Back to Baghdad

1.

Ali was going to kill me.

I lurched to my feet, groping for my glasses, as a vision flared across the dark: Around six the next evening, I go up the Mansour Mall’s four flights of escalators to the food court, passing on my way glitzy Western-style clothing shops and overpriced Chinese tech stores. The food court is packed, as Meethaq had told me it would be, and I scan the crowds of young Iraqis and Baghdadi families for his face. Meethaq’s going to introduce me to his friend Ali, who worked as a terp for the Americans during the war.

The skin on my neck prickles—I want to leave but I go on, pulled in, anxious but incapable of doing anything different. I pass through segregated clusters of twenty-somethings, the men together in leather-fringed blue jeans, with manicured stubble and faux-hawks, the women on their own, keeping nominal hijab in elaborate colored scarves and high-heeled shoes. People are talking all around me, but their conversations are drowned out by a rising ringing and beating in my ears.

Somewhere between Burger Queen and Pizzarro’s I stop and turn. There he is. I don’t know his face, but he knows mine from the cell-phone picture Meethaq took, and I see the recognition in his eyes as he steps toward me, smiling, one hand reaching for mine, the other reaching in his jacket for the trigger to his explosive belt.

“Allahu akbar,” he says, and turns the world to fire.

As I sat in my Baghdad hotel room in the dark, hours yet from dawn, all the pieces slid into place. First, the location. Mansour Mall had good security, but I was sure that if somebody wanted to sneak in a PBIED (personally borne improvised explosive device), they’d be able to. There had to be at least one service entrance, and there was no way they were checking every box of merchandise that came into the mall. More important, the Mansour Mall was Baghdad’s biggest and most modern shopping center. Opened a year before, in 2013, it was a beacon of global commerce. All sorts of consumer goods gleamed under the relentless lighting, from Xboxes to Timberland shoes to Versace purses. The top floor housed Baghdad’s most modern movie theater, showing Transcendence and Captain America: Winter Soldier. Young men and women gathered, browsed, and even mingled, out from under the watchful eye of parents and religious authorities.

For the extremists in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the al Qaeda–spawned movement that had been sending suicide bombers into Baghdad and had, in January, conquered Fallujah and most of Ramadi, Mansour Mall would be a symbol of both Western influence and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s national leadership. It would therefore be a perfect target for an attack three days before Iraq’s upcoming national elections, the first since the Americans had left in 2011. Even a small PBIED in the crowded food court could kill dozens. And all the better for ISIS if one of them was an American journalist and a former US soldier.

Second, there was Meethaq. I wanted to believe his passionate hope for Iraq’s future, his heartfelt patriotism, and his hospitality, but something—perhaps these very qualities—didn’t compute. Meethaq studied at the Iraqi Foreign Service Institute, training to be a diplomat. He’d met me the day before in a charcoal gray suit and a conservative striped tie, and we’d had an awkward but friendly conversation over Diet Pepsis in the food court. He was thirty-one, had studied at the Osaka School for International Public Policy in 2008 and 2009, and before entering the Foreign Service Institute had worked three years at the Japanese Embassy. You wouldn’t think, observing his calm, professional demeanor, that he’d spent most of his adulthood negotiating life under a foreign occupation, that his college years had been interrupted by an invasion, or that the two years after graduating college, during the sectarian civil war, had been so painful and difficult that he refused to talk about them.

Meethaq seemed representative of the educated Sunni upper middle class that had before 2003 formed Iraq’s political and cultural elite. I expected him to be pessimistic, resentful, and grim, given that he was an intelligent young man who, as a Sunni, would have seen privilege turn into prejudice, and who lived in a failing state under increasingly autocratic rule, with dim prospects ahead and two decades of bad blood behind. Instead, Meethaq expressed earnest ambitions for his country: a fervent faith in Iraq’s potential as a developing economy and a viable democracy. Although his hair was prematurely gray and his face serious beyond his years, when he talked about the future, his eyes shone.

“We’re a new generation,” he told me. “We can make the change. Iraq has suffered for thirty years, and that has closed people off from one another. As a new generation, we can make the reforms our country needs. We want to say to the world that Iraq is a new country. It has a new government. Iraq is a free country. Iraq is peaceful . . . The media has created this false perception of Iraq and of Arab countries. We’re not extremists. We welcome everybody, from any nation. We’re open to others. We don’t want to be apart from other countries. We want to change this reality . . . I remember, Mr. Obama said, ‘We can do it.’ So we can do it. Why not? This is our message to the world.”

It was hard, listening to Meethaq roll off numbers for oil revenue, describe strategy points for positive change, and articulate the need for sectarian and regional cooperation, to not be swept along in his progressive dream. I could imagine a coalition government defeating incumbent Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law party in the elections on April 30, bringing peace to Anbar, investing oil money in public infrastructure and education, and opening Iraq to intercultural exchange. As I looked around at the gathering crowds at the Mansour Mall, in a food court that could be anywhere in the capitalist world, Meethaq’s hopes seemed not only possible, but plausible.

This was a very different Iraq from the one I’d known as a private in the US Army ten years before, although I remembered a lot of hope then, too. But the closest thing I saw to the Mansour Mall in 2004 had been an open-air market in the Green Zone where vendors sold watches bearing Saddam’s face and little kids hawked ficky-ficky DVDs. Back then, I never talked to anyone like Meethaq, although odds were good we stopped people like him at checkpoints and forced cars full of people like him out of the way of our convoy. The only Iraqis I talked to back in 2003 and 2004 were day laborers who helped us recover abandoned munitions, a few terps we worked with, and a handful of soldiers and police who pulled gate guard with my unit at FOB Falcon.

I had gotten Meethaq’s email address secondhand, from a sociologist who did research on interpreters. I had written Meethaq describing my project, asking if we could talk, and also asking if he knew any Iraqis in Baghdad who’d worked as terps for the US during the war. He was among some dozen or so Iraqis I reached out to before arriving, most of whom seemed cagey at first, unwilling to put their trust too easily in an American journalist. Meethaq, however, was enthusiastic to meet me; he was my first appointment, on my first full day in country. It seemed like a good omen that the first place I’d go in Baghdad would be the mall.

My pitch for the story had been straightforward: Send me back to Iraq. The fall of Fallujah to ISIS in January 2014 had shocked a lot of American veterans and provoked a lot of soul-searching. As Iraq slid into a new civil war, it became harder and harder to make sense of our sacrifices there. For most Americans, that sacrifice had been something distant and abstract: po-faced ceremonies, jingoistic action films, sentimental commercials for real estate and insurance. For myself and my fellow veterans, though, that sacrifice was personal, gut-deep, concrete. Many of us had lost friends, brothers, sisters, parts of ourselves, and parts of our souls in the eight-year-long mess called Operation Iraqi Freedom. The names in the news that winter—Fallujah, Ramadi, Abu Ghraib, Mosul—resonated deeply with American soldiers and marines, triggering memories of fear, violence, and loss, calling up complex feelings of pride and sorrow. To see an al Qaeda splinter group take over a third of Iraq, with daily life there wracked once again by terrorist violence, while the central government fell increasingly under the control of a corrupt and brutal ruler, was to see the props holding up one’s sense of honorable service fall away. It meant having to give up the fragile illusion that we might have done some good in Iraq. It meant having to let go of the tenuous belief that we had left the country stable, democratic, and better off. Most troubling of all, it meant having to confront the possibility that we didn’t just leave Iraq, we lost Iraq.

Of course, that depends on what you mean by lost. And with the enfeebled state of the American news media today, especially when it comes to international coverage, it was all but impossible to get a sense of what was actually happening on the ground. It seemed that Iraq was nothing but explosions and death, but was it really that bad? Surely there was another side to the story. And what about the upcoming election, Iraq’s first real independent parliamentary vote since the 1950s, when the country had been a constitutional monarchy untangling itself from the grip of British colonial rule? Was it free? Was it fair? What would happen? What would it mean?

Thus I found myself, ten years after flying out of Baghdad International Airport on a US Air Force C-130, flying back in on a Royal Jordanian A320, sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, nervous, and feeling trapped.

I had seriously considered bolting during my layover in Amman, just not getting on the plane, giving up the whole trip. Why was I risking my life again? For what? And what the fuck did I think I was doing? I didn’t know anybody in Baghdad, just the translator and driver I’d hired; I didn’t have any idea of how to be a “foreign correspondent”; I didn’t speak any Arabic; I had no insurance, no security team, no backup, and no idea what would happen if I got kidnapped or injured. Meanwhile, Iraq was being torn apart by the most intense violence it had seen in years. Nearly three thousand people had died since January 1, 2014, on top of almost nine thousand killed in 2013, in a rising tide of political murders and suicide attacks. Residents of Baghdad were enduring several car-bomb attacks a week, and the Karrada neighborhood—where I’d gotten my hotel—was a special target, since it happened to be home to many of Iraq’s new Shiite elite.

The good news was that most of the violence was limited to just such car bombs, or to fighting between the Iraqi Army and ISIS, outside the city in Anbar and Diyala provinces. Getting killed in Baghdad these days was largely a matter of bad luck. This was a far better situation than the worst years of the civil war, between 2005 and 2008, when on top of IEDs and VBIEDs going off regularly, kidnappings and street assassinations were common occurrences, gun battles between militias and the US Army were an everyday affair, and Westerners were targeted specifically. As I forced myself to line up for my flight from Amman to Baghdad, I kept reminding myself that I would be safer there today than I had been in 2003 and 2004, when the US Army fought sporadic battles with Baathist holdouts, disgruntled locals, and foreign insurgents. Although being a soldier had meant I had armor, a rifle, and twenty heavy dudes backing me up, it also meant I was a target. This time, I wouldn’t have the firepower or the backup, but at the same time I wouldn’t be a walking symbol of colonialist oppression. Or not as blatantly, anyway. I was still the only palefaced motherfucker on the flight.

We landed a few hours later. The familiar scent of Baghdad hit me as soon as I stepped off the plane: Oil, diesel smog, and a whiff of sulfur. Late at night and early in the morning, when the air is cleanest, this is what Baghdad smells like. As the day goes on, the odor thickens and turns metallic, until darkness falls and the fires start, filling the air with a pungent mélange of kebab and melted plastic. When I was here ten years ago, the smell was mixed with the stench of corpses.

A week before, I’d been in a seminar room at Princeton, talking with my students about the Cold War, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Whitney Houston’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The campus outside softly exhaled magnolia.

My driver, Ahmed, was to meet me at the parking lot at the edge of the airport. The cabbie at the terminal told me it’d cost $35 to get out there, then $40, then $45, then $50, the fare changing in as much time as it took him to figure out I was an easy mark. Rolling out to the parking lot on the road we used to call Talladega, I saw the cluster of dull, squat buildings that once marked the American command center at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport): the mayor’s cell, Hotel California, the PX. Once upon a time, for me, these unremarkable administrative offices and warehouses had been my closest connection to home. Now they were just random airport infrastructure. Bob Hope DFAC (dining facility) was gone, and so were the hundreds of tents that had housed transient units. We passed the backside of the warehouse where I’d lived with three hundred other men, then our motor pool, the small mosque that had always been off limits, and the area where I used to go jogging when I needed some time alone, a verdant maze of palms and ponds where the Rangers kept their hooches.

In the parking lot, I met Ahmed. I had worried, before coming, about who this guy was, since I would be trusting him with my life, and it had been impossible to tell anything about him from his brief and cryptic emails. When I saw him rise up out of his white Kia, though, a barrel-bellied, patient man with a canny smile, I knew I’d be in good hands.

As we left the airport, it seemed beyond believable that we were driving out into hostile territory, at night, with no protection. We passed the winged statue marking the airport entrance, which in 2003–4 had represented the edge of friendly territory and the beginning of the “red zone,” Indian Country. We would lock and load as we passed beneath the statue’s wings. I came to think of it as the angel Jehovah had sent to guard, with a fiery sword, the gates of Eden.

To see a place that has become mythical to you changed is to see it diminished. Yet at the same time as the myth diminished in scale, it became human again, and mine. It was just a place, my memories just memories. The stories I’d turned the place into, the impressions that had escaped the realm of self and come back at me like fables from a distant land, fell to earth. They were only mine, and nothing more. The place, BIAP, Baghdad . . . it had gone on without me, and my memories hadn’t touched it. Everything was coming loose.

It wasn’t hostile territory anymore, it wasn’t Indian Country. It was just a city. But while I knew that in my head, my body remembered the bad old days. The smells, sights, and feel of Baghdad activated all my old alert mechanisms, the danger focus, the threat assessment matrix. Not knowing what the threats were, or where they came from, I skipped status yellow and went straight to full-on freak-out. Everything was a potential threat. Would the hotel clerk sell me out to ISIS? Would somebody launch an RPG at my room? Was I being followed?

When I met Meethaq at the mall the next day for my first interview in country, after a restless, jet-lagged night, he was vague about which floor to meet on, then late, and, when he finally arrived, sweating and nervous. I found his earnestness difficult to credit and his assertions of goodwill excessive. He was working very hard to get me to trust him, which didn’t make any sense. What did he want from me? Who was he? What was I doing here? I couldn’t shake the sense that Meethaq was hiding something, and I was puzzled by his idealism. Nevertheless, I had a story to report, so we made plans to meet at the mall again the next evening, when he would bring his friend Ali with him. Ali had been an interpreter for the US Army, and I wanted to ask him about his memories of those days and what he thought now about the legacy of the American occupation in Iraq.

When I woke in the middle of the night, I knew he wanted to kill me. That’s why he wanted to meet back at the mall, at six, when the food court would be packed. That’s why he took my picture, so the bomber could identify me. It explained him asking me if I’d told the American embassy I was there. It explained a thousand inexplicable details, things he’d said or not said, his strange manner, his self-contradictions, the way he refused to talk about what he’d been doing in Amiriya in 2006 and 2007. The way he’d assured me the mall was totally secure, I wouldn’t be targeted there, it was completely safe.

Nowhere was safe. The day I’d arrived, ISIS extremists had hit a campaign rally in northern Baghdad with three separate bombs, killing thirty people and wounding many more. Thaier Al-Sudani, a photographer for Reuters, captured incredible photos of the bombing: giant balls of orange light, dust, and shrapnel. These images seized my mind in the dark of my hotel room, as I came to see the danger I had put myself in. I remembered I’d told Meethaq the name of my hotel—of course I’d have to move, now. I also needed to email Rolling Stone and have them advance me some expense money. If things went sideways, I would need to get out quick, and that would take cash.

While I’d been talking with Meethaq and then driving around Baladiyat, a car bomb had gone off in al-Nasir and there’d been a drive-by in al-Amil. Nine bodies, riddled with bullets, had been found in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya. Meanwhile, the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had called upon his followers to kidnap Western journalists. The campaign-rally bombing was obviously just the beginning. I knew with absolute certainty that if I went to Mansour Mall again, it would be the last thing I ever did.

2.

At the American Embassy the next morning, over coffee and cookies, one of the first questions Jane Arraf asked the US ambassador was about the rise of Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Jane was an old Baghdad hand, having covered the region since 1991. Utterly charming, sparky, petite, funny, and brimming with sympathetic curiosity, she’d been covering the Asaib Ahl al-Haq rally in Baladiyat for Al Jazeera English on Friday when the three massive bombs had gone off. When she started snapping photos, an armed guard grabbed her camera and smashed it, screaming at her, “Why are you taking pictures?”

“Because we’re journalists,” she’d shouted back.

