Nearby, photographers surged around a huge rose-shaped birthday cake and a golden sculpture displaying Saddam on horseback, surrounded by Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, jet fighters and artillery emplacements. A team of artisans had labored for two months on the gift, the parade’s organizer, Muhammad Juma Khalifa, proudly told me, using 132 pounds of silver and more than 1.5 pounds of gold. The vast majority of Iraqis may languish in dire poverty, but nothing, it seemed, was too good for the dictator. “This birthday is a symbol of the struggle against America,” Khalifa said, “and our support for the Palestinians, who are killed every day by Israeli troops”.
Rows of ruling Ba’athist Party leaders and army generals in green military fatigues watched the proceedings from the central of three reviewing stands, a tableau reminiscent of the May Day celebrations in the former Soviet Union. Finally, an off-tune flourish sounded from an Iraqi army band, and a tall, mustachioed figure in a white kefiyeh emerged from behind a pair of French doors. As he took his place at the seat of honor behind a large bouquet of flowers, a murmur shot through the crowd. Could it be?
But a closer inspection revealed the Saddam lookalike was only Taha Ramadan, vice president and frequent presidential stand-in. “Saddam will never show up,” a minder from the regime’s press center assured me. “He has his reasons.”
Those reasons aren’t difficult to fathom. As Iraq celebrated the dictator’s birthday with the requisite parades and fireworks last weekend, Saddam’s absence wasn’t merely a reflection of his usual paranoia. With the Bush administration weighing a massive military operation aimed at unseating the Iraqi regime next winter or spring, Saddam has been more preoccupied than ever with his own survival. In preparation for the expected attack, the regime is stockpiling basic necessities, beefing up troops strength around Baghdad, Basra and northern Iraq-even signing off on the creation of a new special presidential guard administered by Saddam’s son and heir apparent Qusay.
Still, an atmosphere of fatalism has settled in, along with the usual bluster. “We know we are going to be bombed whether we cooperate or not with the United Nations,” a confidante of Saddam’s told me. “So we say to the Americans: ‘Come. We will be ready for you’.”
Despite the nervousness, the Iraqi regime is determined to prove that business is going on as usual. The regime even lifted-temporarily at least-the ban on international correspondents that had been in place since September 11, inviting journalists from around the world to observe Saddam’s birthday festivities (and presumably tell the world that Saddam’s support among the masses remains strong). When I arrived in Baghdad last week I found the decrepit capital in the midst of a facelift: beneath the shadow of a turquoise-domed mosque and two crumbling high rise hotels, I watched laborers work frantically to install fountains, plant flowers and spruce up patches of parched grass in a traffic circle ringed by Roman columns, each engraved with the Arabic initials “S.H.” Perched above the scene, a monumental new statue was shrouded in white cloth, its sculpted Arab headdress and raised right arm clearly discernible beneath its shroud.
There was little doubt about the identity of the cloaked figure, but the frightened supervisor begged off all questions. Who does the statue represent? “I don’t know.” When would it be unveiled? “I can’t say.” The mood on the streets was supposed to be celebratory, but in this plaza at least, the atmosphere was an all-too-familiar mix of suspicion and fear.
All around the square, shop owners were festooning their windows with colorful confetti and white banners trumpeting slogans like “the eternal spring of Saddam Hussein,” “Saddam, April’s man of promise,” and “day of joy for Iraq, the West and humankind.” In the lobby of the government-owned Al Rasheed Hotel, bakers smeared dabs of icing on a giant pink birthday cake, and a new exhibit of oil paintings showed the great leader in his various guises: the kefiyeh-adorned Arab chieftain, the dark-suited chief executive, the vigorous lover of nature, hiking with his walking stick through a forest.
Tens of thousands of people gathered in two Baghdad squares for “spontaneous” festivities on Sunday, and similar rallies took place at 15 of Iraq’s eighteen provinces (the three autonomous Kurdish provinces in northern Iraq were not expected to participate). And at Baghdad’s National Theater, Saddam’s birthday coincided with the opening night of “Zabibah and the King,” based on a novel supposedly written by Saddam, in which an Iraqi king sets out to avenge his mistress, who is brutally raped and murdered on January 17-the date that the United States and its allies launched the Gulf War 11 years ago.
It’s impossible to gauge exactly how Iraqis feel about the birthday celebrations. Living under the constant surveillance of Ba’ath party informants, Iraqis understand that speaking out against the regime can land them in prison-or even result in their execution. Many celebrants no doubt viewed their participation as compulsory-letters had gone out to nearly every Iraqi, I was told, urging them to show up at the festivities-but plenty of those who marched dutifully through the streets were willing participants, lured by the free birthday cake and fruit punch and the opportunity to escape from the daily grind.
