Qasim thought the poet a silly old man, but Othman had been Mohammed’s best friend since they were boys. The two men were oil and water, Harun al-Rashid and Jafar, Don Panza and Sancho Quixote. Whereas Mohammed was an engineer, a pragmatist, and a nationalist, Othman was a poet, romantic and cosmopolitan. Whereas Mohammed had never left Iraq, Othman had traveled to Cairo, Paris, and Moscow, and had spent two years in exile in Beirut. Mohammed built houses and offices; Othman wrote poetry and had translated Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. Mohammed was broad-shouldered, with a square, handsome face that in a good light looked like Omar Sharif’s; Othman was dumpy and pear-shaped, with a long, sloping nose—he looked more like Nour El-Sherif. He wore thick glasses, through which he peeped out at the world with eyes that always seemed to be laughing.
“You’re a poetizing fool,” Mohammed said, slamming down his pen and sitting up. “Iraq is a great nation because we have a strong leader. You’d rather have madness, revolution after revolution, like the sixties? You’d rather a plague of crusaders? Because that’s what they’ll be, Othman, these Americans, just like the British. A plague. They’re going to come in like pharaoh and put their foot on the neck of Iraq.”
“They’ll take Saddam’s foot off the neck of Iraq, is what they’ll do,” Othman said, “and you’d see that if you weren’t so old and set in your ways.”
“Set in my ways? Listen, brother, I know you’re an ignorant old skirt chaser who doesn’t know from a handful of lentils, but you must have been taught a little of your nation’s history.”
“I know ‘His watchdogs have corrupted the land,’”—Othman recited, quoting his teacher al-Bayati—“‘stolen the people’s food, raped the Muses, raped the widows of the men who died under torture, raped the daughters and widows of his soldiers who lost the war, from which, like rabbits in clover fields, they had run away, leaving behind corpses of workers and peasants…’”
“Then you know we’re a nation of peasants,” Mohammed interrupted, setting his contracts to one side. “A nation of ignorant hill people in the north, dull-minded farmers in the south, and superstitious tribesmen in the west. We are, like most Arab nations, a backward and troubled people. And yet we’ve modernized more than any other. We beat the Iranians, we beat back the Americans, we’ve kept our nation together and hauled our peasants screaming and wailing into the twentieth century. And how, my brother, did this happen?”
“The curse of oil?”
“No. By having a strong leader. A strong leader who believes in unity, who believes in a powerful, secular state—a nation—that can stand up to the Zionists and lead the Arabs into the future. We’re an Islamic civilization, not merely a people or a religion, and it takes a strong leader to keep us moving together. Without Saddam, Iraq will shatter into a thousand pieces.”
“I read Aflaq too, my educated friend.” Othman perched his wide rump on the edge of Mohammed’s desk, offered Mohammed a cigarette from his pack of Miamis, then lit one himself. “Of course we must put sectarian squabbling behind us. On that, I walk with you today and tomorrow and the day after. But for our Father Leader and Daring and Aggressive Knight, the Hero of National Liberation, unity was always only a word. Four thousand times, he played the Kurds against the Sunnis and the Fivers against the Twelvers. He doesn’t heal the rifts between Muslims—he manipulates them. Whereas in a democratic Iraq, an Iraq where every voice can be heard, with the Americans here to help…”
“To take our oil, you mean. What does your Al-Bayati write? ‘The hourglass restarts, counting the breaths of the new dictator…’”
“They want us to modernize. You see how they are with the Persians. With the Wahhabiyya.”
“Speaking evil from the left side of their mouth while flattering out of the right. Denouncing the mujahedeen with one hand and shoveling cash at them with the other. Yes, I see. The Zionists and the Persians have always conspired together.”
“You’re too cynical. You always have been. You’ve always been too willing to accommodate yourself to power.”
“You didn’t seem to mind much when I used my ‘accommodation’ to get you out of jail.”
“For which I am forever grateful, my friend,” said Othman. “You saved me.”
“And I would do it a thousand times. But to save you, I had to have power. Brother Othman, listen: power must be held. It must be used. Listen: this has nothing to do with democracy. We’re under attack from the Zionist crusaders because we stood up against them—because bin Laden stood up against them. It’s the same as it was with Kuwait. Someone dares to stand up to America, and they’re going to punish whoever they can put their hands on. Listen: Saddam is the only thing that has kept our nation together for the last thirty years. When the Kurds took up arms against us, who stood against them? When the ayatollahs started rioting and rebelling even here in Baghdad, who stood against them? When the Persians bombed our cities and cut us off from the Shatt al-Arab, who stood against them? And when the Kuwaitis started murdering innocent Iraqis and then that snake George Bush, who I spit on, invaded our lands and butchered our brothers, when the entire world lined up to see us broken—who stood against them?”
“‘Carpenters and ironsmiths, hungry and burned under the autumn sky, all forcibly led to slaughter, killed by invaders, alien and homegrown…’ My friend, the same man who runs Abu Ghraib, who gassed the Kurds, who disappeared your own brother-in-law. How can you stand by this dictator as if he stood by you? He cares only about al-Tikriti. He cares only about Hussein. For all his strength, he has no more honor than a dog. And his sons! Think of them. You know the stories.”
“Rumors. Your tribe sit around the Writers Union like Scheherazade, making up gruesome fables to shock each other.”
“Not fables. You see the disco boats. You know what happens to the women—the daughters they take. Scheherazade’s not far off.”
“Listen, Othman, sometimes the powerful must be cruel. If we have to torture people to save lives, so be it. If we have to spy on people, so be it. If my grandsons are to know a peaceful and democratic Iraq, unified not by force but by law and honor, it will only be because we built strong foundations to secure that future. Is Hussein perfect? No. Is the party perfect? No. There are excesses. There are lies and evils. But the choice, Othman, is not between perfection and imperfection. We must choose, as always, between the lesser of two evils: a powerful leader or anarchy. And if you choose the Americans, you choose anarchy.”
“Maybe Bush will be strong,” Qasim said from his bricked-up window.
“What?” Mohammed turned, incredulous.
“Maybe Bush will be a strong leader. Maybe he will keep Iraq strong.”
Othman chuckled. “Your nephew sees things differently, brother.”
Mohammed stood up, spitting and stomping his foot. “Fuck Bush,” he said.
“But if Bush can beat Saddam, doesn’t that mean he is stronger? And maybe he’ll make Iraq strong again. Then we can build our democracy.”
“You see, Mohammed,” Othman said. “The young have hope. They’re not frightened of the future like you are.”
“Bush—strong! You heard about the protests. Against Bush. In his own country. He can’t even unify his own nation, and they have it easy. They’re rich. Fat. Decadent. Not only that, their women… You see how it was with this Hillary Clinton and now that Condoleezza Rice… Their women practically run the country.”
“Mohammed, surely you wouldn’t oppose a woman’s rule…” Othman said with a grin.