Jane’s question to the ambassador about Asaib Ahl al-Haq seemed important. During the last few years of the US occupation, General Ray Odierno had considered Asaib Ahl al-Haq the most dangerous Shiite militia in Baghdad. Its name means “League of the Righteous,” and the group was known for its brutal history of kidnappings, assassinations, and torture, as well as for its strong ties to Iran’s elite Quds Force. But Asaib Ahl al-Haq didn’t just have ties with Iran. When the group’s leader, Qais al-Khazali, was captured after staging a raid on a US military base in Karbala that killed five soldiers, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki protested his detainment and later negotiated his release as part of a cease-fire deal. In exchange, Asaib Ahl al-Haq turned over a British contractor it had held since May 2007, along with the corpses of four of his co-workers. Nearly as soon as Qais was released, however, al-Haq broke the cease-fire and kidnapped an Iraqi-American contractor working for the US Department of Defense, whom it exchanged for four more al-Haq prisoners held by the Iraqi government. Since 2011, Asaib Ahl al-Haq had gone legit, adding a political arm to its militia, which over the last few years had begun fighting alongside the Iraqi army in Anbar and Diyala and sending men to the civil war in Syria. Its campaign posters, plastered all over Baghdad, were readily identifiable by the faces of the armed martyrs who looked down from them.

The group represented the militant wing of Baghdad’s energetic Shiite political majority, which comprised several rival factions. The main parties competing in the election were Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law coalition, centered around the Shiite nationalist Dawa Party; the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, or ISCI, joining very conservative Islamist cultural politics with a technocratic appeal to middle-class stability, backed up by its bloody-handed Badr Brigades; and Muqtada al-Sadr’s populist Al-Ahrar bloc, appealing most explicitly to poor Shiia in Baghdad’s slums and the rural south.

These were only the most prominent of the 107 “political entities” and coalitions representing 9,964 candidates competing for 328 seats in the national election. Most of them I’d never heard of, and it was difficult keeping track of even the two dozen most important. Iraqi national politics was a bewildering congeries of politicians, coalitions, outsiders, proxies, and allegiances: in addition to the thousands of candidates, every major regional player had interests and influences, especially Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey; there were five major Shiia clerics involved, whose fatwas could send voters running from one candidate to another; Russian and Chinese oil companies had a stake in securing their investments in the south; Kurdistan, as a semi-autonomous state, had its own politics, and would act as a powerful arbiter of national leadership; the government itself, almost entirely under Maliki’s control, functioned nearly as its own political party; and the country was in the midst of a civil war that was its own hornet’s nest of allegiances and proxies, involving Sunni tribal leaders, the Sahwa militias that had worked with the US in 2008, al Qaeda, ISIS, and factions from the Syrian civil war, which wasn’t, in truth, a completely distinct conflict. Finally, and not least, Uncle Sam was involved—although merely, of course, as a disinterested observer.

When I’d heard that the US Ambassador to Iraq would be giving a “deep backgrounder” to Western journalists on Sunday morning, I jumped at the chance. Not only would it make it possible for me to go into the Green Zone and see the US Embassy, otherwise a challenging prospect, but it would give me the opportunity to hear the official US position on the election, see the Baghdad press corps in action, and maybe come to understand the complexities of Iraqi politics a little better. That I’d never talked with a US ambassador before or been to “a deep backgrounder” didn’t really concern me. I was more worried about managing the nagging certainty that I was going to die at the Mansour Mall later that evening. My fear gave the day a buzzsaw edge and turned everything a little desperate, even the imperial bonhomie at the US Embassy and the relaxed intensity of the four journalists who showed up for the briefing.

I’d expected a crowd and had planned on being to be able to fade into it. Instead, I found myself cozily seated across the table from US Ambassador Robert S. Beecroft. On my left was Tim Arango, from the New York Times, who with his scruffy beard, disheveled hair, and sleepy manner wouldn’t have been out of place at a hipster party in Brooklyn. Prashant Rao, AFP bureau chief, was on my right. Jane, sitting next to him, complimented him on his new jacket, and everyone wanted to know about his fancy recording pen. On Jane’s far side sat newly appointed Reuters bureau chief Ned Parker, wearing a baseball cap. Beyond Ned were the embassy press attaché and the head of Public Affairs.

The journalists I found myself among were every one of them experts on the region, serious reporters with long careers covering Iraq and the Middle East for major outlets. Their talk was all inside baseball, professional shorthand, and old histories. They were there to get into the nitty gritty on Iraq’s first postoccupation election, which Arraf suggested was Iraq’s “weirdest” election yet.

I was no journalist, no regional expert—this was precisely the second time I’d been to the Middle East in my life. I was a PhD candidate in English at Princeton, working on a dissertation about the politics of sacrifice in American literature about World War II. I was supposed to be working on a chapter about silence and community in the poetry of Kenneth Koch and George Oppen. My only training for all this was having once read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Sitting in the US embassy in Baghdad didn’t make any goddamn sense.

It made some sense, actually. Since getting out of the army, I’d published a few articles and essays about my experience in Iraq and as a veteran, most notably a five-part series in the New York Times. I started going to a writing group for veterans at NYU, where I met people who would become close friends, some of whom would go on to become successful writers. It was there that Jacob Siegel, Phil Klay, Perry O’Brien, and I decided together to produce an anthology of veterans’ fiction, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (we brought Matt Gallagher on board later).

With the publication of Fire and Forget, I found myself, disconcertingly, one of the central players in an emerging scene: the veteran-writer racket. There was money to be made talking vet (not a lot, but some), a certain celebrity to be won, and a lot of support and respect from audiences, especially if you suggested you had PTSD. But the best part was that you got to keep being special.

The problem with being a veteran is that the aura you have coming home fades as soon as you do something else. Once you stop making your identity all about the war, you lose your connection to world-historical events. People quit asking you to explain the nature of human suffering, international politics, and the essence of truth. You lose your moral authority. It’s hard to let that go, of course, and the best way to keep the aura shining is to keep reminding people that you’re a veteran. Keep reminding them that you saw or did some fucked-up shit, maybe you had nightmares, maybe you lost a friend. Keep reminding them that you have something they don’t, and keep reminding them that it’s something you only get for going. For many of us, the military was the most intense experience we’d ever had, and it offered the most trustworthy form of social validation we’d ever achieved. We were veterans. And for a shiny dime, we’d sell you our story.

Four months earlier, in the icy dregs of January, I’d been deep into my fifth beer with Matt Gallagher at Pete’s Candy Store, a neighborly bar on the border between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, when it came to me I had to get out of the scene. Matt was dishing over his Guinness about who’d been sleeping with whom (small gossip in the vet writer community), speculating as to whether or not a writer we knew worked for the CIA, and complaining about how some of the younger vet writers seemed merely ambitious, merely hungry for fame, and seemed not to care about literary craft or the truth of experience. Matt, a waggish, pallid Irishman with perpetually uncombed black hair, had recently been interviewed in his Brooklyn apartment by CBS. They’d knocked on his door after the fall of Fallujah and wanted him to tell them what it meant. Did it change how you thought about our sacrifice? Had our soldiers died in vain?

We’d been at Pete’s for an event I had organized, the fourth annual “Bringing the War to Brooklyn” reading. The first time, we’d done it just to give ourselves a chance to read. Since then, I’d worked to find fresh voices. Our reading that night had featured a young poet from New Jersey, a former marine named Johnson Wiley; an MFA fiction student at Columbia who also happened to be a West Point grad with six years in the army, Ravi Venkataramani; and a female National Guard captain, journalist, and blogger, Kristen Rouse. We’d filled the room with fellow veteran writers and friends, including a literature professor from West Point who blogs about contemporary war lit, an anthropologist at the New School who works on resilience and PTSD, and Meehan Crist, a science writer. The reading had gone well, response was good, and everybody had a fine time. After the event, several of us hung around drinking, trading stories, then brainstorming strategies on how I should handle going back to Baghdad. Matt thought I definitely needed to bring a handgun. I wasn’t so sure. Meehan seemed delighted by the conversation: while the streets outside were thick with ice-crusted snow, here we were huddled in a hipster bar arguing about whether or not I needed to pack heat in Iraq.

It was only later, after everyone had left Matt and me to our cups, that the evening took on a sour taste. I had never wanted to be a professional veteran. I had wanted to use my experience, certainly, turn my war into a kind of cultural capital, an investment in my writing career just as the GI Bill was an investment in my education. If I had a special experience, a unique point of view, then people would listen. Some writers get their break because they were drug addicts or because their mom died of cancer. Publishing is a bleak, degrading hustle, like most hustles in this economy, and you sell the story you have. So okay, I’d hustle, flipping the “authenticity” of my war for a chance to keep writing. And it worked. I published an anthology. I did a book tour. I was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

But it wasn’t all just hustle. In the early days, when there were only a few of us, it felt like we were genuinely exploring new territory. Iraq and Afghanistan were different from the Persian Gulf War, Vietnam, and World War II, and it was up to us to see how, to understand in what ways the experience differed, to figure out how the world had changed and, in changing, had changed us. As well, we happy few—at least those I knew and talked with—operated under a trust that we would keep each other honest. Our time overseas and in the military was still raw. Even as we were pulled by the expectations of civilian readers toward satisfying lies and drawn by the influences of literary convention toward familiar fables, we could check each other and remind each other of the ways our experiences had belied those expectations and conventions. Finally, there was a profound shared desire for knowledge, maybe even wisdom. We wanted to make sense of our experience. We wanted to understand. Sure, we were ambitious. Of course we wanted to succeed. But the conditions for success weren’t just worldly acclaim and a publishing contract: we wanted to learn something about what our experience was, how the world worked, and who we were.

All that was gone now. The focus shifted over time from trying to plumb the depths of experience to something else: trying to convey something to audiences, trying to relate something you knew to something they knew, trying to make a connection. As we’d gone on, we’d created our own set of conventions and expectations, shorthand tropes and easy frames that dulled questions and blurred complexity, because that’s what’s necessary for translating lived reality into language other people can comprehend. What I realized talking with Matt in Pete’s Candy Store, over my last beer of the night, was that I had long ago stopped learning anything new about my war. I had gone from being someone who asked what it meant to being someone who explained what it was like.

The truth is, I’d always been ambivalent about being a veteran. On the one hand, I was proud of my service. I’d done something difficult that few Americans show the courage or wherewithal to do, and I’d come out stronger for it. My year in Iraq with the First Armored Division was spent mainly on two kinds of missions: For the first six months of our tour, in 2003, we picked up artillery rounds all over Baghdad. We kept Iraqi kids from blowing themselves up and denied insurgents weapons. For the next six months, I drove a Humvee around a Sunni neighborhood in south Baghdad called Dora, and then down the highway from Baghdad to Karbala and Najaf, looking for roadside bombs and snipers.

On the other hand, the war was the most dehumanizing experience of my life. Inside the wire, we lived like prisoners, staring at the same walls and the same faces, lifting weights, watching DVDs, killing time until we got to go back home. Outside the wire, we moved in an alien, hostile world luminous with adrenaline and danger. Over time, as we were shot at, mortared, and sometimes blown up, fear and rage built up in us like toxins, until we were praying for reasons to shoot—but not people, mind you, just fucking hadjis. We harassed and intimidated hadjis on the street. We humiliated hadjis in their homes. We ran hadji cars off the road when they got in our way. We locked hadjis up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of us did worse. Some of us did a lot worse.

Meanwhile, the war itself never made any sense. Like many veterans, when it came to my role, I relied on a rhetoric of professionalism and camaraderie and a narrow focus on personal experience to help me ignore heavy questions about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Later, I let the relative peace following America’s 2011 withdrawal confirm the official narrative: we had made mistakes, but the surge had worked, and we’d left Iraq a functioning democracy. I had my doubts, but it was a story I wanted to believe. Over time, I took up a mantra of comforting phrases that numbed those doubts and fuzzed out my connection to the big picture:

“I’m proud of my service, but it’s complicated.”

“I did the best I could in a bad situation.”

“The war was fucked, but I did my job.”

After Fallujah fell, though, I found myself beginning to think that either we hadn’t, in fact, done our job, or that the job we’d actually been sent to do was so reprehensible that even if we were successful, there was no way I’d want to claim it. What if the US military hadn’t been sent to Iraq to create a democracy, stabilize a failed state, or even establish a bastion of secular capitalism in the Middle East, as we’d been repeatedly told, but rather to oversee the sectarian partition of a sovereign nation, install a weak authoritarian ruler whose regime would be justified by carefully stage-managed elections, and turn Iraq into a cockpit for regional sectarian and political bloodletting? What if the main US interest wasn’t regional stability but rather regional instability, with just enough infrastructure in place to keep oil flowing out and American-made weapons flowing in? This was undoubtedly what US policy had accomplished, through countless deliberate decisions over many years, and what if it hadn’t been a mistake—what if it had been intended?

I couldn’t ask Ambassador Beecroft to verify an American policy of divide and rule, but I decided I could ask him to square America’s promise of democracy in Iraq with what looked like its support for a developing autocracy. Nouri al-Maliki had been picked by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to succeed elected Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in 2006, after Khalilzad had orchestrated Jaafari’s ouster. Then, in 2010, Maliki lost the election to Ayad Allawi, but, with US support and the threat of violence, managed to hang on to power. Over the years since, Maliki had worked to bring the organs of state power under his direct control. Now, he controlled the most important ministries, the judiciary, the military, and the police. He ignored parliament when it went against him. He tortured and assassinated his rivals. He had banned Al Jazeera and the Iraqi TV station Baghdadiya from broadcasting or reporting in Baghdad. He ruled over one of the most corrupt governments in the world and had been manipulating the conditions for the current election for months. The Supreme Court, alleged to be acting at his behest, struck down a law passed by parliament that would have limited the prime minister to two terms. The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC)—the supposedly independent body that manages and monitors elections in Iraq—was widely held to be staffed by Maliki loyalists and showed its colors by disqualifying numerous opposition candidates because of alleged Baathist connections. Another win for Maliki seemed like a defeat for real democracy in Iraq. Was this what we had fought for?

“I have what may seem like an unfair question,” I said to the Ambassador. “It seems like the best-case scenario is a peaceful transition to a new, democratically elected government. If that doesn’t happen, what does that mean for the legacy of the American intervention and occupation of Iraq?”

Reporting the conversation that followed is difficult, since the conditions for the briefing were that it was “deep background,” not for attribution, quoting, or paraphrase, and the embassy press attaché, Donald Maynard, declined to approve any of the quotations I sent him. Thus I’m limited to describing what other people said and the general outlines of the conversation.

At first, the conversation focused on the credibility of the upcoming elections, then began to move around the question of whether or not the previous Iraqi national election, in 2010, had been fair and credible. I suggested that it wasn’t. There was some lively back and forth, and the conversation stalled in a difference of interpretation.

What happened with the 2010 elections was this. As the votes came in, showing that Ayad Allawi’s secular, multisectarian Iraqiyya coalition had won a slight majority over Maliki’s State of Law coalition, ninety-one seats to eighty-nine, Maliki launched three challenges to the election results. The first was to demand a recount, backed up by the veiled threat of military force. On March 21, the day before the final election results were confirmed, Maliki held a press conference and made his position clear: “I demand, in my capacity as the direct executive authority responsible for the formulation and implementation of state policy and in my capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces, that the Independent High Electoral Commission respond immediately to the demands of these blocs to safeguard political stability and prevent security from deteriorating and violence from increasing.” Reminding people of his role as commander in chief of the armed forces in this context was taken as a veiled military threat. Maliki’s second challenge was to lean on the Iraqi judiciary to disqualify winning Iraqiyya candidates because of alleged Baathist ties. The third challenge also involved the judiciary, and especially Supreme Court Chief Justice Medhat al-Mahmoud: Maliki asked for a ruling from the court on Article 76 of the Iraqi Constitution.

The article reads: “The President of the Republic shall charge the nominee of the largest Council of Representatives bloc with the formation of the Council of Ministers within fifteen days from the date of the election of the President of the Republic.” As written, it is straightforward: the nominee of the winning bloc forms the government. Maliki saw a loophole, however, and had his office ask the Supreme Court whether “largest bloc” meant the coalition that won the most seats in the election, or the coalition that put together the most seats after the election. Maliki’s office made their request on March 21, the same day he threatened military force to ensure a recount; the Supreme Court took four days to decide that Article 76 meant the largest bloc either before or after the election. In their book Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor write, “The ruling appeared to be a blatant reinterpretation of the framers’ intent.”

