Thanks, Saddam, for the Memories

JERUSALEM —  So, the time has come to play tug-of-war with Saddam again. How curiously familiar, this deadly game. And what sweet memories it evokes of the Gulf War gone by.

There was our sealed room in which we huddled during his attacks, packed in like sardines. There were those bleach-soaked rags under the door to ward off gas infiltration that my husband prepared precisely according to army specifications, and the cute little army-issue doctor’s kit with its disposable needles, in case we needed antidotes. There were the long, pitiful strips of masking tape along the windows, diligently installed, to seal out the poisoned air. And the gas masks with their funny smell that reminded me unfailingly, each and every time I donned mine, of the rubber goggles worn in the swimming pools of my Connecticut childhood. Our children in their gas masks, looking like long-nosed wolfhounds, and the times I’d catch sight of the fear in their eyes through the plastic lenses.

Yes, the sealed rooms were a boon to family togetherness if ever there was one. The sirens wailing outside in the night, the way they’d peak to a crescendo, drop, then spiral up again. The radio with its soft rock, to relax the population with its single listening ear, as the bombs made their way toward us, and the mellow-voiced army spokesman telling us, after each attack, where in Israel this Scud had fallen.

Could it be, indeed, that Saddam is planning to treat us to another episode? If he only knew how his missiles bound Israel’s disparate peoples together and healed for a time our society’s wound, he wouldn’t dream of doing it again.

There are differences, of course, this time around. First and foremost, now it’s a question of anthrax, not gas. Masking tape won’t help. Second, the prelude to this war, if indeed it occurs, has been muted by another diversion far away. Just when the U.N. was getting on Saddam’s case about what he was hiding, our attention was riveted elsewhere, to what Clinton was supposedly hiding. I got so busy fearing the loss of a good president that I found it hard to concentrate on biological warfare. Only now, as that spectacle is abating, can we in the Promised Land admit to the creeping sense of danger that has come upon us.

Does Saddam’s superb instinct for self-preservation not extend to the survival of his country? Are we really at risk of biological warfare, and if so, shouldn’t we have already been inoculated for anthrax, as the American soldiers are rumored to have been?

On a popular radio talk show, the host said that Israeli Arabs are more scared than the Israelis. Why is that? “I don’t know,” he replied.”Nobody knows anything.”

There seems to be a mechanism in the human spirit that self-activates when things get really scary: We start laughing. My British neighbor remarked that he has too many other things to worry about than to fret about dying. A friend told me that the army has installed its Patriot missiles on their launching pads, while maintaining that this is just “routine procedure” and has nothing to do with Iraq. “That’s when I got scared,” she told me, “when the Army said we shouldn’t worry.”

In the local market, the woman ahead of me on the checkout line endeavored in her own manner to be reassuring. “Look, the good news is that Saddam is saying he’s not going to attack Israel.” She looked me wryly in the eye. “He may have lied to his son-in-law, [the one he tricked into returning home to be executed] but to us? The Jews?” She smiled pleasantly. “Besides, even if we all end up dead, [Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright says America will stand by us. Not to worry!”