Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [40]
I landed in Libya nearly six months after the war began. It was still illegal for Americans to travel to Libya, and the withered man at the passport counter summoned his friends to watch the stamp come down with a gleeful smack on my U.S. passport. Libya was still under American sanctions, and only recently freed from UN sanctions. Yellowing countryside slipped past the taxi windows on the road to Tripoli. It was the crisp end of a burned African summer, all the lives driven indoors, in hiding from a punishing sun.
Rearing grandly in steel and glass over Tripoli’s fading downtown, the hotel had recently claimed distinction as the only establishment in town to accept credit cards. The clerks hovered over the card, whispered instructions to one another, and bustled nervously before, finally and proudly, presenting me with something to sign.
The bellhop sweated unabashedly, pounding at the elevator buttons. He was a round man, hair gone to drab gray. When the doors clamped shut, he eyed me.
“You are a journalist?”
“Yes.” I hadn’t told him that.
“The things journalists say about Libya, all lies,” he recited sternly. “Libya is great country. Good country.”
“It’s my first time here.”
“They are lying always about Libya,” he repeated. This was the full elasticity of his English.
The room was opulent, tiny, and overstuffed. The phone was scratchy and probably bugged. Maybe it was the weird little bellhop, or the general air of lassitude, but I couldn’t shake the sense that I was being watched. I wandered around the bed, glaring at the vents, staring into the light fixtures. I remembered stories about Saddam’s intelligence officers videotaping reporters’ hotel rooms. I stood against the window, pressed my forehead to the pane, and looked down at the sea.
Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi of Libya were a matched set, the two leaders known in the West as madmen. They belonged to the same generation of Arab potentates: the ones who had used their wits to grab power, who had been molded by the pan-Arab philosophies of Nasser, by global Cold War chess games and the Arabs’ morale-shattering military losses to Israel. Qaddafi and Saddam had dominated their lands because they were cruel, ruthless men, wily manipulators who kept their power no matter how many of their own people had to be killed, tortured, or terrified. There is no Arab leader who has not done these things, done them a lot or dabbled in them. But these two were dictators who wouldn’t be dictated to, not even by a global superpower. They had stood up to the Americans and taken sanctions for their rebelliousness. Now Saddam had been driven from his palaces by American tanks. Qaddafi was the biggest scofflaw still standing.
In Iraq, I had seen the lid snatched away and dark secrets freed. People had told me what they had suffered, and they had told me what they would have said if we had met when Saddam was still around. Now I was in Libya with those memories clanking in my thoughts. From the rogue dictatorship smashed, I had moved backward in time, into the rogue dictatorship preserved under glass.
After pacing for a while, I called a man. Somebody had given me his name as a potential translator. He picked me up and drove me through the salt-gnawed streets to meet his wife, who wore hijab and glasses and smiled sweetly. They pressed tea upon me and spun a web of flowery greetings until, through a thick mustache of sweat, he finally choked out the news that he was afraid to work with a Western journalist. That information came camouflaged in a forest of Arab hospitalities and salutations, and by the time I got it I had realized that the man didn’t really speak English, anyway. So I went back to the hotel and called the official in charge of foreign press to announce myself. He hadn’t been expecting me, and wasn’t entirely glad to hear of my arrival. I’d been granted a visa earlier in the month to cover the thirty-fourth anniversary of Qaddafi’s power grab, but had skipped the celebration and saved the visa for an unscheduled