Having gotten his recount, disqualified fifty-two candidates from other parties because of “Baathist ties,” and succeeded in revising the Iraqi constitution so as to make an electoral majority essentially irrelevant, Maliki then merged his State of Law party with other Shiite groups to form the National Alliance coalition, which commanded 159 out of 325 seats, shutting out Iraqiyya and taking the right to form the next government.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration stood by watching—with upwards of fifty thousand US troops still on the ground. The official line was that it was an Iraqi election and an Iraqi process. The Americans were deeply involved in the process of forming a government, however, through a shady series of backroom deals that took almost nine months. Against the opposition of the Kurds, Sunni politicians, Shiites in ISCI, and even CENTCOM commander General Jim Mattis, Vice President Joe Biden and newly appointed Ambassador James Jeffrey pushed through a Maliki government, in part through soliciting various promises from Maliki that, after he took power, fell to ashes. But there’s more: the real story behind Maliki’s 2010 win wasn’t just about how the US worked to engineer his victory in the face of widespread opposition, but also about how Iran brokered a deal between Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr to secure Sadrist support for State of Law. The real story, that is, was how the US and Iran worked together to ensure the continued rule of a sectarian autocrat.

When I asked Ambassador Beecroft more specifically about this problem and the disturbing parallels between Saddam’s brutal regime and Maliki’s increasingly repressive and violent rule, the conversation grew very lively. The journalists got involved, especially Ned, Prashant, and Jane, and a distinct gap opened up between what Iraq looked like from inside the Green Zone and what it looked like from outside. Ned, Prashant, and Jane had all talked to Iraqis who saw parallels between Maliki’s presidency and Saddam’s dictatorship, and even more emphatically, had talked to many Iraqis who thought their lives had been better and safer under Saddam’s regime than they were now. Working to clarify their positions in what had become an energetic exchange, Ned, Prashant, and Jane tried to make it clear that they weren’t asserting such parallels between Maliki and Saddam, but merely saying that they had talked to thoughtful, educated, intelligent Iraqis who did so. In the end, no agreement in perception could be reached.

I was left to wonder, over the rest of the afternoon, whether the problem of perception I’d seen at the embassy was intentional or circumstantial. Sometimes we see things a certain way because we don’t know better; other times we assert a specific vision of the world because it serves us. I was impressed and fascinated by the lack of official interest in what Jane, Ned, and Prashant had been saying. As I was to discover myself, many people in Iraq saw their lives as being worse today than they had been under Saddam, less stable, more threatened, less free. You would think the US Embassy would want to hear about that perspective. That the ambassador seemed not only uninterested in the truth but outright hostile to it was striking. The situation brought to mind a quote attributed to Karl Rove, which seemed, looking back, as prescient as it was arrogant: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Ten years ago, I’d been among history’s actors, a bit role but nonetheless on the stage, a minor piece in a great game. And I’d spent the decade since then studying, trying to make sense of what I’d seen and done. Making sense meant more than just understanding, though; making sense also meant explaining what had happened in a way that fit with the kind of life I wanted to lead and the kinds of people I wanted to be around.

Over time, three main narratives had developed in American culture through which most veterans explained their experience of war in Iraq and Afghanistan: pride, trauma, or “it’s complicated.” All three were undergirded by an ideology of professionalism, in which the defining feature of military service was having “done your job,” which, as an article of faith, was detached from any serious political consideration by others of what that job was or what it meant in a wider context. In a way, this was a positive turn away from the Vietnam era, when draftees were sometimes identified with a war they’d been forced to fight and held responsible for political and strategic decisions made in Washington or Saigon. On the other hand, the focus on professionalism that divided the war from the warrior suggested a political compartmentalization by which Americans could disavow democratic responsibility for the actions of our government overseas. If the American army is seen as a citizen army, then even an all-volunteer force represents, symbolically, the American public. To detach military service from the ends to which it is put, to “hate the war but love the warrior,” as some would have it, is to disconnect the American people, represented by the citizen army, from the government that acts in its name.

One of the reasons I joined the army in the first place was to bridge that disconnect, to put myself physically at the service of the United States government, and to see what the “global war on terror” and the “new American century” actually meant in concrete terms. And something similar had driven me back to Baghdad now, as a journalist, to observe but also to participate—to insert myself back into history. Perhaps I wasn’t so different from the ambassador, in a certain way, in shaping reality to match my perception; since I was part of reality, and part of history now, as a veteran, putting myself out in front meant changing the very situation I was trying to understand. I attracted stares, attention, interest. I was, in fact, despite what I’d first thought, a target. People could die because they talked to me.

I thought about those possibilities as I sat over sweet tea that afternoon talking with Naseer Hassan, a fifty-two-year-old Iraqi poet, about life under Saddam, which topic included Hassan’s 1979 arrest by the government and the state executions of his Communist uncles—and also the books of poetry he’d written, Hamlet, existentialist philosophy, and the virtue of hopelessness. Naseer was a translator of Arthur Schopenhauer, Emily Dickinson, and Jorge Luis Borges, a radio host at Radio Free Iraq, and a loyal Maliki supporter. He was a lively, egotistical soul, a convivial conversationalist, and something of a Shiite chauvinist. For Naseer, nothing could match the brutal repression of the Saddam years, and if the present-day security situation was untenable, what Iraq needed was a strong leader like Maliki to clamp down.

Naseer sat rumpled and twisted in his chair, in constant back pain, leaning and swooping over his tea to emphasize a point or suggest a philosophical mise en abyme. He saw the American occupation as a “necessary surgery, but a very bad, bloody surgery. The patient has been left bleeding for years . . . ” He jabbed at the table. “But that doesn’t change the essential fact that America replaced a dictatorship with a democracy . . . Of course, there are those peace activists who think every anti-American thing is right and every pro-American thing is wrong. They look for anti-American sentiment wherever they can, decrying the human cost, smooth killers decrying the occupation, this detail or that detail, like Abu Ghraib. But you know what I call them? Peace statues, not peace activists: stiff, ideal, lifeless, glorious. They’re happy when a car bomb goes off in the market and kills a dozen people, because it makes a point that America’s bad.”

He had been ecstatic in 2003, he’d wanted to dance naked in the streets, but ever since that day in Firdos Square when Saddam’s statue fell, he had watched his hopes wither. “I’d had hope for a new era, but now, I see it’s just the same battle from birth to death. After 2003, Saddam was gone, but his remnants and orphans ruined everything after. Now there’s ISIS, these terrorists—it’s the same battle, with no triumph. The happiness of freedom and democracy was stolen from us. I wondered sometimes, can history be that cruel? But history has no conscience. If you’re still alive, that’s just because its foot hasn’t stepped on you yet.”

I asked him if he still had any hope at all for Iraq, and he leaned in, as if to explain a great secret: “Hopelessness is the limit and beginning of a new kind of hope. You have to keep going: not to achieve dreams of beautiful mountaintop forests, but because life is more powerful than death. Hopelessness makes possible a new hope that is more modest, a faith in the basic tissue of life that is stronger than any disaster. This is how humanity survives. This is the strength that keeps us going.”

As Naseer talked about hopelessness, I thought about my upcoming meeting with Meethaq and Ali at the Mansour Mall, which I was putting off, letting my talk with Naseer go long. My surety that I was going to die, coming at the level of gut fatalism, was stronger than any skepticism, stronger than any faith in the basic tissue of life, but weaker than my shame: when Aziz, my translator, came in to remind me a third time that we needed to go, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I shook Naseer’s hand, telling him with rather more force than I intended that I hoped I would see him again.

As we headed for the mall, I asked Aziz and Ahmed to stay alert. I hadn’t been able to properly explain my fear to them, but I thought maybe they would spot something before I did. There was always a chance. I tried to feel sharp, ready, like a survivor, but instead felt fated and numb. The image of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq campaign rally explosion kept cycling through my mind—a blast of orange light, dust, and blood. My dread deepened, minute by minute, as we passed through the crowded streets of Mansour.

3.

Three days later, the streets were empty and silent. The vibrant crowds of shoppers that thronged Mansour were gone. Stores and restaurants stood shuttered. You could almost hear the heat baking off the concrete and reflecting back into the clear blue sky. Somewhere a voice shouted, “Hey, Ameriki!” I didn’t look back.

I followed Aziz across the road, headed for a gaggle of soldiers and police who were, that day, the public face of Baghdad. I showed them my IHEC badge, they patted us down, and then one of them led us toward the school that was being used as a polling center. More soldiers stopped us at the entrance. A police captain came out to greet us. He began asking some questions, then a tense exchange broke out. On the one side stood the tall captain in his black fatigues, pistol on his hip, Iraqi Federal Police eagle on his chest, backed by a half dozen surly men in blue and gray camouflage, with armored vests and Kalashnikovs, while on the other stood Aziz, my translator, a fifty-four year-old former diplomat who had worked as an interpreter for Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, commander of 2-16 Infantry, during the surge. Aziz was my slouching Virgil, in a purple-and-mauve-striped polo shirt tucked fastidiously into stonewash jeans, with thinning hair and a chronic smoker’s cough. He stood facing the soldiers like a bent stick planted in the sand against the tide. I heard Aziz say “Rolling Stone” and “sahafi Ameriki”—American journalist—and saw the captain get a funny look on his face. A quick back-and-forth broke out, capped by Aziz saying “La. La. La.”—No. No. No.

His face was grim, but then, Aziz rarely smiled. Like almost every Iraqi I met, his life story was a transcript of disaster, suffering, and crushed hopes. He had worked for Saddam’s regime for decades, through the Iran-Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War, and the embargo years, but in 2000, fearing for his life, he’d fled to Lebanon. When he returned to Iraq three years later, after the American invasion, his daughter asked her mother, “Who is this man?” During the occupation, he had a successful career as an interpreter, first with a private security firm, then with the US Army, and then worked as a stringer for the Washington Post. After his daughters were injured in a car-bomb attack near his apartment in the Karrada, he decided to apply to come to the US, through the International Organization for Migration Iraq mission. Iraqis who worked with Americans during the occupation have two main routes to the US, the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program through the US Embassy, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an NGO that works to resettle Iraqi refugees internationally. Aziz chose IOM, because it made more sense for his family, and applied in 2010, but his IOM application was rejected only months later. “They gave me no reason, no justification,” he told me. “Just rejected.” When I asked him if he’d appealed the rejection, he told me that David Finkel, who knew him from his time with 2-16, had hired a lawyer to work the case but that now, three years later, he wasn’t optimistic.

The captain said something, almost grinning, and the conversation went back and forth again between him and Aziz before seeming to founder. The soldiers watched me expectantly. The captain stepped back and gestured into the school. “You are American?” he asked. “Nam,” I said, “Aana sahafa Ameriki.”

“You are welcome,” he said, waving toward the door, eyes flashing. A soldier inside smiled.

I looked to Aziz, whose eyes were watching his feet. He moved slightly away from the door, into the shade, and nodded at the space next to him. “Come wait over here,” he said.

It’s one thing to be traveling in a country where you don’t understand the language, customs, and culture. To be a stranger in a strange land can be as exciting as it is exhausting, as ecstatic as it is alienating. It’s something else entirely to be somewhere that can turn evil in a heartbeat—where a clear path can grow suddenly precipitous, overshadowed by cryptic threats, unstable in its footing.

I had to trust Aziz. I didn’t have any choice. I stood with him by the wall. The captain said something sharp, he and Aziz had another back and forth, then Aziz said, “C’mon, let’s go.”

“What happened there?” I asked him as we walked quickly back toward Ahmed’s white Kia. “What was that?”

He lit a cigarette. “Those guys are a bunch of fucking assholes.”

It wasn’t the first time we’d gotten static at a polling center. Election day had begun for us in Sadr City, the Shiite ghetto on the north side of Baghdad that had been a dangerous, restive neighborhood even under Saddam. For the entire eight years of the American occupation, the neighborhood had remained beyond the military’s control. At the height of the surge, in 2007 and 2008, JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) commandos and Iraqi special forces made almost nightly raids there, but General Petraeus’s “clear, hold, build” counterinsurgency never got more than a couple blocks in. As the name Sadr City suggests, the neighborhood was a stronghold for the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Jaish al-Mahdi—a fact in evidence as soon as we turned off the Canal Expressway (Omar bin Al Khattab Street) and were greeted by giant orange banners emblazoned with al-Sadr’s face.

Security at the edges of Sadr City would turn out to be some of the most intense we would see all day. There was a vehicle ban in place throughout Baghdad, except for government vehicles and registered observers like ourselves, and the usual gauntlet of checkpoints had been reinforced by military hardware and extra troops. Sadr City was something else entirely. In addition to the standard tan Humvees and blue-and-white APCs (armored personnel carriers) belonging to the Federal Police, black-masked Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) storm troopers manned the checkpoints, supported by giant black SWAT MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles).

While the Iraqi Army was a bit of a joke, these guys were something else. The Iraqi military had ballooned during the occupation—the army Paul Bremer disbanded in 2004 comprised a mere four hundred thousand men, while Maliki’s present-day security force, including the army, federal police, and other units, numbered somewhere between eight hundred thousand and a million. Many of these were paper soldiers, no more than names on forms, and most of the rest were the hypertrophied bloat of a militarized oil state: poorly trained schmucks pulling perpetual guard duty at government offices, public parks, mosques, political party offices, and the hundreds of traffic checkpoints around Baghdad, in what was one of the most reliable forms of gainful employment, while their less well-connected peers were out in Diyala and Anbar, defending the approaches to Baghdad against ISIS, getting ambushed and blown up by IEDs. Within the Federal Police and the regular army, though, and also set off outside, was another group of operators: well-trained, well-supplied elite fighters. The most notorious of these groups were the SWAT teams and the Counter-Terrorism Bureau’s various ISOF units, which reported directly to Maliki. On the street, they cut fearsome figures: uniformed in black armor and fatigues, festooned with weaponry and tech, their helmets decorated with Punisher skulls, their faces hidden by Wiley-X ballistic goggles and fang-embossed black masks, they moved with the assurance of easy violence. As a former soldier, someone who got used to being surrounded by burly dudes with assault rifles, who was himself for a time one of those dudes, I can tell you: these were some serious motherfuckers.

They had bigger prey to track than an American journalist, though, so after giving us the stinkeye, they let us through. We drove deep into Sadr City, rolling down side streets looking for a polling center, finally leaving Ahmed and the Kia behind to walk alleys, searching for the Sector 13 polling station.

Throughout my entire tour in Baghdad, I’d driven through Sadr City one time. There was a period of two weeks in the summer of 2003 when my unit was clearing an ammo cache to the northwest of the neighborhood, and our route from Camp Dragoon in Baladiyat to the cache took us along the edges of the neighborhood twice a day. We took the route fast, blasting through traffic at fifty miles an hour, practically daring Iraqi cars to get in our way. It was on this route that we’d had an accident between two of our trucks that gave Corporal Fisher whiplash. It was also on this route that one of our lieutenants started shooting into a crowd because he thought he saw someone with a gun. One day, we drove through the neighborhood on recon, looking for an ammo cache. We didn’t find the cache, and we didn’t linger.

I never went on a foot patrol. My unit was field artillery and we did everything mounted: I drove Humvees all over Baghdad, and outside the wire, I was never more than twenty feet from my truck. Now, walking through an alley in Sadr City with no more armament than a camera and a notebook, with no more backup than a middle-aged Iraqi in a polo shirt, seemed like a surreal inversion of reality—my own private Bizarro Baghdad. Every vestigial sense of wartime boundaries from ten years ago flashed red, screaming “You shouldn’t be here.”

Aziz led me down a dirt alley, past poor Iraqis whose stares flickered between gawkery and bitterness, and as we rounded a corner, a young Iraqi came up to me grabbing at my hand and saying “Sabah hel hyeer,” pulling me toward him into the usual greeting between friendly Iraqi men, kissing each other on the cheek, which I did. Then he asked me for my ID.

I reached for my passport and IHEC card, but Aziz told me not to, then the guy said something else and grabbed my head, pulling me toward him again. “Come here,” Aziz said, heading back to the last checkpoint. I pushed Grabby back and broke away, following Aziz, and once we got back past the checkpoint our new friend fell behind, held up by the police. Aziz explained that the guy was just mental.

