• When Iran launched its first air strikes in 1980 to kick off the decade-long Iran-Iraq War, Hussein insisted to his advisers, “This is Israel.” It wasn’t.

• Hussein worried that Israel would attack his nuclear facility at Osirak. Less than a year later, Israel did.

• To protect that facility, he had it fortified with many sandbags. The sandbags were no match for Israel’s, er, bombs.

• Hussein’s paranoia led him to execute the Iranian journalist Farzad Bazoft for allegedly spying for Israel, a fiasco that led to Britain’s withdrawing its ambassador and, indirectly, the first Gulf War.

• “Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel,” Hussein said. “Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq.” No word on whether Israel has accepted the dead man’s vindication as a compliment.

Archive Offers Glimpse Inside the Mind of Hussein [NYT]

As many readers will undoubtedly (if imperfectly) recall, the former Defense secretary was heavily criticized for insisting on force levels in Iraq believed to be based on the Bush Administration’s overly optimistic assessment of how the Iraqi people would respond to the end of Saddam’s dictatorship. When it comes to predicting the outcome of recent popular upheaval in the Middle East, Rumsfeld is clearly more cautious. The popular revolutions that have reconfigured the political landscape in Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries, Rumsfeld says, “might be good, might make things more hopeful. But you can also think of it as someone who yells fire in a crowded theater. Who can tell you who will get out safely? Or who will manage that process? This is the perfect instance of an unpredictable situation. It creates an opportunity for vicious minorities.”

When the smoke clears in Egypt and other Arab countries, Rumsfeld believes, those who are most disciplined are most likely to succeed. I ask if that means a willingness to use force. “It can come to that, but first there’s discipline,” Rumsfeld replies. “There is a lack of discipline in the mass of humanity. You have hundreds of thousands, millions of people who don’t know what they want and a handful who do. Determination is worth something. I close my eyes and picture this turmoil and ferment, and this image that comes to my mind is of magnets and magnetic particles. A magnet will draw along these particles in the direction it’s leading. The question is, who are the magnets going to be? People will have their own views and then add to these views an impression of how things are going.”

Rumsfeld is 78 years old and quick to point out that his time on earth has spanned one-third the history of the United States—the country that he has served for more than three-quarters of his life. After graduating from Princeton in 1954, Rumsfeld was commissioned as a naval officer, serving as an aviator and flight instructor. He was an Illinois congressman from 1962 until 1969, when he joined the Nixon Administration as director of the United States Office of Economic Opportunity. He also served as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff and later as his secretary of Defense before becoming President Ronald Reagan’s Middle East envoy—a role made notorious by the frequently replayed image of Rumsfeld’s 1983 handshake with Saddam Hussein, the man his military would later depose. But it is his last position in government, his second stint as secretary of Defense, from 2000 to 2006, by which history will largely judge Rumsfeld. And if the recent uprisings against Arab regimes are any indication, history may come to look more kindly on President George W. Bush’s administration than seemed likely when Rumsfeld left office.

Rumsfeld’s recently published memoir, Known and Unknown, currently No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, was four years in the making. “I didn’t think I’d write a book,” says Rumsfeld. “Then I thought I’d write a faster one.” Rumsfeld and his staff of young aides, editors, and fact-checkers have also set up a website with all of his many papers, memos, and briefings, so that “anyone who wants to look up the context for one of the quotes in the book can go to the whole document and check it for themselves.”

Known and Unknown opens with an explanation of one of Rumsfeld’s best-known statements, delivered in a 2003 press conference: “[T]here are known knowns … we also know there are known unknowns, that is to say some things [we know] we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” If Rumsfeld was mocked at the time for his utterance’s apparent obscurity and seeming pedantry, the meaning is clear to any first-year philosophy student: What does past experience tell us about things, and what can it not forecast? In other words, what are the limits to what we know of the world?

Rumsfeld’s uncertainty about the outcome of the series of uprisings in the Middle East is an antidote to the blind optimism of those who see military coups as social media revolutions and hence refuse to see the risks involved, not only to U.S. interests and allies, especially Israel, but to the Arabs as well. “Few things are as exhilarating as hope,” Rumsfeld says. “And few are as frightening as the uncertainty that comes from a situation like this.”

Rumsfeld’s worldview is a combination of a conservatism that springs from the experience of witnessing first-hand the limits of political activism and an optimism that is inevitable for any American who believes, in spite of human nature and the course it has charted throughout history, that sometimes the better angels of our nature gain the upper hand. His style is warm and personable, and it’s not difficult to see how he had the press corps eating out of his hands after Sept. 11—up until, that is, the Iraq war.

Overall, he says, he is disappointed in how the Obama Administration has handled the developing situation in the Middle East. “They should have been quicker off the mark with Libya,” Rumsfeld says. “You would be happy to encourage revolts and uprisings in Iran, Syria, and Libya. We almost can’t lose. It’s hard to think those circumstances could get much worse than they are. Qaddafi’s behavior has been harmful to us.”

Egypt is a different matter. “How you behave with an ally tells other allies how you behave,” Rumsfeld says of the White House’s marching orders to Mubarak. Rumsfeld explains how he had just seen a video in which Niall Ferguson ripped into what the Scottish-born NYU professor believed was the administration’s lackluster response to the crises in Tunisia and Egypt. “I can’t help but agree with what Ferguson said, but it’s easier for him than someone who has been in those positions. I’m slow to judgment.”

Still, as Rumsfeld notes, “Mubarak was helpful in the region and created a period of stability that was helpful to everyone”—Arabs and the United States no less than Israel. “If you were an Israeli that benefited from the Egypt-Israel treaty, which provided a respite from decades of fighting, you just have to be deeply concerned,” he continued. “It’s not that they don’t want the Arabs to have opportunities. But if you were in that situation, you might opt for stability versus opportunity for your neighbors.”

I ask how he sees Israel’s strategic situation in the region and whether the Jewish state will continue to serve as an American asset or turn into a liability. “I don’t look at Israel as an asset for the U.S.,” he says. “Any country that is democratic is an asset to the world, a model. That’s despite all the criticism they get from the U.N., the pressure they get from Iran, and the not-so-latent anti-Semitism in our country and other countries.”

While Rumsfeld’s vision of a smaller, more mobile Army may have been partly responsible for the rocky early years of American occupation of Iraq, it may become even more significant now than when he was in office. Rumsfeld’s successor as Defense secretary, Robert Gates, recently said that any future Defense secretary suggesting land invasions in Africa or Asia should have his head examined—a quip apparently aimed at Rumsfeld. But of course that wasn’t what Rumsfeld advised George W. Bush at all. Instead, he argued for a lighter force to go get Saddam and then leave. It was on Gates’ watch that the U.S. military has placed a premium on its counterinsurgency capabilities. In other words, he has helped turn an instrument designed to fight and kill enemies into one with the purpose of winning the hearts and minds of foreign populations. But because the loves and hatreds of foreigners are by definition obscure to American officials, including all future secretaries of Defense, a military centered on counterinsurgency will soon find itself irrelevant.

It is Gates’ Pentagon that perceives of the U.S. armed forces as potential hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they are at the mercy of Iran and its local allies. And it is Gates who has put the brakes on establishing a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace that might shape the growing civil war there to the advantage of American interests. It’s somewhat paradoxical that Gates’ Pentagon has become more influential in the policy-making process than other bureaucracies, even as it means that American influence is shrinking in the Middle East. And it’s not going to get any easier for Washington to project power there, as it did during the tenure of Rumsfeld’s career.

As some analysts have suggested, Arab regimes are now going to be less likely to cooperate with Washington, whether that’s because their publics demand it or because the region’s political elite no longer trusts us as an ally. For instance, Middle Eastern regimes like Egypt’s and Pakistan’s may not give us the sort of help with terrorist suspects that our intelligence community and military have grown accustomed to.

“There are all kinds of power,” says Rumsfeld. “There’s the visible power to dissuade and deter, the power to impose, the power that comes from a nice marriage of military and diplomatic influence. That influence is greater if you know where to focus it.”

This improvised civic initiative was quite symbolic of the latent—though still vital—role that nationalism continues to play in Egyptian life. When a 23-year-old protester named Sabrin admitted in an interview in the Jerusalem Post that the recent demonstrations made her “feel like an Egyptian for the first time in my life,” and exclaimed, “I’m so proud to be an Egyptian—I hope today will be a great day in our history,” she may very well have been speaking for millions of Egyptians who interpreted the recent demonstrations as an opportunity to not only secure a better future for their country but also to reconnect with its sacred past.

Although we tend to associate Arab nationalism with some of the worst dictatorial regimes of the 20th century (Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party being the most notorious), in an ironic twist of fate so characteristic of the unpredictable Middle East, it appears that what had once been thought of as part of the problem has now become part of the solution: With the forces of radical Islam lurking in the background and potentially threatening to hijack the revolution, Egyptian nationalism may very well be the primary bulwark that could prevent that from happening.

***

Long before nationalism in its modern 19th-century European guise was introduced into the Middle East, Egyptians already held a pretty good idea of what the term meant. As proud descendants of the ancient lineages of Tutankhamen and Cleopatra, they were able to coalesce around a shared set of myths, traditions, and symbols that have continually supplied them with a basic collective identity—one that miraculously persevered despite recurring foreign conquests by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Turks, and Europeans. United by their primordial attachments to the shared climate, geography, archeology, culture, and history of the Nile river valley, Egyptians were able to establish a palpable though inchoate sense of nationality that no neighboring peoples, with the possible exception of the Jews, were able to sustain over such a long period of time. As the historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot wrote in her seminal account of Egypt: “The native Egyptian, while coping with alien rulers, also clung to the fixed piece of territory that he identified and knew as Egypt. Even before the age of nationalism made people conscious of national affinities Egyptians were conscious of living in a land called Egypt.”

When modernity began to permeate the land of the pharaohs with the arrival of French and British armies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, modern ideas of nationalism quickly followed suit. They found in Egypt fertile ground in which to take root. While still under Ottoman and then de-facto British rule, Egyptians defiantly mobilized and revolted (in 1881 and 1919) in pursuit of national self-determination. Although these nationalist uprisings eventually succeeded in expelling the British and creating an independent state, it was only after the 1952 free officers’ coup put an end to the last Ottoman dynasty in Egypt, which had been founded by the ethnically Albanian general Muhammad Ali, that Egyptians finally had the opportunity to rule themselves.

It was no coincidence that once this happened, the collected identity that Egyptians had gradually constructed since ancient times blossomed into a radical nationalist ideology. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the coup and would eventually also ascend to the presidency, was an astute student of modern European nationalism—a fact accentuated by his ambitious efforts to apply a European-style model to Egypt in the hope that this would allow it to reclaim its long-lost place of honor. Nasser’s own magnum opus, The Philosophy of the Revolution, reads like a standard nationalist manifesto infused with romantic paeans to the beloved motherland. In it, he calls upon Egyptians to take up what Nasser referred to as the “role of the hero” and embrace their destiny to lead the Arab world. “This role, exhausted by its wanderings, has at last settled down, tired and weary, near the borders of our country and is beckoning us to move,” Nasser wrote.

His nearly 15-year presidency and the proceeding four decades of rule by his successors Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were in many ways an attempt to live up to and accomplish Nasser’s grand aspirations for securing Egypt’s place in the world and regenerating its national spirit. With the help of monumental state-sponsored projects like the construction of the Aswan Dam, the creation of the short-lived Egyptian-led United Arab Republic, Egypt’s vocal leadership role in the non-aligned movement during the Cold War (and its outward defiance before both superpowers), and especially its frequent military conflicts with Israel, Nasser and his successors were able to revive and solidify a coherent sense of Egyptian nationalism that proudly took upon itself that exceptional, heroic role Nasser envisioned for it decades earlier. (Egyptians’ conviction in their chosen nation status was reinforced by the international success of Egyptian cultural icons like the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and the world-famous singer Umm Kulthum.)

***

One thing conspicuously missing from Egypt’s potent nationalism was a role for Islam. Despite being outwardly pious, Nasser and his successors did not hesitate to subject Islamic political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood to the exclusive authority and institutions of the burgeoning Egyptian nation-state. In the Philosophy of the Revolution Nasser separated Egypt into three hierarchical circles of operation—Arab, African, and Islamic, in that order. The result was that the more nationalist Egypt became, the less tolerant it was toward political Islam (not to be confused with the religion itself). As the modern Egyptian nation-state consolidated in the 1950s and ’60s, its power struggles with the Muslim Brotherhood only intensified (leading to the arrests of thousands of members and to the execution of many, including the radical theologian Sayyid Qutb). “Nasser’s success was in motivating the masses through secular ideology, and it was exactly this very nationalism that was so effective in pushing the Muslim Brotherhood aside by subjugating religion to it and by also harnessing its power for nationalism’s own advantage,” says Shimon Shamir, a former Israeli ambassador to Cairo and an Egyptian historian at Tel Aviv University. “You cannot foresee the rise of Islam in Egypt without a commensurate decline in nationalism.”

That the two competing ideologies—political Islam and nationalism—remain in opposition is no surprise. Despite the recent attempts by conspicuously moderate spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood to gloss over the organization’s deep internal divisions and present a unified front that suggests it has reoriented its goals solely toward improving the welfare of Egyptians, the Brotherhood’s ambitions have not always been so modest. On the contrary: Since its founding by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has persistently displayed aims that often transcended the territorial boundaries of Egypt and sought to engage and unite not only Egyptians or even Arabs but the entire Muslim ummah.

Although al-Banna may have been a loyal Egyptian patriot, he was also a devout believer in the universal brotherhood of all Muslims who considered secular nationalism as just another corrupting Western invention. In accordance, many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s early operations and institutions were oriented toward accomplishing both national and international goals. (The organization had a foreign-liaison section, meant to serve as headquarters for a global Islamic movement.) R.P. Mitchell’s classic account of the organization, The Society of the Muslim Brotherhood, aptly described the problematic nature of holding such dual loyalties:

The final and only enduring loyalty possible to a Muslim is to the Islamic nation—every bit of land on which there is a Muslim who says ‘There is only One God and Muhammad is his Prophet.’ … Islamic nationalism transcends geographic boundaries, political division, and the varieties of colors, races, and languages because it is founded on the notion of ‘the unity of humankind.’ Unlike ‘limited nationalism,’ Islamic nationalism is divinely inspired by the triple principles of godliness, humanitarianism, and internationalism. Thus Islamic nationalism is in the service of all humanity.

Although Mitchell’s monumental study was published in 1969, al-Banna’s more recent disciples clearly prove that the Muslim Brotherhood’s universal inclinations are still alive and well. In an interview with the London-based daily newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat in 2005, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood at the time, Muhammad Mahdi Akef, proclaimed that his movement was “the largest organization in the world,” explaining that “a [Muslim] person who is in the global arena and believes in the Muslim Brotherhood’s path is considered part of us and we are part of him.” In 2007, Mohammed Shaker Sanar, at the time one of the handful of Muslim Brotherhood members in the Egyptian parliament, publicly admitted that “the organization was founded in 1928 to reestablish the Caliphate destroyed by Ataturk.” More recently, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief spiritual adviser, the Qatar-based Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi (who was offered the organization’s helm in 2002) advocated the constitution of a “United Muslim Nations” as a modern reincarnation of the original caliphate.

Such persistent transnational aspirations continuously voiced by leading figures within the movement appear to be not only at odds with but completely inimical to Egypt’s national interests. How would a politically integrated Muslim Brotherhood react in the not unlikely scenario that another conflict between Israel and Hamas erupts in Gaza? In the past, Egypt had maintained ostensible neutrality while secretly continuing to cooperate with Israel against Hamas. If, however, the Muslim Brotherhood achieves some measure of political power, it is not too much of a stretch to envision the group as advocating indirect intervention to aid their brothers in Gaza—Hamas is after all the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—or, even worse, actively assisting them militarily. In both cases, the results would indubitably cost Egypt dearly: Not only would it imperil Cairo’s critical strategic relationship with the United States, but it would also risk a devastating all-out war with Israel.

The point of such hypothetical reasoning is not simply to illustrate how incompatible Egypt’s national interests may become with the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational agenda but more broadly to suggest that the two institutions most devoted to preserving Egyptian national interests—the military and state bureaucracy—not to mention most Egyptians themselves, are far too devoted to Egypt to compromise its national security and welfare for the sake of anyone else.

***

The recent collapse of the Mubarak regime has already led some commentators to determine that Egyptian (and Arab) nationalism has entered its last throes. Barry Rubin, an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who has written myriad books about the Middle East, suggests that the recent demise of what he calls the “Nasser-Sadat-Mubarak regime” could be the coup de grace for Arab nationalism. Nevertheless, he still foresees a situation in which Egyptian nationalism perseveres and prevents the radicals from ascending. “The question that needs to be asked is if free elections are eventually held in Egypt, which parties will run against an elBaradei-led presidential campaign backed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rubin tells me. “One could be a nationalist party, possibly led by Amr Moussa. If this does happen, then the prospects are for a president who would counter Islamist elements.” But even then, he warns, the Brotherhood could still remain a force to be reckoned with in Parliament.

While many of the projections regarding the future of Egyptian nationalism are dire, it may very well be that they are too preoccupied with a certain type of nationalism to see the larger—and more promising—picture. Long before culture, ethnicity, and especially language helped construct the “imagined communities” of modern nationalism about which Benedict Anderson has so famously written, there was a short-lived liberal nationalism (also known as civic nationalism) that captivated Europe. More in tune with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s inclusive Social Contract than with the cultural, and eventually racial, exclusivity of German Romantics, it afforded free entry into the national body politic for anyone willing to embrace its democratic values and adhere to the laws that they themselves were required to help legislate.

Since demonstrations in Tahrir Square first erupted, Egyptians have not been able to stop talking about their regenerated national pride. If they can indeed bridge the gap between the traditional nationalism of Nasser and the liberal one of Rousseau and create a pluralist and democratic Egypt, then not only will they be able to restrain the radical Islamists, but they will truly have something to be proud of.

But long before al-Qaida and Sept. 11, long before virgin-seeking suicide bombers began blowing up embassies, U.N. offices, churches, mosques, and weddings, long before beheadings made Islamist terror synonymous with barbarism, long before IEDs and VBIEDs exploded into Western consciousness, and long before the lines of bearded fanatics were injected with tranquilizers and packed off to Guantanamo and CIA black-site prisons, there was Carlos.

“Carlos the Jackal,” as the press fawningly called Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, was the first modern terrorist superstar. For nearly 20 years beginning in the mid-1970s, he staged or masterminded spectacular, made-for-the-media attacks, initially for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical splinter of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Then, after becoming a radical superhero on a par with Che, he took refuge in the Eastern Bloc and ended his career as a thuggish, bloated egomaniac paid to kill on a fee-for-service basis by some of the Mideast’s most odious regimes.

Now the attention he so fiercely coveted has finally been paid with Carlos, a five-plus hour French film that won acclaim at Cannes last spring. But he is still not satisfied. The film is not accurate, he recently complained in a jailhouse radio broadcast from Poissy high security prison, in France, where he is serving a life sentence for the 1976 murders of two French secret agents and an informer. His commando team, for instance, was not a bunch of “hysterical men waving submachine guns and threatening people,” as the film suggested, he said. They were “professionals,” he declared, “commandos of a very high standard.”

French filmmaker Olivier Assayas evidently disagrees. His bio-epic of the life and times of the Venezuelan-born revolutionary—brilliantly portrayed by Edgar Ramirez, another Venezuelan who is not related to his namesake—depicts Carlos as a brutal, charismatic narcissist who pleasures himself through violence. Members of his band of international revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious, fanatical amateurs.

Filling three DVDs at a running time of 5 hours and 19 minutes, Assayas’ film requires stamina and a strong stomach for violence and talk about political violence. But the film is far from hagiography—and it is, in its own way, a masterpiece that not only provides a riveting portrait of a celebrity-seeking killer but indicts the intellectuals and media promoters who helped transform a vain thug into a romantic figure, helping perpetuate the leftist myth of the terrorist as freedom fighter.

Though al-Qaida is never directly mentioned in the film, Assayas clearly sees a connection between the leftist assaults of the ’70s and the religiously inspired terrorism that would supplant it 30 years later. Although I haven’t seen the two-and-a-half-hour-long condensed version prepared for commercial distribution, the longer, uncut film is a nuanced portrayal of the descent from alleged revolutionary fervor into self-satisfied, self-serving violence justified in language long-stripped of meaning or relevance. Carlos may talk the talk, but he knows all too well that his ideological justifications for revolutionary terrorism are a simply a pretext for doing what comes naturally to him—killing.

Carlos has flaws. But it is hard to think of a better recent film about the nature of modern terrorism or its practitioners. In December, the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Carlos its prize for the best foreign-language film.

The movie, divided roughly into three parts, opens curiously, with Israel’s assassination of Mohammed Boudia, a leader of the militant Palestinian Black September group, in June 1973. The car-bomb murder outrages the brash young Carlos and prompts him to try to advance his fledgling career by asking to succeed the murdered martyr as the Popular Front’s London terror chief. No mention is made, however, of the massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich the year before—an outrage that stunned the world and led Israel to dispatch a hit team to kill Boudia and others who planned or conducted the operation.

Waddi Haddad, then the Popular Front’s Beirut-based leader, quickly senses possibilities in this brash young Westerner. Carlos is given membership in the Front, a small pistol, and only five bullets—yet another suggestion that this Palestinian terror group, which ran very profitable extortion and protection rackets in the Persian Gulf and received large subsidies from various Arab governments, was made up of desperate and impoverished fedayeen.

The film quickly shifts to “new left” London, where Ilich, the son of a Communist-sympathizing Venezuelan lawyer, has just chosen “Carlos” as his nom de guerre. In a posh restaurant, he argues revolutionary doctrine with his gorgeous girlfriend, a fellow leftist. Chiding Carlos for not having attended a protest against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, she says the Chilean people need his support. Demonstrations bore him, he replies. They serve no purpose. Chile’s generals and the CIA don’t care about their protests. War demands action. She must commit to the revolution, which means supporting his new group and its as yet unspecified actions against the imperialists.

Guerrilla action against well-armed states is doomed to failure, she tells him. The balance of power is against the terrorists. But Carlos insists that the under-armed Viet Cong had crushed the “gringos.” His path, too, will lead to glory.

“Is that what you want?” she shoots back, accusing him of “petit bourgeois arrogance.”

True glory, he replies, is acting without credit on behalf of the revolution.

Anyone politically active in the late ’60s and ’70s will recall such heated discussions, which Assayas recreates with such perfect pitch that one feels the director’s own sense of nostalgia, if not for the violence that such conversations justified then for the rhythms of the talk. The heady counter-culture is faithfully depicted—the free, guiltless sex, the pounding strains of rock and seductive South American ballads. Carlos’ sideburns are neatly trimmed; his cream-colored suit, with no tie, exquisitely cut, his black leather jacket is well worn with a pistol shoved into his skin-tight jeans. The Belmondo of terror sports a black “Che” beret and trademark sunglasses. It’s all a far cry from the caves in Tora Bora.

Yet the idea of a more perfect form of human existence is equally alive to these amoral hedonists as it is to their dour successors. No TV sets are to be seen in Assayas’ version of the radical underground. Revolutionaries prefer playing guitar, dancing, and singing together as equals. Friends and fellow killers drink, talk, and chain smoke before and after sex and their terrorist attacks, which are portrayed in the film with equal demonic fervor. There are lengthy static shots of Carlos nude, basking in his own virility. The alternation of narcissism, white-walled art-gallery-like spaces, and sudden violence sucks the viewer into a cold place that destroys any romantic illusions about political violence that the art direction of the movie might nourish.

The second part of the film is a highlight reel of Carlos’ terrorist career, in which the achievement of deadly spectacles requires the intricate manipulation of—and finally, manipulation by—cynical Middle Eastern regimes, the former Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and Palestinian revolutionary groups. The linchpin of this segment is Carlos’ notorious attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and his kidnapping of several dozen oil ministers in 1975. The attack is brutal, but this is a more innocent time—an era before concrete Jersey barriers surrounded official buildings and private security guards manned the entrances to company headquarters and wealthy homes. Carlos and his multinational crew of fanatics simply barge into the building and quickly seize control. (KSM, eat your heart out.)

After three guards are killed, Carlos flies his hostages to the Middle East in a borrowed jet. But he’s outmaneuvered by duplicitous Algerians and loses control of his operation. Cornered, he accepts a lucrative deal to release the hostages, and he is exiled to a popular Front terror camp in Yemen, where he is ousted by Haddad for insubordination.

Carlos and his mostly German comrades then go freelance and focus increasingly on finding work and well-funded patrons. Syria pays the tab for a while, helping Carlos create arms-shipment routes through eastern Europe in exchange for attacks on designated targets. For a brief time in Budapest and Damascus, Carlos lives what seems a semi-normal life—marrying Magdalena Kopp, his beautiful German-revolutionary companion, and fathering a child. He dotes on his daughter when he is not busy killing on demand and philandering in the name of revolution. While Carlos and his pals continue espousing their commitment to “fighting for socialism” and utter such slogans as “the only struggle that matters is between the oppressed and imperialists,” the words ring hollow. A sense of desperation builds.

The film’s turning point is the destruction of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Carlos and his not-so-merry mercenaries are a risky embarrassment to their patrons. The world has changed, a cynical Syrian paymaster tells them coolly, ousting Carlos and his group’s German co-founder from their villas. Even the CIA considers him a “historical curiosity,” a “Communist windbag.” Carlos and his gang are forced to live by their wits and their not inconsiderable linguistic resources: English, German, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all spoken convincingly by Ramirez and the other actors.

The last third of the film depicts the betrayal and capture of an aging, paunchy Lothario, still sufficiently vain to undergo liposuction on his love handles in a Khartoum hospital. Magdalena has gone—taking their child to live with Carlos’ wealthy brother, Lenin, in Venezuela. Another younger revolutionary tends lovingly to his needs. He tells visiting Iranian agents that their struggle against American imperialism is his fight too, and that he and his new wife have become Muslims, a conversion of obvious convenience that fails to impress his polite but indifferent new patrons.

Carlos still pretends that he is the cock of the walk, but visions of feather-dusters now surround him. The era of leftist revolutionary terror has ended. Counter-terrorism is rising along with the new world order, which is closing in on him.

In fact, Carlos has long become indistinguishable from the prostitutes who pleasure him, all in the same business. The film deftly makes the point in Europe, when a prostitute he has struck for daring to demand more money turns out to be a confidential informer for a security service.

Sudan’s Islamic government, led by the suave, crafty Hassan al-Turabi, offers Carlos protection but then sells him out to France. In 1994, acting on an American tip, French police employ Sudanese soldiers to kidnap him from a Sudanese government guest house as he recovers from surgery. Bound and drugged, Carlos is bundled onto a private jet and flown to France, where he has been incarcerated since.

Although the movie ends with a scroll of the deaths, disappearances, and incarcerations of the various members of Carlos’ gang, France has permitted the Jackal, now 60, to operate his theater of the absurd from his cell. Earlier last year, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, his latest wife and also his lawyer, sued the film’s producers to block its release because he had not been given the right to vet or edit it. The judge sided with the film’s producers. But Carlos would not relent. He didn’t give “a damn” about the “myth of Carlos,” he told his radio audience. But he did care about historical accuracy. It was Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s erratic autocrat, and not Saddam Hussein who had ordered the OPEC attack, he insisted. And he didn’t smoke cigarettes. “I have smoked cigars since 1969,” he said in the radio interview. “Everyone knows that.”

A scene from Carlos, showing the 1974 bombing of the drugstore Saint Germain in Paris:

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“Some of you so called boycotters are just assholes,” declared Macy Gray, announcing she and her band would indeed play an upcoming gig in Tel Aviv. Here is that one Macy Gray song I know!

Turkish-Kurdish relations have been notoriously fractious and violent; Turkey’s brutal, 25-year war against Kurdish separatists has killed an estimated 45,000 people, and skirmishes between the Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, which seeks to form an independent Kurdish state that would include parts of present-day Turkey, continue to this day. Last year, Erdogan forged a shaky truce with the Kurds, who comprise about a sixth of Turkey’s population and a fifth of Iraq’s, while continuing the fight against the violent separatist organization. This policy, referred to as the “Kurdish Opening,” has seen a warming of ties between Turkey and the broader Kurdish community, which is concentrated mostly in Syria, Iran, and northern Iraq. “I feel really among my brothers,” Barzani said, a sentiment that would have been unimaginable from the Kurdish leader just a few years ago. This past summer, Turkey opened a consulate in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, and a Turkish diplomat recently told me that his country “sees the Kurds as our strategic partners.”

Prior to the meeting, Erdogan had been working himself into a lather over the flotilla incident. He immediately withdrew his country’s ambassador from Tel Aviv, demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the matter, and called the raid “inhumane state terrorism,” all in a seeming bid to become spokesman for the Muslim world. He went so far as to compare the Israeli Defense Forces to the PKK, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, and the European Union. “They saw innocent babies as a threat,” Erdogan declared in the Turkish city of Konya, just a day after meeting Barzani. “They massacred those innocent babies in their mothers’ arms, like those terrorists here.”

With this rhetorical onslaught, Erdogan presented a challenge to Barzani, who as leader of the Kurds has tried to distance the KRG (which has achieved a substantial degree of autonomy in three provinces in northern Iraq) from the PKK and taken a delicate approach to the touchy subject of Kurdish independence. While refusing to rule out the prospect that Kurdistan might one day become a sovereign state, Barzani has made efforts to support Iraq’s nascent federal democracy. When I interviewed him in May, in the midst of fraught negotiations following the most recent Iraqi parliamentary elections, he stressed support for a “national unity government.” (My trip to Kurdistan was sponsored by the KRG.) But if Erdogan was trying to goad Barzani into bashing the Jewish state, his attempts proved unsuccessful. The most that Barzani offered was that he’s “very upset from the loss of civilian life.”

Compared with the outraged reactions from other global figures—particularly his brethren in the Islamic world—Barzani’s response was remarkably tepid. And that’s hardly surprising. For decades, Kurds and Israelis have enjoyed a mutual affinity, fostered by shared aversion to forces that oppressed Kurds and supported terrorism against Israel. The extent of this sympathy was fallaciously leant a duplicitous cast in 2003 when the FBI launched a probe into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The resulting case hinged upon fabricated, “classified” documents, delivered by a Pentagon analyst (working for the FBI as a condition of a plea bargain) to an AIPAC staffer, purporting to show that the lives of Mossad agents working undercover in Kurdistan were in danger. Another AIPAC staffer relayed the information to the Israeli embassy. The case, spurious from the beginning—and predicated upon a rationale that was referred to at the time as “an unprecedented interpretation of the 89-year-old Espionage Act,” by the then-ombudsman of the First Amendment Center—was dropped due to the government’s failure to prove that the activities of the then-AIPAC staffers in any way compromised U.S. national security.

The existence or extent of Israel’s intelligence relationship with Kurdistan is officially denied by both parties. When I asked a senior Kurdish intelligence official if the KRG cooperated with the Israelis, he demurred. In line with most Muslim states, Iraq doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Israel, and moves by the KRG to formulate a foreign policy independent of the central government irritate Baghdad. But official relations between an independent or autonomous Kurdistan and Israel could one day prove to be a decisive factor in the chessboard that is Middle Eastern politics, and whatever their present scope, such relations make a great deal of sense. That’s because Kurdistan and Israel, as well as Kurds and Jews as people, share strategic interests and historic commonalities.

***

The relationship between Kurds and Jews goes back to ancient times. Jews lived in Kurdistan since the exile of the 10 Tribes in the 8th century BCE. At the community’s height, Kurdish Jews numbered around 50,000, spread between Iran, Turkey, and northern Iraq. Many of them fled for Israel when the Jewish state declared its independence in 1948, and that trickle turned into a flood in the 1950s as life for Jews in Iraq became more and more difficult.

Political relations began in 1965, when David Kimche, one of the founding fathers of the Mossad, visited Kurdistan to meet with Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Massoud Barzani’s father and then-leader of the Kurds. The meeting came at the behest of the senior Barzani, who was seeking outside support for his people’s fight against the military regime that ruled the country. Kimche returned to Jerusalem urging Israeli support for the Kurds as part of the Jewish state’s outreach to non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey. With the United States, Israel covertly trained the Kurdish paramilitary, or peshmerga, and provided the Kurds with agricultural and technological know-how.

But Israel was forced to break off its relations with the Kurds 10 years later when Iran, then under the control of Shah Reza Pahlavi, signed an agreement with Iraq under which it would withdraw its backing of the Kurdish militants bedeviling Iraq’s Ba’athist regime, in exchange for the resolution of a territorial dispute along the Iran-Iraq border. Iran and Israel both pulled their military advisers out of northern Iraq, to the great dismay of Kurdish leaders.

The relationship blossomed once again, however, after the first Gulf War, when the United States and Great Britain began to enforce a United Nations-sanctioned no-fly zone over northern and southern Iraq that protected the Kurds (and southern Shia) from Saddam Hussein’s aggression. And cooperation allegedly heightened in the aftermath of the second Iraq War, at least according to a 2004 New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, which asserted that Israel was “establishing a significant presence on the ground” in Kurdistan in order to keep an eye on bordering Iran. “Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan,” Hersh reported, “providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria.” Others dispute Hersh, who relies heavily on anonymous sources, and whose claims of Israeli involvement in Kurdistan have yet to be confirmed by any other media outlet. “The notion that there are hundreds of Israelis running around Iraqi Kurdistan is a fantasy and has been publicly ridiculed by Kurdish leaders,” says Andrew Apostolou, a senior program manager at Freedom House, an independent human-rights watchdog. “The main foreign political and economic presences in Iraqi Kurdistan are American, British, Turkish, and Iranian. Iraqi Kurdistan is also seeking to link itself economically to the Gulf.”

Those claiming that the decline in Israeli-Turkish relations is something sudden, the bitter fallout of the January 2009 Gaza War or this year’s flotilla incident, might look to this alleged move by Israel some six years ago as a contributing factor. And as early as 2007, Turkish security sources were allegedly complaining about Israeli recalcitrance in supplying them with promised weapons to fight Kurdish rebels. Potential Israeli cooperation with Kurds, even if initiated with the intent of undermining the despotic regimes in Syria and Iran, would bother Turkey regardless of the purpose. That’s because the Turks view the de facto independence of Iraqi Kurdistan as a threat to their control over their own Kurdish population.

The obvious alignment of interests between Israel and Kurdistan, and the concomitant decline in relations between Israel and Turkey, have let the Turkish press, never known for its responsibility or hesitancy to sink into sensationalism and anti-Semitism, run wild. Years-old rumors that Barzani is descended from a long line of Kurdish rabbis have been given new weight. Whether or not this aspect of Barzani’s lineage is actually true, it fits well into a conspiracy theory long peddled by Turkish nationalists, which paints Kurdish-Israeli ties as something more than just the result of empathy between two regional minorities that have endured discrimination, war, and genocide at the hands of others. Meanwhile, some enterprising Israelis coyly floated the idea of sending out “reverse flotillas” to aid Turkish Kurds.

Israel’s fraying relationship with Turkey will be to the Kurds’ benefit. One of the main factors that limited Israeli-Kurdish ties in the 1990s was Israel’s military and diplomatic alliance with Turkey, which for decades has been Israel’s most important ally in the Muslim world. That relationship at times led Israel to work against Kurdish aspirations, or at least give the appearance of doing so. In 1999, for example, hundreds of Kurds attacked the Israeli consulate in Berlin over accusations that Jerusalem had aided Ankara in apprehending PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in Kenya. Three Kurds were killed in the ensuing scuffle, and Israeli denial of the accusations did little to stem Kurdish anger. Thanks largely to the provocations of Erdogan’s Islamist government, however, the potential for a strengthened Israeli-Kurdish alliance has never looked better.

