Encounter in A Baghdad Cafe

By John F. Stacks/Baghdad

The restaurant sits near the banks of the Tigris River, from which fishermen haul out the masgouf -- the big carp that are cooked over wood fires and served as a local favorite. Our guest, just days before the war, was a young man who had been translating the Iraqi press so that we could understand what the government was telling its people. He arrived a bit late.

As he was seated, his eyes darted around the room, scanning the other guests. He began to perspire and stammer, suddenly making excuses that he had to get back to work.

The reason was soon clear. When the burly man sitting with his back to our table rose to leave, he was quickly surrounded by soldiers assigned as bodyguards. It was Saddam Hussein's son Uday, 27, whose most notable accomplishment in his relatively young life was to have beaten a presidential bodyguard to death with a club.

The young translator had been helpful and relaxed for days, joining us for meals, discussing his hopes and his family's plans. It did not seem to matter that we were citizens of a nation that was headed for war with his country. Nor did it seem to matter to the scores of other Iraqis we encountered: shopkeepers, hoteliers and even the government functionaries minding our comings and goings in Baghdad. The doctors tending the dying, the security people searching our baggage, the smiling three-year-old son of a government official -- all were strikingly cordial.

As the war rumbles on, as young Americans and their allies are killed, we will demonize not just Saddam Hussein but all Iraqis. That will be unfortunate because the people of Iraq don't really deserve the leadership they have.

There is in Baghdad the feeling of a huge new Jonestown, with another demented preacher leading his flock to death. The isolation is profound. The awareness of the real world limited. The government of Saddam is deeply paranoiac. Officials read single events as connected by strands of conspiracies. Even the Information Minister, not part of the most powerful circle around Saddam, worries enough about his welfare to have at his side a guard armed with an AK-47.

These malignant men shot their way to power. They have ruined their country to preserve their might and exorcise the demons loose in their heads. They may sacrifice tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the deathtrap they have built in Kuwait, believing this will make them Arab heroes, not, in effect, the murderers of their countrymen. They imagine everyone as an enemy. Soon everyone will be.