The hostility came later, from the IHEC staff. The soldiers at the gate checked our IDs and let us in, then brought us through a courtyard to the local commander, a major in the Federal Police. He was sitting in a small room with his shoes off, watching TV while on the phone to his girlfriend. When our escort handed him our IDs, he took them with barely a glance and held them for the several minutes he took to finish his phone call. When he finally turned his attention to us, he didn’t get up or put his shoes on, but sat contemplating us with bored irritation.

He asked us what we were doing here and who had told us we were authorized to come here. When Aziz explained that we were journalists authorized by the Independent High Electoral Commission to cover the elections, including interviewing people at polling centers, the major cut him off. “I don’t give a shit what IHEC says. I’ll decide whether or not you talk to anybody here.” Then he asked Aziz what outlet I was with and what kind of story was I doing. Aziz explained that I was an American journalist doing a feature story about life in Baghdad today, and especially about the election. They talked back and forth a bit; then the major decided to escort us in. “No photos,” he said.

The major put on his shoes and heaved himself up, threw on some sunglasses, and lumbered out of his cave, snapping for a soldier to follow. We followed too, and he took us out through the courtyard and around to the polling center. Hangdog residents of Sadr City passed in and out as if ashamed. The major took us to the door of an office and went in, closing the door behind him. When the major opened the door again, a young woman in an ornate but demure ochre-colored scarf and robe, her eyes hidden behind massive silver aviator lenses, stood in the center of the room scowling at us. After a brief back and forth between Aziz and the major, Aziz explained to me that this young woman was the local IHEC representative, and that she wasn’t going to talk to me. At all. And she wasn’t going to allow us to see the polls.

“But we can still talk to people, right?” I asked.

“Sure, okay,” Aziz said, and we went out away from the office and stood in the path of the voters coming into and leaving the polls. The major and his soldier stood next to us, and an IHEC monitor hung back near the office, watching. We tried to talk to a few people as they passed, a family, an old man, a woman in an abaya, but everyone took one look at the major, then shook their heads and walked on. Finally, a hardy looking laborer with a proud face stopped and agreed to talk to us. Rahim Ahmed was his name, and he ignored the looks the major was giving as he told me about his hopes for the election.

“We’re looking for change,” he said. “To change the faces in power. Two elections have gone by, and they haven’t done anything for the people. We want to see new faces.” He told me his most important concerns were security and services, and that things were so bad now that life was worse than it had been under Saddam. “Life used to be better,” he said, “and we need the new government to serve Iraqis, not just talk.” When I asked him if he thought that would happen—if he thought Maliki would lose the election—he shrugged, then nodded. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe. Maybe when one of the Grand Ayatollahs speaks, asks the people to make a change—then the answer is yes. But if we want all of Iraq to change, we only need twenty or thirty percent of the seats: that will do something. That will achieve something.”

I was so involved in my conversation with Rahim, following his body language and Aziz’s translations while scribbling down notes and trying to think of the next question, that I didn’t notice two more soldiers and three IHEC staff surrounding us. One of the IHEC guys interrupted Aziz, shouting at him, and another IHEC guy started shouting too. Aziz argued back, then two more IHEC guys got involved. Things got loud, and one of the IHEC guys grabbed Aziz by the arm and started pulling him toward the office. Aziz stood his ground. The IHEC personnel said we weren’t allowed to interview people; Aziz asserted that we were international journalists accredited by IHEC to cover the elections, and that we were following all of IHEC’s guidelines. As the guy tugged again at Aziz’s arm, I readied myself to do something physical, not knowing what, if anything, would be needed or prudent. The IHEC volunteer told us we had to come with him, or else. Then Aziz broke away from the IHEC volunteer’s grip and walked off.

“We need to go now,” he said to me, and I followed him out.

So much for a transparent election.

There were actually two elections. The first had been held on Monday, the “private election” for security forces. They had been given their own voting day because they would be so busy enforcing the vehicular ban and guarding poll centers that they wouldn’t have a chance to vote during regular hours on Wednesday. This seemed a reasonable solution to a potentially serious problem, and a good way to make sure that all eight hundred thousand–plus state security personnel got to vote, even the ones who existed only on paper. As we drove around the city on Monday, we saw trucks full of police and soldiers speed screaming through the streets, the men waving their guns in the air like bandits.

“They will vote,” Ahmed muttered.

The way voting worked was that you went to the polling center with your voter ID card, collected your paper ballot, put your ID card into a card-reading machine, let the machine take your digital fingerprint and read the UPC box on your ballot, had an IHEC staff member cross-check your name on a paper list of registered voters, went behind a cardboard shield to mark your ballot, then folded up the ballot and put it in a sealed plastic box. At that point, you dipped your finger in a bottle of purple ink and returned to life proud at having participated in the sacred ritual of democratic self-determination.

An interesting rumor I’d heard, from a young Sunni engineering student, was that many soldiers and police had two separate voting cards, one for each election. Aziz had heard the same thing himself and told me he personally knew a police officer who had two cards and planned to vote twice and might be willing to talk to me after the election. I was fascinated and infuriated by the rumor, puzzled that I hadn’t seen anything about it in the Western media, and curious whether or not it was actually true. Even if only half the military and police voted twice, that would still be four or five hundred thousand votes—which, since most (though not all) police and military supported Maliki, could make a significant difference. With around twenty million registered voters, an extra four hundred thousand votes for State of Law might seal the election.

As we went from polling center to polling center, I asked each IHEC spokesperson who would talk to me about the double-card problem and what IHEC was doing about it. All of them admitted that double cards had been issued, and all of them assured me that IHEC knew about the problem and had solved it. One IHEC rep, in the Karrada, told me that only 21,000 doubles had been issued, and that 19,000 had been withdrawn, so the 2,000 remaining cards wouldn’t have a significant impact even if they were used—but, he told me, if somebody did try to use one, the card reader would reject it, since the cards would both have the same information and the reader would know that the person had already voted. The IHEC rep we talked to in Sadr City (at the second polling place we visited there) told me the same. Another, in Zayouna, told me that IHEC had a list of the people who’d received duplicate cards, and that they’d sent letters to them demanding that they turn the duplicates in. All of the voters with duplicate cards were then required to bring a letter that they were supposed to have gotten after they turned in their duplicate cards, without which they wouldn’t be allowed to vote. If they didn’t have their letter, they wouldn’t be allowed to vote. The IHEC rep at the second polling station we visited in Mansour told me that the duplicates had already been collected, but that if somebody did try to vote twice, the IHEC staff would know because of the ink on their finger. I asked him if they had a list of the names of duplicate card holders, and he told me no. I asked him if the machine would read duplicates, and he said probably, yes, but that it didn’t matter because of the ink. The IHEC rep at the third polling station in Mansour also told me that the duplicate cards had already been withdrawn, and that IHEC policy was to fine anyone who voted twice.

During the election and just after, I talked to four different police officers about the duplicate-card problem. Two said they had duplicate cards; two said they themselves didn’t, but they knew lots of others who did. One policeman I talked to on Tuesday told me he’d already voted Monday and planned to vote again on Wednesday, both times for Maliki. The other police officer, who I talked to on Thursday, after the election, told me he voted both days, both times for Maliki. Then he showed me his cards: one for the private election, one for the public. I asked him about the ink; he showed me his finger, which looked clean. “You just dip the tip of your finger in, then you wash it off. No problem.” I asked him about the machines—did he encounter any issues with the card readers? No, he told me, no problems at all, then he pointed out that his cards were identical except for one minor difference: his grandfather’s name on one card started with a “da,” on the other card with a “ra.” I asked him if he’d received any kind of letter requiring that he turn in his card, or if he’d had to take a letter with him to the poll center, and he shook his head and laughed. No. Nothing like it.

What happened, he told me, was that a bunch of officers in his unit had received duplicate cards, and on the day of the public election they were given a couple hours off to go vote again. They went home, changed into civilian clothes, voted, changed back into uniforms, and went back to work. He told me that he personally saw forty or fifty people he knew voting twice, and that he’d heard of many more. I asked him if he had been told whom to vote for or if he’d been paid extra to vote twice. “Nobody told me how to vote,” he said, “but most police and military follow Maliki. Maybe one thousand out of every hundred.” About the extra pay, he denied that he’d been paid extra during the voting period, but said that the army had been. Other police had said the same, and Aziz told me that he’d overheard some soldiers talking about how nice it was to be getting paid extra. This was consonant with other rumors that Maliki was buying votes all over Iraq, promising people land and cash in exchange for support.

There were also rumors of a widespread trade in voting cards, but the problems with the election weren’t limited to extra cards and vote buying. Many people claimed not to have gotten voting cards at all, and some reports suggested that IHEC failed to distribute cards to more than two million registered voters. Moreover, the voting machines themselves were subject to mechanical failure. One IHEC representative I talked to told me that they’d been having trouble with the machines whenever they were plugged in, but when they left them unplugged (the machine runs on an internal rechargeable battery), they were fine. Another representative told me that the machines malfunctioned when they got too hot—which, given temperatures in Baghdad, was fairly often. The level of competence shown by IHEC representatives varied widely from station to station. One representative in Mansour didn’t seem to know how many registered voters there were in his district, and when I suggested that the number he first told me seemed low, he revised his estimate upward by 150 percent. Allegations of electoral fraud, obstruction, and malfeasance from journalists, bloggers, and opposition candidates were common, including reports from Asharq Al-Awsat, Niqash, Ned Parker and Ahmed Rasheed at Reuters, Struan Stevenson at The Hill, Middle East Monitor, and Al Jazeera.

Perhaps most troubling of all was the limited access granted the media and the paucity of international observers. We visited nine polling stations that day, in five different neighborhoods, and saw a strong media presence at only one—a high-profile center in wealthy Karrada. Except for Karrada, we saw one other journalist all day, a newspaper reporter, in Zayouna. And while every polling center had at least a few internal observers from various political parties monitoring the voting, we saw not a single international observer all day long. Not one. Of the nine polling stations we visited, we’d been forced out of one (in Sadr City) and weren’t allowed to enter two (in Mansour and Karrada). Two other polling stations let us come in but refused to let us take pictures, then pressured us to leave (in Mansour and Saydiya). Given that Baghdad had just over two hundred polling centers, meaning we barely saw 5 percent, it would be injudicious to conclude from this small sample that nobody was really watching the elections or that IHEC was actively suppressing media coverage. That was just my experience. I know there were international reporters out there. I talked to them later. I know Iraqi TV and journalists had cameras at predetermined, officially approved sites. I saw the news. I also know that outside of the officially scripted, managed box, IHEC was sometimes obstructionist, occasionally secretive, and largely unwatched as it went about managing Iraq’s first free postoccupation elections.

Some voters were restrained and noncommittal, nervous about talking to me, and apt to speak in TV-echoing sound bites about the need for security, safety, and stability. Others were more forthcoming. Overall, the impression I got throughout the day was that Baghdadis were tired of politics as usual, anxious about the security situation, and committed to change. What change meant, however, depended on their perspective. For some people, it meant getting rid of Maliki and his Dawa cronies. For one police officer in Sadr City, it meant clearing out the obstructionists in the parliament he saw constraining Maliki’s ability to get things done. For most, the constant refrain was “tahrir”—liberation, freedom, relief, salvation. They’d had enough corruption, violence, and suffering; they wanted a change for the better. At the same time, most people expected that Maliki would stay in power. Some avidly desired it.

Hassan Ali Asim, a police officer in Sadr City, thought Maliki was the only candidate strong enough to beat ISIS and keep the country safe. Asim had been wounded by a roadside bomb during the civil war, on June 24, 2006, and hated to see the country being torn apart again by sectarian violence. If Iraq could achieve stability, he was sure it could be as peaceful and prosperous as any of its neighbors. “We want our country to be like other countries, like Jordan. Look how stable and comfortable it is there. I’m not talking about America—America is a great nation. I’m talking about our neighbors. Honestly, I wish America had stayed. Not in the city, too many people had problems with them there, but on their bases and on the borders. They would have helped us with stability.”

Amaya Faleh, a housewife in Sadr City, was vehement about the need for a new government and the importance of deeds over talk. She was also proud of how many women were active in Iraqi politics. “It’s a good thing. Iraqi women need to vote. We’re not illiterate. We’re not ignorant. We are Iraq.” She was appalled by recent attempts in parliament to pass a new Ja’fari law regulating female behavior, legalizing child marriage, and allowing religious courts to take precedence over civil courts on domestic family issues. “This is awful. It’s not right at all.”

Jodet Marja Jodet, a fifty-six-year-old veterinarian, thought the most important thing was to get past the sectarian violence still bleeding Iraq dry. “We need a strong government that can control the militias,” he told me. “Over politics, over infrastructure, even over poverty, the most important thing is to end the sectarian fighting. It has taken too many innocent souls.”

Haider Hassan, twenty-eight years old, had brought the problem of sectarian violence home with him. Aziz spotted him before I did: a young man in shorts, flip-flops, and a camouflage T-shirt, limping down the hallway of the grade school polling center on Al-Falah Street in Sadr City. I would have missed him among the bustling voters, but when Aziz pointed him out to me, I immediately saw why. Bandages on the young man’s head covered a recent wound, and bloodstains on his T-shirt suggested something more serious than an accident around the house. He was beautiful, too, with the kind of piercing, unrelenting gaze you see in mystics, sociopaths, and traumatized soldiers.

It turned out he was among the latter. He’d been in the Iraqi Army four months—barely out of basic training. Not even a week ago, his unit had been on foot patrol in a suburb west of Baghdad when a roadside IED went off. ISIS forces opened fire from the surrounding houses and date groves, then retreated. Haider had been wounded in his head, leg, and torso, but survived and was evacuated. He was now recovering and had struggled out of bed to vote. He considered it his patriotic duty, just as he considered his military service a duty. “People should be volunteering to protect our country,” he told me. “It’s our responsibility.”

Haider expressed some of the usual desires Baghdadis expressed for security and stability. But as he went on, he waxed passionate: “We want to be like before. When we had pride. We don’t want other countries interfering in Iraq, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. We want to be our own people.” For Haider, change meant a strong military and strong borders. As I watched him limp away, I wondered what he would have said if I’d told him I’d been an American soldier. In 2003, he would have been seventeen. His entire adult life had been lived under an occupation, and now he was fighting a battle America had helped to create. We’d promised him democracy, but what we gave him was a life at war.

As the afternoon passed, I began to feel the need to go somewhere dangerous. Nothing had blown up all day, and with the heavy security presence on the streets, I figured even a bad neighborhood would be manageable—or at least more manageable than it would be normally. I’d gotten a tingle in Sadr City, a sweet taste of old danger, and I wanted to try my luck one last time. Aziz and Ahmed suggested we head back to the hotel, then go to the central polling station in the Karrada. I suggested instead Baladiyat, Ghaziliyah, or Dora, in response to which Aziz and Ahmed were silent. I waited, then Aziz told me he didn’t think we’d be able to get into Dora. He might have been right; we’d had trouble getting in before. A sometimes-rough Sunni neighborhood with a bloody history, the police were fond of shutting down its checkpoints in and out.

“What about Saydiya?” I asked, naming a neighborhood near Dora that was widely considered the most volatile area in Baghdad. It had been the scene of vicious fighting during the civil war, and unlike most other neighborhoods, it had remained mixed Sunni and Shia. Saydiya could turn nasty in a heartbeat.

Ahmed smiled. “You don’t go to Saydiya.”

“It’s election day. They’re voting too.”

“We can’t get in there,” Aziz told me.

“Well, why don’t we go see. If we get in, we’ll hit a polling center, then call it a day.”

“My family lives there,” Aziz said, “and my cousin is in the police. Even he tells me not to come to Saydiya.”

“We’ll just check it out,” I insisted.

