View from Baghdad: Lara Marlowe visits a Baghdad family, who despite being steeped in American culture, are hostile to the US-led invasion.
You might have thought Samira and Mouna were likely candidates to support the US-British invasion of Iraq. Widowed sisters in their 70s, they inhabit a tasteful villa on the banks of the Tigris, filled with antiques, family portraits and English books. But steeped as they are in British and American culture, they, like older generations of Iraqis, see this war as a recurrence of colonial history.
For the 10 years I've known them, talkative Samira and the more reserved Mouna have reminisced about their school days with American Presbyterian missionaries, and further studies at the American University of Beirut. Several of their children married Britons or Americans, and they have grandchildren who carry British and US passports.
A small portrait of President Saddam Hussein has always sat in the entry of Samira and Mouna's house, but I assumed it was a talisman to ward off neighbours' suspicion, rather than a sign of real affection. Their old Baghdadi family produced diplomats and high-ranking civil servants under the 1921-1958 pro-British monarchy that preceded the Baathist revolution. Over the years, each time I tried to elicit an opinion on the present regime, the conversation veered sharply to literature and painting.
So I was surprised to find these two grey-haired ladies spewing epithets against Mr Bush and Mr Blair - especially the latter. "Bush is an idiot, a religious fanatic who understands nothing about the region," Samira says.
"But we're far more angry with the British, because they know us." Dozens of their neighbours' houses have been damaged by blast and shock waves from the incessant bombing of nearby intelligence and military targets. Samira and Mouna have saved most of their windows by lining them with transparent plastic adhesive.
Their living room is a shambles, with lamps, vases and other breakable objects spread out and covered with cushions. They maintain their composure despite the noise and danger, but they're upset that the bombing of the telephone exchange has cut them off from children and grandchildren in Europe.
Their fury with Washington and London is not so much about the bombing per se as it is about the affront to Iraqi dignity. "How dare they tell us how we should be governed," says Mouna.
If British and US forces reach Baghdad, the sisters admit the troops might yet receive the rapturous greeting their politicians promised. "There are always ignorant riff-raff who'll cheer anyone," Samira sniffs. "In Arabic we say: 'When you hear the drum, your legs take over'." The family cherishes a hand-written note by Gertrude Bell, the Arabic-speaking British intelligence agent and amateur archaeologist who so influenced British policy in Iraq, from the first British invasion of the Fao Peninsula in 1914 until her death in 1926.
"An old joke said that when Gertrude Bell arrived in heaven, she took out her notebook and asked God which tribe he was from," Samira recalls. "She really understood Iraqi people." In the 1950s, the sisters frequented the British Club in Baghdad with their husbands.
"In India, they didn't let Indians join the British Club," Samira says. "In Baghdad, it was different: they knew they had to respect us." After all, she reminds me, Iraq was one of the first Arab states to achieve independence, in 1932. While we drink tea and consume Samira's homemade fruitcake, a middle-aged man wearing a khaki green jumper, yellow camouflage trousers and a revolver in a holster walks in. At first I mistake him for a commando officer, or a local militia leader checking up on the foreign visitor. But he is Mouna's son Qassem, a British-trained engineer with an English wife, who has abandoned his job on Baghdad City Council to perform militia duty 18 hours daily.
"The US is like a giant who has pulled the pin on a hand grenade," Qassem says.
"As long as the giant holds the grenade firmly in his hand, he is okay. But as soon has he loosens his grip, it will explode and kill him." How does he see the future of Iraq? I ask, trying to broach the fate of the regime gently. Qassem seems resigned to an eventual US victory.
"This country has been depleted by 20 years of war," he says. "We're the size of one US state; with the weapons they have, we cannot win militarily. But we can make them bleed. We can make occupation hell on earth for them." One of Qassem's daughters, a science teacher who has not worked since schools closed with the start of the war, spends her days writing poetry. Qassem reads three virulently anti-US, anti-British and anti-UN poems out loud.
Shakespeare they're not, but it's interesting that a half-English, affluent young Iraqi woman wrote them: "I am Bush and this is Blair/At the map of Iraq we stare/for the city is burning and we don't care/Aren't we a dreadful pair?"
In A Message to Mr Kofi Annan, the young woman derides the UN Secretary General: "Dear Mr Annan/You want to stay there/And sit on that disgraceful chair/How can you say that you deeply care?/For the morals of the UN you tear/And spread hatred and despair/Just to please Bush and Blair."
Mr Annan spoke of his sadness on the day the war started, and in Europe one had the impression he did what he could to prevent it. But in Baghdad, feeling against the UN runs almost as high as anger towards the US and Britain.
A unanimous Security Council resolution to restart the Oil for Food Programme was rejected by the regime. "The people of Iraq are not hungry or starving," the Vice President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, insisted. "They are not waiting for the Security Council to hand them food paid for with Iraqi money." Mr Ramadan called the purchase of food with frozen Iraqi funds "embezzlement". If the council were a legitimate body, he added, it would condemn the deaths of more than 70 Iraqi civilians in two marketplaces last week.
By chance, I passed the British first World War cemetery in Waziriya on my way back to the Palestine Hotel. Thousands of sand-coloured headstones stretch over a city block there, under a sky billowing with black oil smoke, rumbling with the roar of jet fighters. It's amazing how in a city under bombardment, almost without telephone lines, the colonial theme has caught on. "This is the 12th day of the colonial British-American war against our country," Naji al-Sabri, the Foreign Minister, said yesterday. "We shall turn our desert into a big graveyard for American and British soldiers," he threatened. Iraqis remember that by London's official count, 98,000 British soldiers died in the 1916 Battle of Kut alone.
"British soldiers already have their graveyards in Iraq . . .," Mr al-Sabri continued.
"Now they will have other graveyards, where they will be joined by their American friends."