IRAQ: The Americans yesterday hosted their second conference of Iraqiswhom they hope will take up the burden of government in Baghdad. LaraMarlowe reflects on the challenge ahead
Despite the hackneyed language, Gen Jay Garner touched on something true about the Iraqi psyche at his first press conference in Baghdad last week.
"It is very difficult to take people out of darkness and lead them into light," the US administrator of post- war Iraq said. "Once they've been standing in light long enough, their eyes adjust."
Gen Garner has ensconced himself in Saddam Hussein's former palace but he seems too cut off from the population to realise what a prominent place all things under ground occupy in the minds of Iraqis.
Just as olive trees symbolise their lost land for Palestinians, tunnels and dungeons seem to summarise the Iraqi experience. The 12th Shia Imam went missing in passageways beneath the Iraqi city of Samarra in 874 and Shias still wait for his return.
For the first time in decades, Saddam Hussein's birthday was not celebrated as a national holiday yesterday, but when his former subjects think of him, they imagine the fallen dictator languishing in a subterranean bunker or being chased by US Marines through a labyrinth of Soviet-built tunnels wide enough for a car.
The thousands of disappeared are a sad vestige of Saddam's rule. Their relatives share the belief that the missing were held underground. Yet none of several former offices of Mokhabarat - the secret police - which I visited held basement cells, nor did those inspected by my colleagues.
A few days ago, an Iraqi insisted he heard voices through a door leading into the service corridors of the tunnel under Tahrir Square in Baghdad.
Within hours, hundreds of people flocked to the site and began smashing holes in the tunnel wall, in their frenzy to reach those whom they imagined imprisoned. US soldiers eventually arrived to disperse the crowd, promising to search the tunnel network for missing prisoners; none was found.
Iraq's imprisonment was as much psychological as physical. During Saddam's reign, Iraqis assumed all telephones were tapped; the Mokhabarat allegedly retained an audio-cassette for every household.
US bombers destroyed almost all telephone exchanges and, in the wake of their "liberation", Iraqis are desperate to re-establish contact with four million compatriots in exile. Journalists carrying portable Thuraya-brand satellite phones are mobbed by Iraqis wanting to use them.
Pick-pockets crowd around access points to the Palestine Hotel, where they concentrate on stealing satphones.
Telephone shops have begun sprouting up around the capital - often no more than a man wearing a sandwich-board on the pavement. The price of an overseas call is $10 a minute - a month's salary for many Iraqis - yet the queues are long.
Iraqis are starved for information and they now snap up Arabic-language newspapers like the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat when it arrives in Baghdad a day or two late.
Satellite television dishes, banned under Saddam, are the hottest-selling item in the capital. But their price - between $250 and $350 - is prohibitive for an ordinary Iraqi.
US forces have adopted a cavalier attitude towards these needs, trusting a liberal free-market economy to sort things out. I even heard a GI argue it was good that Iraq was awash in weapons; security was a private individual matter, he said, and guns enabled Iraqis to defend themselves and their families.
Kalashnikovs are sold in the street for $30 and it's not uncommon to see boys of 14 or 15 carrying weapons. The US National Rifle Association, which campaigns for Americans to retain the right to own guns, would no doubt be delighted.
Gen Garner and his Washington mentors seemed to believe it was enough to topple Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi people would be eternally grateful and instinctively gravitate towards the sunlit uplands of democracy.
Gen Garner's explanation for the continuing chaos in Iraq - that Iraqis have been momentarily dazzled by the light - fails to take account of history.
Shia clergy organised resistance to the first British invasion of Iraq, 89 years ago. Despite later British assurances that they only wanted to facilitate Iraq's right to self-determination, the country rebelled repeatedly over four decades, ultimately massacring the British-backed king, his family and prime minister in 1958.
At present, there is no hint of recognition by US officials that the devastated capital, looted archaeological museum and thousands of civilians killed and maimed in the bombardment are the result of US actions.
Gen Garner has promised to kick-start Iraqi government this week. Yesterday, he resumed belated efforts to encourage Iraqi leaders to emerge, hosting only the second gathering of would-be Iraqi politicians since the US-British invasion.