We didn’t have any problems getting in. And although there was a palpable anxiety coming off Ahmed and Aziz, the neighborhood didn’t look any worse than anywhere else we’d gone. It wasn’t as poor as Sadr City or Baladiyat, and it was mostly empty, like everywhere, because of the vehicle ban. It was coming on to the hot part of the afternoon, when most people went home to rest, so there were even fewer voters on the street than we’d seen earlier. Trash blew across vacant streets; I half expected Ennio Morricone music to start playing.

“Here is your Saydiya,” Ahmed said, as I snapped some pictures with my phone. A teenager on the corner, one foot on a soccer ball, glared as we went by.

It didn’t take us long to find a polling center. Ahmed parked on the street, while Aziz and I went through the outer checkpoint. While the police were checking our IDs, a six-truck convoy of machine-gun-mounted pickups roared by, each one filled with black-masked ISOF. They didn’t give us any trouble at the checkpoint, nor at the entrance to the school, where, as a security precaution, they collected voters’ cell phones.

One of the guards brought us into the school and took us to the principal’s office to meet the security detachment commander. He was coolly friendly and completely professional, asking me a few questions in superb English. He looked at my ID and passport, writing my name into a log book. “Is this your first time to Baghdad?” he asked me.

“Yes.” I lied.

“And how do you find it?”

“Complicated. The people are very friendly. Of course it depends on the neighborhood.”

He smiled. “Yes. And you are with a newspaper?”

“A magazine, Rolling Stone.”

“And what kind of magazine is this Rolling Stone?”

“It mainly covers music and popular culture, but it also does long stories on politics, international events, different things.”

“Yes. Well, you are most welcome to Iraq. You will not take any pictures here.”

I thanked him, then went out to meet the IHEC representative. He was a short, stern man, with a closed face. With exceedingly efficient movements and remarks, he guided us through the entire center, showing us each polling station and giving us the most up-to-date numbers for voter turnout. His answers to my questions were polite but curt. They’d had a few minor problems with the machines, which they’d resolved. They’d found forty-four duplicate cards in their district, which had been withdrawn. Security was good. Voter turnout was good. When I asked him if any other media had visited this polling station, he told me that the media were prohibited from coming here, but they’d made an exception for me. I asked him if we could talk to some people, and he considered it for a moment, then agreed.

He stationed us in the main hall, near the exit. Traffic in the poll center was light—few voters were coming in, and those who did looked distracted and glum. They avoided looking at me, and avoided the IHEC rep as well, keeping their eyes down and scuttling through the hall as if they wanted to disappear. The reek of fear in the polling center was so thick you could taste it: an acrid tang in the back of your throat, bitter as myrrh. Aziz watched his feet. The few people that the IHEC rep approached shook their heads vigorously no, then sped away.

At last, the IHEC rep stopped a middle-aged man walking by who agreed to talk to me, though his eyes bulged in fear. His name was Ahmed Abdul-Rajid. He was a sixty-one-year-old professor of English, and although he spoke to me in that language, he communicated only terror. His answers pinched out of his mouth as if he hoped each one would end the interview; each word he spoke made it clear he wanted nothing to do with me and wished I would leave him alone. He grinned as he talked, but it was a rictus of desperation. The IHEC rep stood beside us, staring into the distance but noting every word that was said.

When I asked Dr. Abdul-Rajid what his hopes were for the election, his answer was “For the good.” When I asked him what he meant by “good,” he told me “Security, safety, and stability,” the same mantra I’d been hearing all day. I asked him if there were any other issues that were important to him in the election, and he said “No, mostly security, safety, and stability.” Did he have any worries about the election? “No, none.” Did he think Maliki was going to win a third term? “Nobody knows. It depends on the results.” What did he think would happen if Maliki won a third term? “I hope for the good.” What did he mean by that? “Mostly security, safety, and stability.” Was he positive about Iraq’s future? “Definitely.”

When I thanked him, Dr. Abdul-Rajid nodded with obvious relief, glanced at the IHEC rep, then fled. The interview left me with a bad taste in my mouth, but I pushed on, trying to talk to more people as the IHEC rep shepherded us toward the exit. Nobody else would speak with me. On the way out, though, the IHEC rep introduced me to a soldier manning the exit. Jasim Mohammed Alwan, a sergeant major in the Federal Police with ten years in service, looked capable, intelligent, and young for his responsibilities. He stood at parade rest, with his hands clasped behind his back, and answered my questions crisply, directly. The IHEC rep stood at his elbow, but the young sergeant major ignored him.

His responsibilities included managing two ballot centers in Saydiya, and he told me that everything was going fine. There hadn’t been any security problems all day. Asked about his hopes for the election, he told me he was hoping for change—I heard the word tahrir again—along with an increase in security and stability. “What kind of change?” I asked, and he told me that he wanted to see a change in government. “People are looking for something better. Somebody needs to fix what has been destroyed, take care of the people who just suffer now.”

The IHEC rep stepped between us, ending the interview. He said something to Aziz and then something else to the sergeant major, who turned on his heel and walked off. The IHEC rep turned a grim smile toward me. Aziz said mildly, “We should go now.”

4.

Back in the war, I’d dreamed of Mutanabbi Street. I’d heard it was a place they sold books, a famous street market where intellectuals gathered and talked about ideas. I fantasized sometimes about going there on my own, sneaking off the FOB somehow, hiring an orange-and-white Iraqi cab to take me. I could switch into the one set of civilian clothes I’d brought with me, leave my rifle, leave my boots. I’d still look unmistakably American, of course, and I couldn’t read or speak any Arabic, but at least I’d be able to feel what it was like, be able to see and hear real Iraqis and authentic Baghdad culture. Not the pidgin we talked with Iraqi soldiers on gate guard, not the guarded, pro-American talk we got from our terps, but the real literary, philosophical, and political pulse of a city with traditions going back thousands of years. Civilization had been invented here. They’d invented writing and math. Iraq was the birthplace and motherland of Western culture, older than the Romans, older than the Greeks, as old as the Egyptians and even more important, and in my dream you could brush up against that living history on the street, there on Mutanabbi.

I had naively supposed that, after the US won the war in 2003, things would settle down and we’d start rebuilding. Combat missions would transition to stability-and-support operations, and we would move out into the communities. The US occupations in Germany, Japan, and Korea were the most prominent examples I had of how it might have worked, but the more recent American military intervention in the Balkans seemed a plausible model as well. These operations were all within living memory and continued to have material, concrete historical existence. My unit, First Armored Division, was stationed in Germany, as American units had been since 1945. American units trained with German units. American bases hired German workers. American soldiers dated German girls. The Balkans were different, but when we deployed, to Iraq a few of our Humvees still had KFOR (Kosovo Force) painted on the side, and old sergeants liked to tell us stories of their misadventures there. I imagined something like that would happen in Baghdad. We would meet people. We would mingle.

In the very early days, I even fantasized about going to Ur or Babylon to see ziggurats and ruins; visiting a mosque; eating kebab, mezze, and flatbread with locals; maybe going to the National Museum. Of course none of that ever happened. Stability-and-support operations were sidelined in favor of force protection, which meant pulling security on isolated American bases and letting looters plunder the country’s infrastructure and heritage.

Our life settled into a strange, sequestered version of garrison existence, on bases initially primitive but increasingly Americanized. Burger King was the first franchise to arrive at BIAP, and American fast food soon became a staple of our diet. There were some efforts at integration: vendors were allowed to open shops selling knickknacks and rugs, and some FOBs contracted with Iraqis to run laundromats, shawarma restaurants, and cafés instead of the American companies and third-country nationals de rigueur on the larger bases. Despite these minor efforts, the basic conditions of the occupation were segregation and mutual distrust.

For my unit, as for most Americans in Iraq, you only ever went off post on mission, with at least two trucks and eight soldiers, loaded for bear and ready to fight. Until Petraeus took over in 2007 and implemented his counterinsurgency doctrine, pushing units out into small neighborhood posts, American policy was defensive, centralized, and isolationist. According to General John Abizaid’s “antibody theory,” which guided policy before 2007, the more our soldiers interacted with Iraqis, the more we’d be attacked. That may have been true, in a crude statistical sense, but it created a situation that allowed racism and suspicion to flourish, making it easy for Iraqis to see Americans as distant, alien occupiers, and for Americans to view Iraqis as backward, hostile primitives.

Officially, Iraqis were “local nationals.” Mostly we called them hadjis. The word is a term of respect in the Muslim world; it’s a title signifying that its bearer has completed the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. We didn’t mean it like that. We meant it more like Hadji from the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Johnny Quest, Johnny’s turbaned brown Hindi sidekick. It wasn’t quite as derogatory as some of the things soldiers called Iraqis. At its very best, it was merely patronizing.

Over and over during my tour, I dreamed of crossing the wire. I hated seeing myself reduce human beings to caricatures and threat assessments, as I did every day, and I wanted to have a human encounter with the people whose nation we’d invaded, occupied, and upended. I was also driven by curiosity, a sense of adventure, and a desire for a richer cultural palette than FOB life offered.

Mutanabbi Street came to represent for me not just the storied Iraqi culture with which we weren’t engaging and of which we were almost entirely ignorant, but literary and intellectual culture itself: the resilience of humanistic inquiry and debate in even the most inhospitable conditions. I imagined seeing it, feeling it around me, connecting in even some small way with this manifestation of the human spirit. I carried that dream for years, out of time and out of place, always thinking of it as a symbol of a history that should have been.

Two days after the election, security was still tight, but everyone was in a festive mood. There was a certain giddiness in the air, too, connected to a sense of having escaped a baleful fate: everyone had thought that the election would be wracked with violence, and while there had been a few minor attacks outside the city and in the north, Baghdad had been serene. Now Mutanabbi Street was packed with readers, book buyers, kids, and journalists, out as if on holiday.

Aziz guided me down the street, pointing out the spot where a car bomb had gone off in 2007 and killed twenty-six people. The physical scars of the bombing were barely visible; among the milling shoppers, you could almost believe that someday even the memory would fade. Today the street thrived. Old books and new books, hardbound and paperback, books in Arabic and English and French and Chinese, romance novels and Korans and Mein Kampf and programming manuals and dusty issues of National Geographic lay in mosaics on the sidewalks and stacked the shelves of tiny shops back off the street. The Abbasid poet Abu at-Tayyib Ahmad bin al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi, whose majestic bronze figure overlooks the Tigris at the end of street, once bragged that his poetry was so beautiful that it was heard even by the deaf and read even by the blind; just so, the street that bore his name would have broken through any resistance with its cheerful vitality. Juice sellers stalked the crowd in yellow bibs, ringing brass saucers to attract attention. Old friends, tufts of white hair ringing bald heads, stood drinking at tea carts, smoking and arguing about the election. Oud and lute music wove through the chatter, and a singer’s voice keened over our heads like a scarlet ribbon. In a courtyard off the street, poets versified, their voices thrown by Pignose amps. And although the crowds in the street were overwhelmingly male, some women browsed too, some in hijab, some not. Aziz ran into a friend of his, an Iraqi newspaperman. I ran into the Colombian TV crew who were staying at my hotel. And while I took everything in, I kept an eye out for some of the people I’d talked to earlier whom I expected to see there, like Soheil Najm, a poet and translator, and Hanaa Edwar, head of the leading Iraqi NGO for human rights and women’s issues, Iraqi Al-Amal.

I had spoken with Hanaa Edwar in her home office the morning after the election. Her living room was warm and welcoming, decorated by her many awards for humanitarian activism, and her three white dogs barked and nipped and cowered like fluffy courtiers. With her steely, short-cut hair and forthright gaze, Edwar sat on her sofa like a baroness, regal and determined. She had been fighting for a better world since her student days in the 1960s, when she joined the General Students Union, the Communist Party, and the Iraqi Women’s League. After earning a law degree at Baghdad University, she had been nominated in 1972 to represent the Iraqi Women’s League at the Secretariat of Women International Democratic Federation in East Berlin, and lived there for ten years before returning to Iraq—not to Baghdad, however, or to her native Basra, but to Kurdistan, where she joined the Communist partisan resistance against Saddam. She lived there for three years, until Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988 forced her to flee to Damascus, where she founded Iraqi Al-Amal (Iraqi Hope). In 1996 she returned to Kurdistan, and finally came home to Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003.

Despite her lifelong resistance to Saddam’s tyranny and her tireless efforts to bring modern, cosmopolitan values to Iraq, Edwar saw the American invasion as a disaster for the Iraqi people. In Edwar’s view, the United States’ interest in toppling Saddam was political, military, and economic, and had nothing to do with avowed commitments to human rights or democracy. From the beginning, United States policy worked to divide Iraq, founding the national government on a sectarian-ethnic quota system from the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) onward.

“This was the wrong basis. No democracy can be built on religious or sectarian difference. And as we have seen, the system in Iraq is very weak because of this. It has produced crisis after crisis without any solution, and increased conflicts between the Iraqi people. It’s not just elements from outside, like al Qaeda, but it’s spread through the whole of Iraqi society . . .” Edwar frowned and shook her head. “It was a big mistake for Americans to support religious parties, like Maliki’s Dawa. There was an opportunity to break this kind of rule in 2003, but I believe there was always an intention to keep Iraq weak, make Iraq a weak state, so there’s no chance for solid change for development, no chance for real democracy. I can say now, after ten years, that we are not living in a state. We are living in a non-state. There is no rule of law, no real institutions, impunity for the militias, rule of tribes and religions over the rule of law, and pervasive corruption. This was another thing the Americans did—the American money lost in Iraq, still missing, and where did it go?”

What I’d seen myself seemed to bear out her judgment. Things were better now in Baghdad than they had been in 2004, economically, but the lack of political stability was heartbreaking. In 2004, Iraq was nearly at its nadir. It had suffered under ten years of American sanctions and sporadic bombing that had crippled its economy, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of infants, led to starvation and malnutrition for millions of children, and given birth to a violent criminal underclass of gangsters and black-market smugglers. Then Iraq had been hit by a “shock and awe” bombing campaign designed to demolish critical dual-use infrastructure like the electrical grid, water treatment systems, and communications networks. The invasion that followed the bombing was relatively restrained, compared to what it could have been, but the peace that followed the invasion was more destructive and violent than anyone could have imagined. Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army, sending four hundred thousand armed men out onto the streets, while General Tommy Franks ordered American soldiers to stay on their bases and ignore the looting and chaos that swept the country like wildfire.

My first weeks in Iraq were spent at an old ammo depot tucked away on farmland between the airport and the village of Abu Ghraib. Every night the skies sang with fire and the stars were laced with gleaming streaks of magnesium scarlet and barium green. Explosions lit the horizon in dull mahogany flashes. We huddled behind the wire, protecting the thousands of Iraqi Army artillery rounds, rockets, and grenades cached in the bunkers at our depot, watching for thieves, shooting wild dogs, and staging gladiatorial battles between scorpions and camel spiders. I had thought then that the storm of violence blowing around our tiny, beleaguered island was the natural aftereffect of war. In fact, as I learned later, the catastrophe that destroyed Iraqi civil society was an effect of American policy, a policy consonant with American practices in the Middle East and elsewhere: a political and cultural adaptation of radical economic liberalization (Milton Friedman’s “shock policy”).

When I left Iraq in 2004, things had calmed slightly from the postinvasion chaos, but it would have been difficult to say things had improved. Fallujah had become a battleground, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi was in open revolt, and the electricity was still on for only a few hours a day. The streets were lined with garbage and flooded with raw sewage. The American military controlled its bases and its transportation routes, but little else. Meanwhile, as Iraqis turned to neighborhood religious authorities for security and gangs took to the streets, the sectarian conflict that would explode into civil war with the Samarra mosque bombing of 2006 was already simmering. I was happy to get out. I never expected to go back.

