What are Iraqis to make of this theatre of the macabre?

Robert Fisk
in Baghdad

THE Americans followed a grand Iraqi Baath party tradition by showing their dead enemies on television yesterday. Back in 1963, when Abdul Karim Qassem's corpse was shown on the screen, there was no colour television and the executed prime minister - Baathists and army officers had jointly condemned him to death - appeared in black and white, propped up in a chair but very, very dead.

David Irving comments: YES, I also drew attention in my latest diary to the death of the teenaged grandson. The American press has largely suppressed mention of this.    The Arabic press suggests that this youngster, aged fourteen, died no less heroically than his father and uncle, gun in hand, fending off the 200 men of the 101st Airborne Division.   We just don't know. We can't tell, and we certainly can't believe anything that the American authorities tell us at present. Their credibility is so shattered that they have been panicked into staging a Theater of the Absurd like this, with hideously mangled corpses being waxed and puttied and padded and painted, for the benefit of the pot-bellied media traipsing through the Mortuary tent, although it must be obvious to any logical thinking man that it was a wholly superfluous exercise.    It would be impossible -- IMPOSSIBLE -- for the Americans to produce the corpses of two others and make out they were "Hussein's sons": because that would invite the immediate riposte of the real sons by tape-recording or video, to prove that the American occupiers were lying yet again.    No real sons have "stood up" and presented themselves to the media, even to al-Jazeera, since the gunfight, so it is fair to assume the Americans have indeed got the scalps they claimed.     But even so Dr Joseph Goebbels must be turning in his grave at the solecisms, the faux pas, and the monumental blunders which the clumsy American and British commanders have committed in an Arab country yet again.   In Basra, the British sent raiding parties into private homes, forcing the women and men into each other's presence, conducting body searches on the females, and inflicting other sacrileges on them which were halted only when the locals took the law into their own hands and gunned down six of the British military police who had been issued with these foolish orders.   Now the Americans are doing the same. They need to win the hearts and minds of the Moslem peoples, yet they offend against every canon of Moslem law in their treatment of the dead and defeated enemy.    I remember, years ago, being moved to find in the files of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht a copy of the order that Adolf Hitler had personally issued, decreeing that when a Moslem soldier was killed, he was to be buried within twenty-four hours, with his head pointing towards Mecca, as Moslem law decreed.    "Mecca?" I can hear George Bush say. "What's a movie theater got to do with it?"

Yesterday, it was all in colour. The faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein had been carefully reconstructed by US army morticians, and lay on trolleys, stitched up and with the colour of false life injected into their newly shaved faces, but also very, very dead.

The Iraqis showed off the corpse of Qassem so that the Iraqi people would believe he was dead. The Americans showed off the corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein so that the Iraqi people would believe they were dead. And ghoulish wasn't the word for it.

Apparently realising that the original untouched faces of Uday and Qusay did not convince Iraqis, they were neatly shaved by the Americans, and looked - minus the two bullet wounds just behind Qusai's right ear and the blow to Uday's head - much more like Saddam's children.

Mercifully, the Americans spared us the corpse of Qusay's 14-year-old son Mustafa who was also gunned down by the Americans, a fact which is, needless to say, not making any headlines in the United States, though the American army commander made an oblique reference this week to the "youngest individual" being the last to die.

It had, anyway, been a bad start to the mortuary show. Only an occupation army, perhaps, could have produced the original photographs of Uday and Qusay just in time for the one day - Friday, the Muslim sabbath - when there are no newspapers in Iraq to publish them. But after yesterday's visit to the morgue by the world's press, the corpses were, so to speak, reheated for public consumption.

Today's Iraqi front pages, so the Americans hope, will be covered in these latest macabre photographs. But what are Iraqis supposed to make of all this? The US authorities creepily announced that they had treated the bodies at their mortuary at Baghdad airport with "the same respect" they would accord any corpse, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to parade dead bodies on television.

Is Saddam going to receive the same treatment, one wonders? Or Osama? Or Mullah Omar? Or Karadzic and Mladic?

Then the US authorities announced that they were waiting for "a family member" to come forward to claim the brothers for burial, as if Saddam was going to turn up at the airport in a Mercedes to sign the release papers.

BUT since this is all supposed to be for the Iraqi people, it seemed worthwhile to take a journey around town yesterday morning and combine a shopping trip for washing liquid, soap, fruit, lavatory paper, marmalade, cheese and a bath plug (there are no bath plugs in Baghdad), with a private public opinion poll on those corpses.

The good news - apart from the purchase of the bath plug - was that 60 per cent of the 50 or so Iraqis I spoke to believed that the original photograph was indeed Uday. The bad news was that almost all of the 60 per cent demanded to know why the Americans didn't bother to capture them so they could be put on trial for their monstrous crimes.

The ironmonger who finally provided the bath plug - and, yes, his name really was Uday - was among the most eloquent. "It is him, of course it's him," he said. "But why did the Americans deprive us of a trial? They could easily have surrounded that house with just four people inside and waited till they surrendered. There are many, many Iraqis who have been waiting for real justice, the justice of a democracy not of the military kind. And instead of a trial, they give us a photograph."

There were many complaints that the Americans should have shaved off Qusay's beard to show him as he looked in life, a feat the Americans obligingly carried out before yesterday's television performance. This may be why only about 20 of the 50 Iraqis believed Qusay was dead. In a grocery store, a man angrily asked me why the Americans did not show Mustafa Hussein's body? "Is it because they don't want to show dead children?" he asked.

In the residential district of Mansur, near the site of the bombing in April in which the Americans blew 16 innocent civilians to bits in the vain hope that they would hit Saddam and his sons, it was the same story.

Yes, it was Uday. Perhaps it was Qusay. But did the Americans make any real attempt to capture them? And (of course), why was there no American compensation for the victims of the slaughter in Mansur? One of the few survivors, Abdullah Museiha, has asked for compensation from an Iraqi court. The Americans have offered nothing.

The fruit-seller in Upper Karada Street came out with the inevitable: that the Americans had so many computers, they could digitalise Uday's face on to a real body. Again, yesterday's television show will help to kill that idea.

A photocopyist, ironically very close to the spot where Qassem was executed 40 years ago, asked why the Americans thought that the deaths of Uday and Qusay, which he accepted, would lessen the resistance to American occupation.

Which leads to the really bad news. Every one of the Iraqis I spoke to, without exception, said the guerrillas attacking the Americans were not just Saddam "remnants", but a mukawama shaabia, a popular resistance, and therein, for America, lies the rub.

George Bush may say the contrary, Tony Blair may say the contrary and the host of occupation officials here may desperately want to believe them; but in Baghdad, there is now widespread sympathy, not for the killers and torturers of Saddam's regime who are indeed attacking Americans, but for the much more serious Sunni Islamist movement which is principally responsible for opposing the occupation.

One of the Mansur men put it like this: "You are living on false hopes if you think these pictures will change anything. The war of liberation has started and we are behind it." And if this is true, there are going to be a lot more corpses.