The New Republic

There was a time when Sharif Ali bin Al Hussein spent many of his
days in Baghdad's Al Rihab Palace, home of the Iraqi royal family.
And, though Saddam Hussein has since turned the palace into a
notorious prison--Iraqis today call the building the "Palace of the
End"--Sharif Ali, one of the last surviving members of the royal
family, has settled into suitably regal accommodations in London.
There, in a five-bedroom, mansion-block flat near Holland Park,
surrounded by expensive artwork and silver-framed, sepia-toned
photos of his Hashemite relatives, the man who would be Iraq's king
bides his time, waiting for the day he will return to Baghdad and
the throne. He believes that day is drawing near. "We as Iraqis
have learned to be very cautious about predicting the demise of
Saddam Hussein's regime," he told me. "Given that, we are in fact
the most optimistic we have ever been."Sharif Ali has all the mannerisms of a king. He is tall and elegant,
with slicked-back hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. On the
October afternoon I visited him in London, he was dressed in a
natty gray suit and sipped tea from a gold-embossed china cup. And
listening to him talk--in his crisp, British- accented
English--about the constitutional monarchy he intends to bring to
Iraq once Saddam is gone, he made it sound as if everything in his
future kingdom is set to fall into place. "Iraq has the
second-largest proven oil reserves in the world, possibly the
largest unproven oil reserves in the world, so Iraq will not have a
problem financially," he explained. "The Iraqi people are urban,
educated, sophisticated, capable, and industrious. One just has to
give them the opportunity to unleash their potential." He went on,
"Iraq was the first Arab country to join the League of Nations. It
was a signatory member of the United Nations charter. That was
before Germany, before Japan, before Italy. This is the tradition."
After Saddam falls, Sharif Ali believes, there will be nothing
preventing Iraq from returning to this tradition. "We'll be a
dynamic part of the international community and the global
village," he predicted. "Iraq will be a beacon of progress."

As Sharif Ali spun out his vision of a post-Saddam Iraq in front of
me that afternoon, I found myself wanting to believe in it. I have
not been alone in that desire. As head of the Constitutional
Monarchy Movement and spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress,
Sharif Ali was one of six Iraqi opposition leaders invited to
Washington in August for consultations with American officials,
including Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney. Since
then, he and a handful of other opposition leaders have worked with
the Bush administration on a 100-page blueprint for a post-Saddam
Iraq. This weekend, about 350 Iraqi dissidents will meet in London
for a conference to discuss that blueprint; it's all but certain
the conference attendees will endorse Sharif Ali's--and the other
major Iraqi opposition leaders'--broad vision of a democratic,
pluralistic, multiethnic Iraq. When American officials boldly
predict that they can turn Iraq into the Middle East's first
vibrant, functioning democracy, they base their predictions, in
part, on what opposition leaders like Sharif Ali have told them.

Unfortunately, Sharif Ali is not the most reliable interlocutor. On
the afternoon I met with the would-be king, he sat beneath a
portrait of Iraq's last king, Faisal II, who was assassinated in
the 1958 officers coup that brought a bloody end to the monarchy.
Like Faisal II, Sharif Ali is a Hashemite- -a direct descendant of
the prophet Muhammad. Faisal II was Sharif Ali's cousin, and, since
all of Faisal II's immediate family was killed in the coup, Sharif
Ali argues that he is the rightful heir to the throne. "The legacy
of the monarchy is infinitely better than that of the so-called
republican era of Iraq, " he said with obvious familial pride. "We
had elections, we had a free press, we had a legal system."

But Sharif Ali's claim to that legacy is not entirely solid. Faisal
II was Sharif Ali's maternal cousin, and the Hashemite dynasty has
traditionally followed a patrilineal line, which is why some Iraq
watchers argue that Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan--the late King
Hussein's brother and a paternal relative of Faisal II--is a more
likely king should Iraq restore its monarchy. Such a restoration,
moreover, is far from assured. After all, many Iraqis were not so
fond of the monarchy during its existence. Established in 1921 by
the British--who, a year earlier, had created Iraq out of the ruins
of the Ottoman Empire and administered it as a mandate--the
monarchy was viewed by many Iraqis as a tool of foreign domination.
Even after Iraq gained its formal independence in 1932, the
Hashemites were often dismissed as British stooges. When Faisal II
was killed and the monarchy ended, there were celebrations in
Baghdad's streets. And, while Sharif Ali argues that Iraqis now
pine for the monarchy's return, it's hard to see how he can know
that from his perch in London (where even the organized Iraqi
opposition is generally unenthusiastic about a royal restoration).
Indeed, remarkably little of what Sharif Ali says about Iraq--
about its tolerance, its dynamism, its readiness for democracy--is
informed by any personal experience of the country. That's because
Sharif Ali has not set foot in Iraq since 1958--when he was two
years old.