Now, ten years later, there was more electricity. The power still failed several times a day, but the outages usually only lasted a few minutes. There were new shops. There was more money around. There were police in Baghdad now, everywhere, and an army. Things were better—except for the daily threat of car bombs. Except for ISIS. Except for the civil war that had erupted again in Anbar and Diyala. Except for the widespread poverty outside the capital, the broken schools, the increasing illiteracy, and the increasing influence of religious extremists. Except for the increasingly authoritarian rule of Nouri al-Maliki, who jailed and assassinated opposition leaders, attacked dissidents, and gave a long leash to proxy militias like Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

Yes, there was an election. But as Hanaa Edwar told me, “Democracy is not only elections, not just voting. Democracy is about building civil institutions, transparency, accountability, the separation of powers, the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t have any of that. We don’t have the rule of law. Instead, everything is in ruins. Baghdad is in ruins. My hometown, Basra, is in ruins. They don’t have clean drinking water. I was shocked. Shocked . . . And now, again, we see Daesh or al Qaeda in Anbar and the north, and they’re moving toward Baghdad. They’re in the suburbs, in Abu Ghraib. So what kind of state is this, that was built and is still supported by America? What were the intentions? What is behind it? To divide this country into three states, like Biden said in 2007? . . . You lost five thousand soldiers to bloodshed in Iraq, and spent so much money, and to what purpose? To create a sectarian state?”

Despite her grim analysis of the political situation, Hanaa Edwar would not stop fighting. Even though international NGOs and the Western media lost interest in Iraq after 2011, especially after the Arab spring, Edwar still worked to connect with organizations and activists outside Iraq. Even though Maliki had tried to dissolve Al-Amal and had used police, government regulations, and proxies to threaten and attack journalists, arrest protestors, and undermine activists, Edwar continued to speak out publicly against what she saw as a new dictatorship. Even though conservative and extremist religious forces were turning Iraq into an Islamic republic, she continued to work for women’s rights, secular government, and freedom of speech.

Hanaa Edwar was a physical embodiment of the spirit of Mutanabbi Street. So, in another way, was Ali Adad, the friend of Meethaq Waleed’s who I’d been convinced was going to blow me up at the Mansour Mall. In the end, we never made it to the Mansour Mall, because it had been closed in advance of the election. And Ali hadn’t tried to kill me. We’d had coffee on the top floor of a nearby Maximall, and as far as I could tell, Ali wasn’t a member of ISIS, but an intelligent, highly motivated, proud young man who had worked his way up from humble origins into the Foreign Service Institute, where he now studied with Meethaq.

One of the first things Ali had told me after introducing himself and showing me some pictures from his seven and a half years working as an interpreter with the US Army was that he was a man of literature and a poet. Later, he showed me some of his work, darkly passionate poems in English, influenced by the British Graveyard Poets, such as Edward Young and Thomas Gray, touched by notes of Blake, Whitman, and Donne. His writing showed a masterful command of rhythm and idiom, and a sophisticated sense of rhyme, playing with internal assonance and slant rhyme in complex ways. He told me that what he really wanted was to be a university professor, but that he had entered Foreign Service school in the hopes of securing a career that would let him take care of his family while doing something valuable for his country. Although he saw a difficult road ahead for Iraq, estimating that it would take decades for the country to recover from the bloodshed and trauma of the American invasion and the sectarian civil war it had unleashed, he was committed to making things better.

Ali had come to the US in 2012 on a Special Immigrant Visa, bringing his wife with him, but after three months, he and his wife decided to return to Iraq. He had been working on an assembly line at Hewlett Packard, earning minimum wage, and when his wife got pregnant, they both questioned whether or not they wanted to raise their child in the US.

“She said, I want to go back, I don’t want to give birth here,” he told me. “And I said, that was just on the tip of my tongue. I would rather have my baby here than there. I don’t want him to feel different. Because it’s different there. It’s hard. I wouldn’t say it’s easy here, but I would say it’s better . . . I asked myself hundreds of times, what am I doing here, what was my purpose, why had God created me to be here, on that spot of the earth? And for the record, I’m very patriotic. I am a patriot. I love this country. I hope when the end comes, I would die and be buried in this country. So I asked myself many times, what is my being, why am I being created and why here . . . I wanted my son to be born here, to feel what I have felt. But I don’t want him to go through all the difficulties that I have gone through, because I have seen many difficulties. Here, I can make a difference.”

Making a difference and helping people were, according to Ali, two of the main reasons he had started working with the Americans in 2003. Nineteen years old then, Ali had learned his English from movies and music videos. He started talking to American soldiers in his neighborhood on Haifa Street, telling them where to find hidden caches of munitions, then helping them hand out medicine and first aid to people in the area. With his last year of high school interrupted by the invasion, and as the only child of a single mother, Ali didn’t have much to tie him down, and the tall, powerful American soldiers who had so easily conquered Saddam must have filled some need in Ali for a surrogate father, as his own father had disappeared when he was four years old.

He took a few months to finish high school in 2004, then started working for the army in August. Over the next seven years, he worked with combat units on patrol, Rangers, the Coalition Provisional Authority, military transition teams and police transition teams, and liaison officers. He was as proud of his time in the field as a “combat interpreter” as he was of his work in Baghdad with senior staff and Iraqi Army generals. While with Bravo 2-15 FA in 2004 and 2005, pulling patrols in the suburbs west of Baghdad, he collected sixty pieces of shrapnel from IEDs his patrols had encountered. He saw one of his units completely replaced, when the first sergeant and commanding officer of the unit he’d been assigned to were found selling confiscated weapons on the black market and running whorehouses in collaboration with local Iraqi Army units.

Ali had been a trusted and valued part of the American occupation. Along the way, he married, divorced, married again, and managed to complete a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature at Mustansiriya University. All while his country was wracked by war.

Ali told me he admired Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in many ways he seemed an exemplar of Emersonian self-reliance. He’d been a soldier and a scholar, and was now training to be a diplomat, having pulled himself up from the streets. He was independent, high-minded, earnest, proud, and thoughtful. I realized that part of what had disturbed me with Meethaq was just this quality of earnest idealism that the two men shared. On the one hand, I had gotten so used to the cynicism infecting American society, I didn’t know what to make of these young men who showed no trace of it; on the other, I’d expected Iraqis to be uniformly pessimistic and bitter. Meethaq and Ali had been through dark times, but they weren’t embittered; they saw the troubles they had faced as challenges they had overcome. As Meethaq told me, quoting a French proverb, “Difficult times make strong men.”

I asked Ali what he thought of working with the American army, and he gave me a complex, thoughtful reply. It was clear that the experience, over seven and a half years, was one of the defining aspects of his life. Yet at the same time, he had taken a certain philosophical distance on it and measured out both the good and the bad.

“Generally, the army is a society. Just like any other organization. It’s an organization that’s governed by rules, that has a lot of discipline, but sometimes rules can be obstacles. Sometimes rules are broken. Sometimes justice is lost in the rules. That’s the way I see it. My overall assessment of the army is that it has something to offer, other than advantages and privileges on the social level. It has something spiritual to offer. You have the core values, you have the discipline, you have the mind-set that you learn. That will get you somewhere. For me personally, it helped defining my skills . . . I find all kinds of people in there. People from the ghettos. Crackheads. They have some crackheads in the army. They do. They have some people that inhale the aerosol cans, just to get high. I mean, c’mon, that’ll give you cancer. Why would you do that? They have some pretty good examples and some pretty bad examples . . . I was in a long time and took a lot of it . . . Being in the army is hard. When you work for the army, it’s even harder. When you don’t have the privileges and the advantages they have, it’s even harder. There were some times when we suffered a lot. But if you can take it, you will come out with something. It’s not wealth, but it’s an intellectual gain.”

After a long conversation at the Maximall, we had arranged to meet again after the election, on Mutanabbi Street. Aziz and I found Ali and Meethaq eating lunch at a shawarma place, and I was unexpectedly happy to see them. When they were done eating, we walked around the Ottoman Kishle, looked at Baghdad’s oldest clock, and listened to some poets read, then met up with some friends of theirs. We all took a boat ride on the Tigris. They joked among themselves and took goofy pictures. Ali explained to me the different varieties of traditional Iraqi musical instruments, then the different kinds of traditional Iraqi boats. I reached into the Tigris and felt the water flow over my hand, watched it split and come back together, while the boat puttered in a slow circle. I felt for a moment like I was anywhere. I felt for a moment like a tourist, among friends.

Remembering my panic and suspicion Saturday night and Sunday, I felt guilty, even ashamed. How could I ever tell them I’d thought they were going to kill me? That I’d assumed—that I’d believed, ardently, for a whole day, that they were both ISIS terrorists? The gratitude I felt toward them for having given me this moment of tranquility in a place I had for ten years associated with terror and violence was complicated, through my suspicion, by a feeling of deceit. I would never be able to discharge the debt I’d incurred by doubting their trust. I’d never be free of the guilt I felt for having assumed these men were terrorists.

When we said goodbye, I gave Ali some books of poetry I’d brought from the US and told him and Meethaq that I hoped to see them again, although I wasn’t sure if I’d have time. Already, the profound expanse of days that had opened at the beginning of my trip was closing in as my flight home rushed inevitably nearer. Every connection was already diverging. Soon I would leave again, and Baghdad would go on, and what would happen in the years before my next return, if I ever came back at all? I could see nothing good in Baghdad’s future except its people, and they would go on living and suffering as they had before.

Over the next few days, I talked to many people who had suffered deeply during the occupation, but few of them directly at the hands of American soldiers. Despite our bombing, invasion, torture, and heavy-handed occupation, the American army didn’t commit the worst acts of violence that went on during those years. What the US did was to foster the conditions that allowed horrific things to happen, allow those things to go on unchecked for years, and support the people who committed them. Then we left.

The policeman I’d talked to who’d shown me his duplicate voter ID cards told me he’d lost twenty-three family members in the sectarian civil war. “Iraq has lost a son a day since the US came,” he said and assured me that things had been better under Saddam. Much better. “With Saddam, if you try to touch his chair, he’ll attack you. Otherwise he’ll leave you alone.” Now all his hopes lay with Maliki, whom he saw as the only leader in Iraq strong enough to beat ISIS and end the sectarian violence.

A spice-shop proprietor named Sedrad, in Baghdad’s busy Shorja market, told me how his father had been martyred during the civil war, and showed me a picture he’d hung in his stall of his nephew, Ahmed Sadr, killed six weeks ago by a VBIED. “We lost this one, but we’re going to keep the rest,” he said. “It didn’t use to be like this. We didn’t know what sect our neighbor belonged to. We didn’t care. I’m a Shiia, my friend Othman is a Sunni, and when I was sick, he carried me to the hospital on his back. There was no difference. We’re brothers. Now, if you’re not safe, you can’t work on the street. You have to expect a knife in your back—like Ahmed, when they blew up his store.”

When I met Raad al-Azzur, I knew nothing about him except that he drove a van for St. George’s Church in Mansour. I offered to go to his church to meet him, but it was easier for him to come to me. I received him in the ostentatiously modern lobby of the Coral Boutique Hotel, whose plate-glass windows overlooking Jadriya Street seemed to invite VBIEDs, and asked the Turkish-vested and pantalooned bellboy to bring us some tea from the dining room. Bland Western classical oozed in the background. Raad was a dour, middle-aged man with a limp, in cheap but clean clothes. He was out of place at this hotel catering to high-rolling Iraqis and foreign money, but I tried to make him comfortable. Seated on giant striped sofas, with an American cop show blazing behind us on an enormous HD TV, I began to ask him the basic introductory questions I normally started with—where he was from, his age, what he did, and so on.

“Did you know my son was killed?” he interrupted.

I didn’t. Raad began to explain, then reached into his pocket to pull out a small cloth bag. From the bag he withdrew two plastic-coated photographs. Each showed one of his children lying in a pool of blood, shot in the head. The boy, Aziz, was four and a half. The girl, Ranin, fifteen.

It had happened just over ten years ago. Men with guns forced their way into his house one night, threatened him and his wife, then shot their two children. The men didn’t say who they were or why they came, except that they were “supporters of Islam.” Raad didn’t know why he was targeted. It may have been because for a month or so that winter, he’d helped a friend sell liquor. It may have been because he was Christian.

Over the years, eleven members of his family had been murdered, and he’d heard of more among his congregation. His cousin in Mosul had recently been killed—a stranger knocked on his door, asked him his name, then put a pistol in his mouth and shot him. Many others had been kidnapped or threatened with letters or text messages. There were almost no Christians left in Baghdad, he told me. Most of the ones who hadn’t been killed had fled.

After his children were murdered, Raad had tried to escape, too, taking his three remaining children and going to Jordan. He applied to the UN for refugee status, but they rejected him. He tried again in Syria and was again rejected. So he came back to Baghdad, to the same house in which his children had been killed, where he lives today.

He worked for a time in the Ministry of Displaced People and Immigration, under a Christian supervisor, but he was fired after his supervisor was replaced by a Muslim. Then he got a job at the Baghdad Provincial Council, but he was fired there too when they found out he was Christian. He lived now on the little money he earned driving a van for the church and a disability stipend he got from the government: he pulled up his pantleg to show me the artificial limb he’d been given to replace the leg that had been blown off in Iraq’s war with Iran.

“Life was better under Saddam,” he told me. “Nobody attacked Christians then. When somebody did, Saddam’s police would find the killer and punish them. Now, you can see, ten years and I’m still looking. When they cut the power under Saddam, you knew when and how long. Now, you never know. In the old days, people did their work and handed out rations because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Now, nobody does anything, and the corruption is so bad you don’t get anything . . . Nothing is going to change now. The faces you see in the election are the same faces that came in on the American tanks.”

I looked at the pictures on the table. Here, I thought, were images that would connect with readers, images that could make the suffering real. Yet what could these pictures of pictures do that hundreds of pictures over eleven years hadn’t? Images of suffering, sorrow, and grief inspired pity for the world’s downtrodden, but almost never engaged real sympathy. How could they? How could a photograph communicate the empty heaviness a man like Raad carried with him, coming home every day to the same rooms in which his children had been murdered, knowing that there was no one who could help him, looking ahead to a future without hope, a future always shattering in the echo of remembered gunshots? I could show you a picture, or a picture of a picture, but the picture can’t show you the ghosts that haunt people’s lives, the memories of sudden violence, the abysses hiding behind desperate efforts at normality. Maybe you can imagine living in a war for a day, a week, or even a year. Maybe you’re sympathetic and brave and willing to take the trouble. Now imagine that war goes on your whole life.

I asked him if I could take pictures of the pictures of his dead children. It seemed necessary but inadequate, and when he agreed I felt like a vulture. I had to keep retaking the pictures again and again from different angles, shifting the photos around the table. My reflection kept getting in the way.

The dream I had of Mutanabbi Street was a dream that life could win out over death, as the poet Naseer had said a few days ago: a faith that the tissue of existence was stronger than the ravages of imperial politics or religious violence. I wanted to believe it was true, and I wanted to believe that even in the darkest days, some flame flickered. Before coming to Baghdad, I had been lucky enough to meet Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi writer whose short-story collection, The Corpse Exhibition, took the perverse cruelty of thirty years of war and tyranny and turned it into art. The collection’s title story is about just what it says, a corpse exhibition by an artist who sculpts death, murdering people and arranging their bodies in grotesquely aestheticized positions. Blasim’s work isn’t the kind of redemptive bullshit you often get when people “turn suffering into art.” His stories are as cruel as the cruelty they portray, and they redeem no one and nothing. Yet somehow, even though his work offered no redemption, the mere fact of its existence, the fact that the human imagination had transformed horror into something beautiful was some kind of testament to the human spirit. Blasim’s work isn’t redemptive but rather tragic, and like the best tragedy, affirms life even at its most awful.

But Blasim had escaped. He lived in Finland now. There were artists, writers, and poets who hadn’t, still living in Baghdad, still writing and working. Indeed, while I was there, the Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his gothic novel of wartime life, Frankenstein in Baghdad. The novel’s plot is a metaphor for artistic life in Iraq today: a scavenger named Hadi begins to collect pieces from the unidentified corpses of bomb victims, stitching them together into one body so that they could be properly buried. Before he has a chance to bury the monstrosity, however, it comes to life, and begins a rampage of vengeance, hunting down the killers who had murdered the various people its body was now composed of.