***

Beyond the strategic rationale for the Israeli-Kurdish relationship, there exists a deeper, values-based relationship. Both Jews and Kurds are embattled, once-stateless minorities in a region afflicted by obscurantist religious and ethnic movements that seek to sublimate, if not eliminate, religious and ethnic diversity. On one side of this divide lies a version of Sunni Wahabbist extremism and Shia radicalism pledging to rid the Middle East not only of Jews, but of anyone deemed insufficiently Islamic.

Another commonality is that both peoples have prevailed against attempts at extermination. In 1986, Saddam Hussein launched his Anfal campaign against the Kurds, eventually killing more than 200,000. In Halabja, the town about 10 miles from the Iranian border where, in 1988, the Iraqi military deployed poison gas to murder at least 5,000 people, a museum and monument stand to commemorate the dead. The museum’s inner sanctum, a round room with the names of the victims of the attack etched on the walls, evokes Yad Vashem. The city’s cemetery features a sign, “BA’ATH MEMBERS NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER.” Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War didn’t endear Palestinians to the Kurds, and general Kurdish indifference to the plight of the Palestinians argues against the trendy theory of “linkage,” which argues that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a prerequisite to solving a host of other problems in the Muslim world.

The Kurds have proudly defied the anti-Israel theatrics of their Muslim brethren. Speaking with a variety of KRG officials, I heard that they would be more than happy to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel were such a decision within their power. “We have no problems with Israel,” says Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the KRG Department of Foreign Relations. “They have not harmed us. We can’t be hating them because Arabs hate them.” In a 2007 television interview, Barzani said, “If an Israeli embassy were opened in Baghdad, we would no doubt open an Israeli consulate in Erbil.” That same year, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni sat next to Jalal Talabani’s wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed Talabani, at an international women’s conference in Vienna. The two discussed the peace process and the plight of citizens in Sderot, the rocket-plagued Israeli city on the Gaza border. At the 2008 Socialist International, Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president and the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan political party, shook Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s hand.

“We’ve been called ‘the second Israel,’ ” Bakir says. “We cite Israel as a democracy in the Middle East.” The regional forces arrayed against an independent Kurdistan are the same sorts of theocratic and authoritarian ones that tried to destroy the nascent Jewish state in 1948 and that have been arrayed against it ever since. “This island of democracy,” he says of Israel, “was seen as a germ,” yet Kurds take heart in its success as an independent nation. In light of their experience as a stateless people continually subjected to discrimination and genocide by the regimes under which they have lived, the Kurds have woefully adopted a saying that they have “no friends but the mountains.” They also have the Jews.

James Kirchick is writer at large with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a contributing editor to The New Republic.

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As a writer—and, it would appear, as a man—Hitchens is relentlessly extroverted: He defines himself by his obsessions and crusades, by the fights he picks. Unwittingly, however, Hitch-22 raises a question that must haunt our encounters, not just with Hitchens, but with all intellectuals who deal with large issues of politics and religion. It is not difficult to address oneself to controversies, or to come up with opinions about them, or even to defend those opinions eloquently. Certainly it is not difficult for Hitchens, who has become famous for doing these things. Since he started his career as a leftist journalist and activist, in the late 1960s, there have been few public issues about which he has failed to have, and state, an opinion. The bulk of Hitch-22 recounts these crusades, from his work as an Oxford student for the International Socialists (a Trotskyite, anti-Soviet faction) to his behind-the-scenes advocacy, in the 1990s, for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

But an opinion is only as valuable as the person who holds it—and how can anyone bring wisdom to bear on public questions when he avoids private thought? To paraphrase a source for which Hitchens has notoriously little use: What does it profit a man to gain a whole worldview, if he loses (or forgets about) his soul? “I would often rather have an argument or a quarrel than be bored, and because I hate to lose an argument, I am often willing to protract one for its own sake rather than concede even a small point,” Hitchens admits. He calls this the “ ‘down’ side of one of my happier skills,” his skill at debate, which he has lately employed in humiliating clergymen around the world. What he does not consider is that that skill may itself be “unhappy”: Socrates distinguished between philosophy, which is the love of wisdom, and sophistry, which is the ability to argue convincingly, even for bad purposes. To a vocational arguer, what matters is arguing, not understanding (especially when, as Hitchens says, he is obligated to produce 1,000 words of clean copy every single day). That’s why it seems almost too perfect that Hitchens should have been invited to the Vatican, during the canonization hearings for Mother Teresa, to serve as a freelance Devil’s Advocate—the one job in which argument is intentionally divorced from wisdom.

In fact, Hitchens is at his best arguing in the negative, which is why his best-known views are his hatreds—of Mother Teresa (a pious fraud), Henry Kissinger (a war criminal), Bill Clinton (a liar), and God (all of the above). Hitch-22 suggests that Hitchens’ preference for the role of scold and scourge has biographical origins. He was born in 1949 to ill-matched parents: His father, Eric, was a commander in the Royal Navy, a veteran of World War II, taciturn and conservative in a familiar English style. His mother, Yvonne, was imaginative and socially ambitious, as exotic as her name: “my shell-like ear detected quite early on a difference between this and the various comfortable Nancys and Joans and Ethels and Marjories who—sterling types all—tended to be the spouses and helpmeets of my father’s brother-officers.”

The marriage would eventually come to a sad end—the only real personal sadness that Hitchens describes in the book. When he was in his early twenties, his mother left his father for another man, and Yvonne and her lover ended up committing suicide together at a hotel in Athens. Christopher was the one responsible for flying there and claiming the body. As it happens, this moment of supreme personal tragedy coincided with a political upheaval, and he spent much of his time in Athens interviewing dissidents who had been tortured by the Greek junta. “With Yvonne lying cold? You are quite right to ask,” Hitchens writes. “But it turns out, as I have found in other ways and in other places, that the separation between the personal and the public is not so neat.”

It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to read this as a flight from inwardness into the public realm, where Hitchens is far more comfortable. At the very least, it seems clear that his vocation was a way of synthesizing the warring legacies of his parents. His mother, he writes, wanted nothing more than for him to rise socially, to have the glamorous life that a Navy wife never could. That is why she insisted on Christopher being sent to private school and eventually to Balliol. Writing has done the trick in this regard: So many famous names are dropped in Hitch-22 that it stops being a vice and becomes a technique of self-portraiture. The names fall into two categories, literary (James Fenton, Salman Rushdie, Robert Conquest) and political (Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Chertoff, opposition figures from Argentina to Cyprus). Yet even the most intimate of these friendships, with Martin Amis, is characterized mainly by laddishness and word games: Hitchens devotes a surprising amount of time to recounting the results of a game where “fuck” is substituted for “love” in famous titles. No doubt there is real intimacy also, but Hitchens is uninterested in recording it, or unable to. Certainly there is next to nothing in Hitch-22 about his romantic life, his marriage, or his children.

From his father, whom he respectfully calls “the Commander,” Hitchens takes the other imperative of his work, that writing be a kind of fighting. Many of Hitchens’ fans on the left were surprised when he came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They wouldn’t have been if they had realized how much he honors his father’s experience fighting a just war, and how often in his career he has sought occasions for honorable aggression. He is haunted by his failure to experience combat, and though he dwells on moments when his life has been in danger—reporting from Belfast and Sarajevo—he fears “that I lack the courage to be a real soldier or a real dissident. I have seen just enough warfare and political violence to know that, while I was pleased not to ‘crack’ at first coming under fire, I could never be a full-time uniformed combatant or freedom fighter, or even war correspondent.”

