Inside Saddam's New Charm Offensive

By Johanna McGeary/Baghdad Monday, Apr. 29, 2002
    • GILLES BASSIGNAC/GAMMA FOR TIME

    Iraqi revelers celebrate the 65th birthday of Saddam Hussein

    Saddam is everywhere. Though he never appears in public, his face and figure are inescapable. At traffic circles, you see little stone Saddams and big cast-metal Saddams, right arm raised to embrace his people. In front of a ministry, a brand-new bronze Saddam stands 20 ft. tall in the prow of a boat: the idea is that Saddam will steer his people to the shining shore on the other side of sanctions. On a wall, a white-suited Saddam is painted holding flowers; on another, a uniformed Saddam is staring through binoculars at a battlefield; on a third, he wears a business suit and smiles. He always smiles.

    At the Al-Rashid Hotel, the famous hostelry with the snarling face of former President Bush set into the entryway floor, a 10-ft. photo of Saddam looms high over Bush's head. Inside are 22 more images: Saddam smoking a cigar in Iraqi national dress; Saddam in Jordanian headdress, in Palestinian kaffiyeh, in Saudi robes, in a crested aristocrat's jacket with the Dome of the Rock floating overhead. Never before when I've been here has Saddam been so omnipresent.


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    I am in Baghdad for April 28, better known as the birthday of Iraq's eternal President, which the country celebrates with great ceremony, a cross between Christmas (suddenly all the blinking neon lights on the street are lighted as the government turns on regular electricity) and the Fourth of July (with the obligatory patriotic parades). Journalists who usually never get visas fill the press center. Handsomely dressed Arabs crowd the Al-Rashid lobby, all invited to witness how much the Iraqi people love their leader. For Saddam, it is time for another charm offensive: he is using all his old diplomatic wiles and faux hospitality to put off the threatened day of reckoning with the U.S. He is busily embracing Arab leaders so they won't sign up for Bush II's get-Saddam campaign. He is dickering with the U.N.--again--over revised sanctions and weapons inspections. He is trading on his role as patron of the Palestinian uprising, sending cash to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers instead of spending it to feed and house long-suffering Iraqis. Most of them despair. But they celebrate his birthday nonetheless. Karim, 36, who asked that I give him a pseudonym, runs a car-alarm business: the nouveau riche at the top of this corrupt society can easily afford his $45 systems to protect their new Nissans and Protons. But Karim cannot feed his family of four on his meager monthly food ration. His earnings at the shop let him buy a little meat, a bit of chicken, to supplement the basics. When I ask him if anyone avoids the birthday parade, he looks at me as if I were daft. Anyone in Baghdad who has a job and wants to keep it shows up at the local parade and eats Saddam birthday cake.

    Smart people, says a woman I will call Layla, who quit her $2-a-month office job because it wasn't worth getting up in the morning, know they have to go. Smart people, she says, want to live. Layla has a Malaysian-cloned computer in her house, paid for by her brother in Florida. In the past year, Iraqis have been permitted to buy up-to-date computers if they have the cash. Layla can e-mail her brother, but she can't surf the Net: ordinary citizens are not allowed.

    The shops outside are full of fat oranges, Pepsi, Pringles chips, but Layla's friends without brothers abroad can't afford any of that. Some must sell off a portion of their meager monthly food ration to buy medicine. Imported medicines are smuggled in through the embargo-busting trade with Jordan and the Emirates, but only the rich can buy those. The poor get cheap pills from "private" Iraqi drug companies that "never, ever work," says a pharmacist in the posh Al-Mansur district.

    Layla blames both countries' leaders for her travails. "Why do I have to suffer because our President and your President just care about defeating each other? You Americans, your life is so easy, and mine is so hard." At age 38, she has no hope of marriage, since so many men of her generation died or were crippled in two wars.

    She has no hope for her country's future either. She points to the vast construction site nearby, where Saddam is building the grandiose multidomed Mosque No. 2, bigger than the Mother of All Battles Mosque finished last year but not as grand as No. 3, expected to be completed in 2010, which Saddam claims will be the biggest in the Arab world. The fiercely secular leader has lately switched his building mania from palaces to mosques to co-opt the country's growing religious mood.

    "That's our money," says Layla, dismissing the mosque with an angry wave. "He thinks it will bring him respect, a great house in paradise, while we go inside it to pray to God to give us enough food for the month."