London is full of dreamers at the moment. For more than 40 years,
Iraqis have fled there to escape their native country's string of
increasingly repressive leaders: First the military officers who
toppled the Hashemites in 1958; then the Baathists who, after
seizing power for a short time in 1963, overthrew the military men
for good in 1968; and finally Saddam, who took control of the
Baathist regime in 1979. As a result, London is now home to one of
the largest Iraqi exile communities in the world. And many members
of that community nurture dreams of returning to their native
country. Sharif Ali aspires to go back as king; others hope to go
back as government officials or civil engineers or academics or
businessmen. What unites them all is their desire to return to Iraq
and assume positions of importance--a desire that, after years of
no hope and then false hope and then no hope again, now seems
tantalizingly close to being fulfilled.

And not just because the United States appears irreversibly
committed to toppling Saddam. Rather, the exiles are most heartened
by the fact that American officials, in making plans for what will
undoubtedly be the more difficult job of rebuilding Iraq once
Saddam is gone, have made it clear that the United States is
counting on the exiles for help. The meeting in London this week is
just the most public evidence. For the past several months, the
State Department--under the auspices of its Future of Iraq
project--has brought together Iraqi exiles for discussions on
public health, economics, law, political structure, and other areas
that will be vital to rebuilding the country. Last week, President
Bush asked Zalmay Khalilzad, the special U.S. envoy to Afghanistan,
to also serve as the American ambassador to "Free Iraqis, "
coordinating the exiles. "Iraq will need a big infusion of expertise
and know- how after Saddam to create a functioning civil society,
and that can very well be supplied by Iraqis in exile returning
home," says Ellen Laipson, an Iraq specialist who served as vice
chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council from 1997 until
earlier this year. "They are part of the elite that built the
modern Iraq."

The Iraqi exiles remember Iraq as it was before Saddam, and they
hope to use those memories as a guide to rebuilding Iraq once
Saddam falls. But memory can be a tricky thing. After all these
years away from Iraq, living in the West, are the exiles' memories
still reliable? Did the Iraq they remember actually exist? And,
even if it did, can it exist again?

In the mostly Arab neighborhood of Bayswater, situated among grocery
stores that advertise halal meat and cafs filled with men smoking
water pipes, there is a diwaniya, a meeting place, called the Kufa
Gallery. The Kufa, which takes its name from the famous city of
Arab learning in southern Iraq, is run by Mohammed Makiya, an Iraqi
architect who settled in Great Britain in 1974. Makiya established
the Kufa to promote Arab and Islamic culture in general, but the
gallery retains a distinctly Iraqi character--especially on
Wednesday nights, when it hosts a weekly lecture. The programs
range from performances of Iraqi music to appreciations of Iraqi
actresses to discussions about scholars who studied in the Iraqi
city of Najaf. Whatever the week, the topic of the Kufa's Wednesday
night lecture almost always relates to Iraq.

On a Wednesday night in early October, when London's streets were
unusually clogged thanks to a 24-hour subway strike, I visited the
Kufa for an evening of Iraqi poetry. The gallery is deep and
narrow, and crammed--from its floor to its 30-foot vaulted
ceiling--with Arabic paintings, prints, and books. It is like a
tunnel into another world, and, as an Iraqi poet strummed on a
lute-like instrument called an oud and recited his verse in Iraqi
Arabic, London seemed very far away. About 80 Iraqi men and women
were at the Kufa that night, most of them middle-aged and
well-dressed. They sat in the gallery's plastic chairs and, as they
sipped tea or worried brightly colored beads, they let the poet's
verses wash over them. When the poet described the birds that lived
in the marshes of southern Iraq, they murmured, "Allah, Allah," in
approval. And, as the poet read an ode to the sunrise in Baghdad--a
sunrise, he said, that was far more beautiful than the ones in his
new home in Denmark--I noticed that some in the audience were
softly crying.

One of those crying was a burly man with a thick moustache named
Dhia Kashi. A regular at the Wednesday night gatherings, Kashi grew
up in Baghdad; were he not a Shia, it's likely he would still be
there. Although Shia Muslims account for 55 to 60 percent of Iraq's
population, the country's Sunni Muslim minority has dominated the
ruling elite since Iraq was created as a British mandate in the
early '20s. But, though they were generally excluded from Iraq's
civic and political institutions, some Iraqi Shia, particularly the
secular ones, managed to carve out niches for themselves in the
world of commerce. Kashi's family thrived as Persian-rug and
antique dealers; and, after Kashi graduated from college in the
early '70s, he went into his own business, working for a customs
clearing firm that transported imported building materials to
construction sites around Baghdad. "I was delivering the
foundations of the Meridian, the Sheraton, these type of hotels,"
he says, recalling an era when large, Western companies were eager
to do business in Iraq.

But Kashi's comfortable, middle-class life came to an end when the
Baathist regime ratcheted up the oppression of Iraqi Shia. In the
'70s and early '80s, the Iraqi government declared that thousands
of Iraqi Shia merchants were actually Iranians. The government then
stripped them of their Iraqi citizenship, seized their assets and
businesses, and moved them and their families to the Iranian
border. By conservative estimates, 150,000 Shia were expelled
between 1970 and 1981. "My family had lived in Iraq for five
hundred years, but, because they are Shia, because they originally
came from Iran, the government said we were now considered
Iranians. They called us a fifth column," Kashi says. By 1980, half
of his family had been deported to the border region. Kashi and his
wife plotted their escape, not telling anyone, even family members,
of their plans. They first went to Kuwait, where Kashi started a
new business. But, four years later, when the Kuwaiti government
began arresting Iraqi Shia at Saddam's behest, they fled to London
where, like thousands of other Iraqi Shia, they applied for
political asylum. "I was thirty-two, and I had to start from zero
for the third time in my life," Kashi says.

Kashi told me all this one Saturday morning as we walked around
London. He took me to the coffee shop he owns in Dolphin Square--a
posh apartment and hotel complex in Westminster--and to a row house
near Victoria Station that he's refurbishing as a hair and tanning
salon for his wife to run. The next Saturday, he boasted, he would
take his daughter to Cambridge, where she will study physics. "I
tell her she is lucky she is not in Iraq, or Saddam would force her
to help him make bombs," he joked. It seemed that Kashi was lucky,
too: The vicissitudes that had characterized his life in Baghdad
were distant memories. He does not experience any serious
discrimination in Britain; he doesn't worry that there will be a
knock on his door late at night. Leaving Iraq, it turns out, has
been a good thing for Kashi. And yet, as his tears that night at
the Kufa indicated, he longs to return.; "When I asked Kashi
whether he worried that a democratic Iraq would be torn apart by
tribal, ethnic, and ideological conflicts, he put his hands to his
ears and cut me off."

In our conversations, Kashi fondly recalled--in minute detail--the
ins and outs of his childhood neighborhood and the best items on
the menu at his favorite Baghdad pub. But, beyond personal
reminiscences, Kashi retains a deep and abiding passion for Iraq as
a whole. "It is an amazing country," he said. "We are rich in
people, in land, in oil, even in the weather: You can ski in the
north in the morning, have lunch in Baghdad, and then go sunbathe in
the south--all in the same day." I heard similar sentiments in
almost every conversation I had with Iraqi exiles in London.
Indeed, sometimes their patriotism crossed into chauvinism, so
strong was their belief in the inherent superiority of their fellow
countrymen. "Iraqis are respected all over the Gulf because we are
intelligent; we are intellectuals, we are doctors, we are
engineers, we are the best things," Kashi said. Salah Shaikly,
another exile, told me, "There's a saying in the Middle East: The
books are produced in Egypt, they are printed in Lebanon, and they
are read in Iraq." (Even Iraqis' more ignoble accomplishments under
Saddam are a source of pride. "Iraqi scientists managed to, or near
enough according to American intelligence, produce a nuclear weapon
without direct assistance from anybody!" Shaikly said.)

The exiles boast about the country's once-vital civil society, in
which writers and architects flourished, and even women were
treated with relatively enlightened attitudes. "My mother had worn
an abaya, not covering her face but her head, her entire life," an
exile named Samira Al Mana told me. "But in 1950 she took it off.
... When the men in Iraq had freedom, the women in Iraq had
freedom." They point to the fact that, under the monarchy, Iraq had
a parliament and the government was responsive to the popular will.
"People could vote, and, if they did not vote, they could go out
and bring down the prime minister by demonstrating," Kashi said.
Even after the monarchy fell and parliament was disbanded--and the
first wave of exiles began fleeing--those who stayed in Iraq
maintain that it continued to be a relatively good place. Shaikly,
who was a government economist for most of the '70s, argued that
under the Baathists--before Saddam became president--the country
was on the right track. "We worked on what were called prognostic
models, predicting the future outlook for Iraq," he said. "Our
forecast was that, if things kept going the way they were going in
the mid-1970s, after the oil revenue began to come in, by the year
2000, Iraq would look like southern European countries."

It's one thing to hear neoconservative American officials such as
Paul Wolfowitz say that Iraq has a future as a multiethnic
democracy; it's quite another to hear this prediction from Iraqis
themselves. And, while the subject of whether or not Iraq is
actually ready for democracy may be a point of contention in the
Washington policy world--where a good many people believe that for
Iraq to survive as a viable state Saddam must be replaced not with
a democratic government but with a less repressive, pro-Western
strongman--in London's Iraqi exile community, it is a settled
issue. "A strongman is a dictator," Shaikly said. "We don't want to
replace one dictator with another." Indeed, I did not meet one
exile who would even entertain the notion that a democratic
government should not eventually follow Saddam. When I asked Kashi
whether he worried that a democratic Iraq would be torn apart by
tribal, ethnic, and ideological conflicts, he put his hands to his
ears and cut me off. "We feel humiliated and degraded when other
people talk about Iraq like this," he said. He went on, "Iraq had
two parliaments five thousand years ago. Five thousand years ago!
That's Iraq's history. And we feel this in our genes."

But history should not be confused with memory, and Iraq's history,
unfortunately, is not as rosy as the exiles' memories. The period
that many of them recall with such fondness--the period from Iraq's
inception as a British mandate in 1920 until the 1958 coup against
the monarchy--was marked by instability, inequality, and
repression. During the twelve-year reign of Iraq's first monarch,
King Faisal, the government had 15 prime ministers; even before the
coup that toppled the king, there were coups that toppled prime
ministers. Despite the tumult and turnover, power in Iraq always
remained within a small clique. "Few [politicians] had roots in any
large constituencies outside the halls of parliament," Phebe Marr
writes in The Modern History of Iraq. "Instead, politics ran mainly
on personal lines." Those who questioned that political power paid
a price. In 1933, after Assyrian dissidents demanding autonomy
inside Iraq clashed with government troops, killing nearly three
dozen soldiers, the government unleashed the army and Kurdish
irregulars on Assyrian villages. Hundreds were killed in the
resulting bloodbath. When Shia tribesmen in southern Iraq rose up
against the Sunni-dominated government a few years later, the
government responded with summary executions and aerial bombing.

And those were the supposed glory years. What followed was worse.
The decade of military rule after the fall of the monarchy was
characterized by coups and countercoups as rival officers and the
political factions aligned with them vied for power. When the
officers weren't plotting against one another, they waged a brutal
civil war against the Kurds in northern Iraq. In 1968, the
Baathists, in league with sympathetic elements of the military,
launched a successful coup. Then, learning from past mistakes--in
1963, the Baathists had seized power in a coup only to lose it nine
months later in a countercoup--they moved ruthlessly to eliminate
potential challengers. Military officers and bureaucrats deemed
insufficiently loyal were replaced with Baathist apparatchiks;
other real or perceived opponents were accused of espionage, put on
trial in secret military courts, and publicly hanged. It wasn't long
before the Baathists had taken over the entire apparatus of
government and turned Iraq into a draconian, one-party state.
Finally, in 1979, Saddam Hussein--who had spent two decades rising
through the Baathist ranks--became president of the republic,
ushering in a whole new era of misery.

This history has taken a toll. For the most part, the intellectuals,
doctors, and other educated professionals in whom Kashi and Shaikly
take such pride have--like Kashi and Shaikly themselves--long since
left Iraq; an estimated four million Iraqis, disproportionately
educated and well-off, now live abroad. Many of those who stayed
behind are not similarly accomplished; those who are, such as the
country's nuclear scientists, either volunteer or are forced to use
their skills to support a brutal regime. And then there are the
nearly 14 million Iraqis who were born after Saddam took power and
have known Iraq only as it has existed under his rule. They have
not gone to decent schools: In 1992, the last year for which
reliable statistics exist, Iraq's literacy rate was 62 percent, the
lowest in the Gulf. They have not received good health care: In
1990, there was only one doctor per 1,810 Iraqis, again the worst
ratio among Gulf nations. And, after the Gulf war and a decade of
U.N. sanctions, social and economic conditions in Iraq have
deteriorated badly. As the Iraqi scholar Isam Al Khafaji wrote of
his native country two years ago in the Middle East Policy journal,
"It would not be over-pessimistic to talk of an embargo generation
that will never be able to recover from the effects of material
deprivation, isolation, and a sense of being not only neglected and
forgotten but targeted by the international community as an
enemy."

Indeed, while it's hard not to admire the exiles' idealism, they
are--in their own way--as ideological as their neoconservative
allies in Washington. And, like the neocons, the evidence they
provide to bear out this ideological vision is not always
convincing. "I think Iraq's problem will be much easier to fix than
any other problem in the world," Kashi told me. "Iraqis, between
them, don't have a problem. It's the rulers who have the problem
with the people." It sounded so hopeful I wanted to know more, and
I asked Kashi if he had experienced this harmony when he was
growing up. "I was young before Saddam," he replied. "But I
remember what my father and mother and grandfather told me about
Iraq before that. ... They said it was wonderful."

