the coming war -- NY Times article

I thought the article in today's NY Times on Baghdad art students was
particularly apt and timely. I'm getting more and more upset, like
many people, about this war every day. How many of these people are
we going to kill? I thought this article put a "human face" on
things, and that's what we're talking about. It's particularly
distressing when you see pictures of the huge bombs they are testing
in Florida...

_______________________

Sandbags Already on Streets, Baghdad Is a City in Waiting
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

AGHDAD, Iraq, March 11 — As the likelihood of war ratchets
steadily
upward, the what-me-worry mood that prevailed here just weeks ago has
given way to an anxious waiting. This has become a city taut with
nervous energy.

At Baghdad University's college of art, a first-year student, Walid
Mizhar, put down his charcoal pencils and water colors half an hour
before his studio class was finished, ignoring the model and propping
a newspaper up on his easel.

He was attempting to decipher whether the wrangling at the United
Nations meant that war is about to crash down on Iraq.

"The news is neither black nor white, it's kind of gray," he
said. "It would be black if there was going to be war and white if
there was none, but it is just not clear."

Some of the nervousness stems from the landscape, with sandbagged
positions springing up around government ministries and major
intersections. Some comes from superstition — the women who read
fortunes in coffee cup grounds have found in them the prophecy of a
March 15 start to the war. Some of it is in the atmosphere, with
minarets booming with sermons calling on Iraqis to die fighting the
infidel. But mostly it is simple fear.

"Two weeks ago before this crisis heated up the students were doing
much more creative things," said Nidal Mohammed, 42, the professor
overseeing one three-hour drawing class. "Now they are all thinking
about the war — how to prepare, how to get cooking oil, food,
where
they can hide."

Officially, the Iraqi government is counting on the opposition of
France, Germany and Russia, buttressed by worldwide protests, to
prevail over the Bush administration.

But even distant rumblings of war quickly drown out this rosy view. A
few mornings ago pedestrians froze in their tracks on Baghdad
sidewalks as warplanes scratched across the sky high overhead.

"We are afraid because we expect to be attacked at any moment," said
Raghad Majid, an art student who said she was ready to ditch her oil
painting of a male head because it seems stilted.

"You feel like someone is watching you continuously; you can't work
freely," she said. "Students like me from outside Baghdad don't want
to come to class anymore because we are afraid we won't be able to
get back."

Friday prayer sermons exhort Iraqis to fight as a religious
duty. "Anyone who has dust on his feet from the field of battle will
never enter hell on judgment day," boomed Abu Bakr al-Sammerai, the
prayer leader at Abdel Qadr al-Gaylani mosque in downtown
Baghdad. "Mohammed said fight the infidels with everything you have."

The virulently anti-Christian tone of some sermons moved the
leadership of the Chaldean Church, a branch of the Roman Catholic
faith, to lodge an objection with the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

"You have some mullahs denouncing the Crusaders and the infidels from
the minaret, sometimes meaning us as the Christians here," said
Bishop Shlemon Warduni of the Chaldean Church.

The fact that President Bush stresses his Christian faith has given
Muslim fundamentalists inside Iraq new ammunition to use against the
Christian community here, one of the world's oldest. In recent
decades it has shrunk to under a million, or less than 3 percent of
Iraq's 24 million people.

"The fanatics in Iraq are using it as an excuse to act against the
Christians," Bishop Warduni said. He said Christians are unsettled
about the possibility of attacks against them, especially if any war
results in the kind of violent anarchy that southern Iraq experienced
after the Persian Gulf war.

In fact many Iraqis fear renewed anarchy. Given that Mr. Hussein has
been in power for more than three decades, his abrupt departure might
create the kind of vacuum where violence thrives.

One gauge of that fear is the trade at gun shops. Most Iraqi
households own at least one gun, so there has been no particular run
on armaments. But some gun shop owners report as much as a 50 percent
jump in ammunition sales.

"I came in to buy a hunting gun, but I'm also thinking about how to
protect my house and the neighborhood streets," said Yasser Abu
Bilal, looking at a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun at the Trigger gun
shop in the upscale Mansour neighborhood.

If there is fear, there is also anger. Just weeks ago any American
reporter wandering the streets would be told that the Bush
administration may be despised but other Americans were most welcome.
That sentiment is ebbing.

"We only hate the soldiers," said a customer at the Target gun shop,
just off the square of the Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves
fountain. "Nah, we hate them all," the owner, a tribal leader,
growled.

Such attitudes are not limited to the tribes, whose leaders relish
recounting stories of how their grandfathers described to them the
flocks of vultures circling overhead when tribal gunmen helped take
on the British Army, which invaded in 1916.

Educated Iraqis have grown prickly at the prospect of war, rarely
willing to criticize their government lest it somehow help the cause
of those who want to attack.

"You disarm us and then you come and kill us and you say you are
coming to make things better, to make life happier," one Iraqi artist
shouted scornfully.

Friction has also developed between Western antiwar activists and the
Iraqi government over where to place human shields. The activists
wanted to be positioned at hospitals or schools, but the Iraqi
government instead placed them at industrial locations like the Doura
oil refinery.

The government ordered five of the organizers to leave last week
after protests erupted over the choice of sites.

"There are inappropriate sites like water facilities located too
close to army bases, too close to legitimate strategic targets," said
Gordon Sloan, an Australian architect and one of those ordered out of
the country. "In general I think everyone should leave."

But dozens of shields remain, including a group of 40 who alternate
between three trailers on the grounds of the Doura refinery and a
four-bedroom bungalow in the family housing for refinery and other
workers. Down the street sits the Great Victory Company, which helps
complete the welding for some short-range Iraqi missiles.

Those shields who are staying say they are unfazed, the possible
danger balanced by trying to protect so many families. "In the West
sometimes you get the impression that the only person who lives in
Iraq is Mr. Saddam Hussein," said Luis Fuste, a 26-year-old French
shield.

The idea that the Iraqi leader might step down still gets trotted out
by the Bush administration. But foreign diplomats and Iraqis alike
believe Mr. Hussein will fight it out because that coincides with his
image of himself as the descendant of a long line of glorious Arab
leaders, including Saladin, who came from his hometown.

Little hints of that crop up in odd places. The Museum of the
Triumphant Leaders has half a dozen rooms of gilded palm trees,
jeweled swords and other bric-a-brac that visitors have bestowed on
Mr. Hussein over the years.

At the entrance, the president's own musings on glory and immortality
are carved into white marble with gilded letters in Arabic and
English. They read, "The clock chimes away to keep a record of men
and women, some leaving behind the mark of great and lofty souls,
while others leave naught but the remains of worm-eaten bones."