March 1993, Page 31

A Personal Reminiscence of Iraq

My Unrequited Love Affair With the People Who Gave Us Civilization

By Richard H. Curtiss

"This time the full industrialized fury of civilization will be turned on the very land that gave civilization birth."

—Ken Ringle, Washington Post, Jan. 15, 1991

So wrote a U.S. journalist two years ago, and he was right. Now, on the second anniversary of Desert Storm, Iraqi President Saddam Hussain has made another of his historic misjudgments, and once again Iraqis have died needlessly.

If Iraq's president miscalculates that President Clinton will react differently, still more Iraqis will die. It's a sad fate for some of the world's most fascinating people.

I don't remember ever meeting an Iraqi I didn't like. But then, although I met some of his predecessors, I never met Saddam Hussain.

The Iraqis, a uniquely tough and resilient but altogether warm, generous and friendly people, are the product of their history. It certainly didn't start with the World War I British defeat of the Ottoman Turks, who had ruled there for 400 years. In fact, the world's history started in Iraq.

A 5,000-Year Written History

The Sumerians, who called themselves "the black-headed people'' and lived 5,000 years ago in the marshlands where the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers reached the Gulf, developed the world's first writing system. Because it consisted of reed impressions in baked clay cylinders, tablets and bricks, we can read today their business accounts, their prayers to and descriptions of their gods, and not only their own history but histories recorded subsequently in their cuneiform writing by Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Neo-Babylonians, all of whom came after the Sumerians and founded empires centered in modern-day Iraq.

Many of the best known Old Testament stories first were written down in Sumerian and again in other languages of Iraq centuries before they were recorded in Hebrew. Abraham, after all, was a Semitic Amorite who pitched his tents near the ancient Sumerian city of Ur before he started the travels that took him north and west through Harran in present-day southern Turkey to the western side of the Fertile Crescent around 1500 B.C.

The Old Testament description of the Garden of Eden perfectly fits the region of the modern Iraqi city of Amara. Noah, in the oldest clay tablets of the Sumerians, was a king named Ziusudra, who spent seven days and seven nights in a huge boat ''tossed about by the windstorms on the great waters." By the time the story was picked up by Semitic scribes in northern Iraq, the patriarch was named Utu-Napishtum and the ancient Sumerian city where he built his ark was called Shuruppak.

In this version a dove and a swallow return to the ark because they can find no place to alight. Then Utu-Napishtum releases a raven: "She saw the sinking waters. She ate, she waded and splashed, but came not back."

Shuruppak is now a sprawling deserted mound of ancient bricks and debris situated in a floodplain that, like much of southern Iraq, is blazing desert in summer and nearly impassable swamp in winter.

Then came the Babylonians. Their "Code of Hammurabi," undoubtedly reflecting earlier Semitic legal practice, was written on a stele of hard diorite rock and thus became the first written code of laws preserved from antiquity.

Much later, it was the Assyrians of northern Iraq who started the practice of shifting whole tribes and cities of conquered peoples from place to place in the Middle East. The practice was continued by Neo-Babylonians when they reassumed power throughout the area. Much of the Old Testament, recording those earlier semi-legendary events, was written by Hebrews transported to Babylon in one of those forced population shifts.

When conquering Persians freed them, instead of returning to Jerusalem many Jews remained in Iraq for more than 2,000 years until the creation of Israel, either as prosperous merchants, landowners, clerks and artisans in Baghdad or primitive semi-nomadic villagers in northern Iraq.

When Alexander the Great had conquered the known world, he returned from India to the fertile land which the Greeks called Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers." His Greek soldiers had married Persian women and he was waiting for his navy to return via Kuwait from the exploration of sea routes to India when he died of a fever in Babylon, 45 miles from modern Baghdad.

In the centuries-long clash between Persians and Romans, Ctesiphon, one of Alexander's garrison cities near modern Baghdad, was the Persian winter capital and often the front line. Toward the end, nomadic Arab tribes were serving both the Zoroastrian Sassanians and the Christian Byzantines as scouts and light cavalry. They then became the outriders on behalf of the new religion of Islam as it erupted from the Arabian peninsula after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D.

