Made in the USA
The American zone M Baghdad is all razor wire, chinos and Britney Spears; the Iraqi zone is traffic jams, garbage and roadside bombs. Richard Beeston reports
Baghdad
Iam stuck in gridlocked traffic on Sadoun Street, Baghdad's main thoroughfare. Smoke is still rising from a hotel bombed the night before and the local radio is reporting the overnight casualty toll. An American patrol has also been attacked, more unexplained bodies have turned up at the hospital morgues and various luckless Iraqis have succumbed to the anarchy gripping the city. The fortunate ones have just lost cars or cash, the unlucky ones will have to stump up ransom money to free their kidnapped children.
The talk among the passengers in the car is always the same in Iraq. Which roads are least likely to be attacked? Where is it safe to live? Which restaurant might be next on the hit list, now that Nabil's, a popular haunt with foreigners, has been flattened by a car bomb? Perhaps in future we will stick to takeaways.
A French colleague decided to move after a motley collection of private security guards — recruited from South Africa, Serbia and Lebanon and hired by the Pentagon began loitering in the lobby of his small hotel. It was the right decision. The building was struck soon afterwards by a rocket. An American colleague fled his home in Baghdad and evacuated a local member of staff to Jordan after being followed and receiving threats. Other colleagues now only travel in the company of armed guards, and one has even taken to carrying a gun.
As we crawl through the bumper-tobumper traffic, ordinary Iraqis stare at the foreigners among them with obvious suspicion and resentment. We have already learnt not to travel in the large white fourwheel-drive cars that are used by the private security companies, undercover CIA agents and civilians working for the Coalition Authority. For the same reason, we don't wear sunglasses or photographer's vests, both of them fashion accessories favoured by those working for the American-led government. The precautions may sound excessive until you calculate that most of the attacks are roadside bombs detonated by remote control. How you look and what car you drive can be a matter of life arid death.
The pavement is covered with uncollected rubbish, the odd makeshift defensive barrier, erected by a hotel or a foreign business, and stacks of new electrical goods, which flood Baghdad's main shopping streets. Clapped-out Volkswagen Passats, made in Brazil under one of Saddam's long-forgotten barter deals, belch exhaust fumes and occasionally die in the middle of the road. Accidents are common, particularly with the sudden import of used right-handdrive cars from Japan. When collisions do occur they often end in violence, because there is no insurance in Iraq and the best way to collect money for repairs is by forcing the other driver to pay up on the spot.
On this occasion an impatient traffic policeman, trying to coax a motorist along who has been involved in a minor accident, provokes a furious row. Farmyard insults are traded in Arabic. The officer pulls out a baton and the driver of the car rushes to the boot to get his gun. Nobody waits to find out how the roadrage drama ends. We follow other cars, mount the pavement and make our escape.
Two ID checks and three body-searches later I have stepped into another Baghdad. Here, behind razor wire, machine-gun towers and a four-metre-high cement wall that covers a 20-mile perimeter, is the 'Green Zone', a swath of the city centre reserved for the people who run the country. Inside this citadel you can actually hear birds chirping rather than car horns. At the peak of the rush hour, gleaming monster SUVs shipped out from America politely wait their turn to dock in the large car parks. For those who prefer public transport, an airconditioned shuttle bus, playing Britney Spears on a US military music station, disgorges commuters. Men and women, balancing cups of coffee and briefcases, line up patiently for the obligatory security check, exchanging small talk in American-English. Aside from the palm trees, the odd flattened building and the Arab street urchins who sneak into the zone to hawk pirated DVDs, everything feels and looks strangely familiar but distinctly out of place. Many of the women are wearing trainers with their business suits, ready to change footwear once they get to the office. In this instance the office is in Saddam's former Republican Palace. The cavernous marble edifice, whose long reception halls are lit by chandeliers and decorated with tiles bearing Saddam's initials, is now the Coalition headquarters and soon to become America's largest embassy in the world.
Those men not in combat fatigues wear the American bureaucrat's uniform of choice. In Iraq the familiar chinos, blazers and buttondown shirts are rounded off with flak jackets, Kevlar helmets and the optional holstered pistol, worn more for effect than action. Apart from these small concessions, the men and women running Iraq are largely indistinguishable from the average commuter crowd heading for federal offices in Washington, DC. Even the muddy waters of the Tigris river do a passable imitation of the Potomac. In fact the only obvious details missing from the morning routine are bagels and copies of the Washington Post, though this may in time be remedied. The area already boasts dining halls, with all food shipped in from abroad, Bible-reading classes, karaoke evenings and even a bar run by the CIA.
The creation of this American ecosystem in the heart of the Arab world is due to accident and design. The lack of security and the roughly 20 daily attacks against American targets have forced the 3,000 American officials in Baghdad, and thousands more troops, to retreat inside their forbidden city, which is equivalent to sealing off Whitehall, Westminster and a decent chunk of St James's and Pimlico. There is even a complimentary shuttle bus to the airport — which is also under exclusive American control — 15 miles away. It is possible to fly into Baghdad, live and work in the Green Zone for several weeks and leave again without ever setting foot in the real Baghdad. The growing suspicion among many Iraqis is that the Americans who came here to liberate them and rebuild their country don't much like them, their food, customs or ancient capital. Even when Saddam was in power, living and working in the area now occupied by the Americans, ordinary Iraqis could still drive past his palaces and peek into his compound.
As I prepare to return to the Red Zone, as the area inhabited by the city's six million Iraqis is known, a bored American paratrooper manning the main entrance gate proudly tells me about his Scottish ancestry. 'My folks came from Arran, but I was born here,' he explains. 'You were born in Iraq?' I ask, trying to picture how a clean-cut Midwesterner could possibly have been brought into the world at the height of Saddam's rule two decades ago, during the Iran-Iraq war,
'No,' he says, looking at me as though I were completely idiotic. 'I was born here — America.'
Richard Beeston is diplomatic editor of the Times.
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