The Assassins' Gate (25 page)

The paintings on exhibit were mostly abstract and meditative, the art of internal exile. In the outdoor café, where actresses and poets and painters sat drinking tea, I asked a professor of architecture from Baghdad University where in town I could see a play or movie. Nowhere, he answered. “You need security before you can take the next step.” Security, electricity, and minimal confidence in the future. “Saddam spoiled the way of thinking. Now you see nothing in Baghdad. It's all spoiled, and what you see is a mess which doesn't represent anything because it's not the natural way for Iraqis to live.”

I remarked that liberated Iraq didn't seem a very happy place.

“No one can bring you happiness immediately like this,” the professor said. He had an air of melancholy refinement. “It doesn't come from God. Have you heard the Iraqi songs? They're very sad. Why? Because it's been like this for a long, long time. Even if you are talking about love and nice women and beautiful things, you look at it as very sad. But effective: You touch others.”

The professor asked me what the Americans planned for Iraq. I told him in all honesty that I didn't know.

“I think you need to spend years to understand Iraqis,” he said, suddenly growing animated. For example, Iraq was half urban, half bedouin. The urban personality was on display all around us. The bedouin personality came from the deep past, and it was the one causing problems for America. The bedouin personality explained why Iraqis shouted: In the desert, they had to shout to be heard. “You have spent lots of efforts during those crucial years—on what? When you come in you are not understanding the people. I don't know why. Everyone is asking the question. Military, it's easy—you have complicated, sophisticated forces. But what will be after? This is the question. They have to have a plan.” He seemed genuinely bewildered by what he'd seen since the fall of the regime. “Anyone who wants to live in Iraq must understand Iraqis. He must change himself when he comes to Iraq. And we too must change a bit, to understand him, because we can't have life without a common language between us. You must pay, and I must pay also.” The professor smiled and stood up to leave. “And believe me, Iraqis are all good and nice and simple.”

There was no flowering in Baghdad. It was too soon, and things were too unsettled. And perhaps Iraqis themselves weren't prepared or even capable yet. One day, as I was driving down Saadoon Street in the city center, I noticed a theater called the Nasir. Inside, the director, whose name was Abdulillah Kamal, sat smoking with a group of actors in the front office. Kamal was white haired and pink skinned, heavyset in sweatpants, with a shaggy mustache and reading glasses dangling around his neck. He was about to resume performances of the hit play that had been showing until April 9. “A nuclear fantasy,” he called it, with the title
I Saw by My Eyes, Nobody Told Me.
It had filled all two thousand seats. I asked why he didn't stage something that he couldn't do under Saddam, something new—for example, a satire of the occupation. He brushed the notion aside. “We can't find a sadder story than the street to put on as a play,” he said. “The play is out on the street. All Baghdad is a theater. We are the audience. We don't need to do a play.”

But it would pack the house, I said, and it would give Iraqis something they needed—the chance to see their common experience through the bonding medium of art.

“Can I talk about Bremer and Bush?” the director demanded. “Can you give me guarantees?” He mentioned a newspaper that had been closed for inciting Iraqis to kill Americans. I tried to explain that this was different. In the end I was unable to persuade Kamal that he wouldn't be shut down—but I also sensed that my idea made him uneasy for deeper reasons. It would demand an act of imaginative courage that was beyond his power. Finally, Kamal confided that he had already written his next play. It was called
Masonica,
which crossed “America” with “Masonry” (a word one often heard in Iraq, having some obscure relation with Zionism). The play would reveal, he said, “the hidden thing that happened in America on September 11.”