Arab armies forded the Tigris near Ctesiphon and defeated the Persians in 637 A.D. at the battle of Qaddisiya. After the Arab armies had moved north, east and west from Arabia, battles among the Muslims near the present-day shrines of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq split Islam into the Sunni-Shi'i dichotomy that persists today.

The Arab Golden Age

Damascus, under the Umayyads, emerged as the capital of the Arab Empire from 661 to 750 A.D., only a moment in the sweep of Middle Eastern history. Then the Arab Abbasids made Iraq the center of an Islamic world that stretched from Spain and Morocco on the Atlantic well into India, exceeding in both directions the conquests of Alexander. This became the Arab Golden Age, and, as in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian times, Iraq was at the center of the civilized world.

In succeeding centuries, the Abbasid Empire increasingly fell under the sway of Persian, Turkish and other soldiers who eventually became its rulers. The most disastrous events, however, were the Mongol invasions, in which the conquerors built a pyramid of the heads of their Iraqi victims in 1258, laying waste to and virtually depopulating the land. Some 300 years later, Iraq and most of the rest of the Middle East became part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. For four centuries Iraq was ruled from Istanbul.

That ended after Turkey made its fatal decision to join Germany and the Central Powers in World War I. British-led Indian troops landed in Iraq and, after three years of bloody trench warfare, the Turks were finally driven back to their Anatolian heartland in 1918. The victorious British installed two sons of Sharif Hussein, their Arab ally in Mecca, as King Faisal I of Iraq and King Abdallah of Jordan.

King Faisal died in 1933. He was briefly succeeded by his eldest son, King Ghazi, who was killed in 1939 while driving. Because he was considered both wild and unpredictable by the British, they were suspected by Iraqis of having a hand in his death. Ghazi's brother, Abdul Illah, became regent while Ghazi's son, Faisal II, completed his education.

The British found Abdul Illah sufficiently malleable, while Iraqis increasingly loathed him as a cold and corrupt man. Everyone, however, was awed by the strongman prime minister, Nuri Al Said, an Arab officer who had defected from the Turkish army to fight on the British side for Arab independence in World War I. Bluff, decisive and hail-fellow-well-met, he appealed mightily to the British because he agreed with them that Iraq should first develop a strong agricultural infrastructure and postpone expanding its educational system until it had an economy that could provide jobs.

Iraqi intellectuals thought otherwise. In their judgment, a land with rich agricultural resources and the prospects of a strong petroleum industry was putting its resources into projects that benefited the ruling class and the landowners while keeping the rest of the population poor and ignorant.

It was at this time, in the mid-19SOs, that I first became acquainted with Iraqis in the United States. I was stunned at their outspoken resentment of the British and of Nuri Al Said, and their fervent admiration for the Arab nationalism of Syrian leaders and of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser. I couldn't understand why Britain and the United States were putting so much effort into creating a Western protege state in Iraq, when its people so deeply resented their pro-Western leaders.

Nuri Al Said

Subsequently, I met Nuri Al Said. It was at a 1957 reception in Ankara for members of the Baghdad Pact, which the U.S. and Britain saw as a "northern tier" blocking Soviet expansion into the Middle East and which the Arabs saw as an attempt to enlist Iraq and any other Arab state that might join it into a counter-force to the Arab nationalism of President Nasser.

Stocky and big-boned, Nuri Al-Said had a hearty charisma that dominated the room full of British, Turkish, Iranian and Pakistani leaders of the Pact member nations. Although the U.S. bankrolled the organization, we Americans had only "observer" status because of our wildly unpopular support for Israel.

Seeing him in action, I understood what mesmerized Westerners into thinking that Nuri Al Said could convince his people to resist the pan-Arab nationalist tide then sweeping the Arab world. Only a year later, however, on July 14, 1958, I was at the airport in Turkey, waiting with other American Baghdad Pact "observers" to meet delegates arriving for another, urgent Baghdad Pact meeting. Civil war had broken out between pro-Nasser Muslim militias and pro-Western Christian militias in Lebanon. And in Amman, pro-Nasser mobs were calling for the downfall of King Hussein.

