'We didn't raise our sons to fight. But we know it will happen'

The movie channel at Baghdad's most expensive hotel, the Al-Rashid, shows Tom Berenger playing a CIA agent hunting terrorists who have acquired chemical weapons. In the city centre, men watch Sport TV and cheer Manchester United. There is a Britney Spears concert on a giant video screen at the Black and White, one of the more fashionable restaurants.

Yet no one appears to doubt that this country will be at war with the United States and Britain within a few months. And the same people watching the film and the football declare they will fight the Western invaders. Some say this to toe the official line, but many because they mean it.

The Iraqi capital is, at the moment, a strange and surreal place. Normal life continues on the surface, but there is fatalism not far below. People go through the routine with the knowledge that it is going to be turned upside down in the near future. They will lose friends and relations, they say, and may even die themselves.

The last time I saw Khalid and Rahima Abbas was during a visit to Iraq more than 18 months ago. Khalid is a qualified engineer, but in this crippled economy there is little chance of getting a job befitting his qualifications. At the age of 39, he works as a car mechanic, an assistant at a hardware store and a private tutor.

He has been working 12 hours a day, six days a week, while Rahima has taken cleaning jobs to enable them to move from a single-bedroom apartment to one with two bedrooms. We sit drinking chai in the tiny living room, where photos of the children, Selim, 19, Saied, 16, and Sultana, 14, hang on the wall.

Rahima says she is savouring what little time is left before the bombs and bullets start flying. During the Gulf War, and again when US and British aircraft attacked during Operation Desert Fox in 1998, she had insisted on kissing her husband, two sons and daughter every single morning as they left home. Her 17-year-old niece was killed in Baghdad during the Gulf War by a misplaced American bomb, which also badly injured the girl's father.

"I always feared that, by the time the day was out, something could have happened to one of us. It is silly, but it felt like a form of insurance kissing them goodbye," she says. "I haven't started doing that yet, partly because they're older now, and the boys get embarrassed ... But also because it will make them realise how afraid I am becoming."

Khalid agrees that it is best not to do anything that will frighten the children. What will happen will happen, soon enough. His side of the family, too, has suffered in Iraq's violent history. A brother was crippled, and a half-brother killed, in the war against Iran.

"I am too busy working and that occupies my mind," he says. "But whenever I stop to think, I do get very worried, not just about the war, but what will happen afterwards. Everything we have struggled to gain in the last 10 years could be ruined."

It is a very brave or very foolish Iraqi who would talk totally candidly about Saddam Hussein, and Khalid is neither. He does not want his views on "regime change" aired in public, but he does not believe that it is the real goal of the Americans to rid Iraq of its ruler.

"It is the oil. That is what they want. The inspection is just an excuse. When we let them back in, George Bush will find another reason to hit us. But none of us understand why Britain is going along. What is Tony Blair's motive?" asks Khalid, who supports Tottenham Hotspur on Sports TV and once hoped to take a master's degree at a British university.

"A war will cause so much damage. The killings will be not only by the Americans, but internal. This is a country with lots of feuds and a lot of guns. Iraq will fall apart, and there will be terrible consequences for all our neighbours."

There is little overt sign of security, let alone military preparations, in the streets of Baghdad. When the Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, announced at an international anti-war conference that Iraq was prepared to readmit the United Nations weapons inspectors, we walked into the hall without our ID being checked or our bags searched.

A few bored-looking young conscripts guard the ministries; an anti-aircraft gun on the approach to one of Saddam's palaces is unmanned. Does this mean that the Iraqi government is growing more confident that the conflict can be avoided, I ask a senior official? Oh no, he reassures me, there is little doubt that the Americans are itching for an excuse to bomb.

The main "excuse", of course, is the alleged development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons by the Iraqi regime. Journalists are taken to a few sites named by Washington and London as the production centres. But they are the same ones for each batch of the media. We are assured by Mr Aziz that there will be fresh ones on display this week, in time for Mr Blair's much-trailed "dossier" on weapons of mass destruction.

Outside the Al-Rashid there's a giant banner saying "Tourism is the way future [sic] for man and land to build together." It is the "Second Iraqi Tourist Week", and seven "tourism advisers" sit at two tables to welcome visitors in further broken English to "Baghdad, Capital of glory and civilisation inspit of American aggressive threats to hit Iraq, and you well come".

There are not many tourists, but the city appears to be prosperous and buzzing. There are more foreign businessmen and diplomats than ever before since the Gulf War. In the hotel shops, Saddam Hussein watches made out of gold-plated martyrs' Kalashnikovs have gone up from around $120 to $170, and are selling well. There are also more local entrepreneurs around in their fake Versace, a sign that some, at least, are prospering despite the UN sanctions.

The anti-war conference has an interesting fringe element. At a previous one, I found myself chatting to a Frenchwoman who, I subsequently discovered, was Jany Le Pen, wife of the French right-winger. This time I share a lift with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the hard-line Russian leader. "How many more colonies do the Americans want?" he growls. A hotel porter remembers the visit, two months ago, of Jörg Haider, the Austrian right-winger, who apparently was a lousy tipper.

The restaurant is full of customers sampling the local delicacies such as mazgouf, a smoked fish from the Tigris, French and Lebanese wines, and 12-year-old Scotch. It is, of course, only a few who can afford such luxury. The vast majority of people in Baghdad, and elsewhere in Iraq, have seen their living standards plummet. What links all of society together is preparing for the coming conflict. At the Al-Mansour hospital, director Dr Luay Qasha talks about stocking up with blood supplies, fluids, antibiotics; at the Mother of All Battles Mosque with minarets shaped like Scud missiles, the Imam urges the faithful to be resilient; at the football match between the Air Force and Baghdad FC, supporters ask journalists: "Why do Britain and America want to bomb us?"

Back at the Abbas home, Rahima looks out of the window at the gathering dark. "We have all tried hard to make sure our children get a good education. We didn't want our sons to grow up knowing how to fight. But now we are afraid that is what is going to happen."