Talk of Tikrit's Favorite Diner: Hatred of Hussein, Fury at U.S.

December 23, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

TIKRIT, Iraq, Dec. 18 — If there is a favorite meeting place here in Saddam Hussein's hometown, it is a tightly packed, crockery-clattering, $1-a-plate restaurant called Al Mudhaif — Arabic for a place of hospitality, or inn — on the town's scrappy main street.

Anybody wanting to know Tikrit can stop by and listen to the talk as waiters shuttle by with plates of flat-baked bread and spit-roasted chicken. All types gather here, including, one recent day, a posse of heavyset men with traditional Arab tribal dishdasha robes and checkered kaffiyeh headdresses. With jutting beards, old combat jackets and narrowing eyes, they were identified by other diners as members of the "resistance," still working, other diners said, for the restoration of their fallen idol, Mr. Hussein.

The restaurant lies around the corner from one of Mr. Hussein's pillared palaces, now the headquarters of the town's new rulers, the Fourth Infantry Division of the United States Army, whose tanks and armored vehicles ceaselessly thunder by. From the restaurant, it seemed a pageant of Iraq's wider drama, with the grim-faced resistance men looking out at the Americans driving by with flags fluttering from radio antennas, helmeted soldiers with wraparound goggles at their turrets, machine-gunners swiveling, watching for trouble.
But not all is quite as it seems in Tikrit, or at least quite as imagined by many Westerners here.

Tikrit, the legend goes, is the Dodge City of Iraq, a place of such fervor for Mr. Hussein that there can be no accommodation with the American vision for the country, no tolerance for democracy or a civil society that would strip power from the Sunni Muslim minority cliques that have dominated since the nation's founding in 1921; above all, no acceptance that Mr. Hussein, the town's great patron, might face trial for mass murder.

A hint that this image of Tikrit was incomplete came when the Americans took reporters out to Ad Dwar, the site of Mr. Hussein's capture on Dec. 13, aboard low-flying Black Hawk helicopters that curved across the Tigris and out over the silted wheat fields and citrus orchards by the river. The pilots flew in fear of rocket-propelled grenades, which have brought down American helicopters elsewhere, but days after the arrest of Mr. Hussein, villagers were running from their homes to wave as the Americans flew by.

When a reporter and a photographer for The New York Times walked into The Inn, apprehensively, it was a relief to be invited to sit down. A man at a table near the entrance identified himself as Hatim Jassem, a 35-year-old theology professor, Muslim by creed, recently returned to his home village of Al Alam near Tikrit from teaching at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, having judged the capital too lawless under American rule to remain.

His home village has been identified by American military intelligence as a bastion for Mr. Hussein, where many families are linked to the former dictator by extended family ties. Mr. Jassem, speaking loud enough to be overheard tables a distance away, addressed the matter forthwith.

"Look, it's not as if I love Saddam," he said. "I don't. They arrested me in August 1998, after I'd warned one of my younger brothers he was getting too close to Saddam's men and that they would hurt him and the family if he carried on. Somebody overheard me and told one of Saddam's bodyguards. Then they came and put me in prison for six weeks. They tortured me — I still have the scars on my back — but it could have been worse."

Among the complexities of post-Hussein Iraq is that many who speak in support of the toppled dictator, or oppose the Americans, are victims of his terror, either personally or through the brutalities inflicted on relatives and friends. By any reckoning of the number he killed — Iraqi human rights groups' estimates begin at 300,000 — a large proportion of this nation of 25 million were directly affected, and many more admit that they carry the trauma's scars.

Mr. Jassem is among the many with conflicted views. Having begun by condemning Mr. Hussein, he switched to castigating American troops for the "humiliation" they visited on him at his arrest. Next, unprompted, he was back to saying Iraqis had been unable for years to rid themselves of the tyrant. "We thought it was a good thing, that the Americans invaded and threw him out, because we Iraqis couldn't do it ourselves," he said. "Only American troops could do that."

"Even the psychological atmosphere is improving, after the overthrow of Saddam," Mr. Jassem said. "Wherever you were under the regime, you always felt people were watching you, you always felt people were listening. Now, it's better — you can criticize and complain. When I go to a restaurant now, I don't look about and wonder if the secret police are watching."

But for the rest of the 90-minute conversation, the professor spoke bitterly of the Americans. At those moments, with the rush of passion for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, against the troops that did it, Westerners in Iraq sometimes feel tempted to reach for reflections on Arab culture in books like "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," written in the 1920's by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

Some Arabs consider the book chauvinistic, but the sense of Arab tribal culture conveyed by Mr. Lawrence, an Englishman who lived among Bedouin warriors and helped lead them during the Arab rebellion against Turkish rule during World War I, may yet have relevance to Americans trying to make sense of the crosscurrents in Iraq.

"They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns," he wrote. "They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades."

He added: "Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity."

Mr. Jassem's words, at times, seemed unconsciously to echo Lawrence's sense of tribal psychology, one contested among Arabs ever since. The issue in Al Alam, Mr. Jassem said, is not the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, but the offenses against Arab dignity that the Americans were committing with their raids.

"Why are the Americans being attacked?" he said. "Not because all Iraqis are pro-Saddam, no. If Saddam had come out of his palaces and into the streets of Tikrit without guards, somebody would have killed him for sure.

"Iraqis are attacking the Americans now because they have humiliated us. We feel if somebody trespasses in your home, breaks the door and beats the head of the household and cuffs his hands in front of his family, it is the greatest humiliation. It happened to Saddam. If it happened to me, I wouldn't hesitate to go and buy a Kalashnikov and look for an American to kill."

But was it not Mr. Hussein who brought humiliation on himself, a visitor asked, by hiding underground and emerging from his bunker, hands up, looking like a vagrant? Mr. Jassem agreed, but switched to a homily.

From his studies of Christianity, he said, he knew of a truth that Americans should observe in seeking a way home from Iraq. "There is a very famous saying of Jesus Christ," he said. "'Glory to God, and peace on earth. Let the Americans bring peace on earth."

Lunchtime was coming to an end, and other Tikritis stopped by to offer a welcome to the visitors. Many offered extravagant invitations to their homes. The men of the resistance remained stone-faced, but as they left, pistols in their waistbands, they pulled Mr. Jassem aside and whispered that he might want to bring his new friends to Al Alam.

"They would like a conversation," he said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company