BASRA, Iraq, April 16 -- The bookkeepers of the police state were meticulous. Payoffs to tribal leaders, quotas for cheering crowds on Saddam Hussein's birthday, long lists of "bonuses" paid to party members on every state occasion, reports on suspicious families and pro-Iranian Shiite "traitors" in their midst -- at the Mother of All Battles Branch of Iraq's ruling Baath Party, they wrote it all down. Here at the chief party headquarters for Iraq's second-largest city, near the party villas and the date palm groves and the decayed elegance of the Shatt al Arab waterway, officials kept a hand in nearly every aspect of daily life. They tracked thousands of army deserters and demanded still more recruits, they kept copious files on every comrade in their ranks, and they passed on intelligence warnings about spies and saboteurs. No detail was too small to escape the party's attention -- from making sure women turned up at a military parade to determining the location of machine guns for defense of local party buildings. Even the rotten condition of the cheese offered to student recruits in a paramilitary group came under the party's purview.
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