Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [36]
But nobody came. Saddam’s government slammed down, slaughtering thousands, razing fields, tossing men and women into torture chambers. They filled mass graves, sacked shrines, and drained the storied marshlands. An Iraqi friend who worked for the Baathist regime told me that when Saddam sent the army to slaughter rebels hidden in the shrine at Karbala he told his advisers, “We’re both named Hussein. Let’s see who’s stronger.”
The collective punishment dragged on for years. The graves were secret; some families still held out hope that the disappeared would yet return. “We have been killed not by Saddam,” a Shiite man in Najaf told me, “but by America.” He did not say it with venom. It was, for him, a matter of fact.
I did not come to Iraq expecting to hear about 1991; the stories at first rang strange in my ears. And then stranger still to understand that those days still stirred around us. In my mind, that earlier Iraq war belonged to another time. We are Americans, after all, living on our island, and it has always been easy for us to detach from history, even fast like that, in the same generation. We are struck by the distant echoes of events, and the arrival of refugees who are urged to dream forward, not back. We live isolated not only by stretches of ocean and space, but also by kinks and voids in time. We keep our history in a museum case and consider it; but we don’t have much of it, and we don’t regard it as alive. We are here, we push forward, we manifest destiny. Iraq does not live like that. Nobody in the Middle East lives like that. In Iraq, there is no past or present, there is only everything, and it weaves together, shimmering and seamless. Ghosts move among the crowd, fed on stories, fattened by prayer. Hussein dies, year after year, on the plains of Karbala. When looters raged in the streets of Baghdad, the Mongols had come pounding back across the sands. Saddam is still with us. And the Americans come, lofty and unscathed, cloaked in the power to spin dreams of freedom and break hearts.
The Shiites would crow, “Thank you, George Bush!” and poke up their thumbs, but if you scratched off just a tiny flake of gilt, if you stopped and asked a simple question—What do you think of U.S. troops occupying Iraq? Who do you want to run the country? Do you want a democracy? What does democracy mean to you?—you gazed into an abyss. It was Iran who’d reached out to help the Shiites through sanctions and collective punishment, given them shelter, medicine, and guns, absorbed the refugees. It was Iranians who were now in a position to influence the Iraqi clerics. And, in turn, the clerics were the only figures trusted by the Shiite masses, many of whom pined for an Iranian-style Islamic republic. Maybe the Shiites would never be America’s friends, and it was hard to blame them. They owed the Americans nothing, as far as they could see, except payback for years of suffering. By toppling Saddam, perhaps the Americans had broken even—or perhaps not.
The hotel in Najaf was a desolate tower on the edge of town. Out back, the poorest merchants pushed flimsy Chinese toys and rotten vegetables from stalls of calcified wood and cardboard. When they closed down the market and faded homeward for the night, garbage blew on desert winds and packs of wild dogs snarled through the maze of locked stalls.
The hotel manager was a small, balding man. He covered the dining-room walls with mirror shards and sat daydreaming in his crazy den of infinite, broken reflections. He drank little cups of what he said was tea, the stink of liquor steaming out with each breath. He called himself Abu Adi; he was fifty-three years old, the father of five children.