Down and Out in Umm Qasr

The ranks of unembedded journalists who make this standard day trip under the sponsorship of the military, Kuwaitis, or humanitarian organizations have various names for it: The Milk Run, The Trip to The Science Fair, The Prop-Op (as in, propaganda operations). They look at it as a great way to dip into Iraq and escape their Kuwaiti hotels while searching for reliable interpreters and extra gas cans to plot their journeys to much sexier Baghdad. “As a story, Umm Qasr is so over,” one newspaper reporter recently said, of the place that just two weeks ago was the hottest ticket in Kuwait City. In fact, the story’s being over for these stone-broke southern Iraqis who hug the borderlands of civilization is precisely what worries them.

Last week, two days before the unofficial fall of Baghdad, a group of us roll into Camp Khor, a Kuwaiti outpost near the border that is shared with the British Army. Until recently, it was also a U.N. compound, and the walls are still dotted with “Hello Bangladesh!” tourism posters, left over from the mostly Bangladeshi U.N. employees who hightailed it out of here before the shooting began. “They couldn’t run fast enough,” one British soldier says, “though they’ll probably try to come back now that it’s bloody well safe.” Inside the compound, a British Army spokesman outlines the dire state of humanitarian affairs in the place where we’re headed.

The rampant looting now underway in Iraq (which my optimistic colleague P.J. O’Rourke assures me “will eventually evolve into shopping”) is its own sort of entertainment. There’s something deeply, seriously satisfying about watching the Iraqi hoi polloi walk off with Tariq Aziz’s good china and DVD collection. But otherwise, what has made excellent television has wreaked havoc on medical care in Iraq, where hospitals have been looted. In Baghdad, scores of people have been hospitalized with gunshot wounds sustained in looting fracases, and health care facilities have been relieved of everything from wheeled beds to ambulances.

After the briefing, a Kuwaiti Ministry of Information official encourages me to go up and meet their minister of health, under whose auspices we are traveling for the purpose of dropping off medical supplies in Umm Qasr. He tells me that I’d better do it quickly, since the minister will have to peel off before crossing the border. “He has to be invited by the Iraqi government,” he says, for reasons of sovereignty. “They don’t have a government,” I reply. “They will soon,” the official says with a grudge-settling smile.

At the last stop before Kuwait turns into Iraq, the checkpoint is dotted with warning signs such as “Accident blackspot” and “Warning, You Are Approaching the Border of Iraq.” The most curious one is mounted to a steel girder near a sand berm, and says “Please do not feed the kids.” On an Umm Qasr trip the day before this one, a colleague and I asked an Australian public affairs officer why we were forbidden from feeding children. “Maybe they bite,” he said. As our bus crossed over, and we saw lean and leathery kids running alongside us, we ignored the sign. I reached into my swag bag for some gum, and handed three sticks to a colleague to shower on young supplicants outside his window. He did so, and a kid who looked to be six years old picked the sticks off the ground. An older boy ran over to him, and cracked him in the skull, taking the gum. “I guess that’s why we’re not supposed to feed them,” my colleague deduced.

Today as we drive through, it’s the same crowd, only there are lots more of them. It’s as if the circus is in town, and it’s us–which is perhaps not surprising in a city that features nothing but run-down shacks and trash-strewn lots. The only noticeable signs of urban planning are the scores of Saddam murals, freshly defaced. There are so many of them that soldiers frequently use them to give directions: Take a right by the Saddam with the three blood-red X’s on his face, then a left by the Saddam with the bullet hole in his forehead.

On the way in, I see a child swinging on a rope lashed over a tree branch. At first glance, I take it for a tire swing, but when I look down at what’s supporting his foot, I realize it is a perfectly knotted hangman’s noose. Our buses pull into a compound whose walls manage to keep nobody outside its gates, and I ask an Arabic-speaking journalist to translate the sign. “Hospital General,” he says with a chuckle–new evidence that this country is ass-backwards. Before we can even de-board, hungry and thirsty Umm Qasr citizens are on us. Several journos take their uneaten boxed lunches of lamb and beef samboussek–or meat pies–and toss them out the window as if feeding rhinos on safari. When several of the boxes drop to the ground, their lids come open, and the doughy little meat pucks skitter across the ground. Though authorities have told us that the food supply here is plentiful, people pick up the pies and bite into them without so much as dusting them off.

In the dirt courtyard, it looks like the entire town has turned out. A Kuwaiti health official stands there magisterially, while a large Iraqi woman in a black abbiyah with dirty handprints all over it accosts him. She showers him in a spit-rain of angry vowels and consonants. “Water! Water! Water!” she screams in her native tongue. He stands there like a human heavy bag, letting her punch out her frustrations, even though it’s not his fault. “Our children need water. We can’t wash! We can’t drink!” she screams. After Umm Qasr’s water supply was knocked out by the war, the Kuwaitis and the Brits arranged to turn on a pipeline, from which locals should theoretically be able to get water. But in practice, one Iraqi after another tells me, Iraqi water tanker drivers, who are paid by coalition forces to transport the water they get for free, try to charge their desperate countrymen money they don’t have in order to drink it.

This particular woman, I learn, has a family of 16 that has had almost no water in three days. She is far past hysterical, so I push my way through the crowd and hand her the only bottle I have, a drunk-down Evian with no more than four ounces left. She recoils as if I had demanded her purse, and refuses to accept it. She will not partake of it, I’m told, until the rest of her family can drink as well.

Children run all over the hospital courtyard, many of them looking like they’ve been outfitted by a Salvation Army drop of 101 Dalmatians and I Love NY T-shirts. One of them tugs on my sleeve, “Meester, what joor name?” he asks. I take him for an English speaker, but it’s the only useful phrase he knows. I give him the four-ounce bottle–points for trying–which he downs greedily.

Other children quickly flock to me, and adults do as well. I reach into my swag bag and dispense cigarettes and plastic dinosaur toys. The crush is immediate and overwhelming. In the confusion, adults reach for toys, and kids for cigarettes. A Kuwaiti official rides to my rescue, snatching the Ziploc from which I’m dispensing party favors. At first, I think he’ll find a way to distribute them in a more orderly fashion. But instead, he cavalierly tosses them over his shoulder like a bride tossing a bouquet. Shoving matches ensue, with the desperate ugliness of people fighting to take possession of the smallest spoils, as if their lives depended on extracting the fresh, minty taste of Wrigley’s gum. When the Kuwaiti throws the empty bag in the air, they fight to grab that, too.

Eventually I make my way into the hospital, which, with its sickly green aberrant paint job, looks like a project of the local school for the blind. The flies of Iraq need a place to call home, and they have apparently found it at Hospital General. The pharmacy is a joke, according to the pharmacist, who says since fighting broke out in the north, he is down to about four different kinds of medicine. Next, I make my way to what passes for an emergency room, which would be much more convincing if there were any doctors or nurses to be found.

On a bed, a shriveled old man lies morosely, with his skin taut around his bird-cage torso. I’m not sure what’s wrong with him, but he’s bleeding onto the floor. On another gurney sits a younger, healthier looking man. Or so I think. I see a bloody bandage around his leg, and ask him, through a translator, what’s wrong. I’m told he was injured during the British shelling of Basra, and when he hoists himself off the bed, and stands up, it becomes clear that his leg is the least of his problems. He lifts up his shirt, and, though I don’t have my Gray’s Anatomy handy, it becomes evident that I am viewing his small intestine, which is hanging out of his torso. It is now taped to the side of his ribs in a plastic baggie. He’s quite a trouper, it turns out, since a friend tells me he’s been like this for six days. His friend asks if there’s any way I can help him, since the three doctors at this facility, who’ve been seeing about 300 patients a day, haven’t gotten around to it.