Like Saddam Hussein before them, US forces are attempting to co-opt Shia clergy, asking them to issue fatwas - religious decrees - in support of the US presence.
But as Ahmad Chalabi, the US- backed banker tainted by an embezzlement scandal, is finding, US support may a political kiss of death.
Mr Chalabi's Free Iraqi Forces militia was alone in welcoming the statement by Lt Gen David McKiernan, the commander of US and British land forces in Iraq, that "the coalition alone retains absolute authority within Iraq".
Although US convoys and encampments are nearly omnipresent, "absolute authority" is a fiction. Unless things change dramatically, US forces in Iraq are embarked on a collision course with the hawza, or Shia religious hierarchy, in Najaf.
Washington's warnings to Tehran not to meddle in Iraq beg the question of the Shias loyalty to the hawza. Shias represent 60 per cent of Iraq's 24 million people. After centuries of oppression by the Ottomans, British and every post-colonial regime - especially Saddam Hussein's - the Shias believe it's their turn to rule now.
Shia power frightens the US, the minority Sunnis and even the Shias themselves. Discord between Muslims is a sin known as fitna and the murder in Najaf of Sayyid Majid al-Khoie, the son of a Grand Ayatollah, on Apirl 10th, terrified Iraqi Shias.
A worst-case scenario would be Iraqis uniting to drive out US-British forces, then turning on each other in civil war. There are indications this could happen: at Friday prayers on April 25th, Sunni and Shia clergy alike called for an end to "US occupation".
And although the Shias have now taken the lead, the first anti-American demonstrations in Iraq were led by a returning Sunni member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ahmad Obeid al-Kobaissi.
Last Friday, 100,000 people gathered in north Baghdad to hear Sheikh Mohamed al-Fartussi, the most powerful Shia leader in the capital, who was arrested and held over night last week by US Marines. Sermons harked back to the struggle against the British in the 1920s. One sheikh reminded worshippers that the hawza forbids shops selling dance music CDs or alcohol.
There have already been three suicide bombings against US forces in Iraq. From Mosul in the north to Najaf in the south, Iraqi youths have adopted Palestinian intifada (or uprising) tactic of throwing stones at occupation forces.
US soldiers tried to help the wounded after a munitions dump exploded in Baghdad on April 26th, but they had to retreat because so many Iraqis shot at them.
Yet a more moderate tone in some Islamist movements gives slight cause for optimism. Iraqi Shias are aware of the economic and human rights disaster in Iran and they want to avoid replicating the neighbouring revolution's errors.
Sheikhs close to Muqtada al-Sadr, considered the most radical young leader, told me it was preferable that clerics not hold political office. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest-ranking Shia leader in Iraq, has issued a fatwa to that effect and followers of the Iranian-backed Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr Hakim swear they will respect the result of elections.
Millions of Muslims were horrified by September 11th. Paradoxically, al- Qaeda's atrocities seem to have sobered Iraqi Islamists.
"America is not objective about Islam," Hussein al-Mussawi, a member of the formerly banned Shia Islamic party al-Dawa, told me. "They look on all Islamic parties as Taliban and this is very dangerous. We call on the US to study Islamic parties and differentiate between terrorism and Islam."
Mr al-Mussawi went on to say that "there is still time for the US and its allies to prove whether they are occupiers or liberators." It's an oft-heard refrain in Iraq.
If US forces enter the city of Bakuba, near the Iranian border, a Shia school teacher there told me, "everyone will hide in his house, because we are too tired to fight now. The only thing we ask of the US is to keep order in our city. We will wait for perhaps six months and if they do nothing, then we will fight them."
US forces have received notice; the Iraqi countdown has started. Yet Washington persists in a naive form of international populism, with constant lip service to "the Iraqi people".
Unfortunately, horrible dictatorships create not civic-minded democrats but vengeful mobs.
Gen Garner might reflect on a 1933 memo by King Faisal I, quoted in Andrew and Patrick Cockburn's book, Out of the Ashes - the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein:
"There is still - and I say this with a heart full of sorrow - no Iraqi people, but unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever."