Suddenly we heard the rumble of army vehicles, and the crowd scattered, or tried to; we clustered into a group again as we realized both exits from the field were blocked by two convoys of four Humvees. Marines emerged from the vehicles in full body armor, pointing their M16s at us. A disembodied roar filled the field: “Hands above your heads! Hands where I can see them! All of you on the fucking ground now or I swear, you gloating fucking Ali Baba pig-fuckers, I’ll put you in the ground!” No translation was provided, but we all got the idea.
“HANDS HIGHER!” another marine yelled at a man in a mechanic’s oil-stained overalls, who said, “Mafee mushkila, mafee mushkila,” No problem, no problem, but the marine shouted, “Don’t contradict me! Don’t contradict me!” and booted the man in the stomach — all our guts jerked tight in sympathy — and he folded over, gasping and coughing. “Find out who owns this farm,” the marine ordered an interpreter, whose face was hidden in a sort of head-wrapping, like a ninja. The marine spoke into his headset, saying the area was secured while the interpreter asked the old man in the red kaffiyeh who owned the farm.
I didn’t hear the answer because a black marine was standing over Aziz, saying, “Souvenirs, huh? This your handiwork, huh?” Fate sent a Chinook thundering out of the sun; it drowned my voice as the marine yanked Aziz’s camera off his neck with such force that the strap broke, and Aziz fell forward headfirst. Next thing I knew the marine was kneeling by Aziz with his handgun pressed against my photographer’s head.
I shouted, “No — stop! He’s working for me,” but the din of the Chinook drowned me out, and suddenly I was flipped to the ground and an armored kneecap was pressing my windpipe into the dirt, too, and I thought, They won’t discover their mistake till I’m dead. Then, No, they won’t discover their mistake at all; I’ll be deposited in a shallow pit on the edge of Baghdad.
“WHY AREN’T THEY grateful, Ed?”
A cube of wedding cake is halfway to my mouth, but Pauline Webber has a penetrating voice, and now I’m being watched by four Webbers, six Sykeses, Aoife, and a vase of orange lilies. My problem is, I have no idea who or what she’s talking about, as I’ve spent the last few minutes mentally composing an email to the accounts department at the corporation that owns Spyglass. I look at Holly for a hint, but she blanks me from behind her wronged-woman mask. Though I wouldn’t be too sure it is a mask.
Luckily, Peter’s younger brother and best man, Lee, comes to my aid; his “core competence” may be “tax evoision” but that doesn’t stop him being an authority on international affairs too. “Iraq under Saddam used to be a concentration camp aboveground and a mass grave below. So us and the Yanks, we come along and take their dictator down for them, gratis and for free — and how do they pay us back? By turning on their liberators. Ingratitude is deeply, deeply, ingrained into the Arab races. And it’s not just our lads in uniform they hate; it’s any Westerner, right, Ed? Like that poor reporter who got offed last year, just for being American? Grotesque.”
“You’ve got spinach stuck in your teeth, Lee,” says Peter.
Of course Aoife asks, “What does ‘offed’ mean, Daddy?”
“Why don’t you and I,” Holly says to Aoife, “go and see Lola and Amanda at the big kids’ table? I think they’ve got Coca-Cola.”
“You always say Coca-Cola stops you sleeping, Mummy.”
“Yes, but you worked so hard being Aunty Sharon’s bridesmaid, we can make an exception this once.” Holly and Aoife slip away.
Lee still hasn’t caught on. “Has the spinach gone?”
“It has,” says Peter, “but the tactlessness is still there.”
“Huh? Oh.” Lee does a contrite smirk. “Oops. No offense, Ed. Imbibed too freely of the old vino, methinks.”
I should say, “No offense taken,” but I just shrug.
“Thing is,” says Lee in a let’s-face-it tone, “the invasion of Iraq was about one thing and one thing only: oil.”
If I had a tenner for every time I heard that I could buy the Outer Hebrides. I put down my fork. “If you want a country’s oil, you just buy it. Like we did from Iraq up until Gulf One.”
“Cheaper just to install a puppet government, surely.” Lee pokes out the very tip of his tongue to show how provocative he is. “Think of all those lucrative oil contracts. Favorable terms. Yum-yum.”
“Maybe that’s what the Iraqis object to,” says Austin Webber, father of Peter and Lee, a retired bank manager with drooping eyes and a fascinating forehead like a Klingon’s. “Being governed by puppets. Can’t say I’d relish the prospect much, either.”
“Could we please let Ed answer my questions?” Pauline says. “Why has the Iraqi intervention gone so horribly off script?”
My head’s humming. After Holly’s ultimatum last night, I didn’t sleep so well, and I’ve drunk too much champagne. “Because the script was written referring not to Iraq as it was, but to a fantasy Iraq as Rumsfeld, Rice, and Bush et al. wanted it to be, or dreamt it to be, or were promised by their pet Iraqis-in-exile it would be. They expected to find a unified state like Japan in 1945. Instead, they found a perpetual civil war among majority Shi’a Arabs, minority Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. Saddam Hussein — a Sunni — had imposed a brutal peace on the country, but with him gone, the civil war reheated, and now it’s … erupted, and the CPA is embroiled. When you’re in control, neutrality isn’t possible.”
The band at the far end of the hall strikes up “The Birdy Song.”
Ruth asks, “So the Sunni are fighting in Fallujah because they want a Sunni leader back in charge?”
“That’s one reason, but the Shi’a elsewhere are fighting because they want the foreigners out.”
“Being occupied’s unpleasant,” says Austin. “I get that. But surely Iraqis can see that life’s better now than it used to be.”
“Two years ago your average Iraqi — male — had a job, of some type. Now he hasn’t. There was water in the taps and power in the grid. Now there isn’t. Petrol was available. Now it isn’t. Toilets worked. Now they don’t. You could send your kids to school without being afraid they’ll be kidnapped. Now you can’t. Iraq was a creaking, broken, sanction-ravaged place, but it sort of, kind of, worked. Now it doesn’t.”
An Arab-looking waiter fills my cup from a silver pot. I thank him and wonder if he’s thinking, This guy’s talking out of his hole. Sharon, meanwhile, a girl happy to discuss Middle Eastern politics over her wedding cake, asks, “Who’s to blame?”
“It entirely depends who you ask,” I reply.
“We’re asking you,” says Peter the groom.
I sip my coffee. It’s good. “The de facto king of Iraq is a Kissinger acolyte named L. Paul Bremer III. On taking office, he passed two edicts that have shaped the occupation. Edict number one ruled that any member of the Ba’ath Party above a certain rank was to be sacked. With one stroke of the pen Bremer consigned to the scrap-heap the very civil servants, scientists, teachers, police officers, engineers, and doctors that the coalition needed to rebuild the country. Fifty thousand white-collar Iraqis lost their salaries, pensions, and futures and wanted the occupation to fail from that day on. Edict number two disbanded the Iraqi Army. No back pay, no pension, no nothing. Bremer created 375,000 potential insurgents — unemployed, armed, and trained to kill. Hindsight is easy, sure, but if you’re the viceroy of an occupied country, it’s your job to possess foresight — or at least to listen to advisers who do.”