Arabs Shocked, Relieved at Baghdad's Fall

At a Tea Shop in Cairo, Disbelief at War Reports
At a Tea Shop in Cairo, Disbelief at War Reports
By SUSAN SACHS
CAIRO, April 12 ?- They just do not believe it.

Those Iraqis who stamped and spit on the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein? Those were Kurds maybe, but not Arabs, insisted the men of Nasr Street, sipping sweet tea on the sidewalk on a sunny afternoon.

"I'm sure the Iraqi people did not do that themselves," said Hamdi Mahmoud, an accountant relaxing in a chocolate-colored robe on his day off. "Millions loved Saddam."

American marines welcomed in central Baghdad? Another clever fabrication, his friends agreed. "The media must be hiding something," said Hanafi Abu Saleh, a television repairman. "If Iraqis are so happy, why are they still fighting?"

It was Friday afternoon in the Imbaba section of central Cairo, and the men were in their usual chairs at the Saafan tea shop.

The butcher sliced meat from a haunch of beef hanging in his doorway. Clothes flapped in the breeze on the balconies like multicolored flags. Cars honked as they passed donkeys pulling carts piled high with fragrant fresh garlic or watermelons.

Far away in Washington, President Bush was proclaiming the liberation of Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling Arabs that the televised images from Baghdad were proof that "America is a friend to the Arab people."

The men at the cafe were having none of it. The images they remembered from satellite television and Egyptian stations during the war left an entirely different impression.

"After the Egyptian people have seen this, all this killing of women and children, they think that Bush is a bloodsucker," said Mr. Mahmoud, a forceful speaker who was convinced that the United States would never be trusted in the region.

"Bush decided to launch this war because of weapons of mass destruction," he said. "Where are they? This war was launched to protect Israel. What about the Arab countries? Aren't we threatened by Israel's mass destruction weapons?"

A few tables away, two men concentrated on a chess game, using worn wooden pieces from a battered cardboard box. Slowly a crowd gathered to hear the conversation.

At the edge of the group stood a young man wearing a T-shirt that declared, "No attack on Iraq."

"He wanted to go and fight in Iraq," said Mr. Saleh, pointing at him. "Tell them."

But the younger man, seized with paralyzing shyness, just nodded.

"All the Egyptian people wanted to go," continued Mr. Saleh, a veteran of the Egyptian Army's war in Yemen in the early 1960's. "I would go, to defend the Arab nation and the Islamic religion."

The talk grew more heated. Why did Mr. Bush do this? they asked. Why did so many Iraqi children die? "Didn't you see the little girl in the hospital with all the blood?" asked Tarek Ali, a construction worker brandishing the tube of his water pipe.

Abruptly, another middle-aged man stalked off. "My blood pressure gets too high when I think of this war," he said as he left. "Anyway, the Americans brought Saddam Hussein to power, and now they are just hiding him to justify staying in Iraq as occupiers."

With his departure, the men turned to the mysteries of the fall of Baghdad, a subject they embraced with relish and humor. They wondered about the Iraqi information minister, who had so delighted them each night on television with his colorful invectives against the Americans.

They speculated on the whereabouts of Mr. Hussein. Maybe the Russians are hiding him, one man volunteered. No, said another, there was a deal with the Americans.

The men, all in their 50's and 60's, rejected the idea that the outcome in Iraq was a humiliation for all Arabs. They had lived through the 1967 war against Israel.

That was a bad time, said Saleh Soleiman, a shopkeeper. "But we had our victory in 1973," he added, referring to Egypt's early rout of the Israelis from the Sinai in the first stages of a war Israel eventually won. Those days are relived constantly here.

The men worried out loud about the looting in Iraq, about the deadening effects of the war on Egypt's important tourism industry, about the possibility of Iraq's spinning apart into warring factions.

Maybe, they suggested hopefully, Iraq might soon hire Egyptian laborers, as it used to do before the gulf war in 1991, when some six million Egyptians worked there.

At one point the talk turned to the United Nations, and Mr. Soleiman began an analysis of the speech in which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the General Assembly that Iraq was hiding banned weapons. "He looked bad, don't you think?" asked Mr. Soleiman, the only one in the group to speak in English. "Weak evidence. Not convincing."

Much of the rage and passion that the men of Imbaba had been feeling about the war over the past three weeks had clearly begun to dissipate. No one cast an eye on the television set in the gloom of the tea shop.

Mr. Ali shrugged off whether the Iraqis were better off without Mr. Hussein. "Don't ask us this question," he said. "The Iraqis have their own feelings. They are living there. And whether they would overthrow him or not, it's too late to discuss it. I'm just sad to see the Iraqis suffering now."

The crowd of onlookers was thinning out. Men returned to their tea and quiet chats.

"America is a big empire, but it's thinking in terms of the imperialism of centuries ago," Mr. Soleiman said. "O.K. now, with this globalization we have economic occupation. But America has returned to the idea of military occupation."

He leaned back. "God makes us to enjoy life, not to kill people. In Egypt we have 7,000 years of civilization. Another country with just 200 years of civilization will not stand for a long time against the whole world."