Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,72

neutral population. We found Alastair out by the pool, sitting at a candlelit table cluttered with bottles and ashtrays and talking to a young American man whose hat identified him as with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Each man was working his way through a cigar, the American rather less adroitly, and because Alastair was no longer wearing his keffiyeh I saw now that while his beard was real, the black was not.

Anyone who was paying attention in the nineties, he was saying—anyone who learned anything from Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Somalia—would have anticipated this. If you disband the military, if you fire everyone who ever worked for the government, if you take away people’s jobs, their income and their pride, what do you expect? That they’re going to sit around playing Parcheesi until you show up at their door and hand them a ballot? And if they know where the old munitions are hidden, and you aren’t guarding those either—is it really a surprise when they turn them against you?

In the pool, a series of fluorescent deck lamps reflected like a row of shimmering moons. A chin-ups bar had been installed on the far side of the water, where, as we talked, an impressively muscled silhouette strode over, sprang up, and began vigorously pistoning himself into the air. The UNHCR man, who had a Southern accent and continuously shifted his cigar from one hand to the other as though even its unlit end were unbearably hot, said:

Well, what choice did we have?

For that matter, said one of the other Americans, why wasn’t anything done sooner? Like when Saddam was murdering Kurds and Shiites for staging a rebellion at our own not-so-subtle suggestion? Leading to thousands of them being killed right under our noses, because our troops were under inexplicable orders not to intervene? Even though they were there. Even though the attack arguably breached Schwarzkopf’s cease-fire treaty. Why didn’t we do anything then?

You sound like an exceptionalist, said Alastair.

So? said the American. Exceptionalism is only a problem when it’s used to justify bad policies. Ignorance is a problem. Complacency is a problem. But to aspire to exceptional behavior—exceptionally generous, judicious, humane behavior—as anyone lucky enough to have been born in an exceptionally rich, exceptionally educated, exceptionally democratic country should do . . .

The man in the UNHCR cap nodded sagely and blew smoke rings that stretched oblong before dissolving into the collective haze above the pool. Less than two years later, the same pool would have the body parts of suicide bombers floating in it, but on this night, an Iraqi Christmas of relative calm, Saddam had been captured and it was impossible not to hope that the arc of the moral universe was not, after all, so very long and unyielding. I watched my brother light a cigarette without taking his eyes off the man on the pull-ups bar and thought maybe he wasn’t listening to the conversation, or listening but dismissing it as unworthy of his own participation. But then, still with his eyes on the exercising silhouette, Sami exhaled and said:

Isn’t it possible that what the West really wants is simply not to be inconvenienced by the Middle East? Not to be terrorized, not to be charged too much for its gas, not to be threatened with chemical or nuclear weapons? And otherwise you couldn’t really care less?

No, said the man with the UNHCR. I believe the average American is sincere when he says he wants Iraq to become a peaceful and democratic nation. A free and secular nation. Though we understand this may not be possible for some time.

But you wouldn’t want us to become richer than you. More powerful than you. To have greater international clout and the same seemingly boundless potential.

The man in the UNHCR cap looked nonplussed.

Well, Alastair put in quietly, it’s hard to imagine. But it would make for an interesting development, geopolitically speaking, yes.

Inside, the journalists, cameramen, and contractors were sitting around one long table now, carving up a Honey Baked Ham someone’s mother had FedExed from Maine. I sat down with Alastair at one end of the table, where two plates of meat were passed down to us and Alastair ate them both. While he did, I noted that he seemed more alive than when I’d last seen him, which had been in London five years earlier; his body now appeared more charged and alert—as though, casualties aside, he really rather preferred life in a war zone. I