During the frozen winter of 2003 in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, Ahmad Chalabi was waiting for the United States to invade his country. He was reading, among other books, a biography of Gertrude Bell, prima inter pares of the British founders of modern Iraq. The book, Desert Queen by Janet Wallach, included a passage that Chalabi liked so much he read it aloud to me beside an open fire at his safe house in Sulaimaniya. In the anecdote he selected from Desert Queen, Miss Bell was listening to the aged Abdul Rahman al Gailani, who, as the Naqib of Baghdad, was a respected Sunni Muslim religious figure. The Naqib addressed her as "Khatun," or Lady (from the Turkic word for a noblewoman), in Baghdad on February 6, 1919, two years after Britain conquered the old Abbasid capital but before it had presented its plans for postwar government. Speaking in Arabic, he said to her,

Your nation is great, wealthy and powerful.... Where is our power?... You are the governors and I am the governed. And when I am asked what is my opinion as to the continuance of British rule, I reply that I am the subject of the victor. You, Khatun, have an understanding of statecraft. I do not hesitate to say to you that I loved the Turkish government when it was as I once knew it. If I could return to the rule of the Sultans of Turkey as they were in former times, I should make no other choice. But I loathe and hate, curse and consign to the devil the present Turkish Government. The Turk is dead; he has vanished, and I am content to become your subject.

Chalabi was gambling that the Naqib's stance toward the British in 1919 would serve as the model for Baghdad's reception of his American allies in 2003. However, even in 1919, the Naqib was in the minority. A year later, most of the population of what became Iraq took up arms against the British. Yet Miss Bell had chosen to listen to the Naqib, albeit selectively. Washington too preferred, over more skeptical Iraqis, the assurances of Chalabi's friend and political ally Kanan Makiya, who told George Bush that the Iraqi people "will greet the troops with sweets and flowers." As events unfolded, Iraq's greeting consisted more of bombs than sweets.

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