Why Iraqis distrust Americans...

By Elizabeth Neuffer, Globe Staff, 2/16/2003

ASRA, Iraq-The Muslim cleric fingered his glass worry beads and contemplated how best to answer a journalist's brazen question. If US troops invade Iraq, would the inhabitants of this war-worn southern city rise up to overthrow Saddam Hussein as they did during the Gulf War?

"The year 2003 is different than 1991," was his swift reply, as the beads clicked in his hands.

Almost exactly 12 years ago, anti-government revolts erupted across southern Iraq, sweeping the Shi'ite Muslim majority and local Christians alike into an alliance against Saddam Hussein. Disenchanted Iraqis, aided by exiled compatriots crossing over from Iran, responded to a call from President George Bush to topple their government. They athered up weapons and formed ad hoc civilian militias to battle against their leader's troops. (In the North, Iraqi Kurds would also rise against Saddam.)

"Bush! Bush! Bush!" shouted the euphoric rebels I met in March 1991, in a small village along the banks of the Euphrates some 100 kilometers northwest of this city. The rebels were confident that Bush and his US-led coalition would continue their march northward to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein's repressive regime. Throwing open a warehouse, they showed off an arsenal-surface-to-air missiles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades-that they hoped, along with US military might, would liberate their homeland. "Now I am with the revolution," said my guide, a professor who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Ali. "If all goes back to what it was before, I will be killed."

But the United States and its allies did not go to Baghdad. Nor did they come to the aid of the rebels, whose uprising was swiftly crushed. And the brutal retaliation wreaked by Saddam Hussein upon rebel leaders and upon this region, the marshlands of southern Iraq, became another chapter in the long chronicle of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Iraqi leader. Abu Ali, I suspect, met his death long ago.

Last month, returning to Iraq for the first time since 1991, I tried to gauge whether uprisings in the south would again be likely, and if American troops would be seen as liberators-or conquerors. Few Iraqis are forthcoming with foreign journalists in a country where all reporters are required to have a government-appointed "guide." But from snippets of private conversations, veiled remarks, and occasional outbursts, I gleaned this much: While many Iraqis may hate Saddam Hussein, that does not mean they trust President George W. Bush's pledge to "liberate" Iraq. Nor do the people of this deeply proud country-they are quick to remind visitors that Iraq was once the cradle of civilization-necessarily think it is America's business to liberate them in the first place.

Are American intentions humanitarian or economic? Does Bush aim to "liberate" Iraqis from Saddam or, as many speculate, to seize control of Iraq's oil fields? To understand these skeptical questions, one must recognize how much Iraq has changed since another President Bush pondered the wisdom of marching on Baghdad. Twelve years of crippling UN economic sanctions, coupled with intense political repression, have transformed a well-educated, middle-class nation into an impoverished, backwards one. The chief concern for much of the population is daily survival.

The political opposition is long dead or exiled. Vanished, too, in a nation of tyrannical rule, is trust-whether in America's declared intentions, or those of one's neighbors.

"I have no friends left in Baghdad," said one 36 year-old Iraqi bitterly. "And you cannot make new friends, because you simply cannot trust anyone here, any more." His cousin and another companion had recently threatened to make his life "difficult"-they were desperate for a slice of the cash he was earning from Western journalists.

Iraqis may distrust each other, but they are largely united by a feeling of collective victimization. And life here is bleak. Unemployment is rampant, the value of the Iraq dinar has collapsed, and 49 percent of Iraqi families do not earn enough money to meet their basic needs, according to the UN. Chronic malnutrition rates for children are at 26 percent-an improvement from 32 percent a few years ago. So when Iraqis contemplate their grim struggle to survive, they often blame the United States for refusing to consider lifting the UN economic blockade. (Overlooked in public conversation, thanks to Saddam's security agents and his spin control, is the fact that UN sanctions were to be lifted once weapons inspectors verified that Iraq was free of weapons of mass destruction-a step the Iraqi leader has yet to facilitate.)

Whatever Iraqis think of Saddam Hussein, they know that he puts food, however meager, on their tables. Under the UN's 1996 oil-for-food program, designed to offset the widespread hunger that first resulted from the sanctions, Iraqi oil is sold in exchange for humanitarian goods. It is the Iraqi government, consequently, that hands out many essentials-oil, flour, sugar, tea-that its citizens rely on.

Anti-US attitudes take hold easily in a population that sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and government crack-downs have rendered less sophisticated than it was 12 years ago. Literacy rates have plummeted-from 89 percent in 1985 to 57 percent in 1997, according to the UN. Nearly a quarter of the country's children no longer attend school. Instead, they're trying to make money for their families by shining shoes or running errands.

"The population is far worse off than they were in 1991," said Carel de Rooy, the head of UNICEF here.

Of course, many Iraqis blame Saddam for their country's miserable state. Beneath the rote public expressions of adoration for the Iraqi president lies an undercurrent of anger at Saddam and his all-powerful Ba'ath party, whose tentacles stretch into every aspect of Iraqi life. People here count off friends and relatives who have fled abroad because they refused to join the party.

Notably, in the Shia-dominated sections of Baghdad-Shia Muslims are this country's majority but hold no power-there are the odd, empty billboards where a portrait of the Iraqi leader has been torn down. As one Iraqi woman in her 30s told me in a rare but frank outburst, "Things will only change for the better in this country when Saddam is dead."

Regarded with equal disdain is Baghdad's nouveau riche: the friends, cronies, and allies of Saddam who profit from his illegal oil smuggling. "Corruption, nepotism, profiteering," said one Baghdad taxi driver. "It is not the same country as it was before."

The same taxi driver added: "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." Saddam is a known quantity; George W. Bush is not. And in a land of strictly government-controlled media, Iraqis have only their memories of Washington's past actions to judge this president's intentions. Memories resonate, particularly among the southern Shi'ites, of Washington's failure to support the 1991 rebellions. "It was the Americans that gave Saddam and the Iraqi troops the green light to move against us," recalled Said Ahmed, a survivor of the Basra uprisings now in exile in Tehran, Iran. "It will be hard for people to put their faith in the Americans again."

Memories linger too, of the days when Saddam was Washington's ally, not enemy, in the Middle East. And Iraqis have a hard time squaring US professions of concern about the Iraqi people with US efforts to keep UN sanctions in place.

Cynical-and determined to survive-many Iraqis may not choose sides until a winner emerges in the war for Iraq. "To imagine American troops welcomed here as liberators is difficult to believe," notes a foreign diplomat in Baghdad. "The Iraqis haven't forgotten they have had their fingers burned in the past."

Elizabeth Neuffer, a staff writer, has reported from Kuwait, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. She is based at the United Nations.

This story ran in the Boston Globe on 2/16/2003.
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