The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend Also My Enemy
Speaking of People Who Are Out To Get John Burns:
It’s old news, but we’re still curious: did anyone ever figure out who ratted Burns out to the Iraqi Ministry of Information?
Semi-related, re: hanky-panky at the Al-Hamra:
From The Observer, July 21, 2003, “At the Al-Hamra Pool, I’m a Babe Once More, and I Wanna Iraqi!” by Ann Marlowe. (We’d link but the Observer’s weird archiving system doesn’t allow for it.):
This June, I spent many evenings in Baghdad sitting around the pool of the Al-Hamra Hotel in a bikini. It was one of the Western oases in Baghdad, and at the white plastic tables foreign reporters drank cheap beer, gossiping and creating the viewpoint that magically becomes the consensus press stance in each war zone — here, it was that the Americans were failing and that the leader they backed, Ahmed Chalabi, was washed up. But I wasn’t terribly interested. I was there because all I had to do was sit in my bikini, copying Arabic verb tables in the dim light, to feel again, thanks to the skewed gender ratio, the sexual power I’d had at 25…
Aside from an obsession with plaid shirts, urban Iraqi men dressed pretty much like Americans. I’d found them appealing from the moment I arrived. Waiting in the long line of cars at the Jordanian border, I’d watched perhaps the most attractive man I’d ever seen walk past our GMC — an Iraqi, by his looks. I never ran into him again, but I realized that my penchant for dark, Semitic-looking men could be fulfilled here.”
We imagine that Marlowe now walks ignominiously along the streets of New York, mentally conjugating Arabic verbs and occasionally getting pelted with copies of Orientalism by passersby.
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