Saddam’s hands-on years in the dungeons distinguish him from the other great dictators of the twentieth century, none of whom had much taste for “the wet stuff.” The mores of his regime have been shaped by this taste for the wet stuff—by a fascinated negative intimacy with the human body, and a connoisseurship of human pain. One is struck, too, by how routinely Saddam’s organs have used familial love as an additional instrument of torture. Here, in moral terms, we decisively enter the Palace of the End, as the interrogator applies himself to your mother or your three-year-old child.

  I said earlier that America’s war aims remain partly undisclosed. The frank answer to the question “why now?,” for instance, would be the usual jumble, something like: a) to pre-empt Saddam’s acquisition of more WMDs; b) in good time for the next election; and c) before the weather gets too hot. Without his war, Bush is an obvious one-term blowhard; and he listens to his political handler, Karl Rove, at least as keenly as he listens to Donald Rumsfeld. The supplementary motivation, hatched at the think-tank and prayer-breakfast level, is, I fear, visionary in tendency. It has been noticed that a great deal of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a collection of corrupt, benighted, and above all defenseless regimes. The war, as they see it, will not be an oil-grab so much as a natural ramification of pure power: manifest destiny made manifest reality, for the good of all.

  Tony Blair must have known that the war was inevitable more than a year ago, when Bush started talking, with vulgar levity, of “taking Saddam out.” In the past, Blair has been consistently tough on the Iraq question, just as France has been consistently and venally lenient (as early as the mid-1970s Jacques Chirac was known as “Monsieur Iraq”). More generally, perhaps, he feels that British interests are better served by continuing to ride on the American elephant, even as it trumpets its emancipation from the influence of Europe; and that the total isolation of Washington would only heat Bush’s internal brew of insecurity and messianism.

  There are two rules of war that have not yet been rescinded by the new world order. The first rule is that the belligerent nation must be fairly sure that its actions will make things better; the second rule is that the belligerent nation must be more or less certain that its actions won’t make things worse. America could perhaps claim to be satisfying the first rule (while admitting that the improvement may be only local and short term). It cannot begin to satisfy the second.

  We contemplate a kaleidoscope of terrible eventualities: a WMD attack on Israel, and a WMD response (conceivably nuclear); civil war in Iraq, and elsewhere, together with all manner of humanitarian disasters; fundamentalist revolutions in Egypt and Jordan; and, ineluctably, an additional generation of terror from militant Islam. Meanwhile, common sense calmly states that an expanded version of the present arrangement (inspectors, “smart” sanctions, full exposure to world opinion) is sufficient to contain and emasculate Saddam until pressure builds for a coup; and that the “war on terror,” the peace in the war on terror, can only start with the cautious giving of face (a gesture which the hegemon alone can make), and, say, the dismantling of the illegal settlements in the territories occupied by Israel.

  But the necessary momentum has already been achieved, full deployment has been achieved, and the first humanitarian disaster will of course be the war itself.

  O people of Iraq…By God, I shall strip you like bark, I shall truss you like a bundle of twigs, I shall beat you like stray camels…By God, what I promise, I fulfill; what I purpose, I accomplish; what I measure, I cut off.

  You could imagine Saddam Hussein muttering these words when he assumed the presidency in 1979. It is with weariness and shame that we hear them from our own leaders, in various encryptions—faithfully echoing al-Hadjadj, the newly arrived governor of Iraq, in the year 694. And what al-Hadjadj measured, he cut off.

  MARCH 2003. The Guardian

  “In the Palace of the End”

  As one of the doubles of the son of the dictator, I am quite often to be found in the Palace of the End. Six days a week, to be precise: and twelve hours a day. Actual public impersonations of the successor (parades, investitures, going on television, and the like) are by now a thing of the past. But we have our standing duties. In the mornings I set about my work in the Interrogation Wing. Then, in the afternoons, following a glass of scented coffee with the other doubles, I make filmed love to—or have filmed sex with—a series of picked beauties in the Recreation Wing. The Palace of the End is built in the shape of a titanic eagle: the beaked head downturned, the scalloped pinions out-thrust…It was the brainchild of Old Nadir, who is very slowly dying of the injuries he sustained in the notorious “toilet bomb” assault at another of his palaces, in the south of our country. And now all power rests with his only son: Nadir the Next.

