Saddam Hussein's Iraq is a place of brutal and potentially explosive social divisions. Among the country's 22 million people, a favored few have access to the most extravagant luxuries. In general, most seem blithely indifferent to others' suffering in a society where a vast majority of people have been reduced to penury by two decades of war and sanctions.

The sanctions, requiring United Nations approval for Iraq's imports of medicines and other goods, were imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and have continued until now, pending resolution of the dispute over Iraq's banned-weapons programs.

For any visitor spending a few weeks in Iraq, it is this contrast in lifestyles between Mr. Hussein's elite and other Iraqis that seems as telling a characteristic of the society as any other, besides a pervasive climate of fear with no obvious counterpart in any country, except possibly North Korea.

In this atmosphere of dread, with Iraqis forever terrified that their dissident thoughts will attract the attention of Mr. Hussein's secret police, the self-indulgence of those with favored positions has echoes, for an outsider, of Bob Fosse's 1972 movie "Cabaret," with its depiction of the decadence in mid-1930's Berlin that accompanied the rise of Hitler.

» Amid Brutal Poverty in Iraq, a Favored Few Enjoy Riches