This shame is the subtext of the most powerful section in Hitch-22, where Hitchens writes about a young American soldier named Mark Daily, who was killed in Iraq in 2007. Daily, Hitchens learns, was motivated to join the Army by reading his fire-breathing articles in support of the war; Hitchens even learns, from the soldier’s parents, that Daily “tried to contact [him] from Kuwait or Iraq.” He records feeling “hollow,” a “deep pang of cold dismay.” It is the rare moment when Hitchens experiences a profound responsibility for the opinions he shares so readily.

One other ancestral legacy did not reach Hitchens until he was an adult. As he has written before, he learned in his thirties that his mother’s mother, whom he had known as Dorothy Hickman, was Jewish, her maiden name Levin. Yvonne had concealed this part of her ancestry from her husband and children, presumably in order to make things easier for herself socially. The revelation of his Jewish background came too late to shape Hitchens’ identity in any profound way: “I had to ask myself what Jewishness had meant to me, if anything, when I was a boy. I was completely sure that it meant nothing at all until I was thirteen, except as a sort of subtext to the Christian Bible stories.”

The main effect of “being a Jew” (as he puts it, though this is true only in the legalistic, matrilineal sense) on the adult Hitchens, it seems, has been to make him subscribe to the most clichéd view of Jewishness as perpetual dissent. “Wasn’t there still something in this age-old identification of the Jew with the subversive? If so, good,” he writes. Being a Jew becomes another credential of contrarianism, even though Hitchens’ own story is a perfect demonstration that contrarianism is a character trait, not a Jewish cultural or genetic imperative. Certainly it does not give him any new sympathy with the state of Israel: “I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history.”

“Our” is useful here, rhetorically, giving a Jewish tincture to anti-Zionist opinions formed long before Hitchens learned that one of his four grandparents was Jewish. But many of Hitchens’ other opinions have changed over the years, and his current views—about the need to defend democracy, and the overwhelming danger of Islamic totalitarianism—seem to point in the direction of a change of heart here, too. It would not be at all surprising to hear Hitchens, in five or 10 years, arguing that the defense of Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah is a moral imperative. Already, he shows, the divergence of his views on the Middle East from Edward Said’s led him to lose Said’s friendship. What is certain is that, whatever it may be, Hitchens will have an opinion—after all, as his hero Voltaire once put it, c’est son métier.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say my family exploded into exile, atomizing in the process. Some members landed in Israel, some in Iran, and some in North America; my immediate kin escaped first to India and then eventually to the United Kingdom. The dynamite involved was—as is ever the story with Jews—racial hatred, which played itself out in the Iraqi political arena as an inability to resolve escalating tensions between Arab Nationalism and Zionism.

My family was far from alone in being shattered. Iraq’s entire Jewish population—a community with roots in Mesopotamia that pre-date the birth of Islam by a millennium—was unceremoniously ejected from the country between 1950 and 1951. But first the Iraqi government had “denaturalized” the Jews, effectively making them refugees in their own land and rendering them defenseless against marauding gangs eager to harm Jews in a kind of skewed quid pro quo for the displacement of Palestinian Arabs.

The improved security prevailing in Iraq over the last two years has resulted more from the increased deployment of U.S. troops known as “the surge” than from any deep rapprochement between the country’s religious and ethnic factions. Once the Americans leave, the security situation may quickly deteriorate. I am thankful that I managed to make it safely into Iraq and back home to London in 2004. At the time I was researching a memoir about my grandmother’s life in Baghdad. I felt compelled to go there, driven by a determination to visit the land of my ancestors and to find out whether any ghostly traces remained of my family’s past, or of the wider Jewish community that had so hastily departed, leaving jobs, homes, community property, and business concerns to their own uncertain fate.

I knew that Saddam Hussein had gone on a series of vengeful campaigns of property destruction in the 1970s and 1980s and that numerous synagogues had been razed. (Baghdad once boasted 65 synagogues, which were obliged by law to be less conspicuous along the city skyline than Baghdad’s mosques.) I also knew that the houses and riverside villas deserted by fleeing Jews in 1950 and 1951 had long ago been repossessed, bought on the cheap at government auctions held after liquidators had completed their inventories of frozen Jewish assets. Still, I’d heard that in the Old City one could find cigarette-shaped indentations in the doorposts of houses, to which mezuzahs, long ago pilfered for their silver, had once been nailed, and Stars of David ingeniously incorporated into a building’s brickwork: empty spaces and silent traces, hinting at prior occupancy.

I was to be disappointed in my quest for concrete evidence of Jewish habitation. The Old City is shaped like a clenched fist, with narrow streets and alleyways threading round endless turns that invariably lead you back to where you started. Along with my guide, I spent a day fruitlessly exploring; the old city was protective of its secrets. Not one mezuzah tray nor Star of David was in sight. As we hunted, I cursed my ignorance of my ancestral past and chastised myself for not interrogating elderly relatives about their lives in Baghdad when opportunity allowed. Now, of course, I see each spasm of self-reproach as a reminder of history’s propensity to slip from our grasp even as we cling to preserve it.

My day in the Old City was not entirely lost, however, in that my guide managed to locate the old, and now abandoned, Jewish Community Office on River Street, offering the Muslim caretaker a little baksheesh to smooth our way inside. We found two dusty rooms, each filled with a heap of upturned office furniture resembling a bonfire in waiting. Along the walls, bookcases with smashed glass doors housed ledger books documenting community business of various kinds. I pulled out one tattered and dusty volume, bound in peeling red leather, wanting to take a closer look, whereupon my guide explained, heartbreakingly, that the carefully scripted lists I found in its pages were logs of marriages in the community. By now the caretaker was leery of our unexplained presence and insisted that we leave.

What has since become of the ledgers and marriage registers is unclear, since current reports claim that only eight Jews are left in Iraq today, and no one else could conceivably have an interest in preserving them. When I visited in 2004, the Jews numbered 22, and none of them had visited the Community Office since a Palestinian gunman let loose a hail of bullets in the mid-1990s, killing two Jews and two Muslims before escaping into the crowded streets of the Old City.

Battered by years of persecution, followed by war, then sanctions, then more war, the Jews I found surviving in Baghdad were not the kind of people to mobilize and regroup, to insist on their rights, or to call to account the powers that be. They were anxious only to keep their heads down, so as not to attract unwanted attention, and to go about their business as quietly as possible. That business—insofar as it related to their faith—was to maintain religious observations at Baghdad’s last standing synagogue, the Meir Tweg Synagogue in Betaween, and to tend the Jewish cemetery in Sadr City, which had suffered bomb and fire damage in the fighting of 2003.

I visited both the synagogue and the cemetery when I was in Iraq. The former turned out to be a stupendously grand edifice; two stories high and occupying a full housing block; it had clearly been built to hold a substantial congregation. The central chamber, containing the ark and bimah, was hung with giant chandeliers, while thick Persian rugs lay on the pews. The ark once held the sum of Baghdad’s Torahs, each encased in carved silver, but on my visit there were only 13 scrolls left. The rest had been stolen in an impromptu raid by the secret police in the 1980s and most likely ended up among the haul of Jewish artifacts found by the allies in 2003—artifacts that had been left to languish in a sewage-filled basement at secret-police headquarters.

