In the Streets, a Shadow Lifts

December 15, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 — As Iraqis struggled to grasp the impact of Saddam Hussein's humiliating capture in a darkened spider hole near Tikrit, it was the television images of the fallen leader that kept replaying in their minds throughout the day on Sunday, just like the images played on their television screens.

The videotape taken by his American captors showed a disheveled old man, more like a hapless, disoriented vagrant than the tyrant whose quarter of a century in power bludgeoned 25 million people into cringing submission. A mythic strongman, so feared that his name set people trembling until only a few months ago, was suddenly reduced to piti able, mumbling impotence.

On the streets of Baghdad, and across Iraq, people who danced out of their homes with paper American flags and raised their rifles for staccato bursts into the clear winter air paused to tell one another again and again what they had seen. They acted as if ceaseless repetition would make real what many called a dream, as if testing their sanity by checking that others had also experienced what they had seen.

Long into the night, the images replayed on televisions at kebab houses and grocery stores, in homes and hospitals. They showed the captured dictator opening his mouth obediently to an American doctor's beam, sitting passively as his unkempt hair was searched for lice, patting his face as if to identify an aching jaw or troublesome teeth, pulling on his straggly beard as if pondering his fate.

As the mocking shouts grew louder in a thousand Baghdad streets, and across almost all Iraqi towns outside the sullen precincts like Tikrit that are still loyal to Mr. Hussein, it was possible to believe that Iraq's nightmare had finally ended.

That is what President Bush proclaimed. The hope, as fervent among millions of Iraqis, was that the shadow Mr. Hussein cast for a generation over the Iraqi soul had passed, never to return.

Yet Americans may be wise to restrain hopes that Mr. Hussein's capture will generate an early downturn in the insurgency that has taken the lives of more than 190 American soldiers since May 1, the day Mr. Bush proclaimed an end to major combat operations. At the same time, many more Iraqis have died.

And listening to the voices in Baghdad's streets on Sunday suggested that the end of Mr. Hussein's months as a taunting fugitive may not contain the other forces that have eroded American popularity. Mr. Hussein's capture brought a surge in popularity for Mr. Bush and the American occupation, yet the inflexions in what the revelers said often sounded like a warning that the tide could just as easily break on the stony shores of unfulfilled Iraqi expectations.

The scenes that played out across much of Iraq were replicated in the celebrations that greeted the American capture of Baghdad, and the toppling of Mr. Hussein, eight months ago.

This time, American troops have done more than help topple a statue, having caught the man himself.

But few who witnessed the statue falling could have imagined the speed with which Iraqi opinions began to turn against the Americans as problems accumulated with failing electricity supplies, looting and lawlessness on the streets and lines outside gasoline stations that have stretched into days. Judging from the undertones in what many people said on Sunday, there was little reason to think that something similar could not happen again.

In one Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday, Adhamiya, the seizure of Mr. Hussein met with angry vows to continue the attacks that have seen American soldiers and Iraqis killed by suicide truck bombings, by roadside explosives, by ambushes and by assassinations.

Adhamiya was the last place where Mr. Hussein was seen before the television images of him after his capture, a dramatic sequence on April 10 when he taunted American troops who captured the center of Baghdad the previous day by climbing onto a car roof outside one of the city's most venerated mosques. There he proclaimed that he would stand with the Iraqi people to fight the Americans.

At exactly the hour on Sunday when the American governor of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, was prompting cheers from Iraqi journalists at a news conference with his opening words, "We got him!" a group of men gathered sullenly on the sidewalk outside Al Imam al-Adham mosque, still bearing the marks of the tank shell American troops fired at its minaret as they hunted Mr. Hussein the day after he appeared.

Adhamiya is one of the few districts in Baghdad that is virtually 100 percent Sunni Muslim, and therefore a redoubt of loyalty, like Tikrit, to the domination of Iraq by the Sunni minority that was represented by Mr. Hussein.

The images of their idol as he emerged from the crawlspace outside Tikrit had not yet been seen by the men at the mosque, so they began, as many Iraqis did, by saying they would not believe reports of his capture until they saw "real pictures" of the former dictator in American custody.

It quickly became clear that the men knew that Mr. Hussein's hopes of restoration were finally gone. Gone, too, was any hope that the majority Shiites, 60 percent of the population, could continue to be excluded from power as they have been since Iraq's founding as a modern state in 1921.

What followed was an example of something eerily familiar to anybody who experienced Mr. Hussein's years of power, indeed familiar to anybody who has studied totalitarian states like Stalin's Russia. That is the seeming ability of people to dismiss reality by creating a virtual world that conforms to the dictates of the state, or to their personal interests, either in benefiting from the state or surviving its terror.

