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The devastating results of the eight-year war against Iran are visible everywhere: the numbed population, fraying public services, unemployment and a pervasive security state that enforces Saddam's rule through fear and a cult of personality that is truly Orwellian. "This could have been the most prosperous, advanced country in the Middle East," says a diplomat stationed here for six years. "It has the minerals, 10% of the world's oil reserves, favorable climate, it's not overpopulated. But as Nasser did in Egypt, Saddam put his country's resources into technology, and then the technology was applied to the war machine instead of the country."
The state-owned hotel where most of the press and many Western "guests" are kept serves as metaphor for the failed ideal of Saddam's Baathist party, which preaches a renascence of Arab greatness through socialism, Islamic values and the secular goals of a modern industrial nation. The place is overreaching, contradictory, a lot better in conception than execution. From the outside, it beckons impressively, promising luxury, hospitality, comfort. There is tennis, a casino, gardens of bougainvillea and the shade of towering eucalyptus trees. But all has been overtaken by security functions, inefficiency and economic chaos: at the official rate, lunch for one costs $75, the phones are monitored constantly, employees whose only purported function is to check the ashtrays apologize after bursting into the room, the lobby is watched by ever present "minders" who keep tabs on the press. A scratchy recording of Beethoven's Fur Elise has been playing constantly for 10 days, the sound grating, nerve-racking.
Nearby is the Baathist Bauhaus enclave, where party members, wealthy Iraqis and foreign diplomats reside. Outside the Pakistani embassy, refugees from Kuwait squat next to their belongings. A few lawns away, a "PNG party" is in progress, to toast farewell to French personnel declared persona non grata. Inevitably the conversation gets around to where people plan to be when the attack comes. Most think the safest haven will be their embassy or residence. Since few buildings in Baghdad have basements, a Scandinavian says, "We will sit beneath the staircase or in a corridor with no windows and hope for the best."
Among Western ambassadors and military aides, there is virtually universal belief that war is almost inevitable and probably imminent. Representatives of countries that for 40 years opposed or ignored one another now share information, plans, intelligence, last-minute strategy. They speak emotionally of a renewed international security system made possible by the Soviet- American thaw. The Iraqis, they say, do not comprehend the change implied in the new world order or its implications for international resolve against Baghdad.