When Saddam ruled Iraq, the Baath Party's intelligence offices kept track of the rumors that were making their way through the streets. The documents were compiled annually in forty thick volumes that convey all the obsessive fascination of a police state. “Very confidential—to the President through the Office of the Secretary of the Security Council. The subject is Rumors,” began one report written a few weeks after Saddam emptied Iraq's prisons in October 2002. “The political prisoners weren't set free, and they were executed by the Iraqi government.” A second document declared: “It's about a fight between the two sons of the President, God praise him. It's about receiving power. Qusay Saddam Hussein was hurt. This rumor was discussed at Baghdad University in the College of Business Administration. October 6, 2002.” The informer who was the source of the report was then named. Another rumor, originating in Hilla, said that Ariel Sharon was going to destroy Palestinian homes in Jenin to weaken the Iraqi economy, and that Saddam would give gifts of cars to foreign Arabs who had been living in Iraq since before the 1991 intifada, known as “the Page of Treachery and Treason.” The king of Jordan would allow the Iraqi opposition to enter from his country and give them his support. The American invasion would come on the day of Saddam's reelection, to end the celebrations. The invasion would come on September 11, 2002, one year after the attacks in America. The United States would attack all the mosques in Iraq, with the excuse that the Iraqi government was hiding its WMD there in order not to attract attention. The aggressors would attack Iraq with a new weapon, a gas which, inhaled, would put Iraqis into a coma lasting more than eight hours. The invasion would be completely different from other military operations, and it would come in two stages, one secret and one public. The invasion would come in three places, each with a code name: in the north, “The Rabbit's Jump”; in the south, “The Movement of the Tortoise”; and in Baghdad, a special operation, “Pulling the Molars.”

Most of the rumors originated in poor neighborhoods. In a sense, they were a normal expression of the experience of people undergoing the extreme stress of awaiting war and fearing their rulers—of coping with powerlessness amid constant violence. Many of the rumors were actually planted by the Baath Party, so that Saddam, having turned Iraq into a nation of spies, was tracking the progress of germs he himself had introduced into the body politic. He and his countrymen were joined in a closed system, a circle of paranoia. Survival depended on believing that anything was possible—the more unlikely, the more likely. To try to live outside the circle was a risky, even fatal, effort, and only the extraordinary were able. “Every Iraqi is a Baathist,” Saddam liked to say, and even after he was gone from the scene, many of them acknowledged that he continued to inhabit their souls. The Iraqi who showed me the rumors, a sophisticated, artistic-minded woman whose whole family had gone into exile while she stayed behind with her husband and children, kept muttering oaths and trying to pull the volumes away. “I'm sorry, George, I hate government documents,” she said. “Imagine living like this for thirty years. Surviving.”

I had been in Iraq less than two weeks when Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a safehouse in Mosul after an extended fire-fight with American soldiers. Uday in particular had been possessed of a psychotically cruel temperament. One of his former bodyguards, a bluff, good-natured man named Emad Hamadi, told me a story to illustrate what it was like working for him. Uday was frolicking in a swimming pool one day with a group of young women. He summoned Emad, who was wading nearby in his swimsuit, to bring him a whiskey. As soon as Emad handed over the glass, Uday forced his head under water and pinned it between his knees. Emad knew that if he struggled at all it would be the end of his life, but the game went on and on, for half a minute, a minute, until he felt he was about to die anyway. Emad resigned himself to his fate, but as he started to lose consciousness his arm instinctively moved from side to side to indicate that he couldn't endure any more. He felt himself released, and when he came to the surface, Uday was laughing along with his consorts. “You're a good man,” said the heir apparent, and he insisted that Emad have a whiskey as well. Uday was probably the most despised man in Iraq—even more than his father, who at least had climbed on his own to the pinnacle of power and kept himself there with impressive mastery.