"Sunnis or Shiites, we all love Saddam Hussein," said Abu Mohammed, a 33-year-old store owner. Mr. Hussein, he said, had built a strong Iraq that had made its people proud; he had been "cruel," but only as far as he needed to be to maintain "security."

As for the mass graves discovered since the dictator was toppled, which have led to estimates that he murdered as many as 300,000 people, that, Abu Mohammed said, was a fiction bandied about by the "looters and thugs" the Americans brought with them and installed on the Iraqi Governing Council, the shadow administration that advises Mr. Bremer.

"Those traitors who asked the Americans to come to Iraq are dead," Abu Mohammed said, "As of today, we will kill them all."

As one man in the crowd waved a pistol, he waved off any notion that the Shiites could hope to lead the government, by simply eliminating them from the count of Iraq's population.

"We Iraqis are 10 million Saddams," he said, counting only Sunnis, "and we will drive the Americans out, with or without our leader."

A few miles distant, similar groups of men, and occasionally a handful of black-cloaked women, gathered on the muddy streets of the Baghdad district where more families were devastated by Mr. Hussein's years of torture and execution than any other. It is the suburb of two million impoverished Shiite Muslims that used to be called Saddam City, renamed Sadr City now after a Shiite ayatollah Mr. Hussein had assassinated in 1999.

The hubbub on the sidewalks and in the bazaars quickly became a cathartic ritual, as if mocking the Shiites' erstwhile persecutor would purge the darkness he had cast across their lives.

An hour after Mr. Bremer began to speak, virtually everybody had seen the television images. "Saddam's a coward, he didn't shoot, he didn't kill himself, he gave himself up without a fight!" one teenage boy shouted. "He was like a rat in a hole," an older man said. "Like a beggar," another said. "Like a caveman."

Across the divide that separates Adhamiya and Sadr City, one thing emerged that all Iraqis have in common: that nothing in his arrest, nor anything in a trial or possible execution, is likely to remove the huge psychic space he occupies.

One man in Sadr City, Mohammed Jabbar, a 32-year-old teacher, who cried so jubilantly his voice became hoarse, said the fallen dictator was "our Hitler, our Stalin, our Mao, because he killed so many people."

The analogy may work at deeper levels even than Mr. Jabbar intended, if the experience of those other societies that have emerged from the 20th-century's harshest tyrannies is any guide. Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist who became the leader of that country's human rights movement, once said it would take the lifetime of everybody living in the Soviet Union in 1980 before it became a normal society, even if communism collapsed overnight, because of the trauma inflicted by Stalin.

Some Iraqis think the same may be true after Mr. Hussein. Kamel Ahmed, a professor of history at the University of Baghdad, told Al Jazeera television in the hours after Mr. Hussein's capture became known that "we will need hundreds of Ph.D's and M.S.'s to understand all the dimensions of this subject," the terror inflicted by Mr. Hussein and the way in which he held, and still holds, millions of Iraqis in psychic thrall. Other Iraqi academics and politicians have said much the same thing, that Mr. Hussein and his terror will continue to obsess Iraq, and shape the future, long after he is gone.

One middle-class Iraqi, a 44-year-old engineer, showed a glimpse of that when he saw the first images of Mr. Hussein being looked over by the American doctor. Turning to a friend, he said: "I hate this man to the core of my bones. Just seeing him sitting there makes the hairs on my arms stand up. And yet, I can't tell you why, I feel sorry for him, to be so humiliated. It is as if he and Iraq have become the same thing."

For the American occupation, those complexities are more than a matter for abstracted discourse. Of all the unpleasant surprises since American troops overran Iraq, none has puzzled officials quite as much as the volatility of Iraqis who welcomed the Americans as liberators in April, and by the autumn were stamping on the bodies of American soldiers. Even Sadr City, where the first troops were welcomed like the G.I.'s who entered Paris in 1944, has become so dangerous for Western reporters that, until the mood changed Sunday, few dared entered the area without armed guards. On Sunday, the hostilities were gone, but the undercurrents were still there.

Men and boys who shouted "Bush good, Bush good," and "Saddam bad," along with the harshest curse of all in the Iraqi street, "Saddam down shoes," and acted out mimes of eating his flesh, shifted moments later to what sounded like warnings to the Americans that things could quickly turn against them once more.

"We need salaries, tell the Americans that," Amar Jabbar, an 18-year-old, said during the pause in the celebrations. "If there are no jobs soon, we will hate them just as much as we love them today."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company