The last time Saddam was in serious trouble--after the Gulf war in
1991, when Kurds in the north and Shia in the south rebelled en
masse and briefly gained control of 14 of Iraq's 18
provinces--Iraqi Shia in London flocked to the city's Husaynias.
Dedicated to the Shia martyr Husayn--who was killed in 680 A.D. in
the southern Iraqi city of Karbala and whose death became the
defining event in the schism between the Shia and Sunnis--Husaynias
were originally created as places of mourning and study. But over
time they have become Shia social centers. In 1991, London's
Husaynias filled up with Iraqi Shia who sought the latest
news--conveyed by faxes and phone calls from Iran, Syria, and
sometimes Iraq itself--about what was happening in their native
country.

At the Al Khoei Foundation in northwest London, they are expecting
the crowds to return. "We were at the center of the intifada in
1991," an Al Khoei official named Ghanim Jawad told me, "and we
will be at the center again." The Al Khoei Foundation is located in
an imposing three-building compound that, in its previous
incarnation, was a Jewish community center. It is home to two
Islamic schools (one for boys, one for girls), a mosque, a community
center, and offices that serve as the headquarters for the
foundation's extensive worldwide operations. (The foundation has
programs in a number of countries, including India, Thailand, and
the United States.) The Al Khoei Foundation is dedicated to serving
Shia of any nationality, but unofficially it has a particular
interest in Iraqi Shia. That is because the foundation's founder,
the Grand Ayatollah Abul Qassim Al Khoei, lived and taught in the
southern Iraq city of Najaf and was, until his death ten years ago,
the grand Marja, the most respected Shia cleric in all of Iraq.

Although there has been much discussion in the U.S. media about the
complications that could accompany the post-Saddam reintegration of
the Iraqi Kurds, many of whom currently live semi-autonomously
under U.S. protection in northern Iraq, the Shia may pose a more
vexing problem for Iraq's future. Some Iraq watchers worry that the
country's long-oppressed Shia would take advantage of any power
vacuum to engage in bloody score-settling against Sunnis. Another
concern, especially to some American policymakers, is that an Iraqi
government that truly reflected the country's Shia majority would
form a natural alliance with the Shia mullahs in Iran. Among Iraqi
exiles, Ayatollah Al Khoei is often invoked as a rebuttal to both
charges. During the 1991 uprising, they note, Ayatollah Al Khoei
issued a fatwa instructing Iraqi Shia to respect people's property
and to honor public institutions. And they point to the fact that,
unlike his Iranian counterpart Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Al Khoei
did not believe that clergy should seek political power. Rather, as
Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke write in The Arab Shi'a: The
Forgotten Muslims, Al Khoei represented "a more quietist tradition
that stressed the traits of personal piety and a neutral stand on
public affairs."

That tradition, Iraqi exiles argue, is the tradition of the Iraqi
Shia. "There is a huge difference between the Shia of Iran and the
Shia of Iraq," Ghanim Jawad insisted. A light-skinned man with
thinning hair and an open face, Jawad spoke with me in his office
at the Al Khoei Foundation, just off a hall lined with pictures of
the unsmiling, black-turbaned Ayatollah Al Khoei. Jawad came to
London in 1988, after his status as a Shia and his opposition to
the Baathist regime made his life in Iraq untenable. At one point,
he was arrested and detained. "They hit me with guns," he explained
matter-of-factly, taking my hand and running it along a dent in his
skull. "I saw how other people were tortured." But Jawad does not
hold all Sunnis accountable for his and other Iraqi Shia's
mistreatment. "The oppression did not come from any problems
between Shia and Sunnis," he said. "The oppression came from Saddam.
He used the difference between Shia and Sunnis as a predicate
because he needed to stay in power." That difference has never
mattered much to Sunnis and Shia themselves, Jawad said. He
recalled that when he was growing up in southern Iraq, members of
the two sects frequently married one another. "There is not any
disharmony at the grassroots between Shia and Sunni," he said. He
continued, "If we get rid of Saddam Hussein and his gang, the rest
of the Sunni of Iraq are normal, quiet, good people. And we would
live with them without any problems."

