STIRRINGS A week that began with a flower show ended in bombings.
By ROD NORDLAND
Published: April 25, 2009
BAGHDAD — It has often been said, on those rare occasions when the brutal climate eased up a bit, that a beautiful day is wasted on Iraq.
After a wartime winter made colder than it really was by the scarcity of central heating, there would be the false spring of a desert land. Marred by sandstorms, it never seemed more than about three days long. Abruptly the furnace door would swing open and the triple-digit summer would roar out.
Then when that rare fine day did happen, there was little to see but landscapes marred by T-walls, those huge concrete blast barriers shaped like upside-down T’s. There was a prevailing attitude of can’t-be-bothered, as seen in the buildings that went unpainted, crisscrossed by tangled wires from generators and satellite dishes, or the bomb debris just left lying. Outside it smelled always of generator diesel and often of dead dogs, which rotted by the roadside untouched for fear they hid an I.E.D. Even when there was a splotch of green it was covered with thick dust. Iraq seemed a place painted in desolation, and decorated with despair.
This year it has been noticeably different. Partly it’s because superb spring weather has endured for an amazing five weeks, with scarcely a sandstorm; sunny and 60 degrees to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s been something more though. For the first time in years, on any sort of serious scale, Iraqis have been taking a visible pride in their surroundings. Returning after an absence of some six months makes this pride now seem the most striking thing about the place. The improving security, the hundreds of checkpoints in Baghdad, the latent but diminishing risk of terrorist attack — all that was already the case last year.
Driving in on the Airport Highway once was a trembling quarter-hour on a road that defied taming. Now it’s getting landscaping. Neighborhoods like Jihad alongside it once treated the highway like a carnival duck shoot. Now they’re pacified behind anti-sniper walls painted in bold diagonal stripes: yellow, orange, white, pale blue, purple, pink and green.
No one will argue that these initiatives are always in the best of taste, but anything is an improvement on concrete-colored T-walls with reinforcement bars sticking out of them. For years there have been some efforts here and there to paint the blast walls as they became more permanent features of the cityscape. Now T-wall paint jobs are the norm in some areas, often with elaborate murals.
The blast-proofing in front of the Defense Ministry has a long mural of Humvees and helicopters, little Iraqi Air Force cargo planes, patrol boats and obsolete Russian tanks. There’s a certain wistfulness to it, since the Iraqi military so far has precious little or nothing in the way of heavy weapons, modern tanks, fighter aircraft or combat choppers.
In many places, T-wall murals depict sculptures and monuments from Mesopotamia’s ancient civilizations, Babylon, Sumer, Assyria. At the government’s Council of Ministers compound, the scenes range from Sumerian through Greco-Roman to abstract Arabic. That compound used to be a shabby place, but now its buildings and walkways are trimmed by meticulously cared-for flower beds, with laurel hedges in geometric shapes, and so many roses that the breeze is fragrantly cloying.
All over, fountains have started to spout again after years of disuse, including the magnificent one in front of Al Rashid Hotel. Made by the famous Iraqi sculptor Khalid Rahal, it depicts a parched man summoning a djinn from a jug, with water spouting in wanton abundance from many clay pots.
At Zawra Park, once best known for its sorry zoo and its suicide bomb craters, the first Baghdad Flower Show was underway last week, until it ended Wednesday. There was an impressive variety of offerings, including some elaborate designs mimicking ziggurats and Al Shaheed monument in Baghdad, two giant blue half-shells.
No doubt there are many better flower shows, but this one stunned with its incongruity. Flowers were almost as rare as beautiful days before, and as wasted on Iraq.
This is not at all to say that the ugliness of a war zone isn’t still present. It’s pretty hard to make towering blast walls into a thing of beauty, no matter how much paint is deployed. Mad Max fortifications are still often the rule. Hescos — antiblast protection consisting of big wire containers of rubble — defy all attempts at decoration. They’re just huge piles of dirt. There are still many areas of the city where no one seems to have figured out whose job it is to pick up the trash.
One such area is the Green Zone. There, a series of murals of Iraqi landscapes, each stretching over three to six sections of blast wall, have been moved to protect an Iraqi Army camp, with no effort to keep them in the right order. The result is a crane-size jigsaw puzzle.
Yet in such fine spring weather it has been easy to overlook all that. Even the customary pessimism that afflicts recidivist visitors has been hard to sustain against an onslaught of good news.
In an interview on Wednesday, Maj. Gen. David Perkins, the American military’s top spokesman in Iraq, ventured an optimistic analysis of the decline in what the military labels high-profile attacks. “They’re much less sophisticated,” he said. “We’re seeing that complexity is much less. Obviously very devastating to people who are wounded and killed, but we’re not seeing the 50 and 60 dead we used to see.”
Over the next two days, Thursday and Friday, five suicide bombers killed at least 140 people in attacks both complex and sophisticated. They targeted Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad and Iranian tourists in Diyala and refugee women and children in line to receive food donations. The killer at the food line was a woman who reportedly slipped past security by holding a young child’s hand.
Recalling a very different false spring in Paris in “A Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway wrote this: “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”
Here in Baghdad it is the summer heat, rather than the rain, but just as surely it vexes spring and takes “a season out of your life.” On Thursday for the first time the thermometer soared toward 100 degrees. Then on Friday a sandstorm blew in that will sully all attempts at beauty and make the fountains run with mud.