Another artist I met, a playwright and sculptor named Sarem Dakhel Ahmad, who had spent seven long years in the Iraqi Army during the Iran-Iraq War and the Persian Gulf War, thought of his art not as cruelty but as catharsis. “The curse of war has polluted my life . . . but after getting out of the army, I started making art as a way to purge the pollution. I think of my art as a practice of purification.” Under Saddam’s regime, he had been investigated for staging Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and had had a play of his own, The Night of Murder, banned. After the fall of the regime, he was threatened by religious extremists. One day he received an envelope with a note and a bullet. The note read: “Stop making sculpture.” He kept on making art, though he did take advantage of a fellowship offered by a Russian art institute to spend some time outside the country. The fellowship had been awarded because of a series of sculptures he’d made using American shell brass. After the invasion (in which the Americans had accidentally bombed his house), Ahmad began collecting spent American brass wherever he could find it. He melted the brass down and shaped it into several stark, Giacometti-like sculptures: a man and a woman on a boat, a three-headed minotaur figure, two women lifting a body overhead.

For all the stories of individual artists struggling to show an affirming flame, like Saadawi or Ahmad, there were as many stories of flames being choked out and smothered by religious fundamentalism. Haider Hashim, owner of the Akkad Art Gallery in the Karrada, told me how the art scene in Baghdad had been all but obliterated by the war, and that now, neglected by a government focused only on weapons and oil and under attack from religious zealots, it was breathing its last gasp. In 2002, Haider told me, there had been more than fifty art galleries in Baghdad. Today, his was one of two.

Ahmed Farouk Lafta, who under the name J-Fire was one of the most celebrated contemporary musicians on the Baghdad scene, used to perform rap and nü-metal, inspired by bands such as Linkin Park, P.O.D., Limp Bizkit, and Korn. When Islamic extremists threatened to kill him if he kept on using Western styles, he switched over to more anodyne Middle Eastern pop. The Baghdad music scene itself now existed almost entirely online: people were afraid concerts and dance clubs would attract bombs, and xenophobic religious conservatives opposed any youth culture that swerved from traditional lines—which meant anything that’s not Islamic, Arab, and segregated by sex.

Meanwhile, in Baghdad’s universities, departments were rife with sectarianism and corruption was eating away at educational and scholarly standards. I talked to professors and students at Baghdad University, Mustansiriya University, and the Academy of Fine Arts, and the system was failing everywhere. Students bought their way into college, then bought their way through it. Religious and sectarian pressures were forcing academic committees to limit what professors could teach and sometimes even intervene directly in professor’s courses. Nadia Faydh, a professor of English language and literature who quoted Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to me to describe the current situation in Iraq (“And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night”), was banned from including Marxist literary criticism on her syllabus, and chastised by her department chair for “causing trouble” by teaching Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” a canonical text of English Romanticism. Students had been offended by Shelley’s equation of love and poetry with religion, as when he writes:

“Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that Earth became peopled with the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden.”

The dream I’d had of Mutanabbi Street wasn’t just about cultural tourism, escaping the spartan constraints of military life, or even connecting with Iraqis. The dream I’d had was about finding common ground in a cosmopolitan humanist vision of intellectual freedom, self-development, learning, and collective cultural exchange. But such exchange depends on a free and open culture, and on engagement that goes deeper than military occupation and political manipulation.

I had visited Mutanabbi Street, as I had dreamed of doing for so many years. I talked to poets, artists, musicians, teachers, students, and philosophers. I walked among the people as they voted. I searched for every hopeful flame I could. But the spirit I found in Baghdad was broken, corrupted, or threatened where it wasn’t already dead—and we had caused the damage. We had let loose a grisly pandemonium in Iraq, then walked away and tried to wash our hands of the whole affair.

5.

We blasted along the Tigris, Nicki Minaj ripping out of the speakers over a furious woofer bump, Duraid’s Dodge Charger slipping through the traffic on Abu Nuwas Street like a hammerhead through a school of clownfish. The Karkh blazed and streaked across the gleaming black water, streetlights turning the faces of drinkers on the Jadriya Bridge a dull, efflorescent bronze. Duraid slowed to pass an Iraqi police Humvee, then gunned it down a side street, as kids and wary fathers watched us roar through the night. The city slowed around us, blurring into abstractions, statues, swaths of color.

It was my last night in Baghdad. Earlier in the evening, I’d met up with two freelancers working on a story about Baghdad EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) for Vice magazine, Ayman Oghanna and Andrea Bernardi, and Borzou Daragahi, a Pulitzer Prize finalist on staff at the Financial Times, and we’d walked over to Pizza House to get some dinner to take back to their crash pad at the Internews House, a cheap rental for journalists in Baghdad. I had some beers to finish off before I left in the morning, and Borzou had some vodka and Campari to dispose of before he flew to Cairo, so the four of us made a party of it. Borzou and Ayman dissected the election and Andrea showed us combat footage he’d taken during the Libyan revolution. Meanwhile, firecrackers went off behind the house, setting us all slightly on edge. It seemed like a good omen, though—they were the only explosions I’d heard the entire time I was in Baghdad.

I told them about the brief visit I’d convinced Aziz to make with me to a nearby nightclub, where Iraqi fat cats puffing nargilehs watched glammy young women dance in hip-tight, shimmering dresses. The audience was all men, clustered around tables laden with whiskey bottles and mezze plates, except, oddly enough, two families tucked away in the corners eating dinner. The nightclub had a rocking band belting out Middle Eastern pop too loud to talk over, and during the break the singer came out into the crowd and sat with one of the customers, asking him how he was doing that evening, complimenting him, thanking him for coming. In response, the man at the table tossed a fistful of dinars into the air. This seemed to be some kind of ritual: the singer moved to another table and the same thing happened again. Hundred-thousand-dinar bills fluttered out over the stage like ash after an explosion. Between songs, the girls came out and sat with the men, chatting them up, leaning in. I wanted to stay longer, but the management wasn’t encouraging our stay, and Aziz was growing increasingly uncomfortable. “I can’t even look at those women,” he hissed over the music. “They’re diseased.”

Borzou whipped out his phone and showed us a story he’d written about a similar club, back in 2010. He’d worked a deal with the management to hang out all night, and even claimed to have sneakily snapped a couple photos with his phone. Borzou had been in and out of Baghdad since 2003, and if there was a story in the city he hadn’t heard, covered, or written himself, it probably wasn’t worth talking about. And it wasn’t just Borzou: for eight years, the city had swarmed with Western journalists scrambling and hustling to scoop each other. You name it, somebody had written it. Baghdad nightclubs? Check. Iraqi rappers? Check. The looting of the national museum? Check. Corruption? Check. Children orphaned by war? Check. The rise of sectarian militias? Check. After the Americans left in 2011, though, the press corps scattered, back to New York and Washington, London, Paris, or settling into regional offices in Cairo, Beirut, or Istanbul—accessible cities with lower insurance premiums. Without any boots on the ground, American interest faded.

A handful of salty journos had ambled back for the elections, and I wandered into the party like a goof. Any story I might scare up had already been hunted, and when it came to finding real news, I was out of my league, poorly equipped, and totally inexperienced. The best journalists had at least some Arabic, could pass for a Middle Easterner on the street, and knew how to work through the sometimes paralyzing Iraqi inertia, the constant “Inshallah” that could stall out even the most motivated investigator. I had none of that, but I had one thing that none of them could put a claim on: an exclusive account of what it was like coming back to Iraq as a veteran, ten years later. As Matt Bradley from the Wall Street Journal had observed at a party at the Swedish Consulate, my story was all about putting my fucked-up self into the story.

Now my fucked-up self was leaning back as Duraid fishtailed around a corner, tires squealing. The last time I’d been in a Dodge Charger had been almost exactly a year before, the sun rising slowly behind us as we drove over the misty blue hills of central Texas, headed for the Austin airport after having driven all night from New Orleans. Austin had been the final stop on the Fire and Forget book tour, and the five of us behind the project—me, Jake, Phil, Matt, and Perry—all flew down for it, scheduling a quick visit to New Orleans as a kind of last hurrah. The car rental place at the airport had upgraded our rental on account of our being veterans, and so we found ourselves tooling around in a muscle car Jake dubbed Black Betty.

In New Orleans, we stayed at the Café Brasil, a Marigny landmark shuttered by its owner, Adgenor “Adé” Salgado, after Hurricane Katrina, for reasons that remained known only to him. But he was a friend of Jake’s, and so he let us stay upstairs. Adé was an enigmatic, hard-edged Brazilian mystic, a curved blade in a silk shirt, and he’d put Jake up for a few months after Jake had come back from Iraq. He welcomed us into the empty upper rooms of the Café and offered us beer, weed, and whatever else we might want. The rooms were musty and haunted, full of old books, clothes, Adé’s thickly daubed abstract paintings, sculptural junk, and, for Jake, memories of a strange time.

The next day, before we left, while Jake was catching up with Adé and the other guys were napping, I found a worn copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost on the mantel of a bricked-up fireplace. I opened the book at random and came to a passage in one of Satan’s monologues, a passage that resounded like the striking of a clock. It echoed through my ears all that day, all night as we drove back from New Orleans, all through the soft blue Texas morning, and onto the plane coming up out of Austin:

 

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;

And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep

Still threatening to devour me opens wide,

To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

 

The lines came back to me again in the close darkness of Duraid’s Charger, Nicki Minaj singing “I beez in the trap,” Baghdad a blur around me. Which part was the story, I wondered, and which part my fucked-up self? Who was a terrorist? Who was a victim? Who was trapped in hell, and who could fly away?

Almost everyone I talked to wanted to leave. The Americans wanted to leave. The ambassador wanted to leave. My translator, Aziz, wanted to leave. My driver, Ahmed, wanted to leave. The English literature students I talked to at Mustansiriya University wanted to leave, and who could blame them? Rania Tawfeeq, a Western-dressed woman with a direct gaze and free-flowing black hair who was finally finishing her bachelor’s degree at twenty-five, had spent much of her life in exile in Jordan, Sweden, and Syria. She was “home” now, but felt trapped and dreamed of nothing but escaping with her daughter. “Baghdad streets can’t compare to anywhere else,” she said, shaking her head. Huda Kadhim, a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old in hijab, hadn’t seen her father since he’d been kidnapped in 2006. One of her cousins had also been kidnapped, and another murdered. The state paid her family a pension from her father’s salary for six months after his disappearance, then someone in the ministry started stealing it. Osama Kadhim, twenty-three, moved back to Iraq with his family from Yemen in 2003, then saw most of his family killed over the next few years. He was an affable, gentle-looking young man, but everything he said spoke of a soul clarified and hardened by violence. “Politics here is just lies and more lies,” he said. “I’m afraid to leave my house, afraid to die or be kidnapped.” Maysoun, looking even younger than her twenty years with her shy smile and bashful glance, had been forced to move from Saydiya to Abu Ghraib, now on the front lines of the fight against ISIS. Her brother had been kidnapped in 2006, and she hadn’t seen him since. She was phlegmatic about the dangers of living in an area being fought over by Daesh and the Iraqi Army, and of having to travel every day into the city for school. “I believe if I’m going to die, I will die,” she said, shrugging.

“You’re not going to die,” Professor Faydh told her, laughing. “They will use you for some other purpose.”

“There are worse things than death,” one of her fellow female students said, giggling.

Maysoun hoped to leave Iraq, but didn’t think she’d be able to, because of the difficulties involved, but also because she didn’t think her parents would let her. “I have dreams,” she said. “I just can’t achieve them because I’m a girl.”

Professor Faydh herself, who studied and taught American literature, said that her greatest wish was to come to the United States but she probably never would because she was unmarried and her parents wouldn’t let her travel. Professor Ghadah Abdul-Sattar, who taught philosophy of science at Baghdad University, told me she was obliged to wear hijab at the university or risk harassment from fellow teachers and even students. Isma Najm, an idealistic young woman with a degree in chemical engineering and a specialization in oil refining, was unemployed and pouring her energies into Facebook activism, because her parents wouldn’t let her move to the south of Iraq where she could get work with an oil company. Wasan Faghel, one of Professor Faydh’s most forceful and articulate students, left college in 2004 after getting married, and when she decided to go back to school in 2011, her husband told her she couldn’t. Only her mother-in-law’s influence convinced him to let her go. Wasan expressed her admiration for Professor Faydh and her desire to be a professor herself but didn’t think she’d ever be able to. “When I came back here, I had a dream to be something. I was influenced by a great teacher. She was a great model for me, she has a good character, she is an educated woman, and she is sitting right in front of me. She presents the woman I dream to be. But actually, I don’t believe I will be.” The other girls laughed. “I dream to be just like her but I don’t believe that I can do this, because I’m so tied to my family and my husband.”

Many wanted to leave, but few could. The SIV program and the IOM had tight filters and narrow pipelines for getting people out, and the process often took years—and this was for people who had worked with the US and were eligible for special consideration. For most Iraqis, not only was leaving impossible, but even traveling outside Iraq had become incredibly difficult. “The Iraqi passport means nothing now,” one of Professor Faydh’s students told me. “Nobody recognizes us. You can’t go anywhere.” Meanwhile, refugees from Fallujah came back to the neighborhoods in Baghdad they’d been forced out of in 2006, where they were threatened by the same militias as before. Refugees who had moved to Syria had become refugees again. Part of the misery of Iraq was the pervasive feeling that the walls were closing in: it was getting harder and harder for foreigners to come in and harder and harder for Iraqis to leave.

For me, leaving the first time was easy. I got on a C-130 at Baghdad Airport and I was gone. When people asked me if I’d ever go back, I’d laugh: “What for?”

My tour in Iraq had been extended past its original end date, after the Jaish al-Mahdi uprising in April 2004, and during our last months there, my anger, fear, and frustration grew into an unbounded hate: I hated the constant threat of violence, the smell of oil, the despicable role I was forced to play as an occupier, and the resentment we drew in performing that role. I hated my commander, who was an idiot. I hated military logic, with its redundancy and regulations, and I hated military culture, with its puffed-up machismo and dumb aggression. I hated the explosions and the gunfire and the mortars. I hated the feel of the air. I hated the sand, the heat, the tents, the streets, the camouflage, the Iraqis, the Americans, the sky, the sun, the wind, and the hands of the clock marking time.

It took about a year before other feelings started filtering in, other memories. As time went on, my memories grew richer and more ambivalent. I remembered standing on the roof of a building at Camp Dragoon in Baladiyat, watching the sun go down a purple sky over Sadr City. I remembered watching people go to ice shops on the street as though there wasn’t a war on, envying their vulnerable freedom. I remembered my first Rani peach drink, ice cold, bought at a stand by the side of the road after I’d convinced my commander it was safe to stop. I remembered the water buffalo we passed every day on the way from Baghdad Ammo Depot West to the airport. I remembered the Iraqi who ran the coffee shop at FOB Falcon, who brought his daughters in and let them talk to us. I remembered the local girls who did our laundry there, and how I heard they were murdered just after we left. I remembered two Iraqi boys I took a picture of in Dora, both of them in ridiculous pink pants, and I remembered wondering what their lives would be like. I remembered Waleed, the Facility Protection Services cop who pulled gate guard with us, who taught me and RonRon how to curse in Arabic. I remembered the thrill of danger and how it made me feel alive. I remembered something sweet in the evening air over the Tigris, as the muezzin called out across the city.

And as Duraid downshifted and cut past an SUV back onto Jadriya Street, slamming my body against the door, I remembered hitting a hundred and twenty on the highway back to Austin from New Orleans, feeling something shudder and crack inside as one cycle came around to its end and another began, and I remembered swerving through traffic at the head of a convoy, ten years before, feeling my Humvee slide and grind under my fingers, my foot slipping gas-brake-gas.

6.