But, while it may be true that, left to their own devices, Sunnis
and Shia in Iraq would live in relative harmony, Saddam has not
left the two communities to their own devices--and his brutal
persecution has almost certainly left deep wounds. One need only
look at the 1991 uprising. Although exiles boast that Al Khoei
issued his fatwa against scoresettling, they usually fail to note
that his edict was largely ignored. As Andrew and Patrick Cockburn
note in their book Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam
Hussein, the intifada was a "spontaneous and leaderless fury." As
such, it was an exceedingly bloody and destructive affair. In
Basra, Shia rebels raided a hospital and took away three patients
who were security men, killing one of them on hospital grounds.
They also set fire to the city's Sheraton Hotel. In Najaf, a Baath
functionary was hacked to death with knives; others were hanged.
Many Sunnis fled for their lives from southern Iraq. Making matters
worse, an Iraqi Shia exile named Mohammed Baqir Al Hakim--who lives
just across the border in Iran and operates an opposition group,
the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI),
with the support of the Tehran regime--tried to take command of the
rebellion. His allies put up posters of him and Ayatollah Khomeini
all over southern Iraq, and announcements in Al Hakim's name
claimed full authority over the intifada, instructing rebels that
"no ideas except the rightful Islamic ones should be disseminated."
Thousands of members of SCIRI's militia, known as the Badr Brigade,
crossed the border into Iraq to join the fighting.

It is what happened next, however, that makes the notion of future
Sunni- Shia harmony seem sadly implausible. After the rebels had
gained control of almost all of southern Iraq, Saddam struck back.
As U.S. airplanes circled impotently overhead, Saddam's Republican
Guard units swept into the south and, in a matter of days, routed
the rebels. From helicopters, government troops poured kerosene on
fleeing refugees and then set them on fire with tracer rounds.
Tanks bombarded and ultimately razed entire city centers. In Basra
alone, more than 1,000 Shia were killed. Some claim that the regime
killed 300, 000 citizens in putting down the intifada. After the
uprising was crushed, Saddam sought revenge. The Iraqi leader
forced the 90-year-old and increasingly frail Ayatollah Al Khoei to
travel to Baghdad and read a statement on television denouncing the
rebellion. Al Khoei was then sent to Kufa and placed under house
arrest, which lasted until his death the next year. Saddam went
after other clerics as well: About 100 of them disappeared without a
trace, and, since then, several important Shia clerics in southern
Iraq have been killed or have died under mysterious circumstances.
In 1992, the Baghdad regime ordered the construction of a huge
canal in southern Iraq called the Saddam River. This had the effect
of draining southern Iraq's marshes, which had been home to, and
later a hiding place for, many Shia rebels; an estimated 500,000
marsh inhabitants were displaced. As Fuller and Francke write, "The
Iraqi state has moved from a policy of discrimination to one of
active repression of the Shia."; "Generally speaking, there are two
types of Iraqi exiles in London..."

In London, among the exiles, much of the anger over the intifada's
failure is directed at the United States. It was the first
President Bush, after all, who encouraged the Iraqi people to rise
up against Saddam, only to abandon them once they did. "When the
intifada happened, King Fahd and Hosni Mubarak called the Americans
and said, `Stop Schwarzkopf. Don't let him go to Baghdad, because
there will then be another Shia state that will ally with Iran,'"
Jawad told me bitterly. And, he said, the Americans listened. "They
allowed Saddam Hussein to devastate the intifada." But, in southern
Iraq, the Shia do not have the luxury of shaking their fists at a
far-off superpower. They have more immediate tormentors, and their
collective anger--should they ever get the opportunity to exercise
it--will likely be directed at more immediate targets.

On the second floor of a dilapidated building in the London suburb
of Ealing, Saad Bazzaz presides over a media empire. A short, round
man in his early fifties, with a thick moustache and large glasses,
Bazzaz is the publisher of the Azzaman newspaper, a pan-Arabic
daily that, as Bazzaz likes to say, is the world's only independent
daily newspaper run by an Iraqi. Azzaman has been publishing for
only five years, but it already has three editions--one printed in
London, one in Bahrain, and one in Algeria. In addition to the daily
paper, Azzaman publishes a monthly current-affairs magazine, a
semi-annual culture magazine (which, Bazzaz boasts, is "thick like
a phone book"), and a number of books--ranging from Arabic
translations of Jean-Paul Sartre to reportage on Afghanistan.
Entertaining me in his office one afternoon, Bazzaz barked at his
secretary to bring him copies so he could show them off. Unlike some
Arabic- language publications in London, all of Azzaman's offerings
are slickly and professionally produced. "We're very keen about the
design of our publications, the paper we use," Bazzaz said. "Having
good thoughts is not enough." It's an indication of Bazzaz's media
ambitions that in choosing a title for his paper he picked
Azzaman--the Arabic word for "time."

