War fear grips people of Baghdad

War fear grips people of Baghdad
A long-suffering land braces for conflict with America

EDITOR'S NOTE: P-I foreign desk editor Larry Johnson and photographer Paul Kitagaki Jr. have been dispatched to Iraq to report on the mood and conditions as the country is under threat of attack from the United States. They are among only a handful of Western journalists reporting from Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the shadow of war, the men, women and children of this 1,200-year-old city go about their lives with as much normalcy as can be mustered.

Despite a rich ancient history -- this is, after all, Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers, where Western culture began 5,000 years before Christ -- and despite the world's second-largest oil reserves, Iraq, today, is a land of poverty, death and desperation.

Iraqis have been ruled by military strongmen for decades; Saddam Hussein has been in charge since 1979. The vast majority of Iraqis have no say in their nation's policies and practices. Many have suffered mightily under the repressive regime.

They also have been decimated by previous wars -- the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 and the Persian Gulf War with the United States and its allies in 1991 -- and by 12 years of United Nations sanctions.

Now, with Congress debating a resolution to allow the United States to use force to oust Saddam, the shadow of war has darkened. Many Iraqis believe an attack is inevitable.

"The people are very scared," said Abdul Sittar Jabbar of Baghdad, a former civil engineer who now drives a truck to care for his wife and four children. "If the bombs start falling, there is nothing I can do but try to protect my family in any way I can."

Still, in a land where anti-U.S. sentiment is strong and anti-U.S. rhetoric is broadcast daily by the government, individual U.S. citizens are still welcomed, albeit with what seems an increasing weariness.

Among those welcomed recently were Democratic Congressmen Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California, who have drawn considerable attention in Iraq and controversy around the world for the past three days as they got a close look at the Gulf War destruction of Iraq's infrastructure.

"Fifty thousand Iraqi children die prematurely each year, because of this destruction that war brought," McDermott said yesterday at a news conference at a sewage treatment plant on the outskirts of the city.

"The sanctions have punished the Iraq people; they have not affected the leadership, they have not brought 'regime change,' and to go to war again would simply punish the Iraqi people again and put our own soldiers in harm's way in this country for a problem that I think can be handled diplomatically."

At an earlier appearance on ABC-TV's "This Week," McDermott said President Bush might mislead Americans about the threat Iraq poses, comparing the situation to misleading statements made by President Johnson about the Vietnam War.

Those comments were quickly dismissed by the Senate's second-ranking Republican, Don Nickles of Oklahoma.

McDermott and Bonior "both sound somewhat like spokespersons for the Iraqi government," he said.

Washington state Republican Chairman Chris Vance went much further, calling McDermott's actions "outrageous. . . . Congressman McDermott has pulled some absurd stunts before, but nothing like this. For him to go to Iraq now and essentially make excuses for Saddam Hussein is just contemptible."

Bonior said he and McDermott had come to Iraq to help make the humanitarian crisis known to the rest of the world.

"The other point we've made very forcefully while we were here," Bonior said, "is to make sure that the government of Iraq understands how serious the United States is . . . about the need to have unrestricted and unconditional inspections."

U.N. resolutions from the Gulf War require Iraq to allow weapons inspectors to verify that all missiles and other weapons of mass destruction are eliminated before the sanctions, enacted in 1990, can be lifted.

"We are doing what we can to make sure that the message is clear -- to the Iraqi government and to our government, that war is not the answer," Bonior said. "There is a way to resolve this, and the way to resolve it is for the Iraqis not to interfere and for the United States not to interfere with the inspection process."

The sewage plant McDermott and Bonior used as a backdrop for their news conference was a deliberate choice. In the Gulf War, the United States and its allies destroyed electrical plants that powered sewage treatment plants. As a result, raw sewage was and is dumped into the rivers that supply water to most of the country, creating a deadly epidemic of diarrhea for children.

Many water treatment plants have not been repaired, and those that are in operation are not able to supply clean drinking water to all of Iraq's 23 million people.

Under the sanctions, U.N.-controlled oil exports are sold to allow Iraq to take care of its humanitarian needs. However, since the oil-for-food program began in 1996, only $20 billion in goods has been shipped to Iraq. That amounts to less than 50 cents a day per person for food and medicine and to rebuild the country's infrastructure.

During an interview later, as his car weaved through downtown Baghdad, McDermott talked about the congressmen's trip Sunday to southern Iraq, where they flew into the small civilian airport just after U.S. and British planes bombed what Pentagon officials said was a mobile military unit that had been concealed there. Iraqi officials said the civilian airport's control tower had been the target.

The congressmen visited a hospital in Basra that treats cancer patients and has done considerable research on the effects of depleted uranium, the slightly radioactive heavy metal the U.S. military uses to coat many of its munitions. Experts say some 300 tons of depleted uranium were used on the battlefields, mostly in southern Iraq, during the Gulf War.

The effect of depleted uranium on humans is hotly disputed -- the Pentagon says there is little if any adverse effect, a statement that has been supported by some studies.

However, in a report last year the Royal Society, Britain's academy of scientists, concluded that children playing at sites where the uranium munitions fell could be harmed if they ate the soil. In the long term, buried uranium shells also could eventually leach into local water supplies, the report said.

Critics have pointed to depleted uranium as the cause for birth defects, leukemia and Gulf War syndrome.

"You will see pictures you don't want to see of the malformations at birth," McDermott said.

He said almost all of the malformed infants died and the doctors there could do very little for those children who are suffering from leukemia, which has seen a dramatic increase. Most of the medicines needed for cancer treatment are too expensive or impossible to find in this country.

Shortly after the congressional delegation flew back to Baghdad Sunday night, the airport in Basra was bombed again.

The delegation left Baghdad last night, saying they were eager to join in the congressional debate on a resolution giving Bush authority to enforce U.N. sanctions on weapons inspections.

But McDermott is sure how he will vote. "I don't see any reason to give Bush any new authority," he said. "We should allow the inspections to proceed."

IRAQ FACTS

(For comparison, the United States is 3.85 million square miles, half the size of Russia.)

Broad desert plains; reedy marshes along Iranian border in south; mountains along borders with Iran and Turkey.

Shiite Muslim, 60 percent to 65 percent; Sunni Muslim, 32 percent to 37 percent.

Under order by the United Nations to scrap weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles but has not allowed inspections since 1998. Standing military force of more than 380,000.