A Book Found in Baghdad
Much Outdated Tips for Tourists

        In an old Baghdad gift shop, a glossy orange and blue book caught my eye. It was entitled (in English) ‘Iraq: A Tourist Guide’. I picked it up and cracked open the cover, to see when it was printed. From the condition, it had clearly never been bought, and the shopkeeper said that it had been sitting on the shelf for years. The title page listed the publisher as ‘State Organization for Tourism, General Establishment for Travel and Tourism Services’ with a Baghdad address, and at the bottom, the year 1982.
        Twenty five years ago.

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        It’s always fascinating for me to talk to people who traveled as tourists to, for instance, Afghanistan in the 1970s. Kabul has been a scene of destruction for so long, that it’s hard to picture it as anything else.
        There is a tendency to think of particular countries as inherent war zones, but areas go in and out of conflict, and things change over time. Political movements, resources, and foreign intervention(not to mention the domestic response to it) seem to be the common threads. It can be cyclical, but when events are happening, they seem to belong to a completely new category. A decade or two later, conflicts are grouped with others. A few years ago in Baghdad, I met a photojournalist, about 10 years older than I. He told me “Now, the Middle East is the big place to go, but when I was your age, we were all going to Central America for this stuff.”

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        Just after the book’s title page, there is a large photo of “Field Marshall Saddam Hussein, Hero of Natural Liberation”. This is followed by introductory chapters, touting how “progressive” the government is, and how all Iraq’s minority groups ”enjoy full national and cultural rights”. Then it gets to the actual tourism.
        Most of the attractions are archeological in nature, as would be expected. Prominent among them are The Iraq Museum (now looted), Babylon (now being used as a base by US soldiers, and considered by archeologists to be largely destroyed by them), and many other ancient sites such as Nineveh, Hatra, Ur, Baquba, Karbala, and Najef (all centers of great violence). There is a whole chapter on the vast beautiful marshes of Basra. This is where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet, and they are the marshes which Saddam had drained after the first Gulf War, to punish Shia Arabs who lived there.

Scenes from Iraqi 'Touristic Villages' from the early eighties.

        In the Baghdad section, the reader is asked, “You want a souvenir of your visit to Iraq? Baghdad’s souqs and bazaars have a vast variety of lovely oriental objects… Primitive, austere, elaborate, highly ornate – take your pick.” The numerous Mosques and shrines which color Baghdad’s skyline are mentioned, too. Both bazaars and places of religion have become popular locations for car bombings.
        The traditional experience of eating a whole fish, prepared over a fire in a specific Iraqi way was featured. I decided to try it. Instead of dining at an open air restaurant overlooking the Tigris, as was recommended in the book, my order was decidedly ‘to go’, and picked up with much haste and secrecy.
        ‘Iraq, a Tourist Guide’ is strange to read, largely because the names of so many places are now familiar, but for terrible things. This is an actual quote from the chapter about Anbar Province. “Dear visitor, having gone through Falluja, make sure you pay a visit to Habbaniya Lake and Tourist Village… Then off to Haditha.” There are also pictures of foreigners at five star hotels, basking in front of pools or having their photos taken on camels.

        The level of stability that allows for a tourist trade is so distant, that it seems impossible that the book could’ve been written about the same country. Perhaps the fact that a friend of mine just visited Vietnam shows a little hope that this may be part of some sort of historical cycle. In Vietnam, though, landmines and dioxin (from Agent Orange) remain 30 years later, as cluster bombs and depleted uranium promise to lurk in Iraq for some time to come.
        Today, if a hotel is still open in Baghdad, it is surrounded by towering concrete barriers and billowing rolls of razor wire to keep suicide bombers at a distance. Some of the pools are even still filled with water, despite what’s going on outside the tons of concrete and miles of wire. If a hotel has guests, they’re still often foreigners. I’m in a small one now, and NBC News has offices in a larger one nearby. A private security firm has rented out the entire building that I stayed in last year.

Pictures of hotels at a time when the pools all had water.

        Contractors seem to be the new breed of Western tourists. At Baghdad International Airport, you do not see the usual advertisements for hotels, resorts, and transportation, as are on the walls of other airports. There is, however, an ad for a firm that offers to “make your skills in the security field pay off”. Even if it’s paying off for some, the tourists with guns don’t seem to be making the city any safer, and have been the cause of numerous Iraqi civilian deaths.
        In the book’s section on fine hotels to stay at, the very first on the list is the Al-Mansour. Just today, a suicide bomber walked into the busy lobby and blew himself up.