Power problems

With increasing boldness, Iraqis are demanding to run their own affairs.

By James F. Smith, Globe Staff, 10/19/2003

BAGHDAD -- After half a year of American-led occupation, Iraq's capital city is still struggling just to climb back to zero -- to restore even the grim quality of life that existed when the first American bomb fell.

Fear of organized criminal gangs has replaced fear of Saddam Hussein's secret police. Yet Baghdad also exudes a kind of anarchic anything-goes openness that was unthinkable under the old regime. Iraqis are using once-banned satellite dishes and reading uncensored newspapers to discover a new world.

Like the staircases that sweep around its famous minaret towers, Iraq is caught in a dizzying spiral. It's unclear whether the American occupation will prod the country upward toward order and freedom, or let it stumble downward into a morass where violence worsens, the occupiers have to crack down harder, and resistance grows.

This month, American officials happily announced that Iraq's generation of electricity had surpassed prewar levels: Power in Baghdad is now on for three hours, then off for three hours. On one main shopping avenue, not far from the burned-out shells of government buildings looted in April, the sidewalks are now cluttered with stacks of imported computers, air-conditioners, and generators. The electronics stores are busy meeting years of pent-up consumer demand.

American officials see such advances as evidence that Iraq is on the road to recovery. But most Baghdadis are quick to answer that the lack of jobs and food, and the abundance of crime and chaos, outweigh any vague hopes of future democracy. What's more, a proud people feel subjected to the frequent humiliations of random roadside checkpoints, house raids, and security sweeps through entire city blocks.

Last week, Mohsen Abdul Hamid, leader of Iraq's largest Sunni Muslim party and one of the 24 members of the US-appointed Governing Council, made a grim assessment: "Now we have a security problem, a military problem, an economic problem, and a moral problem. Now our society is destroyed."

Hamid, who will take the rotating presidency of the Governing Council for the month of February, complained bitterly about intrusive American search tactics. In one raid in his own neighborhood, Hamid said, US troops shot up a house and a woman lost an eye. "They attacked people who didn't do anything. They took jewelry, they destroyed the inside of the house. People who hear this go out and attack the Americans."

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The daily and often deadly attacks against US troops, the occasional anti-American protests, and the spate of car bombs still fall well short of a strategic military threat to the American occupation. But many Iraqis believe that opposition to the occupation could coalesce into more serious resistance if the Americans don't move faster to meet Iraqi demands for more political power and more responsibility for their own well-being.

Hamid says American forces should withdraw to the edges of the cities and towns and give control of security to the fledgling Interior Ministry, which is building up a US-trained force of 75,000 new police officers. "We are more competent, we know our society," he said.

Almost without exception, the Iraqis blame the Americans for their hardships rather than Saddam Hussein. It's not hard to understand the animosity. For one thing, the military presence is startling, with tanks dug in behind barbed wire outside hotels, speeding convoys of Humvees bristling with .50-calibre machine guns, and helicopter patrols over the snaking Tigris River channel.

But it seems that few Iraqis want the Americans to pull out instantly, for fear of further chaos or a factional power grab. Many say they want the Americans to pay for the rebuilding and to help with expertise, while Iraqis police the streets, pump the oil, and provide basic services. One obstacle is that many former Ba'ath party members with relevant experience have been purged from their jobs. The Americans are easing their initial hardline against all Ba'athists, but putting Ba'athists back in positions of authority will please some Iraqis and make others furious. The transfer of power is not a simple operation.

Coalition officials maintain they are nonetheless moving as fast as they can. Charles Heatly, a spokesman for the American-led provisional authority in Iraq, says a central goal is to get the Iraqis to produce a constitution that will allow a transfer of sovereignty to an elected, democratic government. But most observers expect that process to take one to two years.

Right now, in addition to training the police force and a new 80,000-man army, the coalition is also providing public-works jobs, including 100,000 in irrigation projects alone. The coalition also has made $40 payments to more than 300,000 ex-soldiers, thought that hearts-and-minds gesture partially backfired this month when riots broke out among Iraqis queuing in the hot sun for their payouts, herded along by American soldiers with batons.

Major Troy Smith, executive officer of the First Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division's command center in Tikrit, estimates that 80 percent of Iraqis regard the US presence neutrally and want to get on with their lives, while 15 percent are working with the Americans and 5 percent are actively opposing the occupation. The goal, he said, is to persuade more of the 80 percent to join the 15 percent in tracking down the small numbers who are still fighting.

The importance of winning local support is especially obvious in Tikrit, Hussein's home region 90 miles north of Baghdad. There, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Huron's 299th Engineers' Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Division is hunting for unexploded Iraqi ordnance that could otherwise be used in the homemade bombs that are now killing American soldiers on Highway One. Huron said that 95 percent of the intelligence tips he gets from local people lead his troops to suspects or arms caches.

Huron spent one recent afternoon planning community rehabilitation projects with a Muslim sheikh who had become head of a new local council. "It's going to take some brave leadership, somebody who will, as corny as it sounds, die for their new way of life," Huron said. "And some of these people are coming forward."

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Meanwhile, in Baghdad, fear of carjackers and kidnappers keeps just about everyone inside after dark, and trips that used to take 10 minutes now take an hour or two, thanks to all the checkpoints, broken traffic lights, and road closures near US and international facilities. While the postwar looting was carried out by Iraqis themselves, many still blame the Americans for the chaos that set it off -- and for not halting it with shoot-on-sight curfews right after the war.

"The Americans made the fundamental error of dismantling everything," said Shatha Al Awsi, a former government employee working as a translator. "We are very disappointed. . .. My aunt said last night she wants Saddam back. She worries about security when her child goes to school. This is the feeling of every mother."

It's hard to envision a successful outcome unless the United States takes on the Iraqis as full partners. Instead, signs of suspicion and mistrust abound. On a recent flight from Amman to Baghdad, Royal Jordanian Airlines employed a big Airbus along with the scheduled small turboprop normally used on this four-day-a-week flight. A US contractor had chartered the big plane to transport 102 Indian cooks into Baghdad. In a country where 60 percent of the population was unemployed at the start of the occupation, the United States is apparently paying to bring cooks all the way from India because it does not trust Iraqis to prepare food for coalition officials.

Globe staff reporter David Filipov contributed to this story.

James F. Smith is foreign editor of the Globe.