Other delegations arrived, but the plane bearing the Iraqi delegation, to be headed by Nuri Al Said and the young king, did not. Finally, we were told it had never left Baghdad because of "disturbances" there.

Nuri Al Said had authorized the transit during the previous night of an Iraqi army brigade from the Iranian to the Jordanian border, where it could move into Jordan to defend the regime of King Faisal II's cousin and contemporary, King Hussein. When troops were transferred from one part of Iraq to another they normally were routed far around Baghdad or they were disarmed on one side of the capital and reunited with their weapons when they reached their destination on the other side. This time that precaution was not taken.

The 1958 Revolution

When Iraqis woke the next morning the brigade, commanded by Col. Abdul Karim Kassem and his deputy, Lt. Col. Abdul Salam Arif, was in full control of the city. By the time the Baghdad Pact meeting in far-away Ankara was over, the young King Faisal II, his uncle Abdul Illah, and other men and women of their family had been machine-gunned to death by soldiers, and Nuri Al Said had been lynched by a mob.

Kassem proclaimed himself president and Arif vice president. Arif traveled the next day to Cairo to offer Iraq as the third member of the United Arab Republic already formed by Egypt and Syria.

Kassem, however, had different plans. He turned more and more to the Iraqi communists and their Soviet mentors. Just as Iraq had been the closest thing to a major British-American client state in the Arab world, now it became the first Arab state to provide the Soviet Union a toehold.

Kassem became increasingly idiosyncratic, playing his supporters against each other. He made surprise appearances at diplomatic functions, preceded by chanting, dancing, clapping supporters. He would move smiling through the room accompanied by the rhyming chant, "Ma ku Zaim illa Abdul Karim" (There is no leader but Abdul Karim.)

Then he would depart, the chanting fading into the night as a truckload of his supporters followed him to his next appearance or back to the presidential palace next to the new American Embassy building. The contrast between Nuri Al Said, who could dominate a room just by entering it, and Abdul Karim Kassem, who needed to pack rooms with his supporters, was depressing to Westerners.

If this made him, initially, more attractive to his own people, later they were disturbed by the summary justice he meted out to his opponents. A youthful Ba'thist from the village of Tikrit on the upper Euphrates, who took the name Saddam Hussain, escaped with minor injuries after participating in a nearly successful assassination attempt in which Kassem was wounded in downtown Baghdad. Air Force officers who were accused of plotting an attempt to kill Kassem from the air were not so lucky. All were executed at a military firing range.

The end came for Kassem in February 1963 when members of the pan-Arab Ba'th (Renaissance) party led a successful coup. Kassem was killed in the national television headquarters. His corpse, strapped into a chair, was televised, while one of his executioners occasionally moved the head back and forth to convince viewers this was no manikin, but the Zaim himself.

Arif, whose pro-Nasser Arab nationalist followers had supported the coup, was made president. The Ba'thists, however, ran the show and turned savagely on the communists who had supported Kassem, killing hundreds of them in jails scattered around the country.

In June 1963, I was assigned to "temporary duty" in Baghdad, where the U.S. Embassy had atrophied in the Kassem era into a skeleton crew. As the first U.S. press attache in Baghdad since my predecessor had escaped just one jump ahead of a mob in 1958, all doors were open to me. The television station could not get enough of our hard-sell Cold War films about communist atrocities during the Korean War. The newly installed editor of the government newspaper, renamed Al Jamaheer (the masses), was a bright and engaging young man named Tariq Aziz, now deputy prime minister of Iraq.

When, on my second visit to his office, he opened with a lecture on the U.S. errors in supporting Israel's grab of more Palestinian lands than it had been assigned by the U.N. partition plan in 1947, I reminded him that he had given me that lecture on my previous visit, and I had listened to the end without interrupting.

He stopped talking and let me state my business. On my subsequent visits he never repeated "the lecture," which was a standard performance for Ba'thist officials meeting foreign counterparts. Tariq Aziz got the last word, however, on the last time I saw him in that building. As he turned on his heel after seeing me to the outer door, a charming custom still observed in parts of the Arab world nearly 30 years later, he said over his shoulder: "You seem much too intelligent to be representing an American Embassy."

