Iraqi TV Presents a Relaxed Hussein

April 4, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — With American troops moving cautiously toward placing the city under siege, Iraqi television tonight showed a 12-minute film of a relaxed and cheerful man it said was Saddam Hussein strolling with apparent nonchalance around Baghdad and stopping to exchange greetings with ordinary Iraqis.

The film, shown several times during the evening, appeared to be Iraq's riposte to conjecture among officials in Washington that the 65-year-old ruler might have been killed or incapacitated in the opening American missile strikes of the war, 16 days ago. The man shown looked like a champion returning to neighborhoods where he has been most loved.

The Pentagon had said that the war's opening salvos on March 20 were aimed at a meeting of top Iraqi leaders in a military compound in southern Baghdad that intelligence had indicated might have included Mr. Hussein and possibly his two sons, Uday and Qusay.

Today, at what appeared to be a critical juncture of the war, with American troops occupying the airport just to the west of the city, Iraq produced what amounted to a coup de théâtre, one that put Mr. Hussein back on the public stage in a way that sought to puncture the notion that he and his associates were on the ropes.

Whatever the impression the film made in Washington, most people here believed it was Saddam Hussein, alive, well and garrulous. It was him, down to his loping walk, his thick, almost lisping Arabic with the accent of his native district of Tikrit, and the thick mustache now graying.

The message conveyed, people here said, was as powerful as any the Iraqi leader has contrived in a long time — at least for those Iraqis who saw it, a dwindling number in Baghdad, where the power went out across the city just as a new wave of heavy American air attacks began on Thursday night.

With Baghdad plunged into darkness, and American artillery audible in the city, the increased tension in the capital stood in marked contrast to the casual air affected by the Iraqi leader in the film, if it was indeed him.

A few hours before the broadcast, state television also showed images of Mr. Hussein with a new speech from what appeared to be the same low-ceilinged bunker he used before, sitting at the same lectern and beside the same Iraqi flag as he did on March 24. This time, he urged Iraqis to fight against the growing encirclement of Baghdad.

"Strike them with the power of faith wherever they approach you, and resist them, O courageous citizens of Baghdad," Mr. Hussein said. "With the grace of God, you will be the victors, and they will be the vanquished. Our martyrs will go to paradise, and their dead will go to hell."

Leafing through a text roughly handwritten on a fold-over notepad, he made no mention of the capture of the airport.

But his remarks appeared to have been drafted in the light of the sudden change in the military map that had occurred in the past 48 hours, with the American Third Infantry Division and the Marines' First Division driving rapidly north from the southwest and southeast into the outer reaches of the city.

"The enemy has evaded the defenses of our armed forces around Baghdad and other cities and has progressed, as we expected, to some landings here and there," the Iraqi leader said. Belittling this, he said, "In most cases, these landings have been made on the highways and involve a small number of troops that you can confront and destroy with the arms that you have."

Few films, if any, seem certain to receive closer scrutiny than the one showing Mr. Hussein in the streets of Baghdad. But the provisional answers to the questions it posed that were given tonight by Iraqis friendly enough to Western reporters to speak candidly about Mr. Hussein — and to whisper that they yearned for an Iraq without him — offered little comfort to American war planners.

The man was Mr. Hussein, they insisted. That was the Iraqi leader's slight paunch visible when the man in the film turned sideways to the camera as he accepted the cheers of the crowd. That was his gesture — chopping the air with his right hand, palm clenched, thumb upward, just as Mr. Hussein is shown doing in a battalion of statues around Baghdad.

As for the dating of the film, it seemed unarguable that it was shot after the start of the war.

The black smoke that has plumed skyward over Baghdad since March 22, when trenches filled with a heavy oil were first lit in an attempt to blind American pilots and the guidance systems of bombs and missiles, was clearly visible on the horizon.

The black car carrying Mr. Hussein, apparently a luxury Mercedes or one of its Japanese equivalents, was shown driving past streets of shuttered shops, some with their windows taped, a step almost no Iraqis took until the war began.

Other glimpses of street life resembled what Western reporters have seen during the war: men fanning open air spits at restaurants still offering kebabs, and traffic much diminished but still busy enough, with double-decker buses and battered white-and-orange taxis and crowded minivans.

At least one place where he stopped was easy to identify: across the street from an auction house in the Mansour district where many Iraqis have gone to sell their furniture and household appliances in recent years to stave off penury as the economy collapsed under the weight of Mr. Hussein's wars and international sanctions.

This placed the Iraqi leader — if it was him — at least halfway to the airport from the largest of his vast compounds in Baghdad, the now almost-obliterated Republican Palace grounds. The weather, too, was a clue — overcast, just as it was in Baghdad today, and a sharp break from Thursday, when clear blue skies aided American attacks that were among the heaviest of the war.

All in all, Iraqis friendly to Americans concluded, this was almost certainly Mr. Hussein, and the day he was filmed most probably today.

For years, Mr. Hussein has limited his public appearances to rare moments atop the reviewing stand at Army Day parades and other portentous events. When he has been seen moving among ordinary Iraqis, it has been on old film, endlessly recycled on television, showing him being enveloped by adoring, chanting crowds. The more these films have been shown, the more many ordinary Iraqis have seen them as the obverse of the essential truth, that Mr. Hussein is an isolated, secretive, cruel leader. Against this sense of the Iraqi president, today's film was astonishing.

A handful of security men could be seen around Mr. Hussein, but nothing like the layers of steely eyed men described by the few foreigners who have met him in his palaces.

Principally, his security seemed to be left to two bulky men in sports shirts carrying Kalashnikov rifles, and their concern appeared to be to keep a way clear for Mr. Hussein as he moved forward to greet people, not to watch for potential assassins.

At one point, a small, curly haired boy of about 2 was thrust into his arms. Like any politician on the hustings, Mr. Hussein held the boy up, beaming.

Beside Mr. Hussein, throughout, were two senior-looking officials in the green uniforms that are the common dress among military men and officials of the ruling Baath Party. Aside from them, there was no obvious sign of the Baath Party officials who normally lurk among the crowds to orchestrate adulation for the leader.

Film shot from what appeared to be the front passenger seat of the Iraqi leader's car gave glimpses of the heart-stopping moments other drivers must have had as his car drove by, assuming the drivers knew who he was.

At one point, as the car crossed a bridge over an expressway and pulled to the right to make an off-ramp, it pulled past a battered taxi that could have been a totem for the humiliations that have befallen ordinary people in Mr. Hussein's Iraq.

But it was triumph rather than humiliation that the government sought to project today.

The information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, positively chirped as he laid out the Iraqi version of events at the Palestine Hotel, quarters for all foreign reporters covering the war.

He said American advances in a broad crescent across Baghdad's southern approaches were all part of an Iraqi plan to lure the Americans into a catastrophic defeat at the gates of Baghdad.

The minister said Iraqi forces had battled the Americans at every point of their advance, inflicting "heavy injuries and killings" and destroying large numbers of tanks and other vehicles.

The airport, he said, will be "the Americans' graveyard now."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company