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Being American in Iraq -- with caution

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

April 25, 2004

Baghdad, Iraq - Yesterday I went to my first guerrilla attack of this trip. We were driving to an appointment when our driver's cellphone rang. (A working cellphone system IS one way that life has improved for the relatively well-off class in Baghdad during these last months.) A friend was calling to tell him of explosions in the Chicken Market, an area of Sadr City, Baghdad's biggest slum.

Sadr City was built by Saddam Hussein with all the esthetic sense of the worst of urban redevelopment in the United States. It has turned into a fetid maze of narrow streets and alleys intercut by boulevards where the trash gets piled and burned because there is, of course no municipal service to haul it away. Sadr City (named after the father of Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric U.S. authorities are trying to arrest) is often an angry place.

At the Chicken Market, it was pretty clear that someone had fired a mortar into a crowded street. (A mortar, I learned years ago in Sarajevo, tends to make a narrow, deep hole in an asphalt street, sometimes no bigger than a softball, with little or no damage around the crater. That's what this was.)

As usual, the crowd around the bombing was dominated by teenage boys and young men who clearly have too much time on their hands and too few prospects for education, jobs or careers. As we arrived, my guide, a young Iraqi journalist named Usama, warned that I mustn't let anyone in Sadr City know that I am an American. I speak Arabic with a Moroccan accent, so he decided to introduce me as a Moroccan. It was wise, for the young men had convinced themselves that this attack had been a missile fired by an American warplane. And after a few minutes, they readily turned hostile toward journalists of any nationality.

With this month's kidnappings of foreigners in Iraq, it has suddenly become a much more fearful thing to be a Western foreigner here. When I first came to Iraq in 1990, as now, Iraqis were holding Western hostages. That time, it was Saddam holding 800 people as "human shields" against attack by America. (The shields were ultimately released, and of course the attack -- Operation Desert Storm -- ultimately came.)

But even amid that 1990 crisis, a friendly American interested in meeting Iraqis and asking them about their lives encountered nothing like hatred.

Many people feared to meet foreigners under Saddam, but those who did offered smiles and invitations for tea. They might repeat Saddam's propaganda about the evil of America and its determination to control the world -- an evil to which the proud Arab and Iraqi people would never submit. But you were not in danger from them.

Now, there are still plenty of smiles and invitations. Iraqis remain hospitable and often enthusiastic about meeting people from a country whose culture they in many ways admire. But that natural, proud refusal to submit to foreign domination remains, and the year-old fact of U.S. occupation, with no end in sight, is helping empower extreme thinking among Iraqis that is what makes the streets here so dangerous for us.