  Until recently, at least, my work in the Interrogation Wing was not particularly onerous. I wasn’t obliged to participate in the full course of the numerous procedures. My job was to “appear,” with surreal suddenness, at the climax of this or that cross-questioning (which might have gone on for days or weeks); flanked by armed infantrymen, I would stamp into the cubicle, wearing camouflage fatigues and cripplingly heavy combat boots, and administer one backhand blow to the suspect’s face. And that was all. But nowadays, for several reasons, I am expected, as are the other doubles, to apply myself more variedly. We have not exactly been reduced to the status of mere bucket-boys and poker-warmers—no; but in these tense times we must put ourselves about and show willing.

  The interior of the Interrogation Wing used to be laid out in the traditional “cells and cellars” arrangement: dripping passageways, clanking iron doors, rooms within rooms (“the kennels”), and so on—with the howls and screeches of the suspects decently muffled or snatched or cut short. Now it’s open-plan. One enters an anti-hospital, a vast factory of excruciation: there the strappado, here the bastinado; there the rack, here the wheel. The more communal atmosphere is meant “to discourage the others,” and it’s certainly true that, from the suspect’s point of view, the induction into the Interrogation Wing is far worse than any death. Indeed, it was more or less universal practice for the prisoners to attempt instant suicide by the only means available—by the dental excision, that is to say, of their own tongues.

  However understandable, this practice also entrained a paradox: the tongueless ones, their mouths moreover crammed with soiled gauze, could neither proclaim their innocence nor (by far the wiser course) trumpet their guilt. But in the end it made no difference. At a certain point—perhaps months later—the suspect’s head would give a lolling nod, and the interrogator would stroll to the old Xerox machine for the standard confession (which the suspect would then initial). After more torture preludial to death, 99 percent of those who enter the Interrogation Wing are eventually hanged; the remainder are sent home fatally envenomed, with a day or two to live—and, no doubt, a tale or two to tell. The tongueless ones cannot tell their tale, but they can sketch it, write it, mime it, while they live. Thus would they too play their part in shoring up respect for the essentially personal rule of Nadir the Next.

  Anyway, these days the question of the tongueless ones is academic. There are no more tongueless ones. All suspects now have their teeth smashed and pulled in the anteroom of the Reception Hall, long before they are even fingerprinted by the registrars.

  At twelve forty-five the doubles congregate in the doubles’ commissary, which is situated in the main body of the building—in the golden eagle’s muscular torso. At any given time there are thirty or forty doubles stationed at the Palace of the End (though there are scores of us in the capital, and dozens more in every major provincial town). Idling and milling around the doubles’ commissary, we enjoy a glass of coffee, and a sliver of nougat, perhaps, while we ready ourselves for the work of the afternoon. First, the work of the morning. Then the work of the afternoon.

  For a double, this interlude in the doubles’ commissary can be a slightly depersonalizing experience. We all measure six feet one, and we all weigh 257 pounds. We all have the same glistening black quiff, the same protuberant, blood-flecked brown eyes, the same slablike front teeth (with the same missing canine), the same patch over the same eye. We wear an eyepatch because Nadir wears an eyepatch; and Nadir wears an eyepatch because he was shot in the face, by a bodyguard, seventeen months ago. And here I touch on one of the more somber duties of a presidential double. All the injuries picked up by Nadir, during the course of the increasingly frequent and desperate attempts on his life, must naturally be duplicated in his surrogates. For the blast to the left eye, we were, in turn, strapped and clamped into position with an automatic pistol poised on a tripod at a distance of eighteen inches; many doubles were lost in the initial efforts (despite numerous experiments on an assortment of suspects), and many more were decommissioned, and quietly executed, when their wounds failed to heal in the proper way. Similarly, every double lacks a right kneecap, a left heel, a left shoulder blade, and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand. We have all spent time in wheelchairs, on crutches, in neck braces, in traction. We are additionally subject to periodic poisonings. More recently, we all had our hair scorched off (after a flame-thrower attack on the son of the dictator), and for a while a team of barbers and surgeons appeared every day to regulate the condition of our fuzz and blisters.

