To Be a Friend Is Fatal (4 page)

I was one of a small number of Caucasians who had reached an advanced level in the language. I agreed, more out of curiosity than any ambition, to be flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, to test at the NSA. In a dimly lit room in the basement of the building, I sat in a cubicle with a cassette player, headphones, a few sheets of blank paper, and a pencil on the desk before me. I listened to the cassette and translated a discussion in Arabic about a dispute between Syria and Iraq over the water rights of the Euphrates. A few weeks later, they sent a letter offering me a job as an analyst. I declined it without much thought. I hadn't studied the language to sit in a depressing government building, translating snippets of conversation between people I'd never know.

After graduating in 2002, I left for a Fulbright scholarship in Egypt to study political Islamist “pulp” writings: cheap tracts and treatises sold throughout the streets of Cairo and the Middle East. Nobody in the United States was paying much attention, but these books were the most widely read in the region, written by uneducated but earnest laymen.

I was supposed to spend the year reading and analyzing these books, but as soon as I arrived, I found myself unable to focus on anything but the imminent war in Iraq. I started moonlighting as an intern at the
New York Times
's Middle East bureau, where I translated the headlines from the Arabic newspapers each morning for the bureau chief. By the winter, the office was swelling with reporters who were coming into the region ahead of the invasion. I ran measuring tape around the heads of correspondents to order the right-sized helmets and booked their reservations at the Al-Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad. The major Arabic daily paper,
Al-Hayat
, ran a map of the region showing big arrows pointing to the probable points of invasion and listed the individual commitments made by each nation in the “Coalition of the Willing.” Iceland deployed two soldiers. Kazakhstan sent twenty-nine. Tonga contributed fifty-five.

I opposed the war on fairly simple grounds. Saddam Hussein was among the most isolated and reviled dictators on earth. Yet America's
rush to depose him triggered some of the largest antiwar protests in history and turned long-standing allies against us. If we could not convince like-minded nations of the justness of our cause, we ought to have been humble enough to reconsider the case we were making. Instead, prowar neocons grunted with crotch-grabbing tribalism: skeptics were called sissies, french fries were renamed, and the country backed itself into war.

Many of my friends and professors who had opposed the war were horrified when I told them I wanted to go to Iraq. They believed that no good fruit could spring from a rotten tree, but I felt that despite the unjust rationale for the war, it was unethical to ignore the just and critical efforts to rebuild the country. I was also sick of relying solely upon other sources like newspapers and think-tank denizens to decipher what was happening.

Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, I read an article about the US government's woeful lack of Arabic-speakers in Iraq. I thought I might be able to contribute something and began to apply for jobs in the nascent reconstruction effort. Although I had seven years of Arabic studies behind me, nobody called back: the first year of the war was staffed by the true believers, and my
New York Times
internship likely flagged my résumé in an unfavorable way. And so I waited.

Years of War

Y
aghdan was born into a year of violence, and since 1977, there has been a year of war for each year of peace. Years of peace are used to prepare for more war. On September 8, 1977, his mother delivered him in the Elwia Hospital near their home in Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood on the west bank of the Tigris in central Baghdad.

He was an infant during one of the first major Shi'a uprisings in modern Iraq. The ruling Sunni Ba'ath Party was caught off guard when the Shi'a rioted during their annual
Ashura
procession from Najaf to Karbala'. Thirty thousand Shi'ites protested against their marginalization in the Iraqi government. The response was brutal: more than two thousand were arrested, including many senior Shi'a clerics. A special court sentenced eight clerics to death and imprisoned others. Remaining Shi'a leaders fled, not to return for twenty-five years, among them future prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

As Yaghdan was learning to speak, Saddam Hussein, already the de facto leader of Iraq with President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr ailing, formalized his authority with a brutal flourish. On July 22, 1979, he assembled the Ba'ath Party leadership and ordered a camera to record the reading of a list of sixty-eight traitors. Soldiers dragged each man from the room after his name was read; it is rumored that the shots of execution were heard inside the hall. A year later, Hussein began an eight-year war with Iran, a conflict that ranks among the most blood-soaked
offered up by the twentieth century. When Yaghdan was in first grade, the sirens wailed whenever Iranian fighter pilots raced in low and fast to bomb Baghdad.

His father hailed from Najaf, where most of the extended family still lived. He was a primary school teacher but took advanced degrees in child psychology and was eventually drafted into the Iraqi Ministry of Education in Baghdad to develop curricula. He was not an ideologue, and his coolness toward Ba'ath Party machinations was noticed by both his supervisors and subordinates. As the war intensified, when Yaghdan was seven and obsessed with English-language cartoons like
Tom and Jerry
and
Casper the Friendly Ghost
, party members regularly dropped by the home in search of his father, hoping to conscript him into the Jaysh al-Sha'abi, the Popular Army. They wanted to send him to the front lines, where bodies piled and lethal gas clouded, but his dad managed to evade them until the war's end.

Mired in a resource-draining war, Iraq's infrastructure—refineries, power plants, water treatment centers, dams, and roads—grew brittle, along with the public's tolerance for Saddam Hussein's rule. Saddam wanted new and better technology and reoriented Iraq away from the Soviet bloc and toward the West, particularly America. He invited US firms like Bechtel to carry out massive infrastructure projects to solidify relations with the West, which gladly threw its support behind him as a check against the Iranian revolutionary government.

And then there was no more war with Iran. Eight of the first ten years of Yaghdan's life had been punctured by missile fire. On 8-8-88, the date of the cease-fire, Iraqis pooled into the streets to celebrate. He was in sixth grade. No longer would the futile war suck the youth from the cities and the men from their families. But the triumphant monuments to war that Saddam erected throughout the country were not enough to obscure the true cost: at least one hundred thousand dead, three hundred thousand wounded, and a material loss to the nation's coffers of a staggering $435 billion, a significant portion of which was bankrolled by Kuwait.