I was still pondering the double-edged compliment a few days later when there was a terrific explosion just outside the embassy. When last I had looked out of my window, a group of American women had been standing in front of the building waiting to board a bus for a tour to an archeological site. Now, from a cloud of smoke and dust, they emerged like a herd of gazelles, bounding, almost soaring, to the front door of the concrete embassy bulding. Sporadic aerial attacks on the Republican Palace next door and on the television station a mile down the same road continued for an hour or two and then all was quiet.

A Daring Aerial Attack

All day long American and Iraqi eyewitnesses described the kinds of aircraft used, and guessed at the identifications of the squadrons involved in the repeated attacks on the palace. It turned out to have been several sorties by a lone dissident Ba'thist air force commander, who had landed, refueled and rearmed six times before flying off to take refuge in Syria. It was said that he had put his first rocket right into the office of President Abdul Salam Arif, who was saved only because at that moment he was in the adjoining bathroom.

Only three days later guns went off all over the city. I asked the politically astute Iraqi press adviser with whom I shared my office who he thought was behind this coup attempt.

"I know only one thing about them," he said.

"What?" I asked eagerly, ready to run off to the ambassador with a piece of precious intelligence.

"They'll be worse than anyone we've had up to now."

"How do you know that?" I asked wonderingly.

"Because they always are," he solemnly explained.

I didn't pass that on to the ambassador, but nearly 30 subsequent years of Iraq's history have demonstrated, perhaps, that it was not me but my Iraqi assistant who was too intelligent to be working in an American Embassy.

The fighting lasted several days. In that period, we were under total curfew at night. In the daytime, however, thanks to our Amencan diplomatic license plates, we were able to travel unhindered around the city. In that penod, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

I still did not have a telephone at home, so an Iraqi neighbor crept through the darkness of a total curfew to tell me the embassy was on the phone with some instructions. When I followed him through the darkness to his home I found his wife and sister, both of whom had lived in the United States while he was a diplomat there, watching the television footage from Dallas, tears rolling down their cheeks.

A few days later, my wife was inching our car along deserted streets, seeking to reassure the families of some of our Fulbright professors who, without the language and diplomatic plates, felt trapped in their homes during the fighting. She turned into a narrow street but realized it was blocked by a tank positioned to fire at Ba'th positions across the river. As she gingerly started to back out, the tank roared into reverse and followed her, halting at her bumper.

She froze as the tank turret flipped open and a sweating, mustachioed Iraqi soldier in coveralls clambered out, jumped to the street and came up to her car. Signaling her to roll down her window, he leaned down and reassured her.

"Don't be frightened. I just wanted to tell you how sorry we are about your president." There were tears in his eyes. When she saw them she, too, started to cry. Awkwardly he clambered back up into his tank and rolled forward again to firing position.

Such spontaneous, dramatic moments kindled our love affair with the people of Iraq. When the smoke of the November 1963 coup had cleared, the unsinkable Abdul Salam Arif was still Iraq's president, but heading a government of like-minded nationalists. Syria, meanwhile, broke with Nasser's Egypt, so soon there was no longer a United Arab Republic to join.

I was dealing now with a whole new panoply of journalists and officials. One day I expressed my frustration at the seemingly quixotic and unpredictable Ministry of Information to an American-educated ministry official. "I really want American visitors to see the best side of Iraq, " I explained. "But your rules make that very difficult."

"Do what you must and don't worry," he said solicitously. "If we ever have to declare you persona non grata, I give you my word it will be for something you can prove you didn't really do. That way it won't hurt your career."

That's the way the Iraqis were, and perhaps still are. At one blazing hot July 14 national day parade, a giant Soviet-made tank stalled in the blinding sun right in front of the presidential reviewing stand, effectively blocking the massed formations waiting behind.

