Baghdad prepares for war

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The people of Baghdad hastened Monday to prepare for war, taping windows, shuttering shops and restaurants, and hauling away everything of value they could load into cars, minivans and trucks.

The 4.5 million residents of the capital had little official information about the outside events that made war appear imminent, notably President Bush's announcement in the Azores on Sunday that he was calling a halt to months of U.N. diplomacy over Iraq's banned weapons and Saddam Hussein's government.

All that Iraqis learned from official outlets came in the form of defiant statements from Saddam and his ministers, who vowed in vitriolic language that American troops would be defeated.

But Iraqis have had decades of practice in evading government controls on information, relying on shortwave radio broadcasts from Europe and the United States and illicit satellite television systems that have sprung up defiance of severe government penalties.

So from the moment that Baghdad woke up Monday, the city was buzzing with ordinary people preparing for the conflict ahead, and rife with talk about what American war plans might portend.

As best an outsider could judge it, given the widespread fear here of any candor in discussing political matters, the mood was one of deep apprehension of the immediate consequences for ordinary Iraqis of American air attacks, and the ground assaults that are likely to follow.

But coupled with that, though barely whispered, there was a suppressed but fevered anticipation of the changes for the better that could come to this country if American troops accomplished Bush's aim of toppling Saddam.

Amid the apprehension and anticipation, the people of Baghdad concentrated on doing what they could, and, as almost everyone who spoke to Western reporters said, trusting the rest to God.

Huge lines formed at gas stations as people filled up with fuel that, at 2 cents a liter, is one of the few material privileges left here. Others went shopping for water storage tanks, kerosene lamps, electrical generators, flashlights and batteries, and canned food.

At one suburban school, 14-year-old boys were ordered to dig a series of trenches about 10 feet long and 5 feet deep, chanting as they did so, "This may look like trench, but it's not, it's George W. Bush's grave."

Jewelers and dress shop owners and restaurateurs emptied their premises of all valuables, then locked up. The expressway westward to Jordan, an oasis of relative freedom whose border lies about 350 miles west of Baghdad, was said to be busier than usual with families that had bribed officials for exit visas.

Iraqis looking for guidance from Saddam found little to help them on Monday.

State television reported that he had greeted Tunisia's foreign minister, Habib Ben Yahia, with a promise that Iraq's forces, said by Western experts to be depleted and demoralized, would overwhelm the Americans.

"We hope that the war will not take place, thanks be to God, because we do not need to test the courage and resistance of our people," he was reported to have said.

But he added, "We are ready to sacrifice our souls, our children and our families so as not to give up Iraq. We say this so no one will think that America is capable of breaking the will of the Iraqis with its weapons. If the evil were to come, we would defeat it."

On Sunday, Saddam set the tone by vowing that the United States "should realize that the battle between us will be waged wherever there is sky, earth and water anywhere in the world," suggesting that Iraq could somehow strike far outside its own borders, perhaps even in the United States.

That was coupled with remarks in which he again denied, again, that Iraq had any banned chemical, biological or other weapons, and mocked American allegations to the contrary by saying, "Well, give us time and the necessary means and we will produce any weapon they want, and then we will invite them to come and destroy them."

Iraqi ministers followed up on Monday with a welter of attacks on the United States. The information minister, Mohammed Said al- Sahhaf, described the Azores meeting as "a summit of outlaws" and "war merchants" who had failed to produce any proof that Iraq had banned weapons.

In an interview Monday night on al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language network, al-Sahhaf said, "I promise President Bush and Prime Minister Blair that they will leave office, and President Saddam Hussein will still be in power here."

For years, it has been plain that the official adulation of Saddam echoed in almost every Iraqi's conversation with the Western press has masked a deep yearning for relief from the repression that has left millions of Iraqis in fear for their lives.

As American pressures have peaked in recent days, those yearnings have found new expression among people who have dared to start saying things against Saddam that still carry the potential for severe retribution, apparently because they believe that time is too short now for their worst nightmares to be realized.

Even reporting what those Iraqis say can be dangerous, and not only for the Iraqis themselves. As the hours ticked away toward the time set for Bush's televised address setting a 48-hour ultimatum for the Iraqi leader to quit power -- 4 a.m. Tuesday in Baghdad -- reporters for Western newspapers and television channels who have been working in Baghdad engaged in their own debate about whether to stay or leave, and a growing number chose to depart.

As Monday ended, the 150 reporters still in the city, down from about 300 a week ago, were rapidly becoming the largest group of foreigners remaining here. A group of about 60 U.N. weapons inspectors, along with about 100 staff members, were expected to leave Baghdad on Tuesday morning, following orders from U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, after a warning from the United States that they should depart.

One factor weighing on everyone's mind was Saddam's weekend announcement that Iraq was to be divided into four military districts, and that the Baghdad region would be under the personal command of his younger son, Qusay, 36. Iraqis debated among themselves about how Saddam and his inner circle -- especially Qusay Hussein, long regarded as the heir apparent to the unlimited powers accumulated over 23 years by his father, and his 38-year-old older brother, Uday, who controls the widely feared, black-masked paramilitary force known as Saddam's Holy Fighters -- would respond to an American attack on Baghdad.

Would Saddam, his sons and other high-ranking officials make a last stand in one of their many palaces, or in the vast underground network of tunnels and bunkers that German and other Western companies helped them build in the 1980s?

And would they order the arrest of Westerners to be deployed as human shields at potential American bombing targets, as Saddam did with scores of Western business leaders before the Persian Gulf War in 1991, an expedient that the Iraqi leader eventually abandoned before the conflict began?

Or would they simply disappear, as Osama bin Laden did in Afghanistan, and become "shadows" eluding their American pursuers, as Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's most trusted advisers, predicited in an interview with an American reporter last October?

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