Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [127]
I was a little surprised when he told me he was hoping for a U.S. visa. Didn’t he resent the land whose soldiers killed his son? I asked him. Wouldn’t it be hard to live in the United States after what happened to Mohammed?
“Do you mean because he was killed by U.S. soldiers?” he said. “Of course I don’t have such feelings against the Americans.”
“So you don’t blame the Americans for what happened?”
“Not in general. As you know, in each society there are good and bad people. I blame those who have a quick decision of shooting at civilians.”
“For the war itself, for invading Iraq?”
“I don’t blame them for that,” he said. “I was one of those supporting such a step.”
It was true. I remembered our trip into the south. Raheem had been happy. He had been optimistic. I remembered the small smile on his face when he watched the Shiites march in public for the first time. The ice-cream parlor in Nasiriyah that we’d visit at dusk, when the white owls rose out of the swamps and little boys scampered barefooted after a soccer ball in the darkening streets. His morning strolls to the market, the chats he had with strangers. The wonder in his eyes as he savored the days, as we wandered through Iraq together, watching history happen. Back then the future looked clean and good, and Raheem was full of simple hope—that he and his sons would find stable jobs because Saddam was gone. I’ve never seen him so happy again. Every time I made it back to Baghdad in the subsequent years, at some point one of us would say to the other, “Remember that first trip down south?” We’d talk about the people we met, about the amazing things they’d said, about the stories we found, and we’d smile. Iraq had never been that good again.
In the end, the American visa came through. But Raheem balked. Financial crisis had gripped the United States. The Iraqis who’d crossed the Atlantic before him sent back dire reports—they lived in empty apartments; they couldn’t earn enough money to support their families; they couldn’t find work. The surge brought American soldiers pouring in to police the streets, and for the time being Baghdad had grown quieter, life more livable. And so he waits. Raheem is an Iraqi; his country and mine are tangled together and so our lives meet, pause, and part. All those hard years he would have snatched at a chance to start life anew in the United States. The invasion of his country brought that opportunity at last, but it also weakened the U.S. economy and helped turn the promised land of the past two centuries into a place that suddenly looked to Raheem like a dubious proposition. War is a total change, unleashing all things light and all things dark; we are pushed forward and our lives are invented by the history we live through.
These days, I watch “the region”—we used to call it that, as if it were the only one—from a distance. People are still being tortured, and demonstrations disrupted, in Egypt. In Afghanistan, they throw acid into the faces of girls who try to go to school. As for the U.S.-backed warlords of 2001, Haji Zaman has been driven back out of the country; Hazrat Ali has emerged as a notoriously corrupt security official in the U.S.-backed government; and Abdul Qadir was assassinated—there is a story among old sources from those times that Zaman may have been involved; that it was a clash over drug smuggling. Saudi women still can’t drive, mingle with men who are not blood relatives, or leave the country without permission from a male guardian. Qaddafi is still lording it over