Displayed on a credenza in Bazzaz's office is a gallery of photos of
him meeting with famous Arab leaders: Bazzaz with Jordan's late
King Hussein, Bazzaz with Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, Bazzaz with
Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and so on. About the only Arab
notable missing from Bazzaz's collection is Saddam Hussein. This is
surely not for lack of a picture of the two of them together. For
much of the '80s and into the early '90s, Bazzaz held a succession
of important posts in Saddam's information machine:
director-general of the Iraqi national news agency; head of the
government ministry that oversees all Iraqi radio and TV
programming; editor of the official Baath Party newspaper, Al
Jomhourieh. In Baghdad, Bazzaz was a big and important man. But he
eventually had a falling out with Saddam, or, rather, Saddam had a
falling out with him. In 1989, when Bazzaz was in charge of Iraqi
television and radio, he was summoned to meet with the Iraqi
leader. As Bazzaz memorably recounted to Mark Bowden of The
Atlantic Monthly, Saddam wanted to know why Iraqi television was
not airing all the poems and songs in praise of the Iraqi leader
that people frequently sent to the station. Bazzaz explained that
he had been spiking some of them because he thought they were too
amateurish to warrant broadcast. In a stern tone, Saddam told him,
"Look, you are not a judge, Saad." Bazzaz defected from Iraq in
1992.

Generally speaking, there are two types of Iraqi exiles in London:
those who had to flee Iraq because they opposed the regime and
therefore Saddam wanted to kill them; and those who had to flee
Iraq because, even though they didn't necessarily have any problems
with the regime--indeed, they may well have been part of the ruling
regime--Saddam still wanted to kill them. Bazzaz falls in the
latter category. Today, he is unapologetic about his time spent
working for Saddam. "During the Iraq-Iran war, many of my
generation served the government because we felt that if our ruler
was bad, the other side was worse," he told me. "The world was
standing with Saddam in his war against Khomeini."

People like Bazzaz present a dilemma for those mapping out Iraq's
future. Not only did some Iraqi exiles once serve in Saddam's
regime--just last month a leading Iraqi opposition figure, Nizar Al
Khazraji, was indicted in Denmark, where he now lives, for war
crimes he allegedly committed as the Iraqi military chief of staff
in the '80s--but countless Iraqis still in Iraq have, at some
point, done Saddam's bidding in one way or another. What should be
done with them? Some exiles argue that Iraq should undergo a
rigorous "de-Baathification" process akin to Germany's
"de-Nazification" after World War II. "Anybody who was part of the
killing machine," one exile told me, "cannot be part of Iraq's
future. ... Some of them are as bad as Saddam." But many, many
people were technically part of that killing machine. In a
totalitarian state like Iraq, it can be difficult to stay
completely clear of the ruling regime. The Baath Party, for
instance, has two million members. The military has close to
400,000 soldiers. And then there are the nearly one million Iraqis
who, according to the most recent figures from just after the Gulf
war, are on the government's civilian payroll.

That's why other exiles define that machine narrowly. "There is a
difference between those who actually, physically do have blood on
their hands and those that merely had to succumb to the will of a
tyrannical regime," Sharif Ali told me. Like many exiles, he cited
the horrific stories of Iraqis who, after balking at Saddam's
orders, had their family members jailed or killed. "The regime is
so ruthless, they would rape a minister's wife and videotape it and
then show it to him," he said. According to the opposition groups
working with the Bush administration, the most likely solution for
determining who actually has blood on their hands is a truth and
reconciliation commission of some sort. But even that commission,
some exiles argue, should be extra careful in making its
determinations. "We can't hold everybody up to an overly stringent
standard, " Sharif Ali said. "We're not all saints."

Bazzaz evidently believes he would meet the kind of standard Sharif
Ali proposes. When Saddam falls, Bazzaz thinks there will be a huge
hunger for news in Iraq, and he's anxious to feed it; he plans to
move Azzaman's headquarters to Baghdad. "Our paper has
credibility," he boasted. "We don't say in our news articles,
`Saddam Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad, did so and so.' We say,
`President of Iraq Saddam Hussein did so and so,' but, by the end of
the article, from the facts we've provided, you know he's the
Butcher of Baghdad. We don't need to say it." But Bazzaz has
ambitions beyond his media empire; he envisions a political role
for himself as well. Bazzaz is savvy enough to know what passes for
acceptable political discourse these days. "We need a new open
society, a new open economy, a new free speech," he told me. But,
unlike most of the exiles I spoke to, he did not talk about
democracy in universally glowing terms. "If you have democracy in
Egypt, do you know who would win?" he asked. "The fundamentalists.
... Sometimes the democracy can bring the bad people." More than
anything, it seemed, Bazzaz wanted to be a big man again. "As long
as I am Iraqi, I have to pay attention to the future of my
country," he said. "I am dreaming of a new Iraq. ... If I could
play any role to reach this goal, I am not going to hesitate."

