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By Root 394 0

no proper nouns except Iraq and the Americans, Saddam and Bush and Blair. Waitresses plodded up behind glazed faces; sad hotel clerks stared over teeming lobbies; cashiers dropped coins into white hands with a sneer. The truth of the invasion was new and angry. It had been a suggestion that seemed impossible until, with the smooth birth of enormous news, it became real. Some faceless pilot dropped the first bomb into Baghdad and the war had come. Arab countries melted into pure rhetoric. People shouted about the Americans and spat on the ground to clear their mouths of bile. The Americans would take over all Arab lands. There was no more United Nations, no more decency, no more rules. This is terrorism! They are the terrorists! George Bush is a terrorist! The Americans wanted land and oil, they hated Muslims, and they were doing it all for Israel. This was the new face of colonialism. American power would redraw the borders. And the Arabs wouldn’t stand for it. They would fight to the bitter end, every last one, the portly man smoking in his great-grandfather’s coffee shop, the pampered middle-aged princess with her Botoxed forehead and husband’s crooked bank accounts, the calloused farmers of the Nile Delta.

Earnest aid workers rigged refugee camps in the eastern desert. They thought it would be that kind of war, that refugees would straggle out and live in tents. Everybody imagined how the war would be and set things up for the war they had conjured. But you can’t see a war before it’s happened. Those tents stood nearly empty for months, irrelevant crusts on the edge of a sinking country. The first refugees cruised into Amman in gleaming cars with smoked windows. They sweated filthy dollars, bought posh flats, and drove the price of real estate through the sky. Saddam’s daughters flounced through the beauty parlors. It was that sort of war. But in the beginning nobody knew.

Then the twitching, sand-blind city stared down the first Friday after the U.S. invasion began, and news spread: The clerics would sermonize about the evils of war, and then people would rampage in the streets. It was a useful idea, because inaction was driving everybody crazy. Maybe the government could have stopped it, but then a clever regime bends so as not to break; this is otherwise known as staying power. All that anger shouldn’t fester; it had to find release. So it would go into the streets, but only in a flash, as a quick demonstration of the travails the monarchy faced in keeping the people’s passions in check. It would show the Americans how their invasion made everything harder for this benevolent government with the pretty, plucky queen, and let the Arab brethren see that Egypt and Syria weren’t the only ones who got into a lather for the Great Arab Cause. Yes, Friday riots were the answer. Everybody had something to gain, and so did we, because the reporters were pent up and chomping for a story. Friday is the Muslim Sabbath, and everybody goes to the mosque to hear the sermons. It was a good day to whip up the crowds.

Friday came and I overslept, woke up, and called the L.A. Times translator, Nour.* She was snippy. We had never met. “I’ll be in the street with some other journalists,” she said. “You can meet me there.” I heard small children yelling in the background.

“What street?”

“Near the al-Husseini mosque.”

“What mosque?”

“Al-Husseini!”

“Where is it?”

“It’s—it’s downtown,” she sighed heavily. “The taxi drivers will know. Okay?” She hung up.

Creaking cars and tinted Mercedes and policemen jammed the streets. Koranic verses moaned from streaked windows. The taxi wove and wheedled downtown until the driver’s weary gestures indicated it would be faster to walk. As I pushed through the crowds in the shadow of dingy apartment blocks and dreary offices, I dialed and redialed Nour, hearing busy signals.

Then I saw them: a cluster of jeans-clad foreign journalists, cameras swinging from their necks, all of them clumped around a young Arab woman who chattered into her telephone as if she were alone. I planted myself in front of