US occupation of palace irritates Iraqis
BAGHDAD -- When US soldiers first drove into Baghdad last year, they took showers in Saddam Hussein's main palace and smoked cigars in his armchairs, the ultimate show of power over an invaded country.
The United States then cordoned off several square miles around the Republican Palace, blocking off many of the main routes through the center of downtown Baghdad, and dubbed the area the Green Zone. The marble palace, which was home to three Iraqi presidents before Hussein, became the headquarters of the country's occupiers. And with 11 days left until Iraq regains sovereignty, the occupiers aren't packing to leave. They are converting the palace into part of the massive new US Embassy compound.
From Iraq's new president to the men who stand guard at the Martyrs' Monument to the country's war dead -- itself taken over as a US base until last month -- Iraqis are irritated at the prospect of US diplomats occupying their country's equivalent of the White House. The dispute is becoming a test of how strongly the new Iraqi state can assert its will against a country that will retain great power here even after the occupation formally ends, because the 138,000 US troops remaining far outnumber Iraq's military and the United States controls $18 billion in reconstruction aid.
US officials have expressed surprise that an issue has been made of their continued stay in the palace, which they expect to be a temporary, practical measure to house 1,500 employees during the two-year project to complete the new embassy, State Department officials told Congress this week.
Iraqis say the Americans do not realize the importance of symbolism.
"It is a symbol of sovereignty," Iraq's new president, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawer, said Tuesday.
It is not only the occupation of the palace that irks Iraqis. It is the blast walls and other barriers erected to protect US bases and hotels housing US contractors, and the traffic jams such measures cause every day. It is the loss of public spaces commandeered as military bases, including several of the city's scarce green areas. Baghdad Island's rental rowboats and amusement park are now behind barbed wire; much of the central Zawra Park, including the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a parade ground where teenagers used to roller-skate under Hussein's gargantuan Victory Arch, is part of the off-limits Green Zone. Wedding Island, a breezy riverside spot that was a rare refuge from the 110-degree spring heat, is cordoned off to secure trucks lining up to enter the Green Zone.
"It used to be a beautiful place where families could go," said Milar Hamid, 27, a police officer guarding the concrete-walled entrance to Wedding Island. "Now we don't have anywhere to go."
To many Iraqis, these intrusions seem untenable in a sovereign country. And some of the country's highest officials, with a measure of self-rule in sight, have begun to assert their claim to control public spaces.
"There is no talk of inviting the United States to keep the palace," Yawer, who was named president this month with the approval of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, told reporters this week. "We asked that the Republican Palace be vacated in the fastest opportunity for us to use it as Iraqis, as a republican palace, or a museum."
Bruska Shaways, secretary general of Iraq's Ministry of Defense, said, the occupation authority "should have to buy it or rent it."
US officials show no signs of changing their plans, and they have not set a date for leaving the property. They say the matter is practical, not political.
"The Iraqi people are proud of their patience," a senior coalition authority official said in an interview. "They're proud of the fact that they were able to persevere under 35 years of the brutality of Saddam Hussein, and ultimately prevail. And we would ask them to give us some patience as well."
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it would take time to move a large operation such as the occupation authority and suggested that anyone who makes more of the issue is playing politics.
"We're working as hard and as fast as we can to address their concerns. And we think that people of good will will understand that," he said. "But there will always be demagogues in any society who will exploit an issue and try to use it for their own political ends."
A former official with the coalition authority disagreed, saying that it is harmful for the United States to remain in a building that symbolizes Hussein's rule and that the Green Zone has created an intolerable inconvenience for Iraqis.
"If we are in the Republican Palace on July 1st, we will have failed," said Michael Rubin, a former adviser to the coalition authority who is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
A separate chancery, also in the Green Zone, will house the embassy's public functions, but with 1,100 employees and perhaps that many contractors, the United States still will have to rely on the sprawling palace.
The military is taking a different approach at Baghdad International Airport, occupied by US-led forces since April 2003. The military plans to vacate part of the facility by early July and the rest by late August. Military supply planes no longer will land at the airport, although that will mean longer, more dangerous ground supply routes for the large base outside its walls.
"That shows the coalition's commitment to sovereignty," a senior coalition military operations official said this week. "The coalition has made the sacrifice to cease operations at that airport."
But few changes are planned for the palace, where staff members sit in cubicles in a hall lined with 20-foot mirrors and marble panels, across a towering rotunda from the thick wooden doors leading to the office of top US administrator L. Paul Bremer III. Many coalition authority employees will keep their offices as they transfer to the embassy. Word in the hallways is that a new shop will sell
The Green Zone will remain in place, walled by concrete and guarded by US soldiers, Iraqi civil defense troops, and private guards.
At one point, US officials considered sharing the palace with Yawer, said a former US government employee in touch with US and Iraqi officials in Baghdad. "They're absolutely tone-deaf, he said, referring to US officials.
At Baghdad's city hall, the new mayor's staff is less concerned about the palace -- off-limits to ordinary citizens under Hussein -- than they are about control of Baghdad's streets.
Like Boston and Cambridge, Baghdad is divided by a river. The situation is akin to blocking Storrow Drive, closing off Longfellow Bridge, and narrowing streets around the Boston Common. In one example, Abu Nuwas Street, the main drive along one bank of the Tigris River, and Sadoun Street, a business hub, are blocked to protect the Sheraton and Palestine hotels that house foreign contractors and journalists.
Khalil al Ibadi, a spokesman for the mayor, said the city has little power to demand its streets back from US troops, whom they rely on for security. City workers are afraid to move concrete barriers unilaterally set up by Iraqi political parties with well-armed security forces, he said: "We fear that we will be killed."
Kasim Abdelkarim, 45, a guard at the Martyrs' Monument, said, "We wish the Republican Palace would go back to the Iraqi people so that Iraqis can feel that Iraq's sovereignty is real."
For Hamid, the guard at Wedding Island, the palace is one thing that hasn't changed. "We never saw the palace under Saddam," he said, "and we don't see it now."
Farah Stockman of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington. 