To a man, the Iraqi exiles I spoke to--and, with only two
exceptions, they were all men--insisted that, once Saddam was gone,
they would return to Iraq or, at the very least, split their time
between London and their native country. It seemed to be a point of
pride. "If there is stability in Iraq, there is no reason to live
outside," Bazzaz replied brusquely when I asked him if he planned
to go back, as if he were offended by the question. Given the
exiles' rosy expectations about what awaits them in Iraq--a
tolerant and educated populace, a slew of business opportunities,
the places they remember frequenting as children and young
adults--their attitude is not surprising.

But the exiles' return to Iraq will not be easy. For one thing,
there is the simple matter of comfort: The country's
infrastructure--its buildings, its roads, its water system--will be
considerably below the Western standards to which the exiles have
become accustomed, especially if Saddam is toppled by a massive
military campaign. Perhaps even more of a problem than creature
comforts, though, will be the attitudes of their fellow Iraqis once
they return. Even if the people of Iraq are as well-adjusted, after
years of living in a brutal, totalitarian state, as some of the
exiles believe them to be, there is no guarantee they will welcome
the returnees with open arms. After all, they have suffered under
Saddam's rule in ways the exiles can hardly imagine. Indeed, while
American officials are eager for the exiles to play a prominent role
in a post-Saddam Iraq, they are also wary that the exiles do not
overplay their hand. For the past few months, the Bush
administration has had to repeatedly persuade some opposition
groups not to declare a government in exile for fear of angering
Iraqis living in Iraq.

One evening at the Kufa Gallery, I did meet one exile who seemed to
have a sense of how difficult his return to Iraq could be. His name
was Rasheed Al Khayoun, and, as a lecture was going on in the main
gallery, we talked in hushed voices in a small side room. The room
doubled as a kitchenette and a supply closet and was cluttered with
digestive biscuits and empty picture frames. A short, rumpled man
with wild black hair and slightly bloodshot eyes, Al Khayoun is the
culture editor of the Iraqi National Congress's weekly newspaper
and the organizer of the Kufa's lecture series. But his real
passion is teaching, which is what he was doing in Iraq before he
had to leave in 1979. He taught Arabic and geography at a primary
school in Baghdad, which didn't bother the regime at all. Away from
the classroom, however, Al Khayoun--like many Iraqi
intellectuals--was active in Iraq's Communist Party; and when, in
the late '70s, Baath officials began cracking down on the
Communists, Al Khayoun realized it was time to leave. "If I do not
go out," he told me in his broken English, "I'm killed." He
abruptly left his job at the school and abandoned his apartment;
for two months, he hid at a friend's house in Baghdad while he
waited for another friend in the government to secure him travel
papers, which permitted him to take a brief trip to Turkey. With
papers in hand, he drove across the border. And then he kept
going--first to Bulgaria, where he spent several years completing a
doctorate in Islamic philosophy, and then to Yemen, where he taught
philosophy for more than a decade. After running afoul of the
Islamic party there, he moved to Great Britain in 1992.

Like all the other Iraqi exiles I talked to, Al Khayoun was
insistent that, once Saddam was gone, he would return to Iraq. It
was obviously a matter of principle to him, but he had professional
reasons as well. In London, where his imperfect command of English
has prevented him from getting a teaching job, he has had to scrape
by, doing his newspaper work and running the lecture series; when
we talked, he was wearing a stained white oxford shirt and
threadbare gray trousers. In a liberated Iraq, Al Khayoun could
probably get an academic position and make a good living. "The
university under Saddam is very, very bad, " he said. "Now they
need to build a new university, because it is so bad." He thinks
that he could help with that.

But, as we continued to talk, Al Khayoun admitted that he had some
concerns about returning. He lamented that in his boyhood home in
southern Iraq--where 4, 000 years ago, he said, Sumerians performed
surgeries--there are now no hospitals or even doctors. There are no
televisions or computers, either. Al Khayoun said that when he
speaks on the phone with his brother, who still lives in southern
Iraq, sometimes he does not understand him. I asked if it was
because he no longer understood the dialect. "I understand his
language," Al Khayoun explained, "but I can't understand his
morals. All he thinks about is how to give food to his children.
Here, my daughter goes to music school, and I can buy her books. My
brother has nothing like that." Al Khayoun was speaking even more
quietly now--as if, more than not wanting to disrupt the lecture,
he did not want the others to hear his doubts. He glanced over his
shoulder. "I have not been there in twenty-three years," he said,
his voice practically a whisper. "Will I recognize Iraq?" He ran a
hand through his wild hair. "Will Iraq recognize me?"

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