The Story Read Free Page A

my way down the unlit emergency stairwell to the hotel’s gaudy marble lobby. Its lights were still glowing brightly—a surreal scene, given the darkness and chaos above.
    An Iraqi concierge, who only an hour earlier had been overly solicitous while checking me in, suddenly barked at me, “ Where are you going? ”
    I was leaving the hotel, I told him as calmly as possible. My room had just been destroyed by a missile.
    â€œYou are not going anywhere,” he commanded.
    Seeing him reach for the bulge under his ill-fitting hotel uniformjacket, I froze as he retreated behind the front desk. Handing me a sheet of paper listing over $1,000 in charges for the night and the week I had planned to spend there, he insisted that I pay my bill, in cash. Rattled but furious, I flung two $100 bills on the desk and left. As I bolted out of the hotel, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t shoot me.
    While I walked to the home of a European diplomat, I thought about the Iraqi leader. In a region of brutal tyrants, Saddam stood out. The Godfather was his favorite film—a nugget that Laurie and I unearthed in researching our book. His role model was Joseph Stalin. “I like the way he governed his country,” Saddam had told a well-known Kurdish politician. 7
    Like Stalin, Saddam had institutionalized terror as an instrument of state policy. With more than 150,000 employees of his competing intelligence agencies watching citizens in a country of fourteen million people (the population would surge to thirty million by 2010), his reliance on arbitrary punishment and the promotion of the most obsequious had destroyed Iraq’s civil society and all centers of opposition. Individuals were subordinate to the whims of a state that—as noted by Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi writer and exile whom I had befriended—was synonymous with Saddam.
    No one could escape his vile gaze. Thirty-foot-high portraits and smaller renditions of him—as soldier, peasant, teacher, and tribal elder—were everywhere. With his black hair and trademark mustache, his portrait graced the entrances of hotels, schools, public buildings, city squares, private offices, and even the dials of the gold wristwatches favored by the political elite. As Makiya wrote, the government had devoted an entire agency, the Very Special Projects Implementation Authority, to creating and maintaining such depictions of him. 8
    Iraqi women died for him, literally and figuratively, and men emulated his style of dress, his swagger, even the cut of his mustache. All mustaches in Iraq seemed to resemble his; I longed to see a goatee or a handlebar mustache. In the land where Sumerians had invented writing, discourse had been degraded to a single ubiquitous image.
    All roads led to Saddam, the “leader-president,” “leader-struggler,” “standard-bearer,” “leader of all the Arabs,” “knight of the Arab nation,” “hero of national liberation,” “father-leader,” and my personal favorite title,the “daring and aggressive knight” ( al-faris al-mighwar ).” 9 A scholar said that Saddam’s name was mentioned between thirty to fifty times an hour in a typical radio broadcast; his TV appearances often lasted several hours a day. Makiya argued that Saddam’s name and image were so ubiquitous that he had become the personification of what Iraqis perceived to be the “Iraqi” character. 10
    In Saddam’s Iraq, real and imagined critics had a disconcerting way of ending up dead, in jail, or simply disappearing. Saddam had used the war as a pretext for persecuting the two groups he feared most: the Iraqi Shiites, a majority, and the Kurds, the luckless minority in northern Iraq who spoke their own language, had their own distinct culture, and constituted 20 percent of the population.
    During my assignment in Cairo in the mid-1980s and my visits to the region, I had managed to interview