Two years and a month passed before Saddam reignited the engine of war. The Kuwaiti government had refused to forgive the debt, so the Iraqis invaded and took more from them. Cars were driven north, gold
seized, the nation looted, and, in twenty-four hours, Kuwait became Iraq's nineteenth province. Though driven by economic desperation, the war—more an aftershock—was presented to the Iraqi people as a form of anticolonial justice. The British had carved out Kuwait from its rightful place in Iraq, and now Saddam aimed to take it back.

The West recoiled, and a coalition was formed. American troops were loaded onto airplanes and ships, and within six months more than half a million troops were positioned for war.

On January 16, 1991, America started a six-week program of bombardment in advance of ground troops. Once Iraqi military targets were destroyed, the United States targeted the nation's infrastructure, hitting power plants, water, and roads, and setting back industrial production to levels last seen in the 1960s. Gone to rubble went the Bechtel projects and others carried out by the West only a few years earlier. One senior administration official admitted that the targeting of key infrastructure—bombing seven of Iraq's eight dams to ruin access to clean water, for example—was a deliberate plan to increase “postwar leverage.” Potable water vanished with the power, and access to food became unreliable. Disease spread, and sewage flowed untreated.

The tide of Iraqi soldiers receded from Kuwait nearly as quickly as it had flooded in. On February 15, George H. W. Bush addressed the Iraqi public on Voice of America: “There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: and that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside, and then comply with the United Nations's resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.” A CIA-funded radio station in Saudi Arabia, Voice of Free Iraq, reinforced this message by broadcasting a speech from a high-ranking defector in the Iraqi military: “Rise to save the homeland from the clutches of dictatorship so that you can devote yourself to avoid the dangers of the continuation of the war and destruction. Honorable sons of the Tigris and Euphrates, at these decisive moments of your life, and while facing the danger of death at the hands of foreign forces, you have no option in order to survive and defend the homeland but to put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang.”

The Shi'a community again rose up, believing that the American
president would support it. Cities throughout the south—Najaf, Karbala', Basrah—soon fell to local rebels, but Saddam was prepared, maintaining his Republican Guard for such scenarios. “
La shi'a ba'd al-yawm
”—“No more Shi'a after today”—was spray-painted onto the side of their tanks.

Within weeks, the rebels were crushed. Fifty thousand Shi'a refugees fled to Saudi Arabia, others to Iran, and still others to the swampy marshlands in the south of Iraq. In the north, the Kurds also revolted, but retaliation was swift and complete. Hundreds of thousands fled across the border into Turkey and Iran, blistering with a feeling that the American president had just turned his back on the uprising he had encouraged.

After the rebels had been turned into refugees, the UN passed a Security Council resolution creating no-fly zones in the north and south, but tens of thousands were already dead.

Sanctions were imposed in order to extract good behavior from Saddam. Before Iraq would be permitted to import freely, Saddam would have to repay the Kuwaitis, give up his missile capacity and weapons of mass destruction, and cease the repression of his citizens.

And so the economic siege of Iraq began, when Yaghdan was thirteen.

Following his previous wars, Saddam had drilled money from the deep pools of oil below Iraq's blood-soaked crust to clear the rubble and repair infrastructure. After the Gulf War, though, the international community declared Iraqi oil off-limits and banned the importation of chlorine, vaccines, tractors, fertilizer, and anything else that could be converted to military ends. Pepsi was banned, wheat and sugar imports cut. The sanctions committee found danger in the most quotidian needs: a pencil has lead, lead can be used for war, and so pencils were banned. In one of the more ostentatious breaches of the embargo, a convoy of Jordanian trucks sped across the border to ferry millions of pencils into Iraq.

If Saddam could be prevented from rebuilding, the Americans argued, his country would turn on him. The more that Iraqi civilians
were deprived of basic services, the greater the loss to the legitimacy of his rule, and the more leverage the United States would have in its dealings with him. It was a simple equation.

The drop in oil production—85 percent, by most accounts—meant that the Iraqi government had less money to import food. Although Iraq was the land of two rivers, it could not feed itself, unable to coax enough food from its soil when its tractors were broken and pesticides and fertilizer were illegal.

A humanitarian crisis developed. The infant mortality rate doubled, due in large part to the proliferation of disease caused by untreated water, a result of the ban on chlorine (which could be used to make explosives). When, in the mid-1990s, the
New York Times
reported that as many as five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of the harsh sanctions, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told
60 Minutes,
“The price is worth it.”

He had known Haifa only as a friend and classmate from the Physics Department at Baghdad's Mustansiriyah University. Yaghdan hadn't seen her since their graduation two years earlier, but when he bumped into her at a mutual friend's lecture in the summer of 2002, he saw the woman he wanted to marry. He was twenty-five.

Yaghdan had opened a small shop on Sina'a Street with a partner. They sold computers, monitors, and software and repaired broken computers brought into the store, which was just across the street from Al-Technologia University in eastern Baghdad. Business was good, despite the economic throes of his country.

Yaghdan hired Haifa at the shop so that they would have an excuse to be near each other, and their love unfolded steadily over the fall and into the winter, oblivious to the revving sounds of war. They saw no pictures of troops massing at their border and heard no speeches from George W. Bush. The United States had threatened Iraq with war on countless occasions, Yaghdan figured, so if a war came at all, it would probably start and end with a couple cruise missiles and another bombed-out military installation.

Two days before the invasion, they were in the store, taking coffee breaks, making dinner plans with friends. Haifa's father had heard enough rumors down south in Karbala' to be convinced, though, and pleaded with his daughter to leave Baghdad. She laughed and said, “There is no war! Are you kidding?”