And in Tikrit, where the biggest celebration took place, thousands of Ba’ath party activists from Baghdad joined together with local residents in a jubilant march through the parade ground that went on for two hours and seemed filled with genuine good cheer. “Saddam has been good to these people,” a source in Baghdad who is no friend of the regime told me. “Tikrit was nothing but a farming village before he came to power. Now it’s a big city. The people here have jobs and money.”
But they appear to be the exceptions. In an affluent Baghdad neighborhood, I met a middle-aged scholar who snorted in derision as I asked him how he felt about the tributes to the dictator. “Since when do Arabs celebrate birthdays? This is not a Muslim tradition,” he says. Most Iraqis, he told me, were fed up with the regime, blaming Saddam in equal measure with the United States for the sanctions-induced miseries of the past 10 years. And while most would not welcome an American invasion, he said, neither would they mourn the passing of the dictator. The scholar believed that if U.S. forces did launch an attack, the regime would quickly crumble. “The whole country is so weakened that it cannot engage in a war,” he said. “At the last military parade, the tanks were smoking, stalling. Any president would have to think twice about going into war against America.”
The academic told me that he had often counseled the Ba’ath leadership to crack down on corruption and loosen its grip on the people-advice that had been too long ignored. “Ten years after a humiliating defeat, there has been no reform, no change, and I’m angry about it,” he said. “Building all of these giant mosques and palaces is foolish. What’s it for? Nothing but prestige. You could use the money for hospitals, medicine. But they don’t. Iraqis should be allowed more democracy, have open discussions,” he continued, emboldened by the fact that I was visiting him that day without a government minder. “To ignore the people, with all their suffering, is creating a dangerous feeling of alienation.” I asked him whether he was worried that voicing such opinions could land him in trouble. He shrugged. “Most Iraqis have to wear two, sometimes three faces to protect themselves,” he said. “I try to have one face. But I don’t call for the overthrow of the regime, I call for its modification.”
The scholar was clearly hedging his bets: in his living room I noticed a framed photograph of him with Saddam Hussein. It had been taken at a reception in the 1980s. “I suppose that I keep it hanging for my own safety,” he said. “Maybe I’ll take it down the day that Saddam is out of power.” The academic said he was hopeful that the regime would come to its senses before then. “They are not stupid dictators,” he said. “They are clever and ruthless at the same time.”
A driver I met in Baghdad, a man I’ll call Mohammed, was equally contemptuous of the celebrations. A college graduate in his 30s who dreams of someday escaping from Iraq, Mohammed had paid $900 to buy his way out of military service after graduating in the early 90s. “I didn’t feel like wasting a year and a half of my life,” he says. Mohammed now earns a decent living driving his aging sedan for foreign visitors and selling cars from Jordan on Baghdad’s black market. “Of course people are afraid to say what they really think,” says Mohammed, driving through downtown Baghdad back from “Zabibah and the King”-which had played that night to a nearly empty theater. “We’re watched all the time.”
Mohammed’s healthy income allows him the luxury of small rebellions-escapes from the privations that sanctions and repression have wrought on Iraqi society. Alcohol is banned in Iraq, but Mohammed is a regular patron of black-market liquor stores. He recently smuggled in a satellite dish from Dubai, which he hooks up at night illegally and watches everything from European movie channels to Al Jazeera, the popular news channel broadcast out of Qatar-a welcome alternative to Shebab TV, the all-Saddam government channel owned by Saddam’s brutal eldest son, Uday.
Mohammed was unwilling to criticize Saddam Hussein directly, but he spoke harshly of the Ba’ath Party, the true believers whose lives of privilege stand in stark contrast to the rest of Iraqi society. Along with Saddam’s Presidential Guard, the Ba’athists, who hold twice weekly party meetings and engage in frequent military training, may be the last line of defense of the Iraqi regime. “There is a Ba’athist on every block,” says Mohammed. “Everybody is afraid of them.”
As Mohammed sped across the July 24th bridge that spans the murky Tigris River, heading back to the Al Rasheed Hotel, he gestured out the window to a fire-engine red Rolls Royce speeding past. “That’s Uday Hussein’s car,” he said, barely concealing his disgust. When and if American forces march toward Baghdad, Mohammed-and countless other Iraqis-almost certainly will not be rooting for Saddam.
