By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 17, 1998; Page A30

BAGHDAD, Iraq – As another confrontation with the United States approached, life this month for most residents of the Iraqi capital has been a gritty, intense, often depressing struggle – a survival campaign that starts anew with the melting pink light of every dawn, and that continues unabated until well after the pumpkin moon has painted its quivering reflection on the Tigris River.

If Baghdad needed a visual metaphor, it would be the fountain whose central statue – of a magical genie – was intended to gush water from its raised arm. It fell into disrepair, and like everything else here was given a makeshift repair that rerouted the flow of water. So instead of issuing a triumphal, life-giving spray, the bronze genie was made to cry a river of tears.

"There is no one to help me," Qassem Mahdi Khodr, 39, said one recent evening in a dim Baghdad cafe. "I feel alone."

Khodr fought for Iraq during the disastrous war against neighboring Iran early in the 1980s and ended up spending 16 years in Iranian jails as a prisoner of war before being repatriated last April. At the time, the Red Cross workers transporting him asked three times if he wanted to seek asylum in some third country. He declined. He wanted to go to his homeland, nowhere else. Over time, though, his patriotism has been redefined by experience.

Khodr was a decorated soldier in the Iranian war but now cannot find a job. He spends his days roaming the markets looking for odds and ends to buy, like used tape recorders, which he can repair and try to sell for a profit. "It takes eight hours to make a thousand dinars [less than $1], and less than a second to spend it," he said.

When he was a young man, in the early 1980s, Iraq's currency was strong – fortified with the nation's vast oil wealth – and Baghdad's night life was electric. Khodr said he loved music, nice clothes and taking girlfriends out in taxis to concerts and nightclubs. While he was away, everything changed.

"I asked about the bars and was told they are all closed," he said. His family, which used to live in a four-room house, is now crammed into a one-room shack that houses nine people. His plans to open a bookstore are indefinitely deferred.

The experience was similar for other POWs, who left a proud, modernizing nation and returned to a place seemingly condemned to hollow promises and frozen dreams.

Qassem Mohammed Chaker, 42, was a physician before he went off to war against Iran. He was moved from camp to camp, and like any skilled healer in such circumstances, he tried to relieve his fellow prisoners' suffering as best he could. Chaker recalled performing operations with screwdrivers that he had sterilized in boiling water, and amputating limbs with local anesthesia.

When he returned, the beautiful city he remembered was filled with mounds of uncollected garbage, choked with broken-down cars and peopled with huge numbers of beggars, mostly children. He expected to resume his career at Iraq's hospitals, the most modern and best-equipped in the Middle East. But he found them run-down and in hopeless disrepair.

A United Nations spokesman said most of the medicine allowed into the country as part of a humanitarian exemption to the U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait remained in huge warehouses on the outskirts of the city, due to a "logistical problem" in getting it delivered to the hospitals.

Khaled Qassab, a cancer surgeon, said he charges the equivalent of $5 for an operation of several hours. "I can charge whatever I want, because people know and respect me," he said, "but I cannot charge something that is illogical. A $100 bill, one little piece of paper, is equivalent to a ton of sweat in Iraq."

He said people adjusted their expectations to fit the new reality. "Eight months after the last crisis, people grumble less," he said. "Because they have no hope."

"Did you see the movie, 'Dead Man Walking?' " asked an archaeologist who did not want to be quoted by name. "Well, that is the Iraqi people. Dead man walking." Of the prospect of military strikes, she said: "Let them hit us. . . . Either we will die, or something will change."

As in Berlin between the wars or similar places where life had to be lived on the edge, Baghdad experienced a revival of satirical theater. Iraqis seeking escape have been flocking to the National Theater, the Scheherazade and other halls to guffaw in the darkness and make light of their collective despair.

"The government has been wise to cast a blind eye to the content of some of these plays," said Daoud Farhan, a prominent journalist and author, who started the trend by writing and presenting a biting play, "A Respectable Gentleman's Party," that has played to packed audiences for three years. The plays, he said, "offer social criticism and stab at the injustices committed every day. Commercially, playwrights are discovering that if you criticize, you will get a crowd."

Farhan's play is a farcical parody of Iraqis' daily battle with the cost of living, the bottlenecks of bureaucracy and the vast chasm between the privileged few and the downtrodden many. "An employee can live off a minister's garbage for three months," goes one representative line.

In one scene, a worker is detained for questioning and told to "just confess" some transgression. The employee is baffled: "What? Just confess, without any hot oil or pulling out a tooth or getting tied to the ceiling fan? Just confess? You must be new here. You are going to lose your job."

Another play, called "Bye Bye, America," mocks Kuwaitis and their enchantment with all things American. A kind of Iraqi "Tootsie" and "Cabaret" rolled into one, it imagines the Kuwaiti minister of animal resources throwing a ribald party in honor of the arrival of a prize American bull with a price tag of $115 million. Audiences love it.

Qazem Rawi was one theatergoer who had bought a whole row of seats at "Bye Bye, America" for himself and his friends. "These plays make fun of everything," he said, "and take us outside ourselves to laugh and forget our own daily pressures."