Eventually, a small and battered American-made three-quarter-ton truck, dating back to the pre-1958 era when the U.S. was Iraq's primary source of military supplies, maneuvered around the halted vehicles, hooked some chains to the tank, and with a mighty roar of power pulled the behemoth down the street to clear the route. One of the first to break the amazed silence with roars of laughter and applause was the normally remote President Abdul Salam Arif.

At an embassy reception, we junior officers had been instructed to "pull the guests off the line" as rapidly as possible. This consisted of asking a guest's name if we didn't know it, after he or she had been welcomed by the ambassador, steering the guest to another guest with whom he or she shared a language in common and going back to get another guest.

I pulled a young, heavily bemedaled officer off the line but I couldn't seem to get my ear close enough to his mouth to catch his name through the buzz of conversation. On the third try, he smiled and said "Don't worry about the name. I'm the president's brother."

The Arif Brothers

Only four months later, Lt. Gen. Abdul Rahman Arif was Iraq's new president. His older brother's helicopter had lifted off from a political rally in Basra just at dusk to return to Baghdad. Two other helicopters in the convoy made it home, but his wasn't found until morning, on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab, with all of its occupants killed in the crash.

The government radio reported he had been lost in a storm. But many Iraqis speculated it was a bombing. Two days later, as I lay flat on my back with a ruptured spinal disk, an Iraqi editor who had been in one of the accompanying helicopters visited me at home and described in vivid detail the howling black sandstorm that had suddenly engulfed them. He actually had heard the pilot's wail of despair on the open radio of the president's helicopter as they went down, he said. The next day I assured the embassy political officer that the president's death was an accident because I'd just talked to a reliable journalist who was practically an eyewitness.

By chance, a month or two later, I introduced the political officer to the same Iraqi journalist at a reception and suggested he tell my American colleague about what had transpired the night the president was killed.

"I don't believe the government's story, " my Iraqi journalist friend said. "I was on an accompanying helicopter and it was a perfectly clear night and there was no storm at all."

As I listened incredulously to this totally different version of the same night from the same witness, I concluded that, just as I would never be "PNGed" for anything I'd actually done in Iraq, I would certainly never be promoted for anything I'd actually done there either. For me, the Iraqis remained charmingly bewildering.

The Iraqi I most admired was A., editor of a small paper which, though it received government-subsidized newsprint, did not speak officially for the government. He had been an Iraqi press attache in Beirut for some of the Kassem era and when I first met him he had a "prison pallor," suggesting he probably had spent some or all of the eight months the Ba'th was in power in jail. Iraqis didn't discuss those things with foreigners.

With Friends Like Me

Clearly a leftist, with a degree from the London School of Economics, he was frank, outspoken and clear-thinking. When American journalists visited Iraq, I would recommend him among two or three English-speaking Iraqi journalists they should talk to find out what was going on. When the American journalists returned for subsequent visits, they usually went straight to A. Meanwhile, his newspaper was so well edited that its circulation soared until it became the biggest newspaper in Iraq.

I wanted to send all of the best Iraqi journalists, like A., to the U.S. for visits. But no one quite dared to be the first newsman since 1958 to accept an American travel grant. Just before my departure from Iraq in the summer of 1966, however, I finally persuaded four leading and particularly well-connected editors to go together. Later, my successor got A. a six-month U.S. government grant to attend a course in U.S. journalism and work for a time on an American newspaper.

Then, in June 1967, during Israel's Six-Day War with its Arab neighbors, Iraq and other "nationalist" Arab states broke diplomatic relations with the U.S. When the Ba'thists took over again in 1968 in another brief coup, relations remained frosty and the new Ba'th, I'm sure, would happily have "PNGed" a U.S. press attache like me, had there been one to expel.

The new president was Hassan Al Bakr, and his vice president and, some said, the power behind the throne, was Saddam Hussain, the would-be assassin of Abdul Karim Kassem a decade earlier. Saddam obviously had learned a lot from the first Ba'th debacle in 1963, when infighting had split the party wide open and its erstwhile nationalist allies had moved in and taken over.

This time, Saddam was said to have had some former colleagues shot immediately after he assumed the presidency from Hassan Al Bakr in 1969. He also arrested a lot of intellectuals and potential opposition figures, including my friend, A.

