Some unexpected views

It's amazing how quickly life returns to normal after a bomb in Baghdad. I guess people have just got so used to explosions that they hardly blink. Yesterday, an hour after the Baghdad Hotel attack, I was up on the roof of my hotel not far from the Baghdad. I was talking with a photographer who was sending his photos to New York by satellite modem, pleased that he'd got a shot of an injured guy in front of the burning car which was better than the hurried AP photos which were online twenty minutes after it happened. Down below kids were playing football, people were pushing about trolleys of goods and a guy was walking a sheep - yes, a sheep on a lead - all within 30 seconds walk of the carnage which was being aired on TVs around the world. Today Saddoun street is open and the barrier around the hotel has been rebuilt and supplemented with two tanks. The concrete blocks around the Palastine hotel have been growing every day, seeming to bifurcate like amoeba - now I have to navigate through a maze of concrete to get onto Saddoun street to hail a taxi.

Today I only had one Jubilee Iraq meeting, but it was a quite important one with the Oil Minister Bahr al-Uloum, who I've just heard survived an assasination attempt yestarday. He was a surprisingly softly spoken man, and was very diplomatic in his comments, but at one point his passion flared up. I'd mentioned the possibility of Iraq's economic policies being dictated by the IMF (this would be a condition of a Paris Club debt restructuring deal by the richest creditor countries). He replied "We are Iraq! We were the cradle of civilization, we will become the richest country in the world and we will decide our own future, not have policies imposed upon us!"

I've just had afternoon tea with a lovely Iraqi family. I'd delivered some letters a few days ago from their family in the UK, and they invited me around. The father of the family talked for hours and some of his views were quite surprising and controversial. For example he approved of Halabja - the occasion in 1988 when Saddam gassed a Kurdish border village. What is not usually mentioned, he told me, is that the Iranian army was in Halabja with the help of some Kurds, and their tanks were within striking distance of destroying a dam which could have caused a flood downstream in Baghdad, and furthermore the tanks could have rolled relatively unopposed to the capital. So, he compared Halabja with Hiroshima, a dreadful event but justified in wartime by the danger of not acting. Apparently a large number of Iraqi soldiers also died from the gas. He said, "I hated Saddam and he ruined the country, but if I had been in his place I would have ordered the gassing of Halabja." He said it was a double standard to condemn Halabja and accept Hiroshima. He had the same view about the suppression of the Shia rebellion in 1991 - he believes that the Shia would have sacked Baghdad if this had not happened. I don't know enough to make a judgment about the factual basis of his claims, but unexpected views are always interesting.

He also said that all the coups in Iraq in the last 60 years were a result of British/American/Israeli intervention to keep Iraq weak and submissive. Apparently Ben Gurion wrote a book before the formation of Israel which advised Zionists to ferment military coups and ethnic strife in neighbouring countries. I should note that my host was educated in the UK and US in the 1960s. The most worrying thing he said, if it is correct, was that Iraq's different ethnic groups cannot work together in a democracy and they need a strong man or a foreign ruler to maintain stability - "I will vote for Bremer at the elections" he said, in spite of opposing the war and being critical of the handling of the occupation.