Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (12 page)

We came to a ridge. “It was here,” Hussein said, his face twisted. “Here.” It was almost a bark. He bent down, hands scooping around in the sand, throwing fists of dirt, sliding over slick dunes. His fingers pored over the grains. I glanced at Raheem, but Raheem’s eyes were fixed on Hussein. Now Hussein had turned up something in the sand. He held a bullet aloft, eyes gleaming: “See? You see?

“When I got better I went to see a man whose father was killed with me,” he said, fingering the bullet. “I said to him, ‘Your father died with me.’ I thought he should know.”

Your father died with me. As if Hussein had died that night, too.

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.

T
he 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 clashing with tyrants, how bad was too bad?

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 visit. It was preferable, I
reasoned, to bump around alone than to be herded along with the other reporters, crammed into buses and ferried from one staged event to the next, frustrated and scrapping for stories. I was gambling that I could appear flustered and harmless enough to avoid getting kicked out, and it worked. The foreign press official brought me down to his office for tea, and assigned a minder to keep an eye on me. I was in Libya, and in the system.

Nobody in the world drives like Libyans. They slam the doors, turn the key in the ignition, and press the gas pedal all the way down to the floor. They shred the highways, scream through backstreets, hurtle like mad fish chased by some unseen shark. There is no middle speed. Never mind that the economy was almost dead, that nobody I met ever had anything to do. They were going nowhere at breakneck speed.

In the heat of afternoon, men lined the waterfront and stared off over the Mediterranean, clothes flapping like loose rags in the wind. Sub-Saharan immigrants crouched on roadsides, dark faces cut from bone. Behind them stretched dull, sagging market stalls, and dusk drew the fading light back out to sea. Yet the streets were gaudy with strings of light, and shop windows twinkled with sparkling party dresses. A mask of whimsy sweetened the anguish of isolation and sanctions, but there was something unsettling about it, like the beachfront high-rises somebody had erected without plumbing or electricity. The party dresses looked as if they had been copied from some other place, a land that worked, as if people had been left on their own so long, cut off from the world, that they’d started to imitate their imaginations and memories of other realities.

Nobody in Libya talks about Moammar Qaddafi. There is only the Leader, and when Libyans talk about the Leader, you hear the invisible capital letter. The Leader is a man of mysterious motives and sweeping decrees. The Leader rose to power in 1969 through a small, quiet military coup that, like all small, quiet military coups in the Arab world, is officially referred to as a “revolution.” Since then, he has luxuriated at the core of a personality cult that would make Stalin blush while his regime squashed all political back-talk with a campaign of imprisonments, torture, and disappearances.

When Qaddafi wanted to play tough, he liquidated enemies and slaughtered political prisoners. His relatives and top officials put state-sponsored terrorism to use, bombing passenger planes in midair. When he grew cranky with his “Arab brothers” and decided Libya would focus on being an African country instead, he offered a cash payout to any Libyan who would marry a black African. In a flourish of empire, he sliced his nation with a vast waterworks project, the Great Man-Made River. The Leader woke up feeling whimsical one day, and changed the names of the months. February is “flowers,” and April “bird.” September, the month in which the Leader grabbed the throne, is
fatah
, or “conquest.” When the United States invaded Iraq, he suggested Libyans dig trenches in their yards.

The Leader’s favorite color is green, and so Libya is resplendent with green. Even the Leader’s political manifesto is entitled the Green Book. The Leader also invented a name for his country: the Jamahariyah. The word is a mash of Arabic loosely translated to “ruled by the masses”; it was born in the crackle of synapses and free associations in the Leader’s mysterious mind. In truth, it means only Libya.

One fine morning in that sagging seaside city, the woman I’d come to regard as my head minder marched into the hotel. She had smooth, black hair and a youthful face, and she never allowed herself to smile at me. She shuffled me from one appointment to the next in the diligent, pained manner of a governess with a bad hangover. This morning, she announced, she was taking me to the World Center for Studies and Researches of the Green Book. This is Libya’s version of a think tank, a sun-dappled library dedicated to studying the fickle philosophies of the man who invents the country as he goes along. Every table, chair, door, and shelf glows with fresh green paint. Tucked into the shelves are copies of the Green Book translated into twenty-five languages, and scholars huddle at verdant tables to pore over every speech and proclamation Qaddafi has made, divining the direction of the country from the muddle of his words. Bars sealed the windows, and only the turning of pages broke the silence of cold, quiet rooms. Students looked up with wary frowns.

When I sat in a green den with a pair of government analysts, I was prepared for almost anything except what I heard.

“We learned how vulnerable a country like Libya can be. Everything had to be thought afresh,” one of them said. “We have a defunct system here. It is not working.”

The men went on: Libya has made mistakes. Libya is flawed. Libya has decided to reinvent itself. Libya did not understand how the world worked. Libya had been a little naive—even stupid. I was shocked.
He just called the Leader stupid.

These men were the first to tell me unequivocally that the Bush administration would soon lift sanctions against Libya. Negotiations had been going on for months, they said, and although Libya refused to acknowledge its guilt, it had agreed to pay cash to the families of victims killed on the bombed airplanes. U.S. oil firms were drooling to get back into Libyan fields, and had promised to convince Congress to vote in Libya’s favor. The Libyans were confident that the Bush administration would get its way at home. “The Americans do what they don’t say, and they don’t say what they do,” one of the men said.