  Entering the doubles’ commissary is, as I say, a depersonalizing experience. It is to enter a hall of mirrors. Who is that man by the window with his back turned to the room? He slowly swivels. Again, yes: it is I…There’s no little pleasure to be had, of course, in mingling with one’s peers. But the conversation is always somewhat strained. It isn’t just the presence of five or six full-time informers, posing as doubles—for we are all informers, and inform on one another as a matter of daily routine. No. It is the feeling (entirely unfounded) that Nadir himself is perhaps among us. Once in a while, as you pass the time of day and complain about the weather, you sense in your interlocutor a wavering heat in the eyes, and a heat from the body (and a hot smell, too: the smell of power) that seems to betray the proximity of the son of the dictator. At such moments, both speech and silence become inconceivable—alive, as we all are, to the wellattested sensitivity, and short temper, of Nadir the Next.

  There is one double, and one double only, with whom I feel I can be more or less myself—Mekhlis. For a start, I can always tell it’s him: like me, Mekhlis had a large facial mole removed (or, rather, relocated), and there is a circular blur on his cheek that matches the blur on mine. Today I edged up to Mekhlis in the conservatory bay that leads out to the gardens—the gardens, with their parrots and apes. I said,

  “What was in that sack?”

  “What sack?” he answered in the same gross baritone. Our trouble is that our tongues are too big: too big for our mouths. “Oh that sack,” he said.

  Earlier that morning I had spent an abnormally uncomfortable half-hour yelling at a suspect while a blood-steeped canvas mailbag jerked and jumped around the cubicle floor. The scream it emitted put one in mind of a boiling kettle.

  “Yes,” he said. “A severe measure. The sack contained some starving animals plus the suspect’s three-year-old daughter.”

  “So I imagined. But wasn’t there something unusual about the animals?”

  “Not in themselves. You know—‘bats and cats and rats.’ But the vet said they’d been overstarved. Too listless. So he gave them all a shot. Amphetamine. A very stubborn case.”

  “Why do they not instantly confess?” I said. “Why don’t they sign with a flourish—on entry?”

  We shook our heads and wiped our brows. Again, the mirror feeling: I am him and he is me.

  “The untongueless ones—does nobody listen to them?”

  “They may listen,” he said, “but they don’t believe. And they’re innocent. In Old Nadir’s day at least some of them were guilty. But this lot. It’s hard to confess if you’re innocent.”

  And the consciousness of innocence must be a very powerful thing, I thought. I said, “Then they don’t understand. Guilt, innocence: this is not the way of the Next. Perhaps it would be better if we…”

  But then a third double drew near, and Mekhlis fell to talking about the dust storms.

  At 1:15 we filed out to the locker room, where, six days a week, we exchange our combat boots for pointed slippers and our camouflage fatigues for cream kimonos; the black beret is doffed in favor of the pomaded tarboosh with its crimson tassel.

  Somehow the months pass.

  On to the Recreation Wing, with its conditioned air, its piped music, its picked beauties. Until quite recently, Nadir was having us consort with women of the Jezebel type: demi-mondaines, belly dancers, oiled houris. And we were under the strictest instructions to use them roughly. All that’s over. The policy change began when Nadir was shot in the leg, and became radical when he was shot in the face. No longer the snarling sodomizings, the raucous “squad bangs,” and so on. Now we recline in luxurious apartments with our ladyfriends of the afternoon; we feed them peeled jargonelles drenched in choice liqueurs; I might softly declaim a few verses of the immortal poet, Narciso, as I reach for my lute. Then, at 2:50, you become aware of the activation of the camera, and you proceed.

  Nowadays, a double’s best possible result, in the Recreation Wing, is to bring about multiple orgasm. Any kind of orgasm at all is an inestimable prize; and a solid success rate is usually enough to protect a double from disfavor or disgrace or disaster. But multiple—and preferably continuous—orgasm is what we always feel we have to aim for, and it is not an entirely happy double who, sipping his cola with the other doubles at 7:35, has failed, that day, to achieve it.

  At the time, it was widely thought that the reason for Nadir’s change of course was baldly utilitarian. He had, by then, simply run out of odalisques and filles de nuit, and was now working his way through the general population: young nurses, young secretaries, young schoolteachers—nearly all of them young widows, needless to say. I do not subscribe to this theory (and am attempting to formulate my own). But the fact is that the double now confronts an altogether different kind of challenge in the Recreation Wing. On entry into its apartments, as I made the air hum with my switch, I used to encounter an ogreish wink and a lewd roll of the tongue. Now I encounter the isolated stare of the girl next door, and do so with a nosegay and a box of chocolates in my hands. Mekhlis claims he speaks for all the doubles when he says that he liked it much, much better in the old days. Well, he doesn’t speak for me. The new pressures faced by a double push down into the very lining of a man, and involve mortal danger—not least from suicide. But I wouldn’t go back. No, I wouldn’t go back.

  Your first objective, of course, is to still the trembling. Normally you would hope to get this out of the way over lunch: you calmly adumbrate what lies ahead, and list the penalties and perquisites attending failure or success. The young women are also very sharply warned that the lengthy and invasive verification process—which includes a polygraph test and an injection of scopolamine—will expose all attempts at simulation: such an orgasm, as interpreted by the Next, is a mortal affront. This often makes them tremble all the more. In fact, some of them go on trembling well into the afternoon, despite the skilled foot-massage, the reciprocal ablutions, the application of many a telling unguent. Some of them never stop trembling, and the task, in these cases, is to find the deeper rhythm or logic of it, and so transform vibration into vibrancy. It is not the work of a moment.

  Today, for example, I entertained a young anesthetist from the provincial capital. I toasted her with French champagne, I crooned love songs to the accompaniment of my theorbo, and recited certain stanzas in praise of her pulchritude, which was considerable and highly refined, despite the seraglio outfit and the ghoulish maquillage on which Nadir still invariably insists—and despite the cladding of hatred in her eyes. The young anesthetist’s hands and voice slowly steadied. But when I romantically hoisted her into my arms and carried her to the klieg-lit cushions she felt like a bronze statue (one of the more modest statues of the Next, perhaps)—all suppleness and buoyancy lost, and the flesh as cold and adhesive as dry ice. Toward the end of the third hour of unpunctuated cunnilingus, I thought I might be starting to get somewhere; but in the end the young anesthetist was unable to respond. She will lose her internal passport and her right to medical assistance (and so will all her family). As for me, the non-satisfaction, the anticlimax, will go on my P-card. It will be noticed.

  We used to have the ability, sometimes, to arouse them with our beauty—for we once were beautiful. But not now, in these tense times. Regrettably, during his various incapacitations, the Next has now gained some ninety-five pounds. And there are also the hideous “splatter wounds” to his chest and back, sustained in a dual RPG and IED assault while he was traveling underground by monorail. Then, too, there was the hit from the ATS—or anti-tank shell—he took in the ballroom of yet another palace; he was standing beneath the two-ton chandelier as it fell, and was pierced by stupendous quantities of inch-thick glass. No, we are not beautiful any longer. One vast lesion: that’s what I am. When the doubles shower together—and there are barely twenty of us now—we look all red and raw, like a convocation of colossal penises.

  The darkest moment of the day, I find (surprisingly, perhaps), is the change: the unlacing of the combat boots, the adoption of the pointed slippers. This is when I have to deal with my humanity, and answer the questions put to me by my wizened soul. We are not permitted to wash until eight in the evening; and as I slip the richly perfumed kimono over my head I can smell all the dread and fury of the Interrogation Wing. And then it is that I gird myself for the next craven honey-blonde, the next veal-pale brunette, the next resplendently contemptuous redhead. And all of them always trembling.