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Villagers from a nearby outpost had drifted over the sand to see what we were doing. They stood at a respectful distance and nodded as Hussein spoke. They had seen the graves. Everybody knew, but nobody dared to talk about it. One year the desert flooded and the bones came to light. The men from the government showed up with shovels and forced the villagers to dig fresh sand over the old remains.

“The families ought to know that people have been killed here,” Hussein said. “They have to come to see the graves, because this has to be part of history.”

The villagers nodded as if he were an oracle.

Hussein never got his day of justice. Two years later, in 2005, he was called to testify about the mass grave before the supreme court committee investigating the crimes of Saddam’s regime. He traveled to Baghdad and gave his testimony. As he drove back down to Najaf, a taxi pulled abruptly in front of his car, forcing the driver to jam on the brakes. Gunmen leapt from the taxi, hauled Hussein from the car, and shot him dead. They dumped his corpse at the side of the road, and drove on. They didn’t bother with the other passengers. They only wanted Hussein, to silence a voice that had spoken out.

He had survived Saddam by a miracle, but the U.S. invasion and resulting civil war swallowed his life down. Iraq gets you in the end, one way or the other. One after another, people we met during that ominous and heady voyage through the south have since been killed.

When Raheem told me about Hussein’s death, I remembered the last thing he said to us as we pulled back into the market to drop him off.

“Yesterday a car passed in front of me and I saw two police officers. I know them very well. They were torturers. We are thankful to the American government because they got rid of Saddam. But the Americans have left those who tortured and those who wrote accusations. The power of Saddam was the public security officers and intelligence people. They are still here. We’re afraid they are going to join the new government. We don’t even—we don’t prefer people to be killed, but we think the government should kill them.”

Those words held the presage of Hussein’s death and the seeds of civil war. At the time, I wrote them mutely, hurriedly, the letters smearing together. I’ll sort it out later, I thought. For now, just write it down.

SEVEN

THE LEADER

When countries make difficult strategic choices, the United States responds. And of course, I hope that others will see that lesson and learn from it. It’s why it’s important to reach out to Libya.

—Condoleezza Rice

I support my darling black African woman. I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders … Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much.

—Colonel Moammar Qaddafi

The war rolled right over President Bush’s announcement that major combat operations in Iraq had ended and raged down into the oven blasts of summer as soldiers combed the sands for weapons of mass destruction. In Washington, questions started to surface—political, procedural inquiries about who knew the intelligence was bad, and when did they know and who did they tell. Meanwhile, there was a bigger demand. The war had been sold to the American public as a bold response to the threat of unimaginable attack, and now a costly occupation had to be justified anew. The bloodier Baghdad grew, the more the question gaped—insurgents bombed the Jordanian embassy and truck-bombed the UN headquarters. Bodies poured into Iraqi morgues. And why had we gone?

To answer the great and growing question, U.S. officials launched into a rhetorical crusade against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. We stopped hearing so much about preemptive strikes and U.S. security. Instead, we heard that the war had been necessary because of our rigorous American ideology and morals. Saddam was an oppressor and a tyrant and so we had deposed him. But other Arab dictators still sat among their riches and their torture chambers. If the United States was in the business of