The cemetery was where I felt most at home in Iraq, surrounded by the silent and comforting presence of my ancestors. The brick tombs were being repaired with funds that came, circuitously, from the Jewish Agency, and their Hebrew engravings, many of which had been badly eroded, were being airbrushed, chemically fixed, and preserved. I presumed that my grandfather was likely buried there, though I quickly gave up trying to find his grave after I recalled that the Jews used to bury several bodies in vertical graves. Instead, I sat down beside an anonymous grave and wondered at the miracle that allowed a fragment of my heritage to remain.

The remaining Jews of Baghdad could not be said to constitute a community. They were merely a tiny remnant of a once-great people, and they now find themselves marooned in a sea of anti-Jewish hostility—isolated, frightened, and largely forgotten. Meeting and talking with them, I found it difficult to believe that Jewish people had joyfully thrived in Iraq. Even in the middle of the last century, when their number had fallen from an historic high of several million to just 150,000, Jews still made up one-third of the population of Baghdad.

The first half of the 20th century witnessed a Golden Age for Jews in Iraq, beginning when statehood granted them full citizenship instead of second-class, or dhimmi, status. Iraq’s Jews clamored to contribute to the country’s early political and cultural flowering. They took up seats in Parliament and advised Arab ministers. They populated the officer class in the army, served in the judiciary, and were particularly active members of Baghdad’s café society. The community produced novelists and poets who wrote in Arabic, founded literary magazines, and established intellectual salons. Iraqi Jews invented the classic musical form known as the Maqaam. They formed several orchestras. One of Iraq’s most popular singers, Selima Murad, was a Jew.

The tragedy is that, in the end, none of this history counted for anything. Up against a powerfully antagonistic political milieu, the community collapsed. The injury that compounds the tragedy is that even now Iraqis are engaged in erasing Jewish history, as if determined to pretend it never happened. Since 2003, Iraqi authorities have repeatedly promised to preserve and maintain the nation’s many Jewish shrines, including the tombs of Ezekiel, Ezra, Daniel, Nehemiah, Nahum, and Jonah. Yet nothing has been done. As for the most magnificent of these sacred sites, the carved tower that marks the tomb of Ezekiel at Al-Kifl, the Antiquities and Heritage Authority has announced that a huge mosque is to built there, and already Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments are being removed from the site as part of the “renovations.”

When I talked to Samir Shahrabani, one of Baghdad’s last Jews, he reflected soberly. “We have high tower in the desert,” he said. “Each day this tower sinks, one inch by one inch. One day we will have nothing. This is how we are.” He was talking metaphorically, of course, but in light of the plans to “renovate” the shrine of Ezekiel his words take on a sharper meaning. Today there are eight Jews left in Iraq. One day, in the not too distant future, there won’t be any.

Marina Benjamin, a journalist living in London, is the author of Last Days in Babylon, a memoir about her Iraqi grandmother and the lost Jewish community of Baghdad.

With Saddam’s steely emissaries raining on us for weeks, I, like many other Israelis, began to prepare myself for a bloated death toll. Some analysts spoke of dozens of casualties, others feared hundreds. The reality, we soon learned with great relief, was starkly different, and the antiquated weapons—not more than aged pipes, really, groaning under the burden of their long and strenuous flight—caused some damage to property and claimed the lives of two Israelis, with an additional three suffering fatal heart attacks as a result of war-related stress. Five people, I thought, five people was not bad at all. What I felt was relief. But judging by the media’s extensive coverage of the five victims, one could easily think that Baghdad’s attacks had annihilated a substantial portion of the population: profiles of the deceased were reported at length, their weeping relatives interviewed, government officials filmed rushing to comfort the bereaved.

I asked my mother why all the fuss. Trying my best to sound like a grown man, I said we should be grateful, as we’ve clearly avoided a much larger catastrophe. Five casualties, I stated in a voice that I thought was confident and macho and mature, is a price we could live with.

“No,” my mother said, so softly her words were almost drowned out by the din of the television news, “it’s not.” Her look suggested that our conversation was over, that I didn’t—couldn’t—understand. I went back to my room burning with shame, and listened to Lou Reed wail about heroin until the next missile hit later that afternoon.

My mother’s words, however, refused to leave me. It didn’t take much thought to realize the context of her sentiment, namely that each life was sacred and every needless loss a tragedy and five deaths just as horrible as five hundred. But the piercing gaze with which she stabbed me as she spoke suggested there was more to it than that. Confused, I sought distraction in mindless entertainment.

Like most Israelis during those strange days of that phantom war, I, too, was taken with Zehu Ze, the Israeli equivalent of Saturday Night Live, magnified a hundredfold by the fact that our televisions carried just one, state-run channel, and that Zehu Ze was, at the time, its solitary comedic offering. The most popular recurring character was the Babba Booba, a loopy rabbi who claimed to predict the war’s outcome using gematria, the Jewish system of assigning numerical values to letters and conducting complex calculations to try and unlock the hidden meaning of words—the meaning, mystics believe, that only numbers can reveal.

The skits were hilarious, but for a change, I wasn’t laughing. That crazed comedian, I thought, was demonstrating the same point my mother just had. He was demonstrating how, in times of crisis, we begin to ignore words and place our faith in numbers. Five casualties, then, becomes a national tragedy, not just because of the devastating sorrow of five families, but because the number itself, five, has become our albatross. The analysts might have had their hypothetical hundreds, but the concrete, real-life five somehow seemed like a more menacing, ominous figure that terrified us far more.

Numbers are also what this week’s parasha is all about. It begins with a strange request. Speaking to Moses, God demands the following: “Take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by families following their fathers’ houses; a head count of every male according to the number of their names.” One would think that a deity that had only recently torn the sea in half should not have much difficulty with a simple census. Still, the Lord insists, and the Israelites begin their counting.

Although the parasha itself, with its minute detail of each tribe’s count, is dry and technical—54,400 to Issachar! 57,400 to Zebulun!—there’s something irresistibly charming about imagining this tiny nation, lost in the wilderness, taking the time to painstakingly count each and every one of their numbers.

They had to, of course. Like Israelis during the Gulf War, numbers were all the Israelites had to go on in order to make sense of their other-worldly situation. This is why God instructs them to conduct a census. There’s nothing else he can offer by way of tangible reassurance save for ordering his chosen few to count their ranks and take solace in the figures. When we can’t comprehend or control our circumstances, we cling to the numbers, simple and incontrovertible, with all our might. Just think about the significance, almost mystical in its own right, that the number six million has taken on in our collective imagination. Call it the gematria of crisis.

Which, of course, suggests an interesting new facet to Bernie Madoff’s crimes. The betrayal of trust, the financial ruination, the savage blow to the global economy, all are valid points. But there’s also this: for millennia, Jews have taken comfort in numbers, turning to digits when words were somehow not enough. And Madoff violated this haven, using his prowess to create a false and dangerous trap that lured so many of us to damnation. Had he been around for the Israelites’ census, he might have reported Issachar as eight hundred thousand men strong, and Zebulun as having crossed the one million mark.

Madoff, then, is learning what Moses had already gleaned from God, what I learned the hard way from my mother, and what us Jews seem to have embedded in our genetic codes: false numbers are far worse than false words.