Hatred, fear reign after 'liberation'

[sr_pacifica]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/15/MNGOV9AHEO1.DTL

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Fifteen years ago, Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya published "The Republic of Fear," a terrifying, surreal account of a country where President Saddam Hussein's security apparatus wrought havoc on the lives and psyches of ordinary Iraqis. Today, the country feels almost as surreal and terrifying, with a new kind of fear -- that the violence, the hatred, the chaos of "liberated" Iraq keeps edging closer to one's own life, family and closest friends.

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Paranoia infects every move, even among hardened foreign correspondents - - fear of being followed or of being sold out for a few hundred dinars to kidnappers, or that the next car bomb could have one's own name on it.

"We have to keep moving," a journalist's Iraqi translator says, abruptly ending an interview. "We'll be safer if we keep moving. Let's get out of here. "

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Someday, things will return to normal, people say wistfully. The question, says an Iraqi translator, is "what level of suffering we'll have to endure before things go back to normal."

Every day, headlines on Radio Sawa, the popular U.S.-financed radio station, paint a bleak picture: Sunni clerics abducted and murdered. Three Kurdish peshmerga fighters beheaded. Intense fighting on Haifa Street. New Abu Musab al-Zarqawi communique promises more violence against collaborators.

Then, back to the music.

"I'm like a bird -- I'll only fly away," Canadian pop artist Nelly Furtado sings. "I don't know where my soul is. I don't know where my home is."

The dwindling cadre of U.S. officials in Baghdad continues to express unbridled optimism for the future of Iraq and America's aims. But Thursday's bomb attacks in the Green Zone proved even that fortress, home to U.S. and Iraqi officials, is no longer safe. At least six people, including four Americans, were killed when suicide bombers slipped into the zone and set off coordinated blasts at a popular cafe.

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"I like the Iraqi people," says Pfc. Isaac Staley, 30, of Springfield, Ore., standing guard at a joint U.S. Army-Iraqi police checkpoint in central Baghdad. "But there's so much separating them from us, from our Western civilization, that it's hard to get past. There's prejudice. ... There's prejudice on our side, and there's prejudice on their side."

The Iraqi police radio crackles out an all-points bulletin. "A guy with a beard named Mohammad," says the dispatcher. "If you see him, detain him." A Black Hawk helicopter roars overhead. Then another one.

Many soldiers suspect the people who smile at them during the day are the ones firing rocket-propelled grenades at them by night. "Don't trust anyone, not even the 10-year-old kid on the street," says U.S Army Capt. Jeff Mersiowsky of Tucson.

In Baquba, a hotbed of insurgency, a soldier with the Army's 4th Infantry Division who wished to remain anonymous, says, "The only question for us is how many of us have gotta die before we get to go home."

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