punters, was offering American communications soft ware explicitly labelled for 'military, security and police use'. Another had a selection of Global Positioning System kits for sale — as used in the guidance systems for missiles — and yes, he said, the Iraqi government was very interested in buying, if the price was right.
The USA could stop most of this within months if it really wanted to. US warships patrol the shallow waters used by the dhows coming up from Dubai. The Americans could put pressure on Jordan and Turkey to tighten land border controls and overflights. The fact that they don't suggests that, for all their protestations to the contrary, they do not regard Iraq as a particularly significant threat, If you are an Iraqi Shi'ite in the south or a Kurd in the north, you have good reason to fear Saddam Hussein. If you are a Saudi or a Kuwaiti, you have American troops protecting your northern frontier and the knowledge that, bereft of air superiority, any Iraqi invasion force could be attacked from the sky as it left the gates of its barracks. If you are an Israeli (a 'citizen of the Zionist entity', in Saddam-speak), you have the deterrent power of your very own biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
There may be another reason why the USA does not act. As diplomats here concede, the current situation in Iraq is in almost everybody's interest. The United States needs Saddam, or someone like him, to avoid a hole in the Middle East; Iraq's Arab neighbours make money; and Saddam is much strengthened by the stranglehold on food distribution given him by the UN. (Why didn't the UN distribute the oil-for-food proceeds itself? we asked a local UN official. 'Ask the Americans about that one,' he said.) The status quo suits everyone; everyone, that is, except the Nice Iraqis.
Andrew Gilligan is defence and diplomatic correspondent of Radio Four's Today programme.
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