Dance While You Can

By CARL BERNSTEIN BAGHDAD

The desert winds called hamis are blowing now, and with them Baghdad seems enveloped in a surreal haze: diplomats drop out of the sky to plead with Saddam Hussein for a solution before it is too late; hostages lounge by the pool and pin their hopes on each new arrival; ministers hint of divisions within the government; reporters interview the most recent terrorists to take up residence here; the Muzak in the state-owned hotel plays Hava Nagila.

Increasingly there is talk that Saddam may not survive the winter, that before an American-led military offensive occurs, his own generals may move against him. Or (a more favored scenario) that someone in the inner circle will assassinate him. The talk -- some of it wishful thinking, perhaps -- comes from well-connected Iraqis, Russians and Western intelligence specialists. They draw parallels with Romania, though the idea of an organized mass opposition is improbable. There are reports of protests and desertions in the army.

It is impossible not to feel the change in atmosphere. Intrigue, speculation and confusion abound. For more than an hour last week, the national soccer team refused to leave its field so the ragtag People's Army could parade before foreign television cameras. In private, high-ranking government officials acknowledge that there is widespread dismay and despair among Iraqis over the consequences of the nation's invasion of Kuwait. Influential citizens claim knowledge that the attack was opposed by 18 colonels and generals, as well as by several senior ministers.

Aside from Saddam's principal aides and Baath Party regulars, the only Iraqis who publicly pretend enthusiasm for the coming struggle are schoolchildren. Several thousand parade past the U.S. embassy, shouting, "Down, down Bush!" Each day in their classrooms they salute their leader, are taught the lessons of the reunification of Kuwait and are drilled in the ugly designs of the Americans and Zionists.

Since the invasion, more than 1 million foreign workers have left the country, almost all of them maintenance and service employees. Street cleaning seems to have ceased; boilers and generators are out of order for days. The combined effect of economic sanctions, emigrant flight and international isolation is not "strangling" the country; rather, those actions are demoralizing and destabilizing Iraq, and rendering the place increasingly dysfunctional. In the hotel elevator, a prosperous businessman, fortyish and due to report for army duty in the morning, vows he will flee. "I have a brother-in-law in Chicago," he confides.

Caught in the midst of this psychological battering are 17,000 "guests." These include the 700 Americans, Britons, French, Germans and Japanese tethered to military and strategic sites; 2,000 foreign nationals still hiding in Kuwait; 5,000 Western and Japanese men and 200 women (most of them Irish nurses) who cannot leave because they have contracts with the Ministry of Trade, Consumer Goods and Shopping Centers (yes, thats the title); and 5,000 Russians and 4,000 Yugoslavs, most of them workers in the oil fields and construction projects.

According to diplomats, most hostages at strategic sites are rotated among locations every week to 10 days, apparently to keep them from becoming too familiar with their surroundings and to prevent escape. They are permitted to write and receive letters. "We believe they are being treated well in the vast majority of cases," says a Western official.

Most of the other hostages (except about 100 Americans and Britons holed up in diplomatic residences) live in a strange limbo: relatively free to travel around the country, their mail and movements and phone calls monitored, riding the crest of each rumor and BBC or VOA report that portends hope, spending worthless Iraqi currency on rugs and jewelry in the suq.

Baghdad's citizens seem to have taken fondly to their hostages, particularly four young Dutchmen who cruise around town, top down, in the city's only red Mercedes convertible. They are up from Kuwait, where three of them worked in the oil fields and the fourth was in charge of digging a lagoon for the Emir's yacht. Boredom is the biggest problem. "Mostly we spend our time sitting at the pool plotting useless strategies," says an Irish doctor who arrived here Aug. 1 for what he thought would be two weeks of work and a tour of Islamic culture.

At night the hostages jam the city's open-air fish restaurants on the banks of the Tigris. Except for hotel dining rooms, almost all the city's restaurants are closed. Mangy cats beg for morsels of the fish -- called masgouf -- that are caught in the river, transferred to tanks, clubbed over the head and then roasted over a wood fire.

Afterward, Italian and Spanish diplomats socialize with the hostages for what they call Salsas si Puedas, which means very roughly "Dance If You Can While the Ship Goes Down." Meanwhile the Dutchmen organize a soccer game with a television crew just back from a press conference held by an exiled Saudi prince who enjoys closer ties to Beverly Hills than to Riyadh. He has a peace plan.

It is possible sometimes to imagine that this place is a set for a Peter Sellers movie. And then reality intrudes. A mother, perhaps 50 years old, clutches a letter from President Saddam Hussein. She lost seven sons in the war with Iran, and wrote the President this month to beg that her last male child not be taken from her and conscripted. The President has granted her wish, and she is grateful.