According to Baghdad radio, A. was charged with being "a CIA agent" and sentenced to death, along with many others arrested at the same time. I was serving in Beirut by then, and as A. languished in jail, I was haunted with the worry that my having sent visiting U.S. journalists to him, and my successor's success in getting him to the U.S. for more than a quick tour, had contributed to Al's plight.

In early 1970 there was an alleged plot against Saddam Hussain's regime. He nipped the plot in the bud and executed the suspects. When all the killing was done, it was apparent that all of the other prisoners in Traqi jails under sentence of death, leftists and rightists alike, had been executed as well.

My friend A. was dead, I was consumed with concern that I was somehow responsible, and my love affair with his country went on hold. I had worked off and on a history of Iraq, and now I couldn't stand the sight of the manuscript. In 1979, two years before retiring from the foreign service, I visited Baghdad as the U.S. Information Agency's deputy director for Near East affairs to see if it was time to resume cultural relations, even though the U.S. and Iraq still did not have full diplomatic relations.

Marshall Wiley, the U.S. chief of mission, said he wouldn't try to influence me one way or another. He warned me, however, that when I visited the Foreign Ministry, which was our former U.S. Embassy building next to the presidential palace, my conversation would be taped and that I should be very careful not to say anything that could be doctored or used against the United States, in or out of context.

When I had proceeded through several roadblocks into what is virtually a forbidden city where Ba'thist officials live and work T found myself in a Foreign Ministry reception room only three doors from my old office. The official awaiting me in the room froze with horror when he saw me. He had been a decidedly rakish young foreign service officer and a frequent guest in our home when my wife and I had lived in Baghdad.

I shook his hand warmly but gave no verbal sign of recognition. Nor did he. I finally slipped into our discussion of the merits of American universities the name of the one from which I knew he had graduated, saying, "Of course you understand from personal experience that it is a leader in fields of interest to Iraq."

His answer, in its entirety, was "of course." There was panic in his eyes. I could see it was neither the time to reminisce with old friends nor to renew cultural relations.

Not Recognizing Friends

On subsequent visits to Iraq, twice as a media guest of the Iraqi government and twice on U.S. government-funded educational projects, I scrupulously minded my own business, except for looking up representatives of the current government I'd met in Washington and Tariq Aziz, with whom I'd also spoken during one of his visits to Washington.

I noted, however, that a foreigner is seldom alone with any Iraqi, even a Ministry of Information guide. For them, there was safety only in numbers.

An exception was an old friend I hadn't seen since 1966, until I twice saw him standing in the lobby of my Baghdad hotel four or five years ago. The second time he was alone and near a newsstand. I walked over and stood beside him, but didn't shake his hand or look at him. "I saw you yesterday but didn't want to say anything when you were with your friends," I said, staring at the newspaper display.

"I recognized you too," he said softly, not taking his eyes off the newspapers. Then, from the limitless reserve of hospitality stored inside every Iraqi, he half sighed, "Would you like to come to dinner tonight?"

"I know it wouldn't be safe for you," I said. "Besides, I'm waiting right now for a car that will take me to the airport."

"I really think it might be safe the next time you visit," he replied, with barely concealed relief. He gave me elaborate instructions on getting in touch through a third party, and an innocuous word that would mean, "buzz off, it's still not safe," if that were the case.

On a later visit I was interviewed by several reporters. I asked the reporter for one newspaper that had the name of another old friend on its masthead to say hello to him for me. Months later, I received in the U.S. a hand-written note saying how touched the old friend was that I had remembered him. He didn't ask me to contact him again, however, and he gave an elaborate reason why he would not be able to do a guest article for my present magazine, as I had suggested to his reporter.

So much for old friends and my old love affair with Iraq. My realistic Iraqi aide had said back in 1963 that things would only get worse. How much worse, I think, even he couldn't have imagined. But even in the steep ups and downs of Iraq's long history, there must be an absolute rock bottom. That may be where Traq is now in the 25th year of the reign of Saddam Hussain. So, perhaps, from here on things can only get better.