Leaving, it turned out, wasn’t as simple as all that. The past doesn’t fall away but lives on in your flesh, in your habits, in the synaptic weave that makes consciousness out of electrical pulses and meat. I left Iraq in 2004 and the army in 2006, but I found over time that neither one had left me. My year in Iraq made me who I became after, as did my four years in the army, no matter how I felt about it. In the same way, America’s eight-year-long occupation there has shaped what America is, whether we want to remember those years or not. Shock and Awe, WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, abandoned soccer fields, Fallujah, Tal Afar, Karbala, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Jaish al-Mahdi, the Green Zone, Sadr City, Sahwah, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, the Samarra mosque, al Qaeda in Iraq, and the millions of lives we uprooted, left unguarded, destroyed, and abandoned are all a part of us now. We made them part of America, American identity and American history—Iraq has become flesh of our flesh, Baghdad blood of our blood. We can pretend to forget, try to rub out the image in the mirror, but we can’t change what we’ve done.

When I was in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, most of the students I talked to in 2014 would have been teenagers. I was an American soldier then, distant and wary, separated from the world I lived in by armor, power, ignorance, and fear. They were hadji kids, worried about school and clothes and the future. Worried about getting enough to eat, not getting blown up, not getting shot by nervous Americans.

I left, they stayed. Over the next ten years, I finished my time in the army, went back to college, then went on to Princeton. I got married and got divorced. I wrote and published and thought a lot about what it means to be a veteran. I went hiking in western Ireland, the south of France, and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, those kids in Baghdad struggled to finish high school in the midst of a civil war. They saw friends and family members murdered and blown up. Some just disappeared. The American surge came and went, stabilizing things for a couple of years, and then the Americans left, taking that stability with them. Meanwhile, Rania, Huda, Osama, Maysoun, and their classmates hid from militias, bandaged wounds, took pleasure where they could, and tried to imagine a life that might be livable.

They stayed, I left. But while I may have left Iraq, Iraq hadn’t left me. Baghdad might have been hell, and it might still be hell today, but it wasn’t a hell I’d visited and escaped. It was a hell I had helped create.

The layers write over each other without erasing what came before but changing it, changing me. All the places I’d been in Baghdad, the psychogeography of FOBs and patrols that had loomed so large for me for so long, diminished in the symbolic scale of my past but took on an existential weight they’d never had before. I went back to FOB Falcon and Camp Dragoon, now Federal Police bases, and found a strange continuity in the up-armored American Humvees guarding the entrances, although they bore the Iraqi flag. I had Ahmed and Aziz take me through the streets of Dora where I’d once driven patrols, which then had been open and full of people. Today, the neighborhoods were a maze of concrete barriers, segregated from the rest of the city by fifteen-foot-high blast walls and military checkpoints. The streets were in better repair; there wasn’t as much raw sewage spilling out over the curbs, and the shops seemed renovated, with shiny new signs. Bollards lined the sidewalks of the main commercial avenue, to protect against car bombs. But the streets were almost empty. It felt like a ghost town.

Finally, I went looking for Baghdad Ammo Depot West, “Camp Shithole,” the munitions cache between the airport and Abu Ghraib where my unit spent the first six weeks of our tour. We were really “in the field” then, with no running water, no electricity, burning our shit in giant metal tubs, showering with canteens, and eating T-rats (tray rations) delivered twice a day from BIAP. I slept in the open, wrapped in a mosquito net on a cot next to my Humvee, and several mornings woke to wild dogs licking the sweat off my toes. Camp Shithole seemed like the absolute boonies, though in fact we were just a few miles from the city.

Ahmed drove us down the highway to Fallujah, off which a road led that would, I hoped, bring us to the remains of Camp Shithole. As we passed the outskirts of Baghdad, the checkpoints got bigger, more serious, and more frequent. To our south, what had been Camp Victory, the largest US installation in Iraq, now an Iraqi army base, sprawled behind massive concrete barriers. Traffic congestion worsened at the checkpoints, and the farther we got from Baghdad, the more the road filled with beat-up old vans and rattling junkers. When we got into Abu Ghraib, traffic stopped.

This was familiar territory, even ten years later: streams of poor, rural Iraqis with Dorothea Lange dustbowl faces, women in full black abayas, squat stucco buildings with rusty signs. Broiling heat and stalled traffic. Men in vans staring at me in wonder and hostility. The difference was that I didn’t have a rifle, a helmet, a machine gunner on overwatch, or three trucks behind me full of bros. It was me and Aziz and Ahmed in a Kia. I didn’t even have a hat.

“Do you have a hat?” I asked Ahmed.

“Yeah, sure, I have everything.” He opened the center compartment and pulled out a baseball cap and some Wiley X shades. I put the ballcap on, thinking it might hide my hair and face.

“Does this make me look less American?”

“More.”

I took off the hat, and Ahmed offered me a cigarette. “Here. Have a cigarette. Smoke and think. Maybe it will be your last.”

“Is it dangerous here?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Aziz said. “Very dangerous. There is a lot of fighting out here between Daesh and the army.”

I accepted Ahmed’s cigarette, and then another, and another, as we slowly rolled through the traffic jam, then made a U-turn to get on the south side of the highway. We came back through more traffic and eventually turned off into the town of Abu Ghraib, rolling down a dirt road past hovels and shacks. We were stopped at a small checkpoint, where Aziz told the soldiers that I was a journalist and we were looking for flooding. The soldiers told us there wasn’t any flooding around here and the road went nowhere, but they let us go see for ourselves.

It turned out they were right. What had been Baghdad Ammo Depot West was now nothing but hills of garbage. The road that once would have taken us right into the heart of the camp dead-ended in a mound of trash and dirt. This was probably a good thing, all told, given the likelihood of unexploded munitions lying around, but nonetheless I couldn’t help feeling that the place’s fate was too ironic. What we had called Camp Shithole was now, literally, a shithole. As a symbol for the American occupation, it was stupidly perfect. I got out and took some pictures. A wild dog lay panting in the sun. Then I got in Ahmed’s Kia, and we drove back into the city.

I’d seen what I’d come to see, now I was leaving. Duraid whipped the Charger around a corner and drove back behind the Coral Boutique Hotel, dropping us off at the Internews House. The night was buzzy and smooth. Ayman said goodbye to his friends, and we headed in for more vodka. Somehow, Borzou and I got into an argument about America’s role in fomenting the sectarian violence in Iraq. “You have to remember, these are old problems,” he told me. “The US didn’t create the Shia-Sunni split. But it’s not even that. It’s all these countries that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire, and then when that comes apart, people fight. Think about it: of all the countries that came out of the Ottoman Empire, did any one of them not have some kind of awful violence?”

I tried Turkey, but Borzou brought up the Armenian genocide. I couldn’t remember whether the Armenian genocide had happened before or after 1920 (it happened in 1915, it turns out—one of the last acts of the Ottoman Empire, though the Republic of Turkey has persistently denied that it ever occurred), but I could see his point, for which Yugoslavia was the prime contemporary example, that pre-existing ethnic or sectarian differences were, historically, inflamed and exacerbated by political instability. “Okay,” I said, “that’s true, but the US could have done things differently. It should have done things differently. If you invade a country and change the rulers, that’s your responsibility.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “You break it, you buy it. But they were totally ignorant of what they were getting into. And anyway, what could they have done differently?”

“They could have not started the government on a quota system. They could have not backed sectarian leaders like Maliki. They could have not dumped money into the militias. But more basically, they could have not disbanded the army and de-Baathified the government. They basically destroyed what civil institutions there were and left a vacuum that all but invited sectarian violence, which they then fostered by supporting a Shiite government.”

“I was here then and I don’t remember any quota system.”

“No, you know, they divided it up so many seats to Shiites and so many seats to Sunnis, a seat for the Christians, and so on.”

“Well, sure, but what are they supposed to do? Not give minorities representation?”

“No. But don’t found the political process on sectarian identity. Let people form parties around issues and groups that aren’t based in religious or ethnic identity. Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, whatever. Don’t start with racial or sectarian politics.”

“I’m looking at the people on the IGC, and there were some secular Sunnis, and a religious Sunni, and a couple secular Shia, there’s Chalabi, and, sure, yeah, some religious Shia. But look, the people you’re talking about had helped the US in the invasion. Some of those Shia fought alongside the US army and helped win the war. What were they supposed to do? You have to take care of the people that helped you.”

“They could have been bracketed. I just don’t think putting people with a grudge in power is the best way to form a stable postwar government.”

“That’s true, but I’m saying you should be careful about claiming that the US started the sectarianism.”

“No, you’re right. It was already there. But our policies and our attitudes fed it and helped it grow. And I can’t help but think it was intentional.”

“That’s conspiracy talk. Look, the US just didn’t know what it was doing, especially at first. They didn’t have any real Middle East experts on the ground; the military didn’t know what it was doing, and they didn’t have a plan.”

“Yeah, I don’t buy that anymore. I think ‘no plan’ was the plan. The US had experts, knowledgeable people on the Middle East, and they got sidelined. What’s more, we came in deciding that the Sunnis were the enemy and the Shia were the good guys. We came in with a sectarian agenda.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Man, I remember when we got here in May 2003. We knew fuck-all about Iraq, except ‘Kif, oguf,’ and that the Sunnis were the bad guys and the Shia were the oppressed underdogs. You look at Fallujah, we killed seventeen people there in May that year, protestors, for nothing. All up until the surge, even during the worst insurgency, Sunni tribal leaders kept reaching out to the Americans to work with them, trying to get into the political process, and every time General Casey was like, ‘Fuck those guys.’”

“Casey was an asshole. So was Abizaid.”

“Yeah, sure, but the point is, we had decided, going in, that Iraq was divided into Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds, and that the Sunnis and Shias hated each other, and that we were going to support the Shia. Then that’s what we did. We knew that the Shiite militias were working with the Iraqi police and government as early as 2005, sending out death squads and torturing people, and the policy was to not do a damn thing about it. We trained them, even. And then we put Maliki in power. And that was all by accident?”

“What do you mean we?”

“I mean commanding generals and policy makers in Iraq. And now, that policy has resulted in a weakened, divided Iraq that can’t build an effective, independent national politics, but is still pumping out oil. That seems to fit the needs of the US government very well. I have a hard time believing it wasn’t intentional.”

“I’m telling you, I was here then. I was talking to generals and to people at the CPA. Nobody knew what the hell they were doing. It was just a complete mess.”

“I know. I was here too, for part of it, and what I saw was a total goatfuck. But I can’t believe the ‘innocent American’ story anymore. The US has too much involved, too much power, too much money, and too deep a history in the Middle East to not have a very good idea, at the upper levels, of precisely what the fuck it’s doing. I just can’t believe in the fairy tale of innocent, fumbling Americans anymore. If we made a mess, it’s because we wanted a mess.”

In January, when I agreed to the assignment from Rolling Stone to go back to Iraq, I took it upon myself to try to understand why we’d lost the war. Beginning from the premise that mistakes were made, I found mistakes: trying to completely reinvent an entire society, ruling by sectarian division, a shallow commitment to nation building, no coherent or well-articulated plan, a high turnover rate for both units and commanders, a consistent inability to adapt to changing circumstances, persistent support for Maliki from 2006 onward, and the general incompetence of the US Army and its leadership all seemed like persuasive reasons for American failure. As I read more deeply in US policy in the Middle East and Iraq, though, it became increasingly difficult to accept my initial premise that American actions in Iraq should be understood as a series of mistakes. Instead, it became impossible not to see the Iraq War as part of a consistent pattern of imperialist manipulation aimed at preventing national independence, populist self-determination, and regional stability. That pattern included our intimate involvement with repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran, CIA support for Iraq’s Baathist coup in 1963, our work fomenting and sustaining al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s, our backing Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran (including tacit support for his use of chemical weapons), our unscrupulous history of selling arms to competing and sometimes warring nations (including, from the 1950s to the present, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, and Syrian rebels), and our long-term collusion, going back to the early years of the twentieth century, with the efforts of oil companies to weaken nationalist democracies, foster ethnic, sectarian, and religious conflict, and undermine labor organizing and social reform.

To what end? Most simply, to keep Iraq from becoming a powerful, independent regional player. Since Iraq sits on the world’s fifth-largest proven reserves of oil, including the second-largest single known oil field on the planet, and sits uncomfortably between the American-supported fundamentalist Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the independent, American-resistant Shiia Republic of Iran, the US simply can’t afford to let Iraq go its own way. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, though, the US lacks the regional and cultural power to ensure the allegiance of an independent Iraq, and it lacks popular support for the kind of long-term occupation and reconstruction that would be needed to create a stable, Americanized ally, such as what happened with Germany and South Korea. I say “unfortunately” because, with US interests in the region at stake but US options for exercising its power limited, the most sensible choice is to keep Iraq weak and bleeding. The best ways to do that are by promoting sectarian and ethnic conflict, supporting Sunni extremists through Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supporting Shia extremists through the Iraqi military, obstructing any efforts toward stability and peace, and flooding the region with weapons.

Just because this happens to perfectly describe American policy in the region since 2003, however, doesn’t prove that’s what the US intended. There’s much to be said for the narrative that describes a fumbling but well-intentioned America. It’s a familiar story, after all: We meant to do well. We really meant to spread democracy and peace and freedom. We just fucked up because we’re so ignorant of other cultures and so committed to American exceptionalism. It was just imperial overstretch. Sorry! Our bad! While US diplomats and oil company agents had been working intimately with locals in the Middle East for more than a century, it was good old arrogant stupidity, personified by Donald Rumsfeld, that sidelined all that institutional knowledge and just made a big doody-poo. Who could have known? If it so happens that the bloody conflict and immense human suffering we “accidentally” caused when we opened the lid on “ancient sectarian quarrels” serves American political and corporate interests, well, gee whiz, that doesn’t mean we meant things to go that way.

But as I sat over my vodka on my last night in Iraq, looking back at my service there and considering what I’d seen and what I’d heard, especially from Iraqis themselves, I realized it didn’t matter what we’d intended. What mattered was what we’d done. We’d invaded a sovereign nation on a pretense, fucked up the lives of thirty million people, started a bitter, bloody civil war by pitting one religious sect against another, then left and pretended it had nothing to do with us. We’d helped strengthen fundamentalist religious extremists in the Middle East and put intellectuals, journalists, and activists at risk. A few people made a whole bunch of money, and a whole nation was left in shambles. Whether or not breaking Iraq into pieces had been a deliberate plan from the beginning, as some evidence suggests, the war had been nothing but a murderous hustle. The politicians who ran the war had shown no higher ideals than robbery and plunder, and I’d been nothing but their thug.

As an historical agent in the vast, crooked enterprise that was the Iraq War, I had helped cause immense suffering, and I had profited by it. I had let it happen, and I had made it happen. And when I thought of the pride I’d taken in my service, the combat pay I’d spent vacationing in Paris, London, and Berlin, and the blood money that had bought my college education, holding them up against the lives I’d seen shattered by violence, the hopes I’d seen trampled, and the dreams for a better future I’d seen starved by neglect and choked by frustration, I could feel nothing but disgust and shame for having been an American soldier.

The night was growing late. Ayman brought out his bottle of arak and I poured myself a shot for the road, then stumbled out through the gate and back to my hotel. When I woke in the morning, still wearing my clothes from the night before, it took me a while to register where I was and what I was doing. Blue predawn light filtered through the gap in the curtains. I was leaving Iraq again.

Ahmed picked me up downstairs. Traffic was light and the city quiet. As we drove to the airport, we passed the winged statue marking its entrance.

I pointed out the statue to Ahmed: “I always remembered that angel.”

“Abbas ibn Firnas,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s not an angel. That’s Abbas ibn Firnas.”

Abbas ibn Firnas, it turned out, was a Berber-Andalusian inventor, poet, and musician who lived in the Caliphate of Córdoba—what is now southern Spain—in the ninth century. He had made the first recorded attempt at glider flight in Europe, using wings fashioned from vulture feathers. Firnas had built his wings, Ahmed told me, to escape prison.

As my plane rose into the sky, I watched Iraq fall away below. Five thousand years ago, this precise stretch of land, the fertile crescent running west along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, had been the birthplace of Western civilization. Twelve hundred years ago, it had been the heart of an empire spanning from Kabul to Tunis. Two hundred years from tomorrow, after the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world have been pumped dry and burned, it may finally see peace. [2014]