The night of the firefight in Mosul, there was so much celebratory gunfire in Baghdad that an American foot patrol I was accompanying near the river had to call off the mission and return to base—the rounds were falling dangerously close. But in the days that followed, Iraqis began to wonder if Uday and Qusay were really dead. The corpses presented to the media had been cosmetically repaired in a way that looked waxen and unreal. I heard various theories from a range of Iraqis. A woman who held a high position in the America-Iraq Friendship Federation told me that she didn't believe it. “People haven't seen any evidence that they are they,” she said. “DNA, dental—can these really identify them? Pictures can be manipulated. I heard a story that the house where the sons were killed belonged to an anti-Saddam sheikh. Why would he receive them?” And then there was the father's mysterious silence. “If someone killed your two sons—I'm sorry, would you sit back and say ‘Okay, no problem'? So why hasn't Saddam Hussein done something?” Her colleague suggested that Bush was trying to secure his reelection. My driver had heard that Uday escaped to Spain after the fall of Baghdad. Uday's jeweler, whom I met at a party a couple of nights later, didn't believe it, either. He had set hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds in rings, and if he'd been short .000001 carat in his work he would have been killed. He accepted the fact of all of Saddam's and Uday's crimes. Still, if Uday now came to him for help, the jeweler said that he wouldn't turn him away. Uday had his positive qualities: He was straightforward—if he didn't like you he killed you, if he liked you he treated you well. Uday had never personally wronged the jeweler, and it was a code of honor not to turn him in. His refusal to believe the news seemed like the expression of a wish: It would be humiliating if the Americans killed Uday and Qusay that way. In others it reflected fear: The young monsters were bound to return and inflict more pain. And in everyone it was the natural skepticism of people who had known only an official culture of lies. One old man, having seen Tony Blair discuss the event on television, became convinced that it was true, for Blair was smiling in a way that couldn't be faked; the old man had learned to read the truth from facial expressions after spending the years of the Iran-Iraq War watching Saddam on TV.

Over time, when Uday and Qusay did not reappear, and their deaths became accepted facts, the disbelievers turned into believers, without ever pausing to recalibrate their sense of their own ability to judge.

*   *   *

“
THEY LACK THE POWER
to experience freedom”: The phrase, from Dr. Butti's proposal for the Gilgamesh Center for Creative Thinking, captured a truth about Iraqis in the months following April 9. It helped to explain one of the great mysteries after the fall of the statue: why the moment of good feeling was so short. The thousands of foreign soldiers, officials, contractors, and humanitarians who had poured into Iraq to rebuild the country found themselves in the position of the American sea captain in Melville's “Benito Cereno,” who exclaims to the Spaniard he's rescued from a slave mutiny, “You are saved, you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” Iraqis were told they were free, they expected to be free, they had been waiting for years to be free—but they still didn't feel free. And so a reaction set in almost at once. Aqila al-Hashemi, a former diplomat who in July became one of three women appointed to the interim Governing Council, told me, “We are still under the shock, we are still afraid. We are still living the same—I was fifteen in '68, now I'm fifty. You see? You can imagine—can I change in two days, in two months, in two years? We need to be re-educated, rehabilitated.” Iraqis who longed for freedom, she said, “were happy after the fall of the regime. But then there was an act of sabotage against this joy, against this happiness. It's not accomplished, you see. This feeling you have—ah, yes!—but then it's not accomplished. This is frustrating.”

The “act of sabotage” was many acts: the outbreak of chaos, the return of Baathist violence, the reality of occupation—but also the ingrained sense of powerlessness. With it came an outsized expectation of what the superpower could achieve, and the disturbance in Iraqis' minds was only heightened by the performance of the Americans. If Saddam could restore the country's utilities within a couple of months of the end of the Gulf War, with all the destruction done by allied bombing, why was the power grid still deteriorating after four months, when they had left the infrastructure intact this time? One month before the war, President Bush had declared in a visionary speech at the American Enterprise Institute that Iraq would become a democratic model for the Middle East. Iraqis heard him, and as an unemployed electrician named Tariq Talib told me, “We expected the Americans would make the country an example, a second Europe. That's why we didn't fight back. And we are shocked, as if we've gone back a hundred years.”

Rumors spread that the American forces were cutting electrical lines to punish Iraqis for staging attacks, and that they had brought Kuwaitis up with the invasion force to instigate the looting in revenge for the Iraqi occupation in 1990. “Our people don't understand what's going on, so they think the Americans are deliberately creating this chaos,” Dr. Butti told me. The conspiracy theories were an attempt to make sense of the absurd. He himself didn't know what to think. “We don't want to believe it's not intentional—the greatest power on earth can start a nuclear war.” The notion that bad planning, halfhearted commitment, ignorance, and incompetence accounted for the anarchy simply wasn't believable. How were Iraqis to grasp that the same Washington think tank where Bush offered Iraq as a model for the region had contributed to the postwar collapse by shooting down any talk of nation building? Deliberate sabotage made more sense.