LONELY BAGHDAD

It feels like such a lonely place. I’m not sure why; maybe it is because Saddam Hussein is gone. Gone, but I can’t help thinking about him. I somehow feel he is hiding beneath us. Wherever we go, Saddam is sitting at a long conference table—as he was usually pictured on TV—smoking one of his Habana cigars, speaking in his artificially calm and muted voice about something (we never heard his words). But it is reported that he was badly wounded when they bombed the restaurant he was supposedly in. But it is his absence that contributes to the loneliness of Baghdad. At least if he were about, there’d be his Republican Guards making their presence known, picking up political dissidents and torturing people.

After delivering the medical supplies to hospitals—I’ll get to this at a later date—we took a day to tour the city, much like anyone would want to, having a free day in Baghdad. We hit the hot spots—one of Saddam’s palaces where the U.S. soldiers were glad to show us around—and stopped in front of countless bombed out buildings the use of which the driver would explain, through our translator, Dr. Badri. "Uday’s offices, telephone company, Saddam’s parliament, etc."

Either the driver or Dr. Badri—I forget who—was eager to show us Saddam’s secret police Headquarters, a compound where "someone who enters never leaves—alive."
It was a long, low tan cement affair—all Saddam’s buildings seemed to be tan cement—well hidden from the road by a twelve-foot tan cement wall. We entered through an unmanned guard post and then continued along a long straight driveway into an open courtyard in the center of which was a huge statue of a world globe.

All the windows in the buildings had been blown out and there were black smoke stains around and above them. A couple of looters were busy removing the aluminum window frames which remained. Dr. Badri, who had grown up in Baghdad, was incensed and began to yell at the looters. It didn’t seem like a terrifically wise idea as they were most-likely armed and we were not. One of them rushed over to our car to engage Badri. The yelling went on for a heated few minutes, culminating in the man suddenly lifting his shirt to show the scars he said he had received when he’d been tortured by Saddam’s men.

In an instant reaction—one of those that completely bypasses the rational mind—I lifted my shirt, puffed out my chest and showed off the long scar from my heart operation. This, I knew almost instantly, was a totally irrational act. About all it did was to have the man lower his voice a few decibels. I felt like almost a total idiot. Why had I showed the man my scar? What was I trying to prove? Mine was bigger—longer—than his? I felt childish, dumb.

Suddenly I felt lonelier than before. We left the place and continued on our tour of bombed out palaces, the two huge unfinished Mother of All Mosques that Saddam had recently begun construction on evidently to appease the Gods. We toured the rich neighborhood where Saddam’s faithful lived in perhaps the most architecturally bizarre houses on the planet—houses which in their form, displayed a kind of insanity.

The heat finally forced us to stop at a roadside shop which, thanks to a generator, was serving delicious cups of Baghdad ice cream which was eaten with tiny spoons, the size of the testing spoons at Baskin Robbins.

But even the ice cream couldn’t make the loneliness disappear. The emptiness of Baghdad was in the air. It was as if the city had no soul.