More Baghdad Today

The Ugly American's Quagmire

'Do you have any rooms?" we ask the hotelier. She looks us over, dwelling on my travel partner's bald, white head.
"No," she replies.

We try not to notice that there are 60 room keys in pigeonholes behind her desk - the place is empty.

"Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?"

She hesitates. "Ahh ... No."

We return to our current hotel - the one we want to leave because there are bets on when it is going to get hit - and flick on the TV: the BBC is showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the September 11 commission, and a couple of pundits are arguing about whether invading Iraq has made America safer.

They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where the US occupation has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense that it now extends not only to US troops, occupation officials and their contractors but also to foreign journalists, aid workers, their translators and pretty much anyone else associated with the Americans. Which is why we couldn't begrudge the hotelier her decision: if you want to survive in Iraq, it's wise to stay the hell away from people who look like us. (We thought about explaining that we were Canadians, but all the American reporters are sporting the maple leaf - that is, when they aren't trying to disappear behind their newly purchased headscarves.)

The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, hasn't started wearing a hijab yet, and is instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism with his usual foresight. Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs like Baghdad Now, filled with fawning articles about how Americans are teaching Iraqis about press freedom. "I never thought before that the coalition could do a great thing for the Iraqi people," one trainee is quoted as saying. "Now I can see it on my eyes that they are doing good things for my country and the accomplishment they made. I wish my people can see that, the way I see it."

Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another version of press freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper run by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shia cleric has been preaching that Americans are behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and condemning the interim constitution as a "terrorist law." So far, al-Sadr has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed resistance, but many here are predicting that closing down the newspaper - a nonviolent means of resisting the occupation - was just the push he needed. But then, recruiting for the resistance has always been a specialty of the presidential envoy to Iraq: Bremer's first act after being tapped by Bush was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse to give them their rightful pensions, but allow them to hold on to their weapons - in case they needed them later.

While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's office, I found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will start producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture: Pepsi-Cola. I figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing to defend the Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company's managing director. I was wrong.

"All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremer," Khamis told me, flanked by a line-up of 30 Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He didn't listen to Iraqis. He doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed the country and tried to rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos."

These are words you would expect to hear from religious extremists or Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's not just that his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US multinational in Iraq's new "free market". It's also that few Iraqis supported the war more staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam executed both his brothers and Khamis was forced to resign as managing director of the bottling plant in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday threatened his life. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, "you can't imagine how much relief we felt", he says.

"It's not the war that caused the hatred. It's what they did after. What they are doing now."