Fortunately, I can honestly say help is on the way. A convoy of Brits and Americans and Kuwaitis, along with the Red Crescent, shortly pull up to the hospital with supply trucks and ambulances. The citizens of Umm Qasr flock around the trailer as if it were handing out free money. Men with dollies unload medical supplies, and the citizens–even the children–cheer each and every wheelchair and anonymous box. It is a joyful scene, but even those often have sad endings around here. The woman who earlier was screaming about water is back–being carried feet-first through the hospital door, collapsed from frustration or dehydration or both.

Back inside Hospital General, I interview Iraqis, relying on the translating skills of Mohammad Ben-Naji of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information. A hospital employee who’s pregnant with twins, but who hasn’t had a check-up in nearly two months, seems uninterested in discussing the fall of Saddam. “We’re far away from Saddam Hussein,” she says. “The situation before the war was much better. Because it is three weeks now, and nothing came to us.” Mohammad says that all she cares about is security and normalcy, though he adds, as an afterthought, that three of her cousins were killed by Saddam’s henchmen.

Another man in a Levis 501 jeans shirt tells me that a friend of his was killed by Baath party types the other day in nearby Safwan, after talking trash about Saddam to a television crew on a media run that I happened to be on. I asked how it was done. He sliced his hand across his throat. But he tells the story with the same matter-of-factness one would have in recounting losing the car keys. I ask a group of Iraqis, now assembled around me, if they’re happy the Americans have come. Nearly all of them are, but one pipes up that he wants us to liberate their country, then leave. “We are 22 million Iraqis,” he says. “We can build our country by ourselves.” After a look around, I wouldn’t want the job. But the Levis wearer wants us to stay. “There are no companies left to build our country,” he says.

Outside again, I am swarmed by a teeming mass of desperate, needy flesh. Amidst it, I spot Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. I make my way over to him, and we commiserate about the difficulty of talking geopolitics to the locals when all they want is a glass of water. “I was going to ask them what they thought of the neocons, but . . . ,” he says. Well before politics can become local, it is biological, about shelter and water, food and drink. Trying to conduct focus groups on politics with the residents of Umm Qasr at this point is like discussing box scores with a Labrador retriever. They are not there right now, nor should they be.

But many of them lift their voices to express affection and resentment, disappointment and gratitude, toward the Americans and the Brits. And they do so without worrying about losing their life for holding the opinions they hold. Even the more cynical among them seem to regard this as a marked improvement over the old policy. One twentysomething man, who looks stronger and more authoritative than the rest of the people in his crew, motions to me to come with him. He throws his arm around my shoulder, and says, “Come.” He doesn’t speak any other English, except to say, “America, good.” He jabbers some Arabic, then again says, “America, good.” He offers it strong as a thunder clap, and soft as a prayer. Over and over again: “America, good.” At first, I want to say, “You don’t have to sell me.” But then I get suspicious and think I’m being set up and led off to the Fedayeen treehouse where I will be hung from the ceiling with jumper cables attached to my privates while being force-fed audio tapes of Baghdad Bob press conferences. But he stops, and while saying “America, good,” he hands me his mesbaha, or Muslim prayer beads, a gesture of friendship. I motion that I don’t have anything to give him, but he holds his hands up to say don’t worry. It’s his turn to give.

An hour later, I have left the squalor of Umm Qasr and am standing in a McDonald’s in Kuwait City. It is the shiniest, gleamingest McDonald’s I have ever seen, and I’ve never been gladder to see one. I take it all in: the McSalad Shaker receptacles, and the Jungle Book collector toys. There’s the McArabia flatbread chicken sandwiches, and the lifesize red-headed Ronald sitting on a bench, beckoning patrons to join him. I revel in the luxury of frivolity, the McDonald’s activities board for kids. Monday is magic balloon day, and Thursday it’s time for McGames.

I dig into my bag, searching for a pen to take note of the incongruity of the place I just was, and the place I am now. But I grab my new friend’s prayer beads by mistake. His words return to me, “America, good.” While many would say we’ve already proven him right, I say a prayer we may continue to do so. In Umm Qasr, as in much of Iraq, there are a lot of unhappy people who could really use a Happy Meal.

Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.