BAGHDAD — Every morning like clockwork, an instrumental version of the Beatles' song "Yesterday" forms part of the medley of 20-year-old elevator music echoing off the marble floors of the dreary and slightly threatening halls of the once-illustrious Al Rasheed Hotel.
It's a fitting anthem for Baghdad.
As a war with the United States looms, the capital's depressed, desperate, and fearful people look out over a landscape that mocks the city's proud past, when its eccentric emperors, lusty poets, and seafaring merchants gave rise to the legends of "1,001 Nights."
The tattered magazines lining the bookstores of Mutanabi Street, a once-thriving intellectual entrepot, date back 20 years. Illiteracy has skyrocketed, and one in four Iraqis has dropped out of school. Queued up in the biggest breadline in history, virtually all its people live on the U.N. equivalent of welfare. Once the destination of migrant workers, Iraq is hemorrhaging its best and brightest.
Nearly all the cars — many of them decades-old Chevrolets and Fords — have a cracked windshield.
While Iraqi exiles and the Bush administration look ahead to Iraq's future, the people are mired in their past, gripped by the notion of "hanin," an Arabic word that suggests both longing and nostalgia. Its golden age of the 1970s — when newfound oil wealth radiated Iraqi culture, influence and power across the region — has given way to a brittle, precarious present, with ominous portents for its future.
A country in shambles
With or without war, Iraq is in shambles. A generation is lost in isolation, religious sentiment is overshadowing its once-libertine secularism, and identity has become subsumed in the fractious tapestry of faith and ethnicity that the regime has woven to help it divide, conquer and repress.
Aid workers toss out estimates of reconstructing the country's overwhelmed infrastructure after more than a decade of U.N. sanctions — $20 billion, perhaps far more. They estimate a generation or two to reclaim the rights granted to women, enviable social development and economic growth cut short by a disastrous war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, then an invasion of Kuwait two years later. But they have no answers to its fate as a nation — an anxiety voiced time and again by Iraqis who, with fear and growing anger at the United States and their own government, face the prospect of their third war in 23 years.
"It really is a human tragedy," said Adil Ghaffour, a 67-year-old American-trained doctor, who once belonged to Iraq's now-vanished middle class. "I doubt in history that a nation has suffered like Iraq." He paused and shook his head. "For no good reason."
In Arabic, the word "tabaghdada" means to swagger, to show off. There is little to swagger about in the city that lent its name to the word. There's less to show off.
For Mohammed Ghani, a renowned sculptor, "tabaghdada" lost all meaning in the 1991 Gulf War, when a US-led air campaign to drive invading Iraqi forces from Kuwait promptly sent Iraq back to the Third World from which it came.
In the war's aftermath, he remembers two months with no electricity after the destruction of power stations, which in turn meant no phones, electricity, water, or gas. The light he did enjoy in a home cloaked in darkness was provided by candles that he made from wax used for casting molds.
As he reminisced, he knitted his thick, black eyebrows, and his thoughts turned to the present.
"We are living as the rest of the world lived 15 years ago," he said.
Ghani's 73 years give him perspective. And in it are the echoes of other Iraqis who look at their recent past as a junkyard of broken promises and entrenched misery, giving voice to dissent that even a few years ago was too dangerous to convey to a neighbor, much less a foreigner.
A life of war, war and war
"For 30 years, our life has been war and war and war," Ghani said after turning up the volume of his radio to drown out his words lest anyone be eavesdropping. "Our history has been revolution after revolution after revolution. That has brought destruction, up until now."
More painful, said Ghani, is the isolation that has ensued.
Long gone are the exhibitions and lectures he once gave in Europe and the United States, some of them sponsored by the government. He now complains he cannot find wood and wire for welding. Paint has become too expensive, a far cry from subsidized art supplies in the 1970s.
A rare bright spot was the arrival last year of the Internet and personal computers in Iraq. Underwritten by the government, computers can be bought by university staff for $150. But a typical Internet subscription — about $250 a year — is far beyond the means of most.
Satellite television is banned, except for a truncated state-run version. Cellular phones do not exist. A permit to leave Iraq runs $200. "We are so far away from modernity," Ghani said. "New things, we don't know them."
Shaddad Abd al-Khar belongs to a proud Iraqi tradition of the risque and the blasphemous.
His workshop sits off Abu Nawas Street, which takes its name from a friend of the medieval caliph who scandalized and titillated his fellow Muslims with racy poetry about wine and women. Even in the 1970s, amid Baghdad's boom, Egyptian intellectuals recall the free plane tickets and ample bottles of Johnnie Walker Black that awaited them on sponsored trips to the Iraqi capital. Artistic life — far from the politics that left thousands in Iraq's jails — was a vibrant mishmash brought by Lebanese, Palestinians, and others fleeing hardship in their own countries.
In today's Baghdad, his work is a remnant of that past.
His paintings of nude women, sometimes graphically portrayed, sit in his own gallery. No government art house would show them.
"They'd ban this type of work," he said glumly, chain-smoking his Gitanes cigarettes. "It's not like the 1970s."
Circling the wagons
As elsewhere in the Arab world, religious sentiments are becoming more pronounced in a country once one of the region's most secular. Over the last decade, nightclubs were shuttered, "God is great" was emblazoned on the Iraqi flag and alcohol banned except in private homes.
In its tireless pursuit of legitimacy, the government of President Saddam Hussein has both encouraged and reflected the shift. For many, the Arab nationalism it once espoused evokes the brutality it has deployed to stay in power. In its place, the government has sought other symbols to justify its rule — Iraqi patriotism, defense of Palestine and, most prominently, Islamic solidarity.
Despite its meager resources and relentless repression of organized religious opposition, it is building two of the world's largest mosques in Baghdad. A prevalent icon is a praying Hussein. He has showered gifts on venerated shrines and poured religious rhetoric into his speeches.
Abd al-Khar says the secularism with which he grew up remains in the soul of Baghdad. For how long, he doesn't know.
"The (religious) influence is growing," he said, listening to a tape of Celine Dion. "Economics and politics are forcing our society to transform."
For the Arab world's largest countries — Egypt, Syria and Algeria among them — emigration was the ticket to prosperity. Iraq was different, and for years, it played host to migrants who worked its fields and factories as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men were drafted to fight the war with Iran.
Abandoning Iraqi ship
Today those who can afford it are leaving in droves; hundreds of thousands are in Jordan, Iran and elsewhere.
"They used to go, come and go back," said Suheir al-Tamimi, an engineer. "Nowadays people are leaving and they're staying there."
There are no jobs, and Iraqis point out again and again that someone selling cigarettes will make far more than a political scientist. U.N. officials warn the disincentive for education is potentially catastrophic, depriving Iraq of the very people it needs to rebuild it.
About 23 percent of Iraqi children are not enrolled in primary school, with twice as many girls dropping out as boys. The salaries of teachers are enough to buy three chickens a month. Fewer than half of adult women can read a newspaper, from nearly nine in 10 two decades ago.
The specter of a lost generation speaks to a curse heard often in the capital's streets. Iraq, they say, is a rich country — with ample water, fertile land, a large population and the world's second-biggest oil reserves. But its very wealth gets it into trouble. It made possible the wars Saddam launched against Iran and Kuwait. And many Iraqis remain convinced that its oil — and control over it — is driving U.S. plans for an invasion.
"Oil is a curse for Iraq," insisted Tamimi. As she spoke, she quickly got upset and waved a reporter's business card across her flushed face. "My father said every day that he wished the oil would dry up so the world would leave Iraq in peace."
Peace, she suspects, is not at hand. Some Iraqis are stockpiling flour, water and canned food. Neighbors have sold all the doors inside their homes, save the front ones, for a few dollars. Others, she said, are making plans to leave Baghdad for the relative safety of the countryside.
And the future? She looked down at the floor of her office.
"Who can answer, who can answer," she said. "With or without the war."