THE BAGHDAD BLUES

By PETER ARNETT/BAGHDAD

The Iraqis I see in Baghdad this week bear little resemblance to those I met before the 1991 Gulf War. The same faces, yes; the same names: Sadoun, Ala, Sa'ad, Mahoud, middle-class government officials, merchants, staffers at international companies. Right after the Gulf War, these were the people the U.S. hoped, maybe expected, would overthrow Saddam Hussein. But the political discontent I saw then seems to have dissipated. Now, after enduring rigorous economic sanctions that have stripped away their wealth, the educated merchant class has settled into numb resignation. The dinar has been devalued to one five-hundredth of its previous value: a government official who earned a yearly salary of $50,000 now gets $100. Gone too is the zest for life, the unpretentious way with visitors, the jocularity.

Iraqis are a proud people, but poverty has brought many of them low, poor in spirit as well as dinars. Their whole focus today is on basic survival. A government department head uses his car as a taxi after hours, while his wife takes in laundry. A young Iraqi woman fluent in four languages who once ran a hire-car firm now earns only $7 a month in a similar job. To keep going, she has had to sell so many possessions that she and her grandmother sleep on the floor and eat with their fingers from cooking utensils.

I'm often asked after a Baghdad trip why these hard-pressed people don't rebel against Saddam. The middle class has fallen the furthest and would seem to be a vast pool of potential discontent. But U.S. agents have attempted to stir them to rebellion with scant success. That the middle class is not in a revolutionary mood is understandable when you pair the severe U.N. economic sanctions with the government's preoccupation with protecting its internal security. Their priority is the struggle for sustenance for themselves and their families, a daily struggle that leaves little room for other than dreaming about the abstract chimera of political change.

A Baghdad journalist told me bitterly, "America says it's concerned about the Iraqi people. That's clearly so much rubbish. It'll do anything to spite Saddam Hussein, even depriving the people here of food and medicine that they desperately need." In times like these, I hear more talk about Iraqi nationalism, at least from those friends who want to talk. The others say nothing much at all. They have withdrawn into themselves, maybe better to contemplate their misery.

Peter Arnett, senior international correspondent for CNN, is on assignment in Iraq.