Iraq: Appointments & Greenback Dollars

Christopher Hitchens argues in a Slate commentary headlined “Appointment in Mesopotamia” that a confrontation between the U.S. and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was inevitable, which it may well have been.

Now I don’t know if Hitch writes his own headlines, but be that as it may, the head was a play on John O’Hara’s classic first novel, “Appointment in Samara.”

A chillingly prescient excerpt from the book:

A certain merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the market to buy some provisions. A little while later, the servant returned looking white in the face. In a trembling voice he said, “Just now in the market place I was jostled by a man in the crowd, and when I turned I saw it was Mr. Death. He looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Please lend me your horse, because I want to go to Samara where Mr. Death will not be able to find me.”

The merchant agreed and lent the scared man his horse. The servant mounted the horse and rode away as fast as the animal could gallop. Later that day, the merchant went down to the market place and saw Mr. Death standing in the crowd. He approached him and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”

“That was not a threatening gesture,” said Mr. Death. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samara.”

More from Hitch here.

CASH AS KING

Willem Marx was a summer intern for the Lincoln Group in the Baghdad's Green Zone who blew the whistle on his bosses in breaking the story that they paid tens of millions of dollars in covertly planting stories -- written by American soldiers -- in the Iraqi news media.

Notes Will:

Cash is king in Iraq. The banking system is decrepit and unreliable, and dollars are the only hard currency with any enduring value.

. . . While American taxpayers see grinning contractors who are well paid by badly regulated contracts, Iraqi citizens see foreigners living in luxurious compounds while they struggle without regular electricity.

More here.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cold cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the U.S. gave control back to the Iraqis.

Click here for more.

Hat